"Battle Flag" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cornwell Bernard)

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SATURDAY MORNING, the day after battle, again dawned hot and humid. Leaden clouds covered the sky and added to the air's oppression, which was made even fouler by a miasmic smell that clung to the folds of the battlefield like the morning mist. At first light, when the troops were stirring reluctantly from their makeshift beds, Major Hinton sought out Starbuck. "I'm sorry about last night, Nate," Hinton said.

Starbuck offered the Legion's new commanding officer a curt and dismissive judgment of Washington Faulconer's raid to snatch the captured flag. The Bostonian was stripped to the waist and had his chin and cheeks lathered with shaving soap plundered from a captured artillery limber. Starbuck stropped his razor on his belt, leaned close to his scrap of mirror, then stroked the long blade down his cheek.

"So what will you do?" Hinton asked, plainly nervous that Starbuck would be provoked into some rash act.

"The bastard can keep the rag," Starbuck said. He had not really known what to do with the captured standard; he had thought that perhaps he might give it to Thaddeus Bird or else send it to Sally Truslow in Richmond. "What I really wanted was the Stars and Stripes," he confessed to Hinton, "and that eagle flag was only ever second-best, so I reckon that son of a bitch Faulconer can keep it."

"It was a stupid thing for Moxey to do, all the same," Hinton said, unable to conceal his relief that Starbuck did not intend to inflate the night's stupidity into an excuse for revenge. He watched as Starbuck squinted into a broken fragment of shaving mirror. "Why don't you grow a beard?" he asked.

"Because everyone else does," Starbuck said, although in truth it was because a girl had once told him he looked better clean-shaven. He scraped at his upper lip. "I'm going to murder goddamn Medlicott." "No, you're not." "Slowly. So it hurts."

Major Hinton sighed. "He panicked, Nate. It can happen to anyone. Next time it might be me."

"Son of a bitch damn nearly had me killed by panicking." Major Hinton picked up the plundered jar of Roussel's Shaving Cream, fidgeted with its lid, then watched Starbuck clean the razor blade. "For my sake," he finally pleaded, "will you just forget about it? The boys are unhappy enough because of Pecker and they don't need their captains fighting among themselves. Please, Nate? For me?"

Starbuck mopped his face clean on a strip of sacking. "Give me a cigar, Paul, and I'll forget that bald-headed lily-livered gutless shadbelly bastard even exists."

Hinton surrendered the cigar. "Pecker's doing well," he said, his tone brightening as he changed the subject, "or as well as can be expected. Doc Billy even reckons he might survive a wagon ride to the rail depot." Hinton was deeply worried about replacing the popular Colonel even though he was a popular enough officer himself. He was an easygoing, heavyset man who had been a farmer by trade, a churchman by conviction, and a soldier by accident of history. Hinton had hoped to live out his years in the easy, rich countryside of Faulconer County, enjoying his family, his acres, and his foxhunting, but the war had threatened Virginia, and so Paul Hinton had shouldered his weapons out of patriotic duty. Yet he did not much enjoy soldiering and reckoned his main duty was to bring safely home as many of the Faulconer Legion as he possibly could, and the men in the Legion recognized that ambition and liked Hinton for it. "We're to stay where we are today," Hinton now told Starbuck. "I've got to detach a company to collect small arms off the battlefield and another to bring in the wounded. And talking of the wounded," he added after a second's hesitation, "did you see Swynyard yesterday? He's missing."

Starbuck also hesitated, then told the truth. "Truslow and I saw him last night." He gestured with the cigar toward the woods where his company had fought against the Pennsylvanians. "He was lying just this side of the trees. Truslow and I didn't reckon there was anything to be done for him, so we just left him."

Hinton was shrewd enough to guess that Starbuck had abandoned Swynyard to die. "I'll send someone to look for him," he said. "He ought to be given a burial."

"Why?" Starbuck demanded belligerently.

"To cheer the Brigade up, of course," Hinton said, then blushed for having uttered such a thing. He turned to look at the great smear of smoke that rose from the Northern cooking fires beyond the woods. "Keep a good eye on the Yankees, Nate. They ain't beaten yet."

But the Yankees made little hostile movement that morning. Their pickets probed forward but stopped obediently when the rebel outposts opened fire, and so the two armies settled into an uneasy proximity. Then it began to rain, slowly at first, but with an increasing vehemence after midday. Starbuck's company made shelters at the edge of the woods with frameworks of branches covered in sod. Then they lay under cover and just watched the gray, rain-lashed landscape.

