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Dick's teeth were shut firmly, and he compressed his lips. He stood rigidly erect, gazing now at the flickering flames of the little fire. "I suggest that you try him on some other subject than Buell, General Beauregard," said the bishop-general, a faint twinkle appearing in his eyes. Johnston sat silent, but his blue eyes missed nothing.
Breckinridge, like his chief, Johnston, was also grave and did not say much. Hardee, as became one of his severe military training, discussed the details, the placing of the brigades and the time of attack by each. Polk, the bishop-general, and Bragg, also had their part. As they talked in low tones they moved the men over their chessboard.
Yet Beauregard and his generals were still sanguine of completing the victory. Their scouts and skirmishers had failed to discover that the entire army of Buell also was now in front of them. Bragg was gathering his division on the left to hurl it like a thunderbolt upon Grant's shattered brigades. Hardee and the bishop-general were in the center, and Breckinridge led the right.
Polk, the bishop-general, still led one wing for the South, Buckner massed Kentuckians who faced Kentuckians on the other side, and Longstreet and Hill were to play their great part for the South. Resolved to win a victory, the veteran generals spared nothing, and the little Chickamauga, so singularly named by the Indians "the river of death," was running red.
Dick and his comrades watched the shells in their flight, noting the trails of white smoke they left behind, and then the showers of earth that flew up when they burst. It was rather a pleasant occupation to watch them. In a way it broke the monotony of a long summer day. They did not know that Polk, the bishop-general, was arriving at that moment in the Southern camp with five thousand men.
Beauregard had divided the leadership on the field among three of his lieutenants. Hardee now urged on the center, Bragg commanded the right, and Polk, the bishop-general, led the left. It was Bragg's division that was about to charge the great battery of siege guns that the alert Webster had manned so quickly. Five minutes more and Webster would have been too late.
It was reported that the Bishop-General, Polk, had been ordered to attack the Northern force in or near Frankfort, but the attack did not come. Colonel Winchester said it was because Polk recognized the superior strength of his enemy, and was waiting until he could co-operate with Bragg and Hardee.
They told of the Crescent Regiment, known and loved on all these sidewalks and away up to and beyond their Bishop-General Polk's Trinity Church, whose desperate gallantry had saved that same Washington Artillery three of its pieces, and to whose thinned and bleeding ranks swarms of the huddled Western farm boys, as shattered and gory as their captors and as glorious, had at last laid down their arms.
Next to the bishop-general sat the man who had been Vice-President of the United States and who, if the Democracy had held together would now have been in the chair of Lincoln, John C. Breckinridge, called by his people the Magnificent, commonly accounted the most splendid looking man in America.
Nor had he reckoned wrong. The lingering of the bishop-general, Polk, over a late breakfast saved him from the first shock, and upset the plans of the Southern commander, who had given him strict orders to advance. Dawn was long past, and to Bragg's great astonishment Polk had not moved.
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