THE REMNANTS OF THE FAULCONER LEGION HAD STUMBLED UPHILL to where, in a tangle of small woods and fields behind Jackson’s Virginia Brigade, the survivors of Nathan Evans’s force recovered. The men were exhausted. At Evans’s insistence they made a crude line that faced toward the Bull Run, but they were on the flank of the reconstituted southern defense and far enough from the turnpike to be spared the renewed federal attacks. The men sat on the grass, dull-eyed and thirsty, wondering if there would be any food or water.

Doctor Danson extracted the bullet from Adam Faulconer’s leg, working fast and without chloroform. “You’re lucky, Adam. No major blood vessels hit. You may even have a slight limp to attract the ladies, but that’s all. You’ll be dancing with the ladies in ten days.” He poured lunar caustic into the wound, bandaged it, and moved on to the Colonel. He worked just as swiftly to extract the bullet from Washington Faulconer’s belly muscles, sewed up the mangled flesh of his arm, then splinted the broken bone. “You’re not quite as lucky as your son, Washington”—the doctor could still not get used to treating his neighbor as a superior officer—“but in another six weeks you’ll be back to rights.”

“Six weeks?” Colonel Faulconer was still furious that his precious Legion had been decimated under Thaddeus Bird’s command and at Nathaniel Starbuck’s bidding. He wanted his revenge, not on Bird, whom he had always known was a fool, but on Starbuck, who had become the Colonel’s personification for the Legion’s failure. Instead of marching to glorious victory under Washington Faulconer’s personal command the regiment had been thrown away in some miserable skirmish at the wrong end of the battlefield. The Legion had lost all its baggage and at least seventy men. No one knew the full total, though the Colonel had established that Starbuck was himself among the missing.

Doctor Danson had heard that Starbuck had been captured by the pursuing Yankees, or maybe worse. “A boy in B Company thought Starbuck might have been shot,” he told the Colonel as he bandaged the splinted arm.

“Good,” the Colonel said with a savagery that might have been excusable in a man suffering from the pain of a newly broken arm.

“Father!” Adam nevertheless protested.

“If the damned Yankees don’t shoot him, we shall. He killed Ridley! I saw it.”

“Father, please,” Adam pleaded.

“For God’s sake, Adam, must you always take Starbuck’s side against me? Does family loyalty count for nothing with you?” The Colonel shouted the hurt words at his son who, appalled by the accusation, said nothing. Faulconer flinched away from the splints that Danson was trying to put on his upper arm. “I tell you, Adam,” Faulconer went on, “that your damned friend is nothing but a murderer. Christ, but I should have known he was rotten when he first told us that tale of thieving and whores, but I trusted him for your sake. I wanted to help him for your sake, and now Ethan’s dead because of it and, I promise you, I’ll snap Starbuck’s neck myself if he has the gall to come back here.”

“Not with that arm, you won’t,” Doctor Danson said dryly.

“Damn the arm, Billy! I can’t leave the Legion for six weeks!”

“You need rest,” the doctor said calmly, “you need healing. If you exert yourself, Washington, you’ll invite the gangrene. Three weeks of exertion and you’ll be dead. Let’s fashion a sling for that arm.”

A thunderous crash of musketry announced that Jackson’s Virginians were greeting the enemy. The battle was now being fought on the plateau about the Henry House, a flat hilltop edged with flame and thunder. The waiting Confederate guns tore great gaps in the advancing federal lines, but the northern infantry outflanked the batteries and forced them back, and northern guns unlimbered to take the rebel cannon in the flank. To Captain Imboden, the lawyer turned gunner, the ground around his outnumbered cannon looked as though it was being truffled by a horde of hungry hogs. The northern shells burrowed deep before exploding, but some were finding more solid targets. One of Imboden’s limbers exploded from a direct hit and one of his gunners screamed in brief, foul gasps as his guts were sliced open by a jagged-edged scrap of shell casing. More gunners dropped to the marksmanship of northern sharpshooters. Imboden was serving one of his guns, ramming a canister down on top of a roundshot, then stepping back as the lanyard was pulled and the lethal missiles flensed through a northern regiment of infantry that was advancing through the smoke and stench.

The flags were bright squares of color in the gray. Stars and Stripes came forward while the three stripes of the Confederacy edged backward, but then stopped where Thomas Jackson, his well-thumbed Bible safe in his saddlebag, had decreed they would stop. Jackson’s men stood hard in the smoke and discovered that the hated hours of drill were transmuted by battle into the unconscious motions of efficiency, and that somehow, despite the flail of northern canister and musketry, and despite the terror of men surrounded by the screaming of the wounded, the sobbing of the dying, the horrors of shattered flesh and of disemboweled friends, their hands still kept ramming bullets and charges, kept feeding percussion caps onto cones, kept aiming, kept firing. Still kept fighting. They were terrified, but they had been trained, and the man who had trained them glowered at them, and so they stayed like a stone wall built across a hilltop.

And the northern attack broke on the wall.

Jackson’s Virginians should have been beaten. They should have been swept away like a sand ridge struck by a sea, expect they did not know the battle had been lost and so they fought on, even edged forward, and the northerners wondered how you were supposed to beat these bastards, and the fear lodged in the northern hearts and the southerners edged another pace forward over dry grass scorched by burning cartridge wadding. The federals looked behind for reinforcements.

Those northern reinforcements came, but the southerners were being reinforced too as Beauregard at last realized that his whole plan of battle had been wrong. It had been about as wrong as any plan could be wrong, but now he was making amends by plucking men from his unbloodied right and hurrying them toward the plateau about the Henry House. Irvin McDowell, irritated that such a stubborn defense was delaying the sweet moment of victory, was busy ordering more men up the slope and into the sights of Captain Imboden’s cannon and into the ghastly carnage of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’s canister, and into range of General Thomas Jackson’s rifle-muskets.

And thus the day’s real dying had begun.

It began because a battle of motion, of outflanking, advance and retreat, had become a standoff fight. The hilltop was bare of trees, devoid of ditch or wall, just an open space for death, and death grasped at it greedily. Men loaded and fired, fell and bled, cursed and died, and still more men filed onto the plateau to extend death’s grip. Twin lines of infantry were stalled just a hundred paces apart and there tried to blast the guts out of each other. Men from New York and New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, Connecticut and Massachusetts shot at men from Mississippi and Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, Maryland and Tennessee. The wounded crawled back to collapse in the grass, the dead were hurled aside, the files closed on the center, the regiments shrank, yet still the firing went on beneath the bright flags. The northerners, firing again and again at the Confederate lines, knew that they only needed to break this small army, capture Richmond, and the whole conceit of a Southern Confederacy would collapse like a rotten pumpkin, while the southerners, returning bullet for bullet, knew that the North, once bloodied, would think twice before they dared invade the sovereign and sacred soil of the South again.