In midafternoon, when the rain eased to a drizzle, Corporal Waggoner sought Hinton's permission for a prayer meeting. There had been no chance for such a service since the battle's ending, and many soldiers in the Legion wanted to give thanks. Hinton gladly gave his permission, and fifty or more Legionnaires gathered beneath some gun-battered cedars. Other men from the Brigade soon joined them, so that by the time the drizzle stopped, there were almost a hundred men sitting beneath the trees and listening as Corporal Waggoner read from the Book of Job. Waggoner's twin brother had died in the battles on the far side of Richmond, and ever since that death Peter Waggoner had become more and more fatalist. Starbuck was not sure that Waggoner's gloomy piety was good for the Legion's morale, but many of the men seemed to like the Corporal's spontaneous sessions of prayer and Bible study. Starbuck did not join the circle, but rested nearby, watching northward to where the Yankee defense line showed between the distant woodlands as a newly dug strip of earthworks broken by hastily erected cannon emplacements. Starbuck would have been hard put to admit it, but the familiar sounds of prayer and Bible reading were oddly comforting.

That comfort was broken by a blasphemous oath from Sergeant Truslow. "Christ Almighty!" the Sergeant swore.

"What is it?" Starbuck asked. He had been half dozing but now sat up fully awake. Then he saw what had provoked Truslow to blasphemy. "Oh, Jesus," he said, and spat.

For Colonel Swynyard was not dead. Indeed, the Colonel hardly appeared to be wounded. His face was bruised, but the bruise was covered and shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat that Swynyard must have plucked from among the battlefield litter, and now the Colonel was walking through the Brigade's lines with his familiar wolfish smile. "He's drunk," Truslow said. "We should have shot the bastard yesterday."

Peter Waggoner's voice faltered as the Colonel walked up to the makeshift prayer meeting. Swynyard stopped at the edge of the meeting, saying nothing, just staring at the men with their open Bibles and bare heads, and every single man seemed cowed by the baleful eyes. The Colonel had always been a mocker of these homespun devotions, though until now he had kept his scorn at a distance. Now his malevolence killed the prayerful atmosphere stone dead. Waggoner made one or two brave efforts to keep reading, but then stopped altogether.

"Go on," Swynyard said in his hoarse voice.

Waggoner closed his Bible instead. Sergeant Phillips, who was one of Major Haxall's shrinking Arkansas battalion, stood to head off any trouble. "Maybe you'd like to join us at prayer, Colonel?" the Sergeant suggested nervously.

The tic in Swynyard's cheek twitched as he considered his answer. Sergeant Phillips licked his lips while others of the men closed their eyes in silent prayer. Then, to the amazement of everyone who watched, Colonel Swynyard pulled off his hat and nodded to Phillips. "I would like that, Sergeant, I would indeed." Sergeant Phillips was so taken aback by the Colonel's agreement that he said nothing. A murmur went through the Bible study group, but no one spoke aloud. Swynyard, the bruise on his face visible now, was embarrassed by the silence. "If you'll have me, that is," he added in an unnaturally humble voice.

"Anyone is welcome," Sergeant Phillips managed to say. One or two of the officers in the group muttered their agreement, but no one looked happy at welcoming Swynyard. Everyone in the prayer group believed the Colonel was playing a subtle game of mockery, but they did not understand his game, nor did anyone know how to stop it, and so they offered him a reluctant welcome instead.

"Maybe you'll let me say a word or two?" Swynyard suggested to Phillips, who seemed to have assumed leadership of the prayer meeting. Phillips nodded, and the Colonel fidgeted with the hat in his hands as he looked around the frightened gathering. The Colonel tried to speak, but the words would not come. He cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and tried again. "I have seen the light," he explained.

Another murmur went through the circle of seated men. "Amen," Phillips said.

Swynyard twisted the hat in his nervous hands. "I have been a great sinner, Sergeant," he said, then stopped. He still wore the same hated smile, but some of the men nearer to Swynyard could sense that it was now a smile of embarrassment rather than sarcasm. The same men could even see tears in the Colonel's eyes.

"Drunk as a bitch on the Fourth of July," Truslow said in a tone of wonder.

"I'm not sure," Starbuck said. "I think he might be sober." "Then he's lost his damn wits," Truslow opined. Sergeant Phillips was more generous. "We have all been sinners, Colonel," the Sergeant said, "and fallen short of the glory of God."

