The first pickets, retreating in confusion, fled to the camp, with the intelligence that a large body of Union troops were on their way to make an attack.

Similar tidings were brought by the two other bodies of pickets, and Marshall, in dismay, was led to believe that he was menaced by superior numbers, and hastily abandoned Paintville, and Garfield, moving his men rapidly over the central route, occupied the town.
Gen.

Marshall would have been intensely mortified had he known that this large Union army was little more than one-fourth the size of his own.
But his alarm was soon increased.

On the evening of the 8th of January, a spy entered his camp, and reported that Craven, with _thirty-three hundred men_, was within twelve hours' march at the westward.
The big general (he weighed three hundred pounds) was panic-stricken.
Believing Garfield's force to number ten thousand, this reinforcement would carry his strength up to over thirteen thousand.

Ruin and defeat, as he fancied, stared him in the face, for how could his five thousand men encounter nearly three times their number?
They would, of course, be overwhelmed.