Creative Books

But his anxieties
were relieved early in the morning when a colored man taken aboard from
a canoe told him of a bayou not five miles below Grand Gulf up which his
gunboats and transports could go and find a landing for the troops on
solid ground.
Dick was asleep when the boats entered the bayou, but he was soon
awakened by the noise of landing. It was then that most of the
Winchester and of the Ohio regiment discovered that they were comrades,
thrown together again by the chances of war, and there was a mighty
welcome and shaking of hands. But it did not interfere with the rapidity
of the landing. The Winchester regiment was promptly ordered forward and,
advancing on solid ground, took a little village without firing a shot.
All that day troops came up and Grant's army, after having gone away from
Grand Gulf in darkness, was coming back to it in daylight.
"They say that Pemberton at Vicksburg could gather together fifty
thousand men and strike us, while we've only twenty thousand here,"
said Pennington.
"But he isn't going to do it," said Warner.


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