"I more than most." Swynyard, it seemed, was determined to make a public confession of his sins and of his rediscovered faith. He was blinking back tears and fidgeting with the hat so frenetically that it fell from his hands. He let it lie. "I was raised a Christian by my dear mother," he said, "and I received the Lord into my heart at a camp meeting when I was a youth, but I have been a sinner ever since. A great sinner."

"We've all sinned," Sergeant Phillips averred again. "But yesterday," Swynyard said, "I came to my senses. I was near killed, and I felt the very wings of the angel of death beat about me. I could smell the sulfur of the bottomless pit and I could feel the heat of its flames, and I knew, as I lay on the field, that I deserved nothing less than that terrible punishment." He paused, almost overcome by the memory. "But then, praise Him, I was pulled back from the pit and drawn into the light."

A chorus of amens and hallelujahs sounded among the circle of men. They were all sincere Christians, and though they might have hated this man with an intense hatred, the more honest among them had also prayed for the Colonel's soul, and now that their prayers were being answered, they were willing to give thanks to God for His mercies to a sinner.

Swynyard had tears on his cheeks now. "I also know, Sergeant, that in the past I have been unfair in my dealings with many men here. To those men I offer my regrets and seek their forgiveness." The apology was handsomely spoken, and the men in the group took it just as handsomely. Then Swynyard turned away from the circle and looked among the shelters for Starbuck. "I owe another man an even greater apology," the Colonel said.

"Oh, Jesus," Starbuck swore and wriggled back into the shadow of his shelter.

"Bastard's touched in the head," Truslow said. "He'll be foaming at the mouth next and pissing himself. We'll have to take him away and put him out of his misery."

"We should have shot the bastard when we had the chance," Starbuck said, then fell silent because Swynyard had left the Bible circle and was walking toward his shelter.

"Captain Starbuck?" Swynyard said.

Starbuck looked up into his enemy's face. "I can hear you, Colonel," Starbuck said flatly. He could see now that the Colonel had made an attempt to improve his appearance. His beard was washed, his hair combed, and his uniform brushed. The tic in his cheek still quivered, and his hands shook, but he was plainly making a great effort to hold himself straight and steady.

"Can I talk with you, Starbuck," the Colonel asked, then, after a moment's silence, "please?"

"Are you drunk?" Starbuck asked brutally. Swynyard offered his rotting, yellow-toothed smile. "Only on God's grace, Starbuck, only on His divine grace. And with His help I shall never touch ardent spirits again." Truslow spat to show his disbelief. Swynyard ignored the insult, gesturing instead to indicate that he would like to take a walk with Starbuck.

Starbuck climbed reluctantly out of his turf shelter, shouldered his rifle, and followed the Colonel. Starbuck was wearing new boots that he had taken from a dead Pennsylvanian. The boots were new and stiff, but Starbuck was convinced they would wear in well enough after a day or two. Now, though, he felt the makings of a blister as he walked self-consciously beside Swynyard. News of the Colonel's conversion had spread through the Brigade, and men were drifting toward the picket line to see the proof for themselves. Some evidently believed that the Colonel's religious experience was just another inebriated escapade, and they grinned in anticipation of a display of drunken idiocy, but Swynyard seemed oblivious to the attention he was receiving. "You know why I sent your company forward yesterday?" he asked Starbuck.

"Uriah the Hittite," Starbuck said shortly. Swynyard thought for a second; then the story of David and Bathsheba came back from his dusty memories of childhood Sunday schools. "Yes," he said. "And I intended for you to be killed. I am sorry, truly."

Starbuck wondered how long Swynyard's manifestation of honesty would last and reckoned that it would be only until the Colonel's thirst overcame his piety, but he kept that skepticism to himself. "I guess you were just obeying someone else's orders," he said instead.

"It was still a sinful action," Swynyard said very earnestly, thus obliquely confirming that it had indeed been Washington Faulconer who had ordered Starbuck's company into the place of danger, "and I ask your forgiveness." Swynyard concluded his confession by holding out his hand.

Starbuck, excruciated with embarrassment, shook the offered hand. "Say no more about it, Colonel," he said.