And so, for their twin causes, men fought beneath the colors, though, in the windless heat, the real trophies of the day were the opposing guns, for the side that could silence their enemy’s guns was the side likeliest to win the struggle. None of the guns was emplaced behind earthworks, for none of the generals had planned to fight on this bare plateau, and so the gunners were vulnerable to infantry fire because there was not room on the hilltop for men to stand off at a distance. This was a belly-to-belly brawl, a murderous gutter fight.

Men charged at open guns, and the guns, crammed with lethal canister, left swaths of attackers dead in front of their muzzles, yet still the men charged. Then, as the sun passed its dazzling height, a Virginia regiment dressed in blue coats, which had been the only uniforms available to their colonel, came to reinforce the Confederate left and saw a northern battery in front of them. They marched forward. The gunners saw them and waved at them, believing them to be northerners, and in the still, hot smoky air the triple stripes of the Confederate flag hung red, white and blue like the Stars and Stripes. The northern gunners, stripped to their waists and sweating white stripes through powder stains and cursing as they burned their hands on the blazing hot barrels of their guns, did not give a second glance to the blue-coated infantry that marched, as the gunners supposed, to give them support against the infantry in front.

“Take aim!” A whole battalion of Virginia infantry had come to close pistol range on the flank of a northern battery. The rifle muskets went onto blue-uniformed shoulders. There was no time to turn the field guns and so the gunners threw themselves flat, wriggled under their guns and limbers, then covered their heads with their arms.

“Fire!” The flames ripped through the gray smoke and the Virginian officers heard the rattle as hundreds of musket balls beat home on iron gun barrels or wooden limber boxes, and then they heard the screams as forty-nine of the fifty battery horses died. The gunners who had survived the volley turned and fled as the Virginians charged with fixed bayonets and bowie knives. The battery was captured, its guns splashed with blood.

“Turn the guns! Turn the guns!”

“Charge!” More southerners ran forward, bayonets bright in the smoky gloom. “Our homes! Our homes!” they called, and a crash of musketry greeted them, but the northerners here were falling back. A shell exploded somewhere between the lines, streaking the smoke with flame. “Our homes!”

The northerners counterattacked. A regiment swept over the captured guns, forcing the Virginians back, but the recaptured guns were of no use to the federals for the gunners had been shot or else slaughtered by bayonets, and the horse teams were so much dead meat, so the cannon could not even be taken away. Other gunners in other batteries were killed by sharpshooters, and slowly the Confederates edged forward and the northerners heard the strange wailing scream as the rebel line attacked. The shadows lengthened and still more men climbed the hill to enter the stubborn horror.

James Starbuck came to the hilltop. He no longer searched for trophies that his victorious general could lay before the president’s feet. Instead he came to discover just what had gone wrong on the smoke-wreathed plateau. “Tell me what’s happening, Starbuck,” Irvin McDowell had ordered his aide. “Off you go!” McDowell had sent six other men on similar errands, but had not thought to visit the plateau himself. In truth McDowell was swamped by the noise and the uncertainty and simply wanted an aide to come back with good news of victory.

James urged his horse up the shell-scarred hillside to where he found hell. His horse, devoid of guidance, ambled slowly forward to where a New York regiment, newly ordered to the hilltop, marched with fixed bayonets toward the enemy line, and it seemed to James that the whole southern army suddenly flowered in flame, a great fence of flame which turned to a rolling bank of smoke, and the New Yorkers just shuddered to a stop, and then another southern volley came from their flank and the New Yorkers stepped backward, leaving their dead and dying, and James saw the ramrods working as the men tried to return the fire, but the New York regiment had attacked alone, without flank support, and they had no chance against the southern volleys that enfiladed and confronted and decimated them. James tried to cheer them on, but his mouth was too dry to make words.

Then James’s world obliterated itself. His horse literally jumped beneath him, then reared up its head to scream as it collapsed. A southern shell had exploded dead under its belly, eviscerating the beast and James, stunned, deafened and screaming for help, sprawled clumsily off the collapsing mass of guts and blood and flesh and hooves. He scrambled away on all fours, suddenly throwing up the contents of his distended belly. He stayed on all fours, retching foully, then managed to stagger to his feet. He slipped in a puddle of his horse’s blood, then stood again and staggered toward the wooden house that lay at the center of the federal battle line and seemed to offer a kind of refuge, though, as he got closer, he saw how the little building had been splintered and riven and scorched by bullets and shells. James leaned on the springhouse in the yard and tried to make sense of his world, but all he could think about was the welter of horse’s blood into which he had fallen. His ears still rang from the explosion.

A Wisconsin soldier, his face a mask of white, was sitting beside him, and James slowly became aware that the man’s head was half-severed by a shell fragment and his brains exposed. “No,” James said, “no!” Inside the house a woman was wailing while somewhere in the distance it sounded as though a whole army of women was wailing. James pushed away the springhouse and staggered toward a regiment of infantry. They were Massachusetts men, his own people, and he stood close beside their colors and saw the heap of dead that had been thrown up behind the flags, and even as he watched, another man crumpled down. The flags were a target for enemy marksmen, a bright-starred invitation to death, but as soon as the color bearer fell another man plucked up the staff and held the standards high.

“Starbuck!” a voice shouted. It was a major whom James knew as a dour and canny attorney in Boston, but for some reason, although James must have met the man every week at the Lawyer’s Club, he could not place his name. “Where’s McDowell?” the major shouted.

“Down by the turnpike.” James managed to sound reasonably coherent.

“He should be here!” A shell screamed overhead. The major, a thin and gray-haired man with a neatly clipped beard, shuddered as the missile exploded somewhere behind. “Damn them!”

Damn who, James wondered, then was astonished that he had used the swear word, even silently in his thoughts.

“We’re fighting them piecemeal!” The Boston attorney tried to explain the northern army’s predicament. “It won’t do!”

“What do you mean?” James had to shout to make himself heard over the constant crash of gunnery. What was this man’s name? He remembered how the attorney was a terrier in cross-examination, never letting go of a witness till he had shaken the evidence free, and James remembered how, famously, the man had once lost his temper with Chief Justice Shaw, complaining in open court that Shaw was intellectually and judicially costive, for which contempt Shaw had first fined him, and had then purchased him supper. What was the man’s name?

