Silence and darkness brooded over a great army in gray.

It was as if they marched among forty thousand phantoms, row on row.
The whole appalling truth burst in an instant upon the boy.

The Southern army, which they had supposed was at Corinth, lay in the deep woods within cannon shot of its foe, and not a soul in all Grant's thousands knew of its presence there! And Buell was still far away! It seemed to Dick that for a little space his heart stopped beating.

He foresaw it all, the terrible hammer-stroke at dawn, the rush of the fiery South upon her unsuspecting foe, and the cutting down of brigades, before sleep was gone from their eyes.
Not in vain had the South boasted that Johnston was a great general.

He had not been daunted by Donelson.