"You're a good soldier, Starbuck, a good soldier, and I haven't made life easy for you. Not for anyone, really." Swynyard made the admission in a gruff voice. The Colonel had been weeping when he gave his halting testimony at the prayer meeting, but now he seemed in a more rueful mood. He turned and gazed north to where groups of Yankees could be seen in the far fields beyond the nearer stands of trees. No man on either side seemed inclined to belligerence this day; even the sharpshooters who delighted to kill at long range were keeping their rifle barrels cold. "Do you have a Bible?" Swynyard asked Starbuck suddenly.

"Sure I do." Starbuck felt in his breast pocket where he kept the small Bible that his brother had sent him. James had intended the Bible to spark Starbuck into a repentance like the one that was transforming Swynyard, but Starbuck had kept the scriptures out of habit rather than need. "You want it?" he asked, offering the book to the Colonel.

"I shall find another," Swynyard said. "I just wanted to be certain you have a Bible because I'm sure you're going to need one." Swynyard smiled at the suspicious look on Starbuck's face. The Colonel doubtless intended the smile to be friendly, but the resulting foul-toothed leer uncomfortably recalled the Colonel's usual malevolence. "I wish I could describe what happened to me last night and this morning," he now told Starbuck. "It was as though I was struck by a great light. There was no pain. There's still no pain." He touched the livid bruise on his right temple. "I remember lying on the earth and hearing voices. I couldn't move, couldn't speak. The voices were debating my death, and I knew I had come to the judgment seat and I felt a fear, a most terrible fear, that I was being consigned to hell. I wanted to weep, Starbuck, and in my terror I called out to the Lord. I remembered my mother's teaching, my childhood lessons, and I called on the Lord and He heard me."

Starbuck had heard too many testimonies of repentant sinners to be either moved or even convinced by the Colonel's change of heart. Doubtless Swynyard had received a shock, and doubtless he intended to reform his life, but Starbuck was equally convinced that Swynyard's conversion would prove soluble in alcohol before the sun went down. "I wish you well," he muttered grudgingly.

"No, no, you don't understand." Swynyard spoke with some of his old savage force and laid his maimed left hand on Starbuck's elbow to prevent the younger man from turning away. "When I recovered my senses, Starbuck, I found my sword stuck into the turf beside my head and there was a message impaled on the sword. This message." The Colonel took from his pocket a crumpled and torn pamphlet, which he pushed into Starbuck's hand.

Starbuck smoothed the tract to see that it was called Freeing the Oppressed and had been printed in Anne Street, Boston. The cover showed a picture of a half-naked black man springing free from broken manacles toward a cross that was infused with a heavenly light. The shattered manacles were attached to great iron weights labeled "Slavocracy," "Ignorance," and "Wickedness," and beneath those iron weights was written the name of the pamphlet's author: the Reverend Doctor Elial Starbuck. Starbuck felt his usual tremor of distaste at any reminder of his father's existence, then handed the tract back to the Colonel. "So what was your message?" he asked sourly. "That slavery is a sin against God? That America's blacks have to be returned to Africa? Is that what you're going to do with your pair? Set them free?" And never, Starbuck reflected, had two slaves more deserved freedom.

Swynyard shook his head to show that Starbuck was still misunderstanding him. "I don't know what to believe about slavery. Dear God, Starbuck, but everything in my life has to be changed, can't you understand that? Slavery, too, but that wasn't the reason God left the tract beside me last night. Don't you see? He left it there to give me a task!" "No," Starbuck said, "I don't see."

"My dear Starbuck," Swynyard said very earnestly. "I have been brought back from the path of sin at the very last moment. At that very instant when I was poised on the edge of hell's fire, I was saved. The road to hell is a terrible path, Starbuck, yet at its beginning the journey was enjoyable. Do you understand now what I'm saying?"

"No," Starbuck said, who feared that he understood exactly what the Colonel was saying.

"I think you do," Swynyard said fervently. "Because I think that you are on the first easy steps of that downward path. I look at you, Starbuck, and I see myself thirty years ago, which is why God sent me a pamphlet with your name on it. It's a sign telling me to save you from sin and from the agonies of eternal punishment. I'm going to do that, Starbuck. Instead of killing you as Faulconer wanted I am going to bring you to eternal life."

Starbuck paused to light a cigar he had plundered from the white-haired Pennsylvanian officer who had tried so hard to protect his flags. Then he sighed as he blew smoke past Swynyard's bruised face. "You know, Colonel? I think I really preferred you as a sinner."

Swynyard grimaced. "How long have I known you?"

Starbuck shrugged. "Six months."

"And in all that time, Captain Starbuck, have you ever called me 'sir'?"