“The attacks should coincide! We need a general officer to coordinate affairs.” The major stopped abruptly.

James, who was always made uncomfortable by criticism of constituted authority, tried to explain that General McDowell was undoubtedly aware of what was happening, but then he stopped talking because the major was swaying. James put out a hand, the major gripped it with a demonic force, and then opened his mouth, but instead of speaking he just voided a great flow of blood. “Oh, no,” the major managed to say, then he slumped down to James’s feet. James felt himself shaking. This was a nightmare, and he felt most terrible, abject and shameful fear. “Tell my dear Abigail,” the dying major said, and he looked pathetically up at James, and James still could not remember the man’s name.

“Tell Abigail what?” he asked stupidly, but the Major was dead, and James shook the corpse’s hand away and felt a terrible, terrible sadness that he was going to die without ever knowing the pleasures of this world. He would die and there was no one who would really miss him, no one who would truly mourn him, and James stared at the sky and howled a self-pitying cry, then he managed to fumble his revolver from its stiff-leather holster and he aimed it vaguely in the direction of the Confederate army and pulled its trigger time and again to spit its bullets into a smoke cloud. Each single shot was a protest and a revenge for his own cautious nature.

The Massachusetts regiment stumbled forward. They were no longer in line but had coalesced into small groups of men that now sidled between the dead and dying. They talked to one another as they fought, cheering one another on, offering praise and small jests. “Hey, reb! Here’s a lead pill for your sickness!” a man shouted, then fired.

“You all right, Billy?”

“Gun’s all choked up.” The minié bullets expanded in the barrels as their hollowed-out backs were swollen by the powder gases to grip the rifling and so give the missile a deadly accurate spin. The friction of the expanded bullet scraping through the barrel was supposed to clean the fouled powder deposits from the rifling, but the theory did not work and the harsh deposits still accreted to make the guns terribly hard for a tired man to load.

“Here, reb! Here’s one for you!”

“Christ! That was close.”

“No use ducking, Robby, they’ve gone past before you hear ’em.”

“Anyone got a shot? Someone give me a cartridge!”

James took comfort from the quiet words and edged closer to the nearest group of men. The commanding officer of the Massachusetts regiment had started the day as a lieutenant and now shouted at the survivors to advance, and so they tried, shouting a harsh defiance from their raw throats, but then two Confederate six pounders took the regiment’s open flank with barrel loads of canister and the musket balls whipped along the survivors, decimating their groups and bloodying the slippery turf with still more blood. The Massachusetts men stepped back. James reloaded his revolver. He was close enough to see the dirty faces of the enemy, to see their eyes showing white through the powder stains on their skin, to see their unbuttoned coats and loose shirts. He saw a rebel fall down, clutching at his knee, then crawl away to the rear. He saw a rebel officer with long fair mustaches screaming encouragement at his men. The man’s coat hung open and his trousers were belted with a length of rope. James took careful aim at the man, fired, but his revolver’s smoke obscured the effect of his shot.

The rebel guns crashed back, bucking on their trails, smashing down on their wheels, sizzling as the sponges cleaned out their barrels, then firing again to feed the cloud of smoke that thickened like a Nantucket fog. More guns came from Beauregard’s right wing. The rebel general sensed that disaster had been averted though it was none of his doing, but rather because his farmhands and college boys and store clerks had withstood the northern assault and were now counterattacking everywhere along Jackson’s makeshift line. Two amateur armies had collided and luck was running Beauregard’s way.

General Joseph Johnston had brought his men from the Shenandoah Valley, but, now that they were here, he had no duties except to watch them die. Johnston outranked Beauregard, but Beauregard had planned this battle, knew the ground, while Johnston was a stranger, and so he was letting Beauregard finish the fight. Johnston was ready to take over if Beauregard were hit, but till then he would stay silent and just try to understand the flux of the huge event that had come to its terrible climax on the hilltop. Johnston understood clearly enough that the North had wrong-footed Beauregard and turned his flank, but he also saw how the southern forces were fighting back hard and could yet scrape through to victory. Johnston also understood that it was Colonel Nathan Evans, the unregarded South Carolinian, who had probably saved the Confederacy by planting his feeble force across the path of the northern flank attack. Johnston sought out Evans and thanked him, then, working his way back to the east, the general came to where the wounded Washington Faulconer lay on the ground with his back propped against a saddle. Faulconer had been stripped to the waist and his chest was swathed in bandages while his right arm was in its blood-stained sling.

The general reined in and looked sympathetically down at the wounded Colonel. “It’s Faulconer, isn’t it?”

Washington Faulconer looked up to see a dazzle of yellow braid, but the smoke-diffused sun was behind the horseman and he could not make out the man’s face. “Sir?” he answered very warily, already rehearsing the arguments he would use to explain his Legion’s failure.

“I’m Joseph Johnston. We met in Richmond four months ago, and of course we had the pleasure of dining together at Jethro Sanders’s house last year.”

“Of course, sir.” Faulconer had been expecting a reprimand, yet General Johnston sounded more than affable.

“You must be feeling foul, Faulconer. Is the wound bad?”

“A six-week scratch, sir, that’s all.” Faulconer knew how to sound suitably modest, though in truth he was desperately readjusting himself to the wonderful realization that General Johnston was not full of recrimination. Washington Faulconer was no fool, and he knew that he had behaved badly or, at the very least, that it might be imputed that he had behaved unwisely by leaving his Legion and thus not being in place to save them from Starbuck’s treachery and Bird’s impetuosity, but if Johnston’s friendliness was any guide then maybe no one had noticed that dereliction of duty?

“If it hadn’t have been for your sacrifice,” Johnston said, pouring the balm of Gilead onto Faulconer’s self-esteem and making the Colonel’s happiness complete, “the battle would have been lost two hours back. Thank God you were with Evans, that’s all I can say.”

Faulconer opened his mouth to respond, found nothing whatever to say, so closed it.

“The federals had Beauregard completely bamboozled,” Johnston went on blithely. “He thought the thing would be decided on the right flank, and all the time the rascals were planning to hit us here. But you fellows got it right, and thank God you did, for you’ve saved the Confederacy.” Johnston was a pernickety, fussy man and a professional soldier of long experience who seemed genuinely moved by the tribute he was paying. “Evans told me of your bravery, Faulconer, and it’s an honor to salute you!” In fact Shanks Evans had paid a tribute to the bravery of the Faulconer Legion and had not mentioned Colonel Washington Faulconer’s name at all, but it was a simple enough misunderstanding and not one that Washington Faulconer thought needed to be corrected at this moment.

