The summer passed.  Autumn came and deepened.  The air was crisp and sparkling.  The leaves, turned into glowing reds and yellows and browns, began to fall from the trees.  The advancing autumn contained the promise of winter soon to come.  The leaves fell faster and sharp winds blew, bringing with them chill rains.  Little Mac, or the Young Napoleon, as many of his friends loved to call him, continued his preparations, and despite all the urgings of President and Congress, would not move.  His fatal defect now showed in all its destructiveness.  To him the enemy always appeared threefold his natural size.

Reliable scouts brought back the news that the Southern troops at Manassas, a full two months after their victory there, numbered only forty thousand.  The Northern commander issued statements that the enemy was before him with one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers.  He demanded that his own forces should be raised to nearly a quarter of a million men and nearly five hundred cannon before he could move.

The veteran, Scott, full of triumphs and honors, but feeling himself out of place in his old age, went into retirement.  McClellan, now in sole command, still lingered and delayed, while the South, making good use of precious months, gathered all her forces to meet him or whomsoever came against her.

Youth chafed most against the long waiting.  It seemed to Dick and his mathematical Vermont friend that time was fairly wasting away under their feet, and the wise sergeant agreed with them.

The weather had grown so cold now that they built fires for warmth as well as cooking, and the two youths sat with Sergeant Whitley one cold evening in late October before a big blaze.  Both were tanned deeply by wind, sun and rain, and they had grown uncommonly hardy, but the wind that night came out of the northwest, and it had such a sharp edge to it that they were glad to draw their blankets over their backs and shoulders.

Dick was re-reading a letter from his mother, a widow who lived on the outskirts of Pendleton.  It had come that morning, and it was the only one that had reached him since his departure from Kentucky.  But she had received another that he had written to her directly after the Battle of Bull Run.

She wrote of her gratitude because Providence had watched over him in that dreadful conflict, all the more dreadful because it was friend against friend, brother against brother.  The state, she said, was all in confusion.  Everybody suspected everybody else.  The Southerners were full of victory, the Northerners were hopeful of victory yet to come.  Colonel Kenton was with the Southern force under General Buckner, gathered at Bowling Green in that state, but his son, her nephew Harry, was still in the east with Beauregard.  She had heard that the troops of the west and northwest were coming down the Ohio and Mississippi in great numbers, and people expected hard fighting to occur very soon in western and southern Kentucky.  It was all very dreadful, and a madness seemed to have come over the land, but she hoped that Providence would continue to watch over her dear son.