the Frankfort pike, pushing toward
Cynthiana. Sam Croxton strode back from filling his canteen at a
farmyard well and scowled at Drew, who had dismounted and loosened cinch
to cool Shawnee's back.

"Cynthiana, now. I'm beginnin' to wonder, Rennie, if we know just which
way we are goin'."

Drew shrugged. "Might be a warm reception waitin' us there. Drake
figures about five hundred Yankees on the spot, and trains comin' in
with more all the time."

Sighing, Croxton rubbed his hand across his freckled face, smearing road
dust and sweat into a gritty mask. "Me--I could do with four or five
hours' sleep, right down here in the road. Always providin' no blue
belly'd trot along to stir me up. Seems like I ain't had a ten minutes'
straight nap since we joined up with the main column. Scoutin' ahead a
couple weeks ago you could at least fill your belly and rest up at some
farm. Them boys pushin' the prisoners back there sure has it tough. Bet
some of 'em been eatin' dust most all day--"

"Be glad you're not ridin' in one of the wagons nursin' a hole in your
middle." Drew wet his handkerchief, or the sad gray rag which served
that purpose, and carefully washed out Shawnee's nostrils, rubbing the
horse gently down the nose and around his pricked ears.

Croxton spat and a splotch of brown tobacco juice pocked the roadside
gravel. "Now ain't you cheerful!" he observed. "No, I've no hole in my
middle, or my top, or my bottom--and I don't want none, neither. All I
want is about an hour's sleep without Quirk or Drake breathin' down my
back wantin' to know why I'm playin' wagon dog. The which I ain't gonna
have very soon by the looks of it. So...." He mounted, spat again with
accuracy enough to stun a grasshopper off a nodding weed top, which feat
seemed to restore a measure of his usual good nature. "Got him! You
comin', Rennie?"

The hours of Friday afternoon, evening, night, crawled by--leadenly, as
far as the men in the straggling column were concerned. That dash which
had carried them through from the Virginia border, through the old-time
whirling attack on Mount Sterling only days earlier, and which had
brought them into and beyond Lexington, was seeping from tired men who
slept in the saddle or fell out, too drugged with fatigue to know that
they slumped down along country fences, unconscious gifts for the enemy
doggedly drawing in from three sides. There was the core of veterans who
had seen this before, been a part of su