“We merely did our best, sir,” Faulconer managed to say, while in his mind he was already rewriting the whole story of the day—how he had, in fact, known all along that the rebel left lay dangerously exposed. Had he not reconnoitered toward the Sudley Fords at daybreak? And had he not left his regiment well placed to meet the enemy’s thrust? And had he not been wounded in the subsequent fighting? “I’m just glad we could have been of some small service, sir,” he added modestly.

Johnston liked Faulconer’s humility. “You’re a brave fellow, Faulconer, and I’ll make it my business to let Richmond know who are the real heroes of Manassas.”

“My men are the real heroes, sir.” Just ten minutes ago the Colonel had been cursing his men, especially the bandsmen who had jettisoned two expensive sax-horn tubas, a trumpet and three drums in their desperate efforts to escape the northern pursuit. “They’re all good Virginians, sir,” he added, knowing that Joseph Johnston was himself from the old dominion.

“I salute you all!” Johnston said, though touching his hat specifically to Faulconer before urging his horse on.

Washington Faulconer lay back and basked in the praise. A hero of Manassas! Even the pain seemed diminished, or maybe that was the morphine that Doctor Danson had insisted he swallow, but even so, a hero! That was a good word and how well it sat on a Faulconer! And maybe six weeks in the Richmond town house would not come amiss, so long, of course, that this battle was won and the Confederacy survived, but granted that proviso, surely a hero stood a better chance of promotion if he dined regularly with the rulers of his country? And what a rebuke to the mudsills like Lee who had been so niggardly in their attitude. Now they would have to deal with a hero! Faulconer smiled at his son. “I think you’ve earned yourself a promotion, Adam.”

“But…”

“Quiet! Don’t protest.” The Colonel always felt good when he could behave generously, and this moment was made even better by the burgeoning hopes that his new status as a hero of Manassas made credible. He could surely attain general rank? And he could surely find the time to perfect his Legion, which could then become the jewel and heart of his new brigade. Faulconer’s Brigade. That name had a fine ring, and he imagined Faulconer’s Brigade leading the march into Washington, presenting arms outside the White House and escorting a conqueror on horseback into a humbled land. He took a cigar from the case beside him and jabbed it toward Adam to emphasize the importance of what he said. “I need you to be in charge of the Legion while I’m convalescing. I need you to make sure Pecker doesn’t run wild again, eh? That he doesn’t fritter the Legion away in some piddling skirmish. Besides, the Legion should be in family hands. And you did well today, son, very well.”

“I did nothing, Father,” Adam protested hotly, “and I’m not even sure—”

“Now, now! Quiet!” Washington Faulconer had seen Major Bird approaching and did not want Thaddeus to witness his son’s prevarications. “Thaddeus!” The Colonel greeted his brother-in-law with an unaccustomed warmth. “The general asked me to thank you. You did well!”

Major Bird, who knew full well that the Colonel had been furious with him until just a moment before, stopped dead in his tracks then looked ostentatiously about, as though searching for another man called Thaddeus who might be the object of the Colonel’s praise. “Are you talking to me, Colonel?”

“You did marvelously well! I congratulate you! You did precisely what I would have expected of you, indeed, exactly what I wanted of you! You held the Legion to its duty till I arrived. Everyone else thought the battle would be on the right, but we knew better, eh? We did well, very well. If my arm wasn’t broken I’d shake your hand. Well done, Thaddeus, well done!”

Thaddeus Bird managed to hold his laughter in check, though his head did jerk nervously back and forth as if he was about to burst into a fit of devilish cackles. “Am I to understand,” he finally managed to speak without laughing, “that you are also to be congratulated?”

The Colonel hid his anger at his brother-in-law’s effrontery. “I think you and I know each other well enough to dispense with an exchange of admiration, Thaddeus. Just be assured I’ll put your name forward when I’m in Richmond.”

“I didn’t come here to offer you admiration,” Thaddeus Bird said with tactless honesty, “but to suggest we send a work party to find some water. The men are parched.”

“Water? By all means, water. Then you and I should put our heads together and decide what’s needed for the future. Mr. Little tells me we’ve lost some band instruments, and we can’t afford to lose as many officers’ horses as we did today.”

Band instruments? Horses? Thaddeus Bird gaped at his brother-in-law, wondering if the broken bone had somehow drained Faulconer of his wits. What the Legion needed, Thaddeus Bird decided as the Colonel meandered on, was a McGuffey’s Reader in elementary soldiering, a child’s primer in rifle-fire and drill, but he knew it would be no good saying as much. Faulconer’s huge complacency had been puffed up by some fool’s praise, and he was already seeing himself as the conqueror of New York. Bird tried to sober the Colonel with a small dose of reality. “You’ll want the butcher’s bill, Faulconer?” He interrupted the Colonel. “The list of our dead and wounded?”

Washington Faulconer again had to hide his irritation. “Is it bad?” he asked guardedly.

“I have nothing with which to compare it, and sadly it’s incomplete. We misplaced a lot of men in the course of your brave victory, but we know for sure that at least a score are dead. Captain Jenkins is gone, and poor Burroughs, of course. I assume you’ll write to the widow?” Bird paused, but received no answer, so just shrugged and carried on. “Of course there can be other dead ones still out there. We know of twenty-two wounded fellows, some of them atrociously bad—”

“Twenty-three,” the Colonel interrupted, and offered Thaddeus Bird a modest smile. “I count myself a member of the Legion, Thaddeus.”

“So do I, Faulconer, and had already numbered you among its heroes. As I said, twenty-two, some of them grievously. Masterson won’t survive, and Norton has lost both his legs so…”

“I don’t need every detail,” Faulconer said peevishly.

“And there still appear to be seventy-two men missing,” Bird continued stoically with his bad news. “They aren’t necessarily lost to us forever; Turner MacLean’s boy staggered in five minutes ago having spent the best part of two hours wandering around the battlefield, but he never did have an ounce of sense. Others are probably dead and gone. I hear Ridley was killed.”

“Murdered,” the Colonel insisted.

“Murdered, was he?” Bird had already heard the story, but wanted to provoke the Colonel.

“He was murdered,” the Colonel said, “and I witnessed it, and you will enter that in the regiment’s books.”

“If we ever find the books,” Bird remarked happily. “We seem to have lost all the baggage.”

