THE NORTHERN ARMY groped cautiously into the deserted Maryland farmlands, where General McClellan left nothing to chance. He watched his flanks, secured his communications, and advanced his forward units at the pathetic pace of ten miles a day. Pinkerton, head of the army's Secret Service, assured McClellan that he faced at least 200,000 well-armed rebels, and McClellan imagined that horrid horde waiting to ambush him like Apaches falling on an army supply train. The White House urged McClellan on while the War Department sent him contrary dispatches declaring that the further he went from the capital the more likely it was that the rebels would swarm over the river to assault the city. McClellan just inched forward, always ready to spring back if danger threatened.

Colonel Thorne had abandoned his Washington office. He could not stand the oppressive heat in the capital, where the only news from the army was grudging while every rumor of Lee's apparent ambitions was only too readily reported by the press. Philadelphia was expecting a siege; the city fathers of Baltimore had forbidden the sale of alcohol to protect the nerves of their fearful citizens; while the British Ambassador, a genial aristocrat, was reported to be packing his bags in preparation for a declaration of war against the United States. "All nonsense, Thorne," Lord Lyons told the Colonel at a White House reception. "No point in going to war with you,"

he added lightly, "at least not until Bobby Lee's won the thing for us. We might come in then, of course, to pick up the pieces and get some revenge for Yorktown."

"It might come to that, Ambassador," Thorne had answered gloomily.

Lyons, hearing the Colonel's despair, patted his arm. "It won't, Thorne, and you know it won't. Not while you've got that man," he nodded across the crowded room at the President of whom Lyons was famously fond. "1 admit that some in Britain are not unhappy to see you embarrassed, Thorne," the Ambassador went on, "but I don't think we wish to risk embarrassment ourselves. Believe me, I'm packing no portmanteaus. Pay a call on us, see for yourself."

But Thorne had no patience for Washington's diplomatic niceties, not while the fate of the Republic was being decided in Maryland and so, with the President's permission, he packed his saddlebags and rode west to join McClellan's headquarters where, seeking Adam, he found that his protege had disappeared. Allen Pinkerton's Chief of Staff, James Starbuck, whom Thorne had encountered earlier in the war, declared that Adam had ridden toward Frederick City two days before. "If he did," McClellan, who was visiting Pinkerton's quarters, had overheard the comment, "then he deserved what he got."

"Which is what, pray?" Thorne asked.

"Capture, I suppose. The man had no business there. I thought he was here to advise our signal people?"

"He was," Thorne lied, and knowing that McClellan knew he lied.

"Then he should have been working with the telegraphers, not exercising his horse. Unless, of course, he was here for another purpose?"

Thorne stared into the general's young, fresh face, which was set in the perpetual scowl of a man always trying to look older and more severe than his inmost fears made him feel. "What purpose might that have been, General?" Thorne asked spitefully.

"You'd know, Thorne, you'd know," McClellan snapped. He knew full well that Thorne had the President's confidence, and he feared, justifiably enough, that the white-haired Colonel was feeding Lincoln with a constant stream of unofficial news. No wonder the fool in the White House had no idea how to win the war! If the ape would just let McClellan be slow and systematic then the Union would be saved, but no, he was forever prodding and urging McClellan to go faster. And what did Lincoln know of war? My God, the man was a railroad lawyer, not a soldier. McClellan let these resentments brood in his mind as he listened to the distant grumbling of the heavy guns at Harper's Ferry.

A stirring of the thick, warm air caused that grumbling sound to swell into a sudden staccato. Thorne wondered why McClellan did not launch an army corps toward the beleaguered garrison to rescue the thousands of Northern soldiers and their tons of precious supplies from the rebels, but such an ambitious lunge was beyond the Young Napoleon's thinking. "You wouldn't mind, I suppose," Thorne asked, "if I rode toward Frederick City?"

"Your choice, Colonel, your choice, but I can't spare men to protect you. Besides, I confidently expect to camp there tonight, but if you care to ride ahead, it's your risk. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a war to prosecute."

Thorne did ride ahead of the advancing army, but in the event he arrived much later than McClellan's vanguard. The Colonel's horse threw a shoe and by the time he had discovered a blacksmith and had the shoe nailed back onto the hoof, the Federal army was already moving into the scarred fields that had held the rebel army just a few days before. Axes sounded in the woods as men cut firewood, and everywhere drab tents unfolded in long lines. Latrines were dug, horses led to water, and pickets set to watch the empty fields.

Thorne rode into the town that was filled with curious Northern soldiers who were disappointed not to hear tales of rebel rapine and pillage. Stars and Stripes flew from windows, rooftops, and balconies, but Thorne cynically suspected that just as many rebel flags had greeted the arrival of Lee's army. Barrels of water and lemonade were placed on the sidewalk to slake the soldiers' thirst, while women handed round trays of cookies. One enterprising shopkeeper was doing a brisk trade in Confederate flags; crude things that Thorne guessed had been run up on a sewing machine, but the soldiers were eager enough to buy the souvenirs that would be dirtied, shot at, then sent home as battle trophies. Even the despised Confederate paper money, which had no real value outside the South, was being bought as keepsakes. Four young women in widely hooped skirts and fringed shawls, carrying paper parasols, walked brazenly down the center of Main Street. They were no local girls, that much was obvious, for their pinchbeck sophistication was far too flashy for Frederick City's tastes. Thorne guessed they were four of the hundreds of Washing-ton whores who had followed the army west and were said to have their own transport, tents, and cookhouses.