Starbuck looked into the Colonel's eyes. "No, and I don't intend to either."

Swynyard smiled. "You will, Starbuck, you will. We're going to be friends, you and I, and I shall draw you back from the paths of sin."

Starbuck blew another plume of smoke into the damp wind. "I never did understand, Colonel, just why some son of a bitch can have a lifetime of sin and then, the moment he gets scared, turn around and try to stop other folks from enjoying themselves."

"Are you telling me the path of righteousness is not enjoyable?"

"I'm telling you I've got to get back to my company," Starbuck said. "I'll see you, Colonel." He touched his hat with a deliberate air of insolence, then walked back to his

men.

"So?" Sergeant Truslow greeted Starbuck, the inflection of the word inviting news of the Colonel.

"You were right," Starbuck said. "He's gibbering mad."

"So what's changed?"

"He's got drunk on God," Starbuck said, "that's what's changed." He was trying to sound dismissive of Swynyard, but a part of him was sensing the same fires of hell that had brought the Colonel to God. "But I'll give him till sundown," he went on. "Then he'll be tight on whiskey instead."

"Whiskey works faster than God," Truslow said, but he heard something wistful in his Captain's voice, and so he thrust a pewter flask at him. "Drink some of this," the Sergeant ordered.

"What is it?"

"The best spill-skull. Five cents a quart. Tom Canby made it two weeks back."

Starbuck took the flask. "Don't you know it's against army regulations to drink homemade whiskey?"

"It's probably against army regulations to go caterwauling with the wives of serving officers," Truslow said, "but that ain't ever stopped you yet."

"Too true, Sergeant, too true," Starbuck said. He drank, and the fierce liquor momentarily doused the fear of hellfire, and then, beneath a lowering sky, he slept.

The federal government's bureaucrats might have been reluctant to fund Major Galloway's Horse, but General Pope immediately saw the value of having Southern horsemen scouting behind Southern lines, and so he gave the Major such a slew of tasks that a cavalry force ten times larger would have been hard-pressed to fulfill them inside a month, let alone the one week that General Pope offered Galloway.

The chief task was to determine whether General Robert Lee was moving his troops from Richmond. The Northern headquarters in Washington had ordered Lee's opponent, McClellan, to withdraw his army from its camps close to the rebel capital, and Pope feared that Lee, hearing of that order, might already be marching north to reinforce Jackson. He also feared that the rebels could be building up troops in the Shenandoah Valley and had asked Galloway to make a reconnaissance across the Blue Ridge Mountains. And, as if those two tasks were not sufficient, Pope also wanted to know more about Jackson's dispositions, and so Galloway found himself under pressure to send horsemen south, east, and west. He compromised as best he could, taking his own troop south toward Richmond while Billy Blythe was ordered to cross the Blue Ridge Mountains and sniff out the rebel dispositions in the valley of the Shenandoah.

Adam, meanwhile, needed to replace the horses Blythe had wished on him. Major Galloway tried to reassure Adam that Blythe had meant no harm in buying such spavined hacks. "I'm sure he did his best," the Major said, trying to knit the unity of his squadron.

"I'm sure he did, too," Adam agreed, "and that's what worries me." But Adam at least knew where his troop could acquire more horses, and Galloway had given Adam permission to make his raid on condition that on Adam's way back he reconnoitred the western flank of Jackson's army. Adam left to perform both tasks three days after the far-off sound of the battle at Cedar Mountain had bruised the summer's heavy air.

Two miles beyond the Manassas farmhouse that was Galloway's headquarters Adam found Billy Blythe's troop waiting. "Thought we'd ride with you, Faulconer," Blythe said, "seeing as how you and I are going in the same direction."

"Are we?" Adam asked coldly. "Hell, why not?" Blythe said.

"The Shenandoah Valley's that way," Adam said, pointing west, "while we're going south."

"Well now," Blythe said with his lazy smile, "where I come from a gentleman doesn't go around teaching other gentlemen how to suck a tit. I'll choose my own route to the valley, if that's all right with you."

Adam had little choice but to accept Blythe's company. Sergeant Huxtable whispered his suspicion that Blythe merely wanted to follow Adam and take whatever horses Adam found for his own profit, but Adam could hardly stop his fellow cavalry officer from riding in convoy. Nor, on his dreadful horses, could Adam outrun Blythe, and so, for two days, the forty cavalrymen crept slowly southward. Blythe showed no sense of urgency and no desire to turn toward one of the high passes that led through the Blue Ridge Mountains. He ignored the Chester Gap, then Thornton's Gap, and finally Powell's Gap, hinting all the while that he knew of a better route across the mountains further south. "You're a fool if you use Rockfish Gap," Adam said. "I know for a fact the rebels will guard that pass."