“Murdered! You hear me?” Faulconer thundered the accusation, sending a stab of pain through his wounded chest. “That’s what you will enter. That he was murdered by Starbuck.”

“And Starbuck’s missing,” Bird went blithely on, “I’m most sorry to say.”

“You’re sorry?” There was something very dangerous in the Colonel’s voice.

“You should be too,” Bird said, ignoring the Colonel’s tone. “Starbuck probably saved our colors, and he certainly prevented Adam from being taken prisoner. Didn’t Adam tell you?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you, Father,” Adam said.

“Starbuck is gone!” the Colonel said flatly, “and if he was here you would be required to arrest him for murder. I saw him shoot Ridley. I saw him! Do you hear that, Thaddeus?” In fact half the Legion could hear the Colonel, whose indignation soared as he remembered poor Ridley’s death. Good God, Faulconer thought, but did none of these men believe him when he said he had seen Starbuck fire the shots that murdered Ridley! The Colonel had turned in his saddle and watched him fire the revolver! And now Pecker Bird wanted to make out that the Bostonian was some kind of hero? Christ, the Colonel thought, but he was the hero of Manassas! Had not General Johnston said as much? “You say we lost poor Roswell Jenkins?” he asked, deliberately changing the subject.

“He was quite obliterated by shellfire,” Bird confirmed, then obstinately changed the subject back. “Are you really ordering me to arrest Starbuck for murder?”

“If you find him, yes!” the Colonel shouted, then winced as a lance of pain shot down his arm. “For God’s sake, Thaddeus, why do you always have to make such a damn fuss about things?”

“Because someone has to, Colonel, someone has to.” Bird smiled and turned away while behind him, on a plateau edged with fire, the battle came to its breaking point at last.

 

James Starbuck never quite understood why the northern lines broke, he just remembered a desperate panic suddenly overtaking the federal troops until, all order gone, there was nothing but panic as McDowell’s army ran.

Nothing they had done had moved the southern regiments off the plateau. No assault gained enough ground to let supporting troops reinforce success, and so the northern attacks had been beaten back again and again, and each repulse had whelped its litter of dead and dying men who lay in rows like tidal wrack to mark the limits of each federal assault.

Ammunition had run short in some northern regiments. The southerners, pushed back toward their own baggage, were distributing tubs of cartridges to their troops, but the northern supplies were still east of the Bull Run and every wagon or limber or caisson had to be brought through the traffic jam that developed around the stone bridge and too often, even when ammunition was brought to the hilltop, it proved to be the wrong kind and so troops armed with .58 rifles received .69 musket ammunition and, as their rifles fell silent, they retreated to leave a gap in the northern line into which the gray rebels moved.

On both sides the rifles and muskets misfired or broke. The cones through which the percussion cap spat its fire into the powder charge broke most frequently, but as the southerners pressed forward they could pick up the guns of the northern dead and so keep up the slaughter. Yet still the northerners fought on. Their rifle and musket barrels were fouled with the clinker of burnt powder so that each shot took a huge effort to ram home, and the day was hot and the air filled with acrid powder smoke so that the mouths and gullets of the weary men were dry and raw, and their shoulders were bruised black from the recoil of the heavy guns, and their voices hoarse from shouting, their eyes were smarting with smoke, their ears ringing with the hammer blows of the big guns, their arms aching from ramming the bullets down the fouled barrels, yet still they fought. They bled and fought, cursed and fought, prayed and fought. Some of the men seemed dazed, just standing open-eyed and open-mouthed, oblivious to their officers’ shouts or to the discordant din of bullets, guns, shells and screams.

James Starbuck had lost all sense of time. He reloaded his revolver, fired and reloaded. He scarce knew what he was doing, only that every shot could save the Union. He was terrified, but he fought on, taking an odd courage from the thought of his younger sister. He had decided that Martha alone would mourn him and that he could not disgrace her affection and it was that resolve which held him to his place where he fought like a ranker, firing and loading, firing and loading, and all the while saying Martha’s name aloud like a talisman that would keep him brave. Martha was the sister whose character was most like Nathaniel’s, and as James stood amid the litter of wounded and dead, he could have wept that God had not given him Martha and Nathaniel’s brazen daring.

Then, just as he manipulated the last of his small percussion caps onto his revolver’s cones, a cheer spread along the southern line and James looked up to see the whole enemy front surging forward. He straightened his aching bruised arm and pointed the revolver at what looked like a vast rat-gray army scorched black by powder burns that was charging straight toward him.

Then, just as he muttered his sister’s name and half-flinched from the noise his revolver would make, he saw he was utterly alone.

One moment there had been a battle, and now there was rout.

For the federal army had broken and run.

They pelted down the hill, discipline gone to the wind. Men threw away rifles and muskets, bayonets and haversacks, and just fled. Some ran north toward the Sudley Fords while others ran for the stone bridge. A few men tried to stem the charge, shouting at their fellow northerners to form line and stand firm, but the few were swamped by the many. The panicked troops flooded the fields on either side of the turnpike on which a limbered cannon, its horses whipped into a frantic gallop, ran down screaming infantrymen with its iron-shod wheels. Other men used battle standards as spears with which to fight their way toward the stream.

The rebel pursuit stopped at the plateau’s edge. A spattering of musket fire hurried the northerners’ retreat, but no one on the rebel side had the energy to pursue. Instead they reveled in the slow realization of victory and in the scurrying defeat of the panicked horde beneath them. The rebel gunners brought their surviving cannon to the hillcrest and the southern shells screamed away into the afternoon warmth to explode in bursts of smoke along the crowded turnpike and in the farther woods. One of the shots burst in the air plumb above the wooden bridge that carried the turnpike over the deep tributary of the Run just as a wagon was crossing. The wagon’s wounded horses panicked and tried to bolt, but the fatal shell had torn off a front wheel and the massive vehicle slewed round, its broken axle gouging timber so that the heavy wagon body was jammed immovably between the bridge’s wooden parapets, and thus the northern army’s main escape road was blocked and still more shells screamed down to explode among the fleeing northerners. The federal guns, carriages, limbers and wagons still on the Bull Run’s western bank were abandoned as their teamsters fled for safety. A shell exploded in the stream, spouting tons of water. More shells smacked behind, driving the panicked mass of men in a maddened scramble down the steep slippery bank and into the Run’s quick current. Scores of men drowned, pushed under by their own desperate comrades. Others floundered across the deep stream and somehow pulled themselves free and then ran toward Washington.

