Many other Virginians, some destined to be as famous as he, and a few more so, wondered why he had not gone with his seceding state, and criticised him much, but Thomas, chary of speech, hung to his belief, and proved it by action.
Dick learned, too, that the Southern force operating against Thomas, while actively led by Zollicoffer, was under the nominal command of one of his own Kentucky Crittendens.

Here he saw again how terribly his beloved state was divided, like other border states.

General Crittenden's father was a member of the Federal Congress at Washington, and one of his brothers was a general also, but on the other side.

But he was to see such cases over and over again, and he was to see them to a still greater and a wholesale degree, when the First Maryland regiment of the North and the First Maryland regiment of the South, recruited from the same district, should meet face to face upon the terrible field of Antietam.
But Antietam was far in the future, and Dick's mind turned from the cases of brother against brother to the problems of the icy wilderness through which they were moving, in a more or less uncertain manner.
Sometimes they were sent on false trails, but their loyal mountaineers brought them back again.

They also found volunteers, and Major Hertford's little force swelled from three hundred to six hundred.