A tall, white-haired preacher frowned at the sight of the girls, and Thorne, deciding that the preacher looked like a man of sense, approached, introduced himself and, without any real hope of learning anything useful, asked about Adam.

It took the preacher only a few moments and a half dozen questions to identify the missing officer. He hauled off his wide-brimmed hat and gave Thorne the terrible news. "Buried in my own churchyard, Colonel." The minister led Thorne to the graveyard, and to the mound of freshly turned earth with its makeshift wooden cross on_ which Adam's name had been misspelled. Someone, Thorne was glad to see, had put flowers on the grave. "You poor bastard," Thorne said too softly for the preacher to hear, "you poor innocent bastard."

So that, he thought despairingly, was that, and he rode dejectedly back to the growing Federal encampment. The desperate throw had failed. Thorne had always known it was a reckless and ramshackle chance, but he had deceived himself into believing that somehow it might work. Yet how was Adam ever to have reached Delaney? It had been a waste of a good man and, when Thorne reached the camp and found where his servant had erected his tent, he forced himself to endure the penance of writing to Adam's father. He did not know if Adam's mother still lived, and so he addressed the letter to General Washington Faulconer and assured him that his son had died a hero. "It will doubtless grieve you that he perished while fighting for his country rather than for his native state, but Almighty God saw fit to repose that patriotism in his heart and God's ways are ever inscrutable." The stilted words were hopelessly inadequate, but what words could ever suffice to tell a father of his son's death? Thorne told the General where Adam's body lay, then finished the letter with his sincere regrets. A drop of sweat smeared his signature, but he blotted it dry, sealed the letter, then pushed it to one side. Damn, he thought. The one chance to goad McClellan into a semblance of energetic soldiering had passed. Thorne had played and lost.

Except he had not lost. Two Indiana soldiers, a sergeant and a corporal, had finished pitching their tents and had wandered north out of their camp lines, across a dip in the pastureland, to a cleaner stretch of grass that was unsoiled by rebel litter. They planned to make a fire and boil some coffee away from the predatory gaze of their comrades and so they walked toward a rail fence that had miraculously remained unbroken during the rebels' stay. Rails made good firewood, and the coffee would help pass the long hot afternoon, but just before they reached the fence Corporal Barton Mitchell saw an envelope lying in the grass. It had a curiously bulky look and so he picked it up and shook out the contents. "Bless me, Johnny," he said as the three cigars appeared. He sniffed one. "Damn good too. You want one?"

Sergeant Bloss took the offered cigar, and with it the sheet of paper that had served to wrap the precious find. As he nipped the cigar's end with his teeth he glanced at the paper and, after a few seconds, frowned. There were names here he recognized—Jackson, Longstreet, and Stuart—while at its foot the paper was signed by command of General R. E. Lee.

The coffee was forgotten. Instead the two men took the paper to their company commander, who passed it up the chain of command until at last a prewar colleague of Colonel Chilton's recognized the handwriting. It seemed the order was genuine and it was hurried to General McClellan's tent.

Thorne heard the excitement and, pulling on his blue coat, ducked out of his tent and strode across to where a throng of people was gathered about the General's headquarters. Many in the crowd were civilians come to gape at the Federal general who, convinced that the order was the real copper-bottomed thing, was exultant. McClellan saw Thorne and brandished the paper triumphantly. "Here's a paper with which I can whip Bobby Lee, Thorne! And if I can't I'll go home tomorrow!"

Thorne, astonished at this sudden enthusiasm on McClellan's part, could only gape.

"Tomorrow we'll pitch into his center!" McClellan boasted, "and in two days we'll have him trapped!"

Thorne managed to secure the order. His astonishment grew as he read it, for here were written all Lee's dispositions and those dispositions revealed the enemy commander to be a consummate gambler. Lee must have known that McClellan's army was marching westward, but such was his contempt for his enemy that he had divided his army into five parts, then scattered them across western Maryland and northern Virginia. Most of the Confederate forces were besieging Harper's Ferry, others had gone north to prepare for the invasion of Pennsylvania, while smaller forces barred the hills that faced McClellan's troops. It was true that the order was now four days old, but the constant mutter of the distant guns confirmed that the rebels were still swarming about Harper's Ferry and that sound suggested that the dispositions detailed in the order were still in place, which meant that if McClellan really did march quickly then there was a genuine chance that the Northern army could be placed between the scattered units of Lee's army. Then they would be destroyed, one by one, slaughter by slaughter, surrender by surrender, page after page of history being made.

"Rebellion's end, Thorne," McClellan said as he retrieved the paper.

"Indeed, sir," Thorne said, and felt a pang of distaste for the short general whose hair was so carefully waved and whose mustaches so gleamingly brushed. A gelded cockerel, he thought, and was ashamed that he should so resent this gift of utter victory being given to such a creature.

"You don't doubt the order's genuine?" McClellan inquired, unable to hide his nagging anxiety that the order might be a ruse, though the circumstances of its finding suggested gross carelessness rather than sly design. "Pittman vouches for the handwriting," the General went on. "It's Chilton's penmanship, right enough, or so Pittman says."

