The majority of the Kentuckians, whatever their personal feelings, were not willing to shatter the republic.
He heard definitely that here in the west the North was gathering armies greater than any that he had supposed.

Besides the troops from the three states just across the Ohio River the hardy lumbermen and pioneers were pouring down from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Hunters in deerskin suits and buffalo moccasins had already come from the far Nebraska Territory.
The power of the west and the northwest was converging upon his state, which gave eighty thousand of its men to the Northern cause, while half as many more went away to the Southern armies, particularly to the one under the brilliant and daring Albert Sidney Johnston, which hung a sinister menace before the Northern front.

One hundred and twenty thousand troops sent to the two armies by a state that contained but little more than a million people! It was said at the time that as Kentucky went, so would go the fortunes of the Union and in the end it was so.
But these facts and reckonings were not much in Dick's mind just then.
He was thinking of Buell's camp and of the message that he bore.

Again and again he felt of that little inside pocket of his vest to see that it was there, although he knew that by no chance could he have lost it.
When he was within fifteen miles of Buell's camp a heavy snow began to fall.