Buell led splendid troops that he had trained long and rigidly, and they had not been in the conflict the day before.  Fresh and with unbroken ranks, not a man wounded or missing, they had entered the battle and both Grant and Buell, as well as their division commanders, expected an easy victory where the Army of the Ohio stood.

Buell, to his amazement, saw himself reduced to the defensive.  He and Grant had reckoned that the decimated brigades of the South could not stand at all before him, but just as on the first day they came on with the fierce rebel yell, hurling themselves upon superior numbers, taking the cannon of their enemy, losing them, and retaking them and losing them again, but never yielding.

The great conflict increased in violence.  Buell, a man of iron courage, saw that his soldiers must fight to the uttermost, not for victory only, but even to ward off defeat.  The dawn was now far advanced.  The rain had ceased, and the sun again shot down sheaves of fiery rays upon a vast low cloud of fire and smoke in which thousands of men met in desperate combat.

Nine o’clock came.  It had been expected by Grant that Buell long before that time would have swept everything before him.  But for three hours Buell had been fighting to keep himself from being swept away.  The Southern troops seemed animated by that extraordinary battle fever and absolute contempt of death which distinguished them so often during this war.  Buell’s army was driven in on both flanks, and only the center held fast.  It began to seem possible that the South, despite her reduced ranks might yet defeat both Northern armies.  Another battery dashed up to the relief of the men in blue.  It was charged at once by the men in gray so fiercely that the gunners were glad to escape with their guns, and once more the wild rebel yell of triumph swelled through the southern forest.

Dick, standing with his comrades on one of the ridges that they had defended so well, listened to the roar of conflict on the wing, ever increasing in volume, and watched the vast clouds of smoke gathering over the forest.  He could see from where he stood the flash of rifle fire and the blaze of cannon, and both eye and ear told him that the battle was not moving back upon the South.

“It seems that we do not make headway, sir,” he said to Colonel Winchester, who also stood by him, looking and listening.

“Not that I can perceive,” replied the colonel, “and yet with the rush of forty thousand fresh troops of ours upon the field I deemed victory quick and easy.  How the battle grows!  How the South fights!”