"I trust Colonel Pittman's memory on the point, sir," Thorne admitted.

"Then we've won!" McClellan crowed. The ape in the White House might take the credit for preserving the Union, but George Brinton McClellan was content that the voters at the next presidential election would know who was truly to thank. McClellan in '64! And '68, by God, and maybe forever once the voters realized that only one man in the country had the nerve, prudence, and wisdom to steer America! McClellan luxuriated in that vision for a moment, then clapped his hands. "Marching orders!" he announced, then shooed his visitors away so that he could work in peace.

Thorne found Colonel Pittman, and from Colonel Pittman he traced the order's discovery back to Sergeant Bloss and Corporal Mitchell. From them he learned where the envelope had been found, and after that he rode into Frederick City and found a man who had helped retrieve Adam's body. To Thorne's delight he discovered that the body had been found only yards from where the envelope had lain, and that circumstance convinced Thorne that the copy of Special Order 191 was genuine, and not a subtle trap laid by an outnumbered enemy. "So it wasn't in vain," he told Adam in his grave. "You did well, Faulconer, you did well." He solemnly saluted the grave, then said a prayer of thanks. God, it seemed, had not abandoned His country. And well done, Delaney, Thorne added silently. The Richmond lawyer had earned a reward.

For already the first Federal troops were preparing to march with new haste and sudden purpose; preparing to march west to where Lee's betrayed army was spread so carelessly across the summer-heated land. The Young Napoleon had been offered victory and now, with uncharacteristic verve, he sprang to take it.

At dawn Harper's Ferry was shrouded in a mist that flowed like twin white rivers from the Shenandoah and the Potomac valleys to meld softly above the town. The mist flowed in utter silence, but it was an ominous silence, for by now the rebel troops commanded all the high ground about the river town and their great guns had been dragged forward to the crests so that their cold, dew-beaded barrels were pointing down to what lay hidden by the soft white vapor. The gunners had loaded and rammed their pieces, and their most distant cannon was scarcely a mile from the mist-concealed Federal defenses, a mere six and a half seconds of flight for the nineteen-pound shells that were nestled inside the barrels against the two-pound charges of coarse powder that would explode when Jackson gave the signal. There were guns to the north of the town, guns to the south, and guns to the west. A ring of guns, all silent now, all waiting for that shroud of mist to lift from the doomed town.

General Thomas Jackson paced the rocky crest of the Bolivar Heights west of the town from where he scowled at the valley mist as though it were a devilish device planted to thwart his victory. His cadet cap was pulled low over his brooding eyes, but those eyes missed nothing as he walked up and down, up and down, sometimes dragging a cheap watch from his pocket and peering at its slow-moving hands. The gunners tried not to catch his gaze. Instead they busied themselves with unnecessary tasks like greasing already lubricated elevating screws or straightening the friction primers that came bent from the factory so that they would not accidentally ignite and cause an explosion. Shirt-sleeved infantry carried ammunition up the hill trails and stacked their loads beside the waiting guns.

Most of the rebel infantry would be spectators of this battle and the hills were crowded with lines of gray and butternut uniforms waiting for Old Jack's firework display. Starbuck's battalion was close to a mixed battery of ten-and twenty-pounder Parrott guns, their trails all burned with the initials USA, evidence that Jackson had equipped his batteries with cannon taken from the Yankees. Captain Billy Blythe carried a cup of coffee as he joined Starbuck. "That's Old Jack?" he asked, nodding at the shabby, bearded figure who stumped in his huge square-toed boots up and down beside the guns.

"That's Jackson," Starbuck confirmed.

"Queer-looking fellow," Blythe said.

"Frightening as hell," Starbuck said.

"Specially to Yankees, eh?" Blythe said, then sipped at the coffee that was bitterly sour. He could not wait to get back to the North where the coffee was rich and fragrant, and not this adulterated dirt that the rebels drank. "You met him?"

"I met him." Starbuck was never particularly communicative in the morning and spoke curtly.

Blythe did not mind. "You reckon he'd say howdy?" he asked Starbuck.

"No."

"Hell, Starbuck, I'd like to shake the man's hand."

"Shake mine instead," Starbuck said, but instead of offering it he stole Tumlin's coffee and sipped it. "And if you swear in front of him, Tumlin, you'll wish you'd never met him."

"Keep the coffee, Starbuck," Blythe said magnanimously, "ain't nothing but goober pea shit anyhow. Morning, General!" he called aloud as Jackson's pacing brought the General close to Starbuck's men. "Fine one for a victory, sir!"

Jackson looked astonished at being addressed and stared at Blythe as though surprised to see a soldier on the hill, but he said nothing. Blythe, unfazed by this cold response, strode forward as if the General was his oldest friend. "Prayers are being answered, sir," Blythe said vigorously, "and the enemy will be crushed in the very nest where John Brown defied our legitimate aspirations." '

"Amen," Jackson said, "amen. And you are, sir?"

'Tumlin, General," Blythe said, "Captain Billy Tumlin, and proud to meet you, sir. I prayed for you these many months and am grateful that the Lord has seen fit to hear me."

""Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,'" Jackson said, turning to look at the mist through which the topmost part of the town and the pinnacle of a church in the lower quarter was now showing. The vapor was thinning, promising to lay bare the Yankee defenses. "You're saved in the Lord, Captain?" Jackson asked Blythe.