Blythe smiled. "Maybe I won't use any gap at all." "You won't get horses over the mountains otherwise." "Maybe I don't need to cross the mountains." "You'd disobey Galloway's orders?" Adam asked. Blythe frowned as though he was disappointed in Adam's obtuseness. "I reckon our first duty, Faulconer, is to look after our men, specially when you reckon that the Southern army ain't going to take too kindly to Southern boys riding in Yankee blue, so it ain't my aim to take any real bad risks. That's why Abe Lincoln's got all those boys from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania; if anyone's going to beat ten types of hell out of the Confederates, it'll be them, not us. The important thing for us to do, Faulconer, is just survive the war intact." Blythe paused in this long peroration to light a cigar. Ahead of the cavalrymen was a gentle valley crossed by snake fences and with a prosperous-looking farm at the southern end. "What Joe Galloway ordered me to do, Faulconer," Blythe went on, "is discover how many rebels are skulking in the Shenandoah Valley, and I reckon I can do that well enough without crossing any damned mountain. I can do it by stopping a train coming out of the Rockfish Gap and questioning the passengers. Ain't that right?" "Suppose the passengers lie?" Adam asked. "Hell, there ain't a woman alive who'd tell me lies," Blythe said with a smile. He chuckled, then turned in his saddle. "Seth?"

"Billy?" Sergeant Seth Kelley answered.

"Reckon we should make sure no rebel vermin are hanging around that farmhouse. Take a couple of men. Go look."

Seth Kelley shouted at two Marylanders to follow him, then led them south through the trees that bordered the valley. "Reckon we'll just wait here," Blythe said to the other men. "Make yourselves at home now."

"You say our most important duty is to survive the war?" Adam asked Blythe when the troopers had made themselves comfortable in the shade of the broad-leaved trees.

"Because I reckon that the war's ending is when our proper work begins, Faulconer," Blythe said happily. "I even reckon that surviving the war is our Christian duty. The North's going to win. That's plain as the nose on a pelican's face. Hell, the North's got the men, the guns, the ships, the factories, the railroads, and the money, while all the South's got is a heap of cotton, a pile of rice, a stack of tobacco, and more damn lazy niggers than half Africa. The North's got a whole heap of stuff and the South ain't got a besotted hope! So sooner or later, Faulconer, we're going to have an ass-whipped South and a mighty pleased North, and when that day comes we want to make sure that we loyal Southerners get our just rewards. We are going to be the good Southerners, Faulconer, and we'll be the ones who take over down south. We are going to be hogs in clover. Rolling in milk and honey, and getting the pick of the girls and making dollars like a dog makes spit." Blythe turned to stare at the farm. "Now you don't want to risk all that by getting a bullet in your belly, do you?"

Adam heard the chuckles of those men who agreed with Blythe. Others looked grim, and Adam decided he would speak for those idealists. "We've got a job to do. That's what we volunteered for."

Blythe nodded as though Adam had made a wonderfully cogent point. "Hell now, Faulconer, no one agrees with you more than me! Hell, if I could reconnoitre clean down to the Rappahannock, then no one would be as happy as Billy Blythe. Hell, I'd reconnoitre down to the Pee Dee if I could, down as far as the Swanee! Hell, I'd reconnoitre to the last gol-darned river on earth for my country, so I would, but I can't do it! Just plumb can't do it, Faulconer, and you know why?" And here Blythe laid a confiding hand on Adam's elbow and leaned so close that his cigar smell wreathed Adam's head. "We can't do nothing, Faulconer, and that's the plain sad truth of it. We can't even ride to the brothel and back on account of our horses being razor-backed pieces of four-legged hogshit. What's the first duty of a cavalryman?"

"To look after his horse, Billy," one of his men answered.

"Ain't that God's blessed truth?" Blythe responded. "So I reckon that for the horses' sake we just has to go gentle and keep ourselves unpunctured for the rest of the war. Hell now, what in tarnation was that?" The question was Blythe's response to a pair of gunshots that had sounded from somewhere near the farmhouse. For a man who had just preached a gospel of staying well clear of trouble, he seemed remarkably untