an unwelcome appearance on Dufour's flank, scattering his outposts and menacing the road to the Puerta del Rey. Dufour, conscious of the danger to the mountain passes, set off to confront the Spanish flankers at Guarromán and La Carolina. Consequently, when Vedel, by another tiring night march, retraced his steps to Bailén, he found the position oddly deserted of both friend and foe. When his reconnaissance parties made no contact with the enemy at the Guadalquivir, Vedel concluded that Reding had shifted his division to another point along the line. Dufour sent back alarming reports from Guarromán, convincing Vedel that 10,000 Spaniards—perhaps Reding's division, he warned—were marching on the mountains to their rear. This was too much. Gathering his exhausted division, Vedel hurried to Dufour's aid on 17 July, arriving at Santa Carolina the next day. Dufour's fatal blunder was soon revealed. Vedel discovered that the small band of irregulars roaming about were not at all the threat Dufour had described; for the third time the Spaniards had stolen a march from him, and Reding still hovered somewhere around Mengibar, out of sight. Worse yet, an enormous gap now existed between Dupont and Vedel, and not a single battalion remained to prevent Reding from seizing the central position at Bailén. Trapped News of Vedel's ill-advised movements reached Dupont at noon on 18 July and convinced him to fall back on Bailén and to recall Vedel there as well, re-concentrating his now dangerously scattered army: "I do not care to occupy Andujar. That post is of no consequence." With a wary eye on Castaños' columns across the river, and needing time to prepare his wagons and carriages (encumbered by plunder from the sack of Cordoba), Dupont postponed the retreat till nightfall, hoping to conceal his departure from the Spaniards. Meanwhile, Reding, calling up Coupigny's division from Villa Nueva, had crossed at Mengibar on 17 July and seized the deserted Bailén, bivouacing there the night and preparing to swing west towards Dupont's—and what he assumed to be Vedel's (oblivious as he was to the latter's recent movement east)—position in the morning. Vedel quit La Carolina at 5:00 a.m. on 18 July and rushed the bone-weary French right wing south-west toward Bailén, unwittingly bearing down on Reding's rear. Both armies were now north of the Guadalquivir and staggered in a curious position: Dupont between Castaños and Reding; Reding between Dupont and Vedel. At