"Praise His name, yes," Blythe lied glibly.

"I didn't hear," Jackson snapped and cupped a hand to his ear. Years of artillery work had deadened the General's hearing.

"Praise His name, yes!" Blythe shouted.

"We are a Godly nation, Captain, and a righteous army," Jackson growled. "We cannot be defeated. Fight with that assurance in your heart."

"I shall, sir, and amen," Blythe responded, then held out his hand, which the General, with some surprise at the gesture, finally clasped. "God bless you, sir," Blythe said as he shook Jackson's hand, then he turned and walked back to Starbuck. "See?" Blythe chuckled. "Easy as feeding crumbs to a bird."

"So what did you say to him?"

"I told him I was one of God's anointed, told him I prayed for him daily, and offered him God's blessing."

"You ain't a saved Christian, Billy Tumlin," Starbuck said sourly. "You're nothing but a miserable sinner."

"We have all sinned, Starbuck," Blythe said earnestly, "and fallen short of the glory of God."

"Don't preach to me, for Christ's sake, I've had my bellyful of preaching."

Blythe laughed. He was pleased with himself for having shaken the great Jackson's hand, and the tale would be a good boast in the comfortable days after he had crossed the lines. He was pleased, too, for having fooled Jackson into thinking he was with a fellow Christian. Be all things to all men, that was Billy Blythe's belief, but make sure you profit from the deceptions. "So what happens now?" he asked Starbuck.

"What do you think? We shoot the hell out of those poor sons of bitches, they surrender, then we go and shoot the hell out of the rest of the sorry bastards." Starbuck checked suddenly, arrested by the distant sound of gunfire. It was very distant, much too muted and far away to be the guns on Harper's Ferry's farther side. The same distant grumbling had trembled across the sky the previous evening, just before the sun had set in a blaze of western scarlet, and Starbuck had climbed to the ridge top to see a small billow of whiteness on the far north-eastern skyline. That far whiteness, which had been touched pink by the dying day, could have been an errant wisp of cloud, except that the noise had betrayed what it truly was—gunfire. A skirmish or battle was being waged deep inside Maryland. Starbuck shuddered and was glad he was here and not there.

The last mist shredded from the valleys to reveal the small town of Harper's Ferry huddled at the point between the merging rivers. The fame of the place had somehow persuaded Starbuck that it would prove a large town, almost the size of Richmond maybe, but in truth it was a tiny place. It must have once been a pleasant, tree-shaded village built on a spur of hill that dropped to the banks of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, though now many of the buildings were charred ruins out of which brick chimney stacks reared gaunt. An undamaged church flew a flag that, when Starbuck borrowed a gunner's binoculars, he saw to be the British flag. "I thought those bastards were on our side," he told the gunner officer.

"Who cares? Kill 'em anyway," the gunner laughed, reveling in the wealth of targets that the lifting mist had revealed. There were federal earthworks on the edge of the town and naked batteries waiting to be shelled. The two rivers were edged by a sprawl of industrial buildings that had once been the Federal Arsenal and a rifle factory but which were now nothing but scorched roofless walls, while the massive bridge that had once carried the Ohio and Baltimore's rails over the Potomac had been reduced to a series of stone piers like the stepping stones of a giant. The only passage across the wide Potomac now was a pontoon bridge erected by Northern engineers, but as Starbuck watched a great fountain of water exploded out of the river beside the bridge, making the pontoons tug on their chains. A few seconds later there came the sound of the rebel gun that had fired the shell from the distant hills.

Jackson looked startled, for he had not yet ordered his signalers to wigwag the order to begin the bombardment, but someone in the rebel lines on the north side of the Potomac had tired of waiting and suddenly all the guns on all the hills about the town crashed back on their trails and pumped smoke and shells toward the trapped garrison. The watching infantry cheered as the wispy smoke trails of the shells' burning fuses arced down to the battered town where the Yankees waited.

And where they now died. The rebel gunners worked like fiends to sponge out, reload, and ram their guns, and shell after shell screamed down the slopes to explode in gusting swathes of smoke, flame, and dirt. The Yankee earthworks outside the town seemed to disappear in blasts of smoke, and when the smoke drifted clear the watching rebels could see their enemies running back toward the town's war-scarred buildings. A few Yankee guns tried to answer the destructive barrage, but the Northern batteries were swiftly battered into silence by the rebel artillery. To the watchers on the hills it seemed as though the river town was being turned into a pit of hell. Flames leaped up from burning limbers, smoke drifted thick, and huge trees shivered like saplings as the shells blasted the leaves away. Sweat poured down the gunners' faces and bare chests. Each recoil slammed the guns violently back so that their trails gouged deep troughs in the dirt. The wet sponges that extinguished any trace of red-hot explosive remaining in a barrel after each shot hissed and steamed as they were rammed down to the breach, then, the second that the sponge was withdrawn to be thrust into a bucket of dirty water, the loader would shove the next round into the muzzle to be rammed hard down while the rest of the team maneuvered the gun back to its proper aim. "Ready!" the gunner would shout and the team would duck aside with hands over their ears as the command to fire was shouted. The gunner yanked the lanyard that scraped the friction primer over its incendiary tube and a heartbeat later the gun would crash back behind its billow of smoke and another shell, its fuse smoking, screamed toward the town.

"I was there once," Billy Blythe said to Starbuck.

"You were?"

"Saw Mister Brown hung," Blythe said contentedly. "Smug son of a bitch."

"What were you doing there?"

"Buying horses," Blythe said. "That was my trade, see? And once in a while we came north to find a nag or two. Stayed at Wager's Hotel." He stared at the town and shook his head. "Burned to a cinder, by the look of things. A pity. I was hoping to renew my acquaintance with a girl there. Sweet as honey, she was, only a lot cheaper," he laughed. "Hell, she and I were watching out of a bedroom window when they hung that smug son of a bitch. Hung him higher than an angel. Kicked like a mule, he did, and all the time I was making that sweet little honey moan for pleasure."

Starbuck felt a flicker of distaste for his second in command. "I met John Brown," he said.

"You did?"

"He came to Boston wanting funds," Starbuck explained, "but he didn't get none from us." At the time he had been puzzled that his father had refused to help the famous abolitionist, but now, looking back, he wondered if the Reverend Elial Starbuck had been jealous of the stern, ravaged-faced Brown. The two men had been very alike. Had his father feared such a formidable rival in the abolition movement? But Brown was dead now, and in the wake of his hopeless rebellion there was a plague of death across America. "He told me I'd be a warrior against the slavocracy," Starbuck recalled the meeting in his father's parlor, "guess he got that wrong."

"You're fighting to keep the slaves, is that it?" Blythe asked.

"Hell, no. I'm fighting because I've nothing better to do." "Slaves won't be freed anyway," Blythe said confidently. "They won't?"

"Not this side of heaven, and if God's got any sense, not there neither. Hell, who's going to pay the lazy sons of bitches wages?"

"Maybe they're only lazy because they don't get wages," Starbuck said.

"Sound like your pa, Major."

Starbuck bit back an angry retort. He was surprised at his sudden suspicions of Billy Tumlin and wondered if he was being unfair to the man, but he sensed that Tumlin's glibness concealed a sly dishonesty. Billy Tumlin lied too easily, and Starbuck had seen proof of that when Tumlin talked with Jackson, and now he wondered how many other lies Tumlin had told. There was something that did not ring true about Tumlin, and Starbuck found himself wondering why a man who had ostensibly escaped from a Yankee prison was so well fed and so handsomely equipped with a money belt. "I'm going to get myself a map in Harper's Ferry," he said just after the nearest gun had thumped back on its trail.

"A map?" Blythe asked.

"I want to see where Union is in Massachusetts, Tumlin. You kind of piqued my interest. I thought I knew half the back towns in Massachusetts on account of going with my father when he preached upcountry, but I sure as hell don't remember a Union. Where was it near?"

"Hell, it weren't near nowhere!" Blythe was suddenly defensive. "It was a prison, remember. Maybe the Yankees made the name up?"

"I guess that must be it," Starbuck said, content that he had unsettled his second in command, but as Tumlin moved away to find more congenial company Starbuck found himself wondering how many enemies he could afford to make in the Special Battalion. Case would kill him as soon as give him the time of day, and Starbuck suspected Dennison would do the same if he could ever summon up the courage. He could not depend on Cart-wright or Lippincott, who did their duty, but with a singular lack of enthusiasm. Potter was a friend, and Caton Rothwell too, but Starbuck's enemies far outnumbered his friends. He had experienced the same divide of loyalties in the Legion and Starbuck, reflecting on the schisms, feared it was because of his personality. He envied men like Colonel Elijah Hudson, the North Carolinian whose battalion had fought alongside the Legion at Manassas and whose men seemed united in affection for him. Or Pecker Bird, still recovering from his wound, who had inspired nothing but loyalty during his time as the Legion's commander. Then Starbuck noticed Old Mad Jack pacing up and down beside the busy guns. The General, as he so often did, was holding his left hand in the air as though he was testifying to God's goodness, though in truth he only held the hand in the odd position because otherwise, he believed, the blood would puddle around an ancient wound. Starbuck watched the General and thought that there was a man who made enemies as well as friends.

Jackson chose that moment to glance up and catch Starbuck's eye. For a moment the two stared at each other with the uncomfortable sensation of recognition, but with nothing to say either, then Jackson made a growling sound as he lowered his left hand. "Have you found your Savior yet, Mister Starbuck?" he called, evidently recalling his last conversation with Starbuck.

"No, General."

Jackson veered toward Starbuck, trailing a gaggle of staff officers behind him. "But you are searching?" he inquired earnestly.

"I'm thinking about something else right now, General," Starbuck said. "I was kind of wondering why a soldier makes enemies of his own side just by doing his duty."

Jackson blinked at Starbuck, then frowned at the dirt beside his ungainly boots. He was plainly considering the question, and giving it hard thought, for he remained staring at the ground for what seemed like a full minute. One of his aides called to him, but the General flapped an irritated hand to show that he did not want to be disturbed, and when the aide called again he simply ignored the importunate man. Finally his fierce eyes looked up at Starbuck. "Most men are weak, Major, and the reaction of the weak to the strong is usually envy. Your job is to make them strong, but you cannot do that alone. Do you have a chaplain in your battalion?"

Starbuck wondered if the General assumed he was still in command of the Legion. "No, sir."