Nathaniel Starbuck had watched the rout spill over the plateau’s edge. At first he had not believed what he saw, then disbelief turned to amazement. The sergeant guarding the prisoners had taken one look at the hillside, then ran. A wounded northerner, recuperating in the yard, had limped away, using his musket as a crutch. The red-bearded doctor came to the door in his blood-spattered apron, took one incredulous look at the whole scene, then shook his head and went back inside to his patients.

“What do we do now?” one of the rebel prisoners asked Starbuck, as if an officer might know the etiquette of handling victory in the middle of a defeated rabble.

“We stay real quiet and polite,” Starbuck advised. There were northerners fleeing past the house and some were looking angrily at the southern prisoners. “Stay sitting, don’t move, just wait.” He watched a northern field gun retreating off the plateau. The gun captain had somehow managed to assemble a team of four horses which, whipped bloody by their frightened drivers, were galloping recklessly down the shell-scarred slope so that the gunners perched on the narrow limber seat were clinging grimly to the metal handles. The horses were white-eyed and scared. The gun itself, attached behind the limber, bounced dangerously as the rig splashed through a streamlet at the hill’s foot, then the driver pulled on his reins and the panicked horses turned too fast onto the turnpike and Starbuck watched in horror as first the cannon, then the limber, tipped, rolled and slid hard across the road to crash sickeningly into the trees at the edge of the yard. There was a moment’s silence, then the first screams tore the humid air.

“Oh, Christ.” A wounded man turned in horror from the carnage. A horse, both rear legs broken, tried to scramble free of the bloody wreckage. One of the gunners had been trapped under the limber and the man clawed feebly at the splintered timbers that impaled him. A passing infantry sergeant ignored the wounded man as he cut the traces of the one uninjured horse, unhooked its chains, then scrambled onto its back. A roundshot from the spilt limber trundled across the road and the wounded horses went on screaming like the dying gunner.

“Oh God, no.” One of the prisoners in the tree-shaded yard was a tidewater Virginian who now recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. The awful screaming went on until a northern officer walked over to the wounded animals and fired into their skulls. It took five shots, but the animals died, leaving only the shrieking, gasping, writhing gunner who was impaled by the mangled spokes of the limber’s wheel. The officer took a breath. “Soldier!”

The man must have recognized the tone of authority for he went still for just a second, and that second was all the officer needed. He aimed the revolver, pulled the trigger and the gunner fell back silent. The northern officer shuddered, tossed away the empty revolver then walked away weeping. The world seemed very quiet suddenly. It stank of blood, but it was quiet until the tidewater boy said the Lord’s Prayer one more time, as though the repetition of the words could save his soul.

“Are you boys safe?” A gray-coated officer galloped his horse down to the crossroads.

“We’re safe,” Starbuck said.

“We whipped ’em, boys! Whipped ’em good!” the officer boasted.

“You want an apple, mister?” A South Carolina prisoner, released now, had been searching among the knapsacks that had spilled from the fallen gun limber and now plucked some apples from among the bloody wreckage. He tossed the jubilant officer a bright red apple. “Go whip ’em some more!”

The officer caught the apple. Behind him the first southern infantry was advancing toward the Bull Run. Starbuck watched for a while, then turned away. War’s lottery had freed him yet again, and he had one more promise yet to keep.

 

Tired men collected the wounded, those they could find. Some of the injured were in woodland, and doomed to slow and forgotten deaths in the undergrowth. Thirsty men looked for water while some just drank the fouled liquid in the cannons’ sponge buckets, gulping down the gunpowder debris along with the warm, salty liquid. The small wind was brisker now, stirring the camp fires that men made from shattered musket stocks and fence rails.

The rebels were in no state to pursue the federal troops, and so they stayed on the battlefield and stared in dazed astonishment at the plunder of victory—at the guns and wagons and caissons, at the mounds of captured stores and at the hordes of prisoners. A fat congressman from Rochester, New York, was among those prisoners; he had been found trying to hide his vast belly behind a slim sapling and had been brought to the army headquarters where he blustered about the importance of his position and demanding to be released. A rail-thin Georgian soldier told him to shut his damned fat mouth before he had his damned fat tongue cut out to be cooked and served with an apple sauce and the congressman fell instantly silent.

At dusk the rebels crossed the Run to capture the thirty-pound Parrott field rifle that had signaled the federal attack that dawn. The northerners had abandoned twenty-six other guns, along with nearly all their army’s baggage. Southern soldiers found full-dress uniforms carefully packed ready for the triumphant entry into Richmond and a North Carolinian soldier paraded proudly about in a Yankee general’s finery, complete with epaulettes, sword, sash and spurs. The pockets of the dead were rifled for their pitiful haul of combs, playing cards, testaments, jackknives and coins. A lucky few found wealthier corpses, one with a heavy watch chain hung with golden seals, another with a ruby ring on his wedding finger. Daguerreotypes of wives and sweethearts, parents and children were tossed aside, for the victors were not looking for mementoes of shattered affections, but only for coins and cigars, silver and gold, good boots, fine shirts, belts, buckles or weapons. A brisk market in plunder established itself; fine officers’ field glasses were sold for a dollar, swords for three, and fifty-dollar Colt revolvers for five or six. Most prized of all were the posing photographs showing New York and Chicago ladies out of their clothes. Some of the men refused to look, fearing hell’s fires, but most passed the pictures around and wondered at the plunder that would come their way if ever they were called upon to invade the rich, plump, soft North that bred such women and such fine rooms. Doctors from North and South worked together in the farm hospitals of the scorched, torn battlefield. The wounded wept, the amputated legs and arms and hands and feet piled in the yards, while the dead were stacked like cordwood for the graves that must wait for morning to be dug.

As evening drew on, James Starbuck was still free. He had hidden himself in a stand of trees, and now he crawled in the bottom of a deep ditch toward the Bull Run. His mind was in chaos. How had it happened? How could defeat have happened? It was so bitter, so terrible, so shameful. Was God so careless of the right that he would allow this awful visitation upon the United States? It made no sense.

“I wouldn’t go a foot farther, Yankee,” an amused voice suddenly spoke above him, “because that’s poison ivy just ahead of you, and you’re in enough trouble like it is.”

James looked up to see two grinning lads whom he rightly suspected had been watching him for the last few minutes. “I’m an officer,” he managed to say.

“Nice to meet you, officer. I’m Ned Potter and that’s Jake Spring, and this here’s our dog, Abe.” Potter gestured at a ragged little mongrel that he held on a length of rope. “We ain’t none of us officers, but you’re our prisoner.”

James stood and tried to brush the dead leaves and stagnant water from his uniform. “My name,” he said in his most officious manner, then stopped. What would happen to Elial Starbuck’s son in southern hands? Would they lynch him? Would they do the terrible things his father said all southerners did to Negroes and emancipators?

“Don’t care what your name is, Yankee, only what’s in your pockets. Me, Jake and Abe are kind of poor right now. All we captured so far is two boys from Pennsylvania and they didn’t have nothing but cold hoe cakes and three rusty cents between ’em.” The musket came up and the grin widened. “You can give us that revolver for a beginnings.”

“Buchanan!” James blurted out the name. “Miles Buchanan!”

Ned Potter and Jake Spring stared uncomprehendingly at their prisoner.

“An attorney!” James explained. “I’ve been trying to remember his name all day! He once accused Chief Justice Shaw of being costive. Intellectually costive, that is…” His voice died away as he realized that poor Miles Buchanan was dead now, and Abigail Buchanan was a widow, and he himself was taken prisoner.

“Just give us the revolver, Yankee.”

James handed over the blackened revolver, then turned out his pockets. He was carrying over eighteen dollars in coin, a New Testament, a fine watch on a seal-heavy chain, a pair of folding opera glasses, a box of pen nibs, two notebooks and a fine linen handkerchief that his mother had embroidered with his initials. Ned Potter and Jake Spring were delighted with their luck, but James felt only a terrible humiliation. He had been delivered into the hands of his bitterest enemies and he could have wept for his country’s loss.

One mile away from James, Nathaniel Starbuck searched a meadow that was pockmarked with shell fire and scored with hoofprints. The Yankees were long gone and the meadow was empty except for the dead. It was the pasture where Washington Faulconer had struck him with his riding crop, the place where Ethan Ridley had died.

He found Ridley closer to the tree line than he remembered, but he supposed all his recollections of the battle were confused. The body was a horror of blood and bone, of torn flesh and blackened skin. The birds had already begun their feasting, but flapped reluctantly away as Starbuck walked up to the corpse that was beginning to stink. Ridley’s head was recognizable, the small pointed beard being oddly clear of blood. “You son of a bitch,” Starbuck said tiredly and without real anger, but he was remembering the scar on Sally’s face, and the child she had lost, and the rapes and beatings she had endured just so that this man could be free of her, and so some insult seemed fitting to mark the moment.

The sick-sweet stench of death was thick and nauseous as Starbuck crouched beside the corpse and steeled himself. Then he reached out for what was left of his enemy. There but for the grace of God, he thought, and he pulled the neck of Ridley’s jacket to free the remnants of the garment from the bloody corpse, and something deep in the body made a gurgling sound that almost made Starbuck retch. The jacket would not come clear of the bloody mess and Starbuck realized he would have to undo the leather belt that was somehow still in place around the eviscerated mess. He plunged his fingers into the cold, jelly-like horror, and found the buckle. He undid it, heaved, and a portion of the corpse rolled away to reveal the revolver that Ridley had fired at Starbuck.

It was the pretty, ivory-handled English gun that Washington Faulconer had shown to Starbuck in his study at Seven Springs. The gun was now choked with Ridley’s blood, but Starbuck wiped it on the grass, cuffed more of the blood away with his sleeve, then pushed the beautiful weapon into his empty holster. He then unthreaded the cap box and the cartridge case from Ridley’s belt. There were a dozen dollar coins in the case, which he pushed into one of his own blood-soaked pockets.

Yet he had not come here simply to loot his enemy’s body, but rather to take back a treasure. He wiped his fingers on the grass, took another deep breath, then went back to the bloody remnants of the gray jacket. He found a leather case which seemed to have held a drawing, though the paper was now so soaked with blood that it was impossible to tell just what the drawing might have shown. There were three more silver dollars in the pocket and a small, blood-wet leather bag, which Starbuck pulled open.

The ring was there. It looked dull in the fading light, but it was the ring he had wanted; the silver French ring that had belonged to Sally’s mother and which Starbuck now pushed into his own pocket as he stepped back from the corpse. “You son of a bitch,” he said again, then he walked away past Ridley’s dead horse. Across the valley the smoke of the camp fires drifted away from the hill to veil the sunset.

Dark was falling as Starbuck climbed the hill to where the southern army made its weary bivouac. A few officers had tried to order their men off the hilltop and down to where the ground did not stink of blood, but the men were too tired to move. Instead they sat around their fires and ate captured hard tack and cold bacon. A man played a fiddle, its notes wondrously plangent in the graying light. The far hills were darkening and the first stars gleaming pale and sharp in a clean sky. A Georgia regiment held a service, the men’s voices strong as they sang praises for their victory.

It took Starbuck an hour to find the Legion. It was almost full dark by then, but he saw Pecker Bird’s distinctive face in the light of a fire made from a dozen fence rails which radiated out from the flames like spokes. Every man about the fire was responsible for a rail, nudging it into the fire as the rail burned down. The men around the fire were all officers who looked up astonished as Starbuck limped into the flame light. Murphy nodded a pleased greeting to see the Bostonian, and Bird smiled. “So you’re alive, Starbuck?”

“So it seems, Major.”

Bird lit a cigar and tossed it to Starbuck who caught it, sucked in the smoke, then nodded his thanks.

“Is that your blood?” Murphy asked Starbuck, whose uniform was still thick with Ridley’s blood.

“No.”

“But it’s very dramatic,” Bird said in gentle mockery, then twisted himself around. “Colonel!”

Colonel Faulconer, his shirt and jacket now wrapped around his wounded arm, was sitting outside his tent. He had made a huge commotion about the Legion’s missing baggage and finally a reluctant search party had discovered Nelson, the Colonel’s servant, still guarding as much of the Colonel’s baggage as he had managed to carry away from the Yankee attack. Most of the baggage was gone, looted by successive waves of northerners and southerners, but the Colonel’s tent had been salvaged and a bed of blankets laid down inside. Adam was lying on the bed while his father sat on a barrel in the tent’s door.

“Colonel!” Bird called again, his insistence at last making Washington Faulconer look up. “Good news, Colonel.” Bird could hardly keep from grinning as he made his mischief. “Starbuck is alive.”

“Nate!” Adam reached for the makeshift crutch that a man had cut from a thicket nearby, but his father pushed him down.

Faulconer stood and walked toward the fire. A mounted staff captain chose that same moment to approach the fire from farther along the plateau, but the captain, who had a message for Colonel Faulconer, sensed the tension around the camp fire and checked his horse to watch what happened.

