"Certainly," Floyd answered. "I turn over the command."
General Buckner called for pen, ink and paper and dispatched a courier immediately to General Grant. The reply was in two words:
Pillow crossed the river under cover of the night and made his way into the country.
Floyd offered to take Dick Welford on board the little steamer.
"No, thank you," the young Virginian answered curtly.
"I'm not going to surrender. I'm going to join Col. Forrest's cavalry and fight my way out."
With a wave of his arm Floyd hurried on board the steamer and fled to Nashville.
Dick had seen Forrest lead one of his matchless charges of cavalry in their fight that day. With a handful of men he had cut his way through a solid mass of struggling infantry and thrown them into confusion.
He had watched this grave, silent, unobtrusive man of humble birth and little education with the keenest interest. He felt instinctively that he was a man of genius. From to-day he knew that as a leader of cavalry he had few equals. He had pointed out to his superiors in their council of war a possible path of escape by a road partially overflowed along the river banks. It was judged impracticable.
In the darkness of the freezing night Dick rode behind his silent new commander along this road with perfect faith. Forrest threw his command into Nashville and saved the city from anarchy when the dreaded news of the fall of Donelson precipitated a panic.
The South had met her first crushing defeat--a defeat more disastrous than the North had suffered at Bull Ran. Grant had lost three thousand men but the Confederate garrisons had been practically wiped out with the loss of more than fifteen thousand muskets, every big gun and thirteen thousand prisoners of war.
When Grant met Buckner, the victor and vanquished quietly shook hands. They had been friends at West Point.
"Why didn't you attack me on Friday?" the Northerner asked.
"If you had, my reënforcements could not possibly have reached me in time."
"In other words a little more promptness on one side, a little less resolute decision on the other--and the tables would have been turned!"
It was an ominous day for the South. Bigger than the loss of the capital of Tennessee which Johnston evacuated the next day, bigger than the loss of fifteen thousand men and their guns loomed the figure of a new Federal commander. Out of the mud, and slush, ice and frozen pools of blood--out of the storm cloud of sleet and snow and black palls of smoke emerged the stolid, bulldog face of Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln made him a major general.