"Sir!" the aide called from beside the guns.

Again Jackson ignored the man. "Sheep need shepherds, Major," he told Starbuck, "and greater strength comes from a man's faith than from his sinews. I am, God knows, the weakest of mortals!" This was proclaimed in the energetic voice of a man sure of his own soul, "but God has given me duties and granted me the strength to perform them."

"Sir! Please!" the aide stepped closer to Jackson.

Jackson, in a surprising gesture, touched Starbuck's arm. "Remember, Major," he said, " 'They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.' Isaiah."

"Chapter forty," Starbuck said, "verse thirty-one."

Jackson smiled. "I shall pray for you, Major," the General said, then turned to his aide and his smile vanished. "What is it?"

The aide was carrying a pair of field glasses that he offered to the General. "The enemy, sir," he said, pointing down toward the beleaguered town, "is surrendering."

"Cease fire! Cease fire!" It was the nearest battery commander who, lacking any orders, had decided to end the bombardment on his own authority.

Jackson seized the field glasses, but even without their aid it was possible to see two Yankees walking with a white flag between the patches of smoke that drifted from the exploded shells. The Yankees were holding a grubby white flag hoisted on a pole. "It was a pitiful defense," Jackson growled angrily. "They should be ashamed of themselves." He hurried away, shouting for his horse to be fetched.

"Cease fire!" another gun commander shouted. The rebel guns on the farther hills had still not seen the white flag and they went on firing until the signalers managed to wigwag their flags with the message about the enemy surrender, and so a silence gradually fell across the smoke-veiled, explosive-torn valley, though it was not a total silence, for out of the distant, heat-hazed north, from across the river and the faraway hills, came the sound of other guns. Someone was fighting hard, but who, or where or why, no one in Harper's Ferry knew.

Belvedere Delaney was seeing his first battle and finding it far more terrifying than anything he could have imagined or feared. He had ridden to the range of hills that barred the Yankees' approach from the east and had arrived in time to witness McClellan's attack on the southernmost of the two passes that had been guarded by pitifully small numbers of rebel troops. Prudence would have dictated that the passes be more heavily manned, but Lee had gambled on McClellan's usual supine performance and so had stripped the defenders bare to add to the men assaulting Harper's Ferry. But McClellan was no longer supine. McClellan knew his opponent's mind and now he lunged to break the rebel army.

To Delaney, watching from a high vantage point north of the pass, it seemed as though waves of blue-clad troops were washing up the wide valley like ocean waves running toward a beach. The foam of the breaking surf was the rill of smoke caused by exploding Yankee shells that crashed and flamed along the rebel defenses, while behind the smoke the long lines of blue infantry came remorselessly forward. Delaney was too far away to smell the blood or see the heavy coils of men's guts spewed across the summer grass, but the noise alone carried a violence that was almost unbearable. The crash of the guns was percussive, deafening, disorientating, and, worst of all, unending. How any man could live under that barrage was beyond Delaney's comprehension, yet live they did, and the occasional splintering crack of rifle volleys told him that some rebel units still fought back against the onrush of Yankees.

The Yankee tide did not come forward smoothly, indeed, to Delaney, it often seemed inexplicably slow. He would watch a line of infantry advance under its flags and then, for no apparent reason, the line would stop and the men settle down. Another line would jerk forward while busy horsemen galloped in what seemed aimless errands between the advancing lines. Only the big guns never stopped, filling the shallow pass with smoke and noise and terror.

Behind the pass, stretching out toward the gentler farmland of eastern Maryland, a mass of Federal troops was gathering. McClellan's army was crowding behind the attack ready to stream through the pass and ram their guns and rifles between Lee's scattered troops. To the west, behind the rebel lines, there was no such show of strength, only country roads carrying wagons of wounded back toward the unseen Potomac.

"I guess our message got through," Delaney said to George.

George, a handsome, light-skinned Negro, nodded. "Something stirred them," he agreed in an amused tone.

Delaney, recalling his terror at being found out, felt an immense relief. He unstoppered a silver flask and drank from it, then handed the flask to George. "A toast to Northern victory, George."

"To victory," George said, and tipped the flask to his lips. He savored the wine, then smiled. "You brought some of the '49 hock."

"Only one bottle."

"A pity it isn't chilled," George said reprovingly. "When Richmond falls," Delaney said, "we shall bathe in chilled hock." "You might, not me."

Delaney laughed. Rome, he was thinking, Rome was the place to go, or if Rome was pitching it too high, then perhaps Athens or Naples. He would be an ambassador for freedom in a place of suntouched beauty and decadent luxury. He would uniform George in a curled wig and a gilt-encrusted coat, and dine to the sound of a string quartet playing beneath heavy-scented flowers. By day he would lecture the natives on the arts of government and by night be lectured by them on the arts of decadence.

Beneath him, struggling to make that dream come true, the blue lines suddenly surged forward. The rebels were breaking. Men who had fought and beaten Yankees on fields across Virginia were now tasting defeat. Their defenses were shredding and breaking. Small groups of men ran westward, some shrugging off equipment so they could run faster, while others were left dead or wounded on the shell-torn turf as the victorious Yankees swept across the captured positions. The surviving rebel guns were being limbered up and whipped away, their encampments were abandoned, and everywhere the Stars and Stripes came forward. "Time to go, George," Delaney said, watching the rout. "But to where? Richmond?"

"Back to Lee, I think. I should like to be a witness of the bitter end," Delaney said. He thought there might well be a book in it. A tragedy, probably, for though Lee was his country's enemy, he was a good man, but Delaney doubted whether goodness was the quality that won wars; only might, hard resolve, and low treachery could do that. , Delaney turned his horse and cantered west. He had betrayed the Confederacy to McClellan and now prayed he would be a witness to its destruction.

The Federal general who formally surrendered the Harper's Ferry garrison was splendidly uniformed in gold-braided blue with a shining scabbard hanging from his belt, while Jackson, accepting the great prize, was in a filthy homespun coat, shabby boots, and with his battered cadet cap crammed over uncut, dirty hair. Jackson, even in victory, looked grim, though he did allow himself a smile when Starbuck's hearse came into view. The vehicle was being pulled by the skirmishers of Potter's company, while Potter himself was riding on the box from where he cracked an imaginary whip. The Yankee General, still at Jackson's side, wondered for the hundredth time why McClellan had not come to the garrison's rescue and then, at the sight of the hearse, was overcome with mortification as he realized the utter shame of being defeated by such ragamuffin troops. None of the victorious rebels was better dressed than their general, and most were worse; indeed some of Jackson's men limped into the town on bare feet while the beaten Yankees were outfitted with the best products of the industrial north.

Colonel Swynyard came hurrying down the column in search of Starbuck. "You can jettison your death-cart, Nate!" the Colonel called. "The town's crammed with wagons. New wagons, fine wagons. I've left young Coffman guarding a pair for you. Told him to shoot any rogue who dared lay a finger on them. And I daresay we can give most of your fellows rifles now, there must be thousands here! And food. It's like Manassas Junction all over again."

For once again Jackson had captured a major Federal supply base, and once again his hungry, footsore, ill-dressed troops were given run of the North's largesse. Whoops of joy greeted each opened crate. Tinned meat was prized open with bayonets and real coffee set to boil on fires made from splintered crates that had carried brand-new rifles. Jackson's commissary officers did their best to see that the most needy units received the pick of the plunder, but the chaos was too great and the first arrivals grabbed most of the choice pickings. Starbuck's men were early enough to find some rifles, boots, food, and ammunition, but not enough for every man, yet Starbuck was able to give two of his four musket-carrying companies brand-new Springfield rifles still coated in their factory grease. The rifle locks were inscribed 1862 and were handsomely engraved with an American Eagle and "US Springfield." The hearse and one of the two wagons were loaded up with cartridges for the new rifles.

Swynyard frowned at the hearse. "Are you sure you want to keep it?" he asked Starbuck.

"The men like it. It makes them feel special."

"I suppose it would," Swynyard said, then raised his head to listen to the far off sound of gunfire. "We're marching in the morning," he said grimly. "No rest for the wicked."

"What's happening?"

"Yankees are attacking," Swynyard said vaguely, then shrugged as if to say that he knew no more. "Lee wants us all together again. It'll be hard marching, Nate. Tell your fellows they have to suffer the blisters and keep going. Just keep going." The Colonel had a map that he unfolded to show Starbuck the route they would take. "We go up the southern bank of the Potomac," he said, tracing the westward road with a nail-bitten finger, "to a ford here, near Shepherdstown, then we march east as far as here." He tapped the map.

Starbuck peered at the rendezvous, which was a town situated at a road junction just a few miles inside Maryland. "Sharpsburg," he said. The map showed a small town positioned on a wide strip of land formed by the Potomac River and one of its tributaries, Antietam Creek. "Sharpsburg," Starbuck said again. "Never heard of it."

"You're sleeping there tomorrow night," Swynyard said, "God willing."

"My men's feet willing, more likely," Starbuck said. He lit one of the captured cigars that Lucifer had discovered along with a haul of new underwear, shirts, sugar, and coffee. "Did we get any horses for the wagons?" he asked.

"A few, none of them good." The Colonel folded his map. "Early start, Nate. Get some sleep."

Getting sleep was easier said than done, for the men did not want to sleep. They had won a victory and the ease of that victory was cause for celebration and the Yankee supplies had yielded enough liquor to make that celebration rousing. Others, like Starbuck, wanted to look at the sights. They marveled at the captured cannons that were lined wheel to wheel in the armory yard and that would now take their place in the Confederate battle line, then they explored the engine house where John Brown had been surrounded with his hostages. The little firefighter's building had a handsome cupola, reminding Starbuck of the widow's walks on the houses beside the sea in Massachusetts, though this cupola, like the engine house's brickwork, was pitted by the scars made by the bullets of the US Marines who, under Colonel Robert Lee's command, had forced John Brown's surrender. Some rebels were all in favor of pulling the engine house down in case it became a Yankee shrine, but no one had the energy for the demolition and so the building remained intact. Starbuck climbed to the church flying the British flag to discover it was a Catholic building that had sheltered its parishioners beneath a neutral flag. A nearby church had been shelled to destruction, but the Catholic congregation had escaped the bombardment.