Faulconer gazed through the flames, flinching from Starbuck’s horrid appearance. The northerner’s uniform was dark with blood, stiff with it, black in the flame light with the blood that had soaked into every stitch and weave of the gray coat. Starbuck looked like a thing come from a nightmare, but he nodded pleasantly enough as he blew a stream of cigar smoke into the night. “Evening, Colonel.”

Faulconer said nothing. Bird lit himself a cigar, then looked at Starbuck. “The Colonel was wondering how Ridley died, Starbuck?”

“Got hit by a shell, Colonel. Nothing left of him but a mess of bones and blood,” Starbuck said, his voice careless.

“Is that what you want me to put in the book, Colonel?” Thaddeus Bird asked with a studied innocence. “That Ridley died of artillery fire?”

Still Washington Faulconer did not speak. He was staring at Starbuck with what seemed like loathing, but he could not bring himself to say a word.

Bird shrugged. “Earlier, Colonel, you ordered me to arrest Starbuck for murder. You want me to do that right now?” Bird waited for an answer and when none came he looked back to Starbuck. “Did you murder Captain Ethan Ridley, Starbuck?”

“No,” Starbuck said curtly. He stared at Faulconer, daring the Colonel to contradict him. The Colonel knew he was lying, but he did not have the guts to make the accusation to his face. Men had come from the Legion’s other camp fires to watch the confrontation.

“But the Colonel saw you commit the murder,” Bird insisted. “What do you have to say to that?”

Starbuck took the cigar from his mouth and spat into the fire.

“I assume that expectoration signifies a denial?” Bird asked happily, then looked around the men who were crowding into the flame light. “Did anyone else here see Ridley die?” Bird waited for an answer as sparks whirled upward from the burning rails. “Well?”

“I saw the son of a bitch get filleted by a shell,” Truslow growled from the shadows.

“And did Starbuck fire the fatal shell, Sergeant?” Bird asked in a pedantic voice, and the men around the fire laughed aloud at the major’s mockery. Faulconer shifted his weight, but still kept his silence. “So I reckon, Colonel, that you were wrong,” Bird went on, “and that Lieutenant Starbuck is innocent of murder. And I further reckon you’ll be wanting to thank him for saving the Legion’s colors, isn’t that right?”

But Faulconer could take no more humiliation from these men who had fought while he had been swanning across the countryside in search of fame. He turned away without a word, only to see the staff captain watching him from horseback. “What do you want?” he snapped bitterly.

“You’re invited to supper, Colonel.” The staff captain was understandably nervous. “The president has arrived from Richmond, sir, and the generals are eager for your company.”

Faulconer blinked as he tried to make sense of the invitation, then saw in it his chance of salvation. “Of course.” He strode away, calling for his son. Adam had struggled to his feet and was now limping to welcome Starbuck back, but his father demanded his son’s loyalty. “Adam! You’ll come with me.”

Adam hesitated, then gave in. “Yes, Father.”

The two men were helped onto their horses and no one spoke much as they rode away. Instead the men of the Faulconer Legion fed their fires and watched the sparks fly high, but said scarcely a word until the Faulconers had ridden far beyond the flame light and were just two dark shadows silhouetted against the southern sky. Somehow no one expected to see Washington Faulconer back again in a hurry. Bird looked up at Starbuck. “I guess I’m in command now. So thank you for saving our colors, and more important, for saving me. So now what do I do with you?”

“Whatever you want, Major.”

“Then I think I shall punish you for whatever sins you undoubtedly committed today.” Bird grinned as he spoke. “I shall make you Captain Roswell Jenkins’s replacement, and give you Sergeant Truslow’s company. But only if Sergeant Truslow wants a miserable Boston-bred overeducated beardless preacher’s son like yourself as his commanding officer?”

“I reckon he’ll do,” Truslow said laconically.

“So you feed him, Sergeant, not me,” Bird said, and raised a dismissive hand.

Starbuck walked away with Truslow. When the two men had gone beyond the earshot of the soldiers gathered around the officers’ fire, the sergeant spat a stream of tobacco juice. “‘So how does it feel to murder someone?’ You remember asking me that? And I told you to find out for yourself, so now you tell me, Captain.”

Captain? Starbuck noted, but said nothing of the unwonted respect. “It felt most satisfying, Sergeant.”

Truslow nodded. “I saw you shoot the son of a bitch, and I was kind of wondering why.”

“For this.” Starbuck took the silver ring from his pocket and held it out to the small, dark-bearded Truslow. “Just for this,” he said, and dropped the ring into the powder-blackened palm. The silver glinted for an instant in the blood-stinking smoke-darkened night, and then Truslow’s hand closed on it fast. His Emily was in heaven, and the ring was back with him where it belonged.

Truslow had stopped dead in the darkness. For a second Starbuck thought the sergeant was weeping, but then he realized it was just the sound of Truslow clearing his throat. The sergeant began walking again, saying nothing, but just gripping the silver ring as if it was a talisman for all his future life. He did not speak again until they were a few yards from the fires of A Company, and then he put a hand on the blood-hardened cloth of Starbuck’s sleeve. His voice, when he spoke, was unwontedly meek. “So how is she, Captain?”

“She’s happy. Surprisingly happy. She was treated badly, but she came through it and she’s happy. But she wanted you to have the ring, and she wanted me to take it from Ridley.”

Truslow thought about that answer for a few seconds, then frowned. “I should have killed that bastard myself, shouldn’t I?”

“Sally wanted me to do it,” Starbuck said, “so I did. And with much pleasure.” He could not keep himself from smiling.

Truslow was still for a long, long time, then he thrust the ring into a pocket. “It’s going to rain tomorrow,” he said. “I can smell it in the air. Most of these bastards have lost their groundsheets and blankets so I reckon in the morning you should let us scavenge a while.” He led Starbuck into the light of his company’s fires. “New captain” was Truslow’s only introduction. “Robert? We’ll have some of that fat bacon. John? Break that bread you’re hiding. Pearce? That whiskey you found. We’ll take some. Sit down, Captain, sit.”

Starbuck sat and ate. The food was the most wonderful he had ever tasted, nor could he have asked for better company. Above him the stars shimmered in a sky of dissipating smoke. A fox called from the distant woods and a wounded horse screamed. Somewhere a man sang a sad song, and then a gunshot sounded in the lost darkness like a final echo of this day of battle in which a preacher’s son, far from home, had made himself a rebel.