The Yankee prisoners marched disconsolately out of the town, going to the heights where they would bivouac before being sent south to the prison camps. Harper's Ferry was left to its new owners who, as night fell, lit cooking fires that flickered low as men rolled themselves in blankets and slept on ground still littered with fragments of shell casing. Starbuck had made his quarters in an abandoned railroad box wagon, but he could not sleep and so he pulled on his boots and, careful not to wake Lucifer who, after nights of watching Starbuck, had at last fallen fast asleep, slipped out of the wagon and walked between his sleeping men toward the bank of the Shenandoah.

He was bone tired, but he could not sleep, for the same fears that had prompted his morning conversation with Jackson were nagging at him. He felt presentiments of failure and suspected they sprang from within himself. He had failed to unite the Special Battalion, just as he had failed with the Legion. No battalion, he told himself, could fight well if it was riven with jealousies and hatred, but discerning the problem did not help him find a solution. It was true that he had made some allies in .the battalion, but they numbered fewer than half of the total, and many of the rest were bitter enemies. He thought about Elijah Hudson and Pecker Bird and Robert Lee and decided that their popularity sprang from character, and if character was lacking, he chided himself, leadership was a hopeless ambition. Griffin Swynyard had changed his character through the grace of God and that had made all the difference; a once-hated major had become an admired colonel. Starbuck picked up a piece of rubble and tossed it into the river that here flowed fast and white over rocky outcrops to its junction with the Potomac.

So was God the answer? Was there nothing he could do for himself? Starbuck, gloomier than ever, suspected that the ambition in his own soul was the flaw that revealed itself to his men. That and the cowardice that he saw in himself. Or perhaps Maitland was right, and some men were born to lead. Starbuck swore softly. Hs had a vision of a perfect battalion, one that operated as smoothly as the newly greased mechanism of the captured Springfield rifles. A machine that worked.

Jackson had said that only God could give a man strength, and only strength could make a battalion work together. A battalion was composed of men with different fears and suspicions and ambitions, and the trick of it was to swamp those desires with a greater desire: the desire to work together toward victory. In a day or two, Starbuck feared, the Yellowlegs would face a real Yankee army, the same army that had made the northern horizon vague with smoke these last two days, and how would they fight then? Of the officers Potter alone was loyal, and Potter, God knew, was a weak reed. Starbuck closed his eyes. A part of him yearned for the grace of God to drench him with strength, but whenever he was tempted to yield to his Maker's will another temptation intervened, and this was a more beguiling temptation. It consisted of memories of firelit bodies, not dead and twisted and lice-ridden and scarred and filthy, but bodies on sheets. Sally pushing her hair back from her face. The girl who had died under Blythe's bullets at the tavern. He remembered her crouching by the fire, her red hair falling down her naked back, laughing as she toasted a scrap of bread on which she had melted a scrap of cheese taken from a mousetrap. Heaven, Starbuck liked to think, lay in those moments and he was unwilling to call them hell. His father had always said that being a Christian was not easy, but it had taken these last two years to show Starbuck how desperately hard it really was. He did not want to abandon sin, yet he feared that he would fail as a soldier if he did not. He wondered if he should pray. Maybe a prayer by this hurrying river would hurtle its way through the smoky air to the ear of God, who alone could give a man the strength to overcome temptation.

A stone slid on stone to Starbuck's right. He opened his eyes and saw a shadow flicker among the rubble and stunted trees on the riverbank. "Who's there?" he called.

No one answered. He decided it must have been a rat, or else one of the rake-thin cats that lived wild in the ruined armory. The lights of the town showed through trees, but they revealed nothing on this broken riverbank where weeds grew thick among fallen stones. He turned back to the water. Maybe, he thought, he should pray. Maybe he should claw and crawl his way back to God, but where would that journey end? On the Yankee side? On his knees to his father?

A click sounded and he knew it was a gun being cocked. For a second he froze, hardly daring to believe what he suspected, then he threw himself backward just as a gun flamed and banged to his right. The shot screamed over his head and a billow of smoke gusted across the water. He scrambled into a half-choked culvert that was brimming with scummy water and he dragged the Adams revolver from his holster. He heard footsteps, but could see no one. A sentry was shouting, demanding to know who had fired and why, then Starbuck saw a shape silhouetted against the tree-shrouded lights of the town and he leveled the revolver. Then a second man sprang up and he changed his aim, but both were running away, bent double, unrecognizable, scuttling toward the rusted tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio rails. He fired once, but over their heads for if he had aimed and missed then the bullet could have struck home among the encamped soldiers. More men were running toward the river, shouting warnings and questions.

Starbuck dragged himself out of the filthy water. A sentry saw him and dropped to one knee with his rifle leveled. "Who are you?" he shouted.

"Major Starbuck. Swynyard's Brigade," Starbuck holstered the revolver and brushed stinking water off his pants. "Put the gun down, lad."

An officer arrived demanding to know who had fired and why. Starbuck gestured at the river. "Thought I saw a man swimming. I reckoned it was an escaping Yankee."

The officer stared at the moon-glossed river that foamed over the rocks. "I can't see anyone."

"So I was dreaming," Starbuck said. "Now I'm going to bed."

He walked away. He heard the word "drunk" being used, but he did not care. He knew what he had seen, but he had not known whom he had seen. Two men, his men, he guessed, and somewhere in the battalion they were still loose and waiting for their chance.

Them and a hundred thousand Yankees. Across the river. Marching toward a town no one had ever heard of. Called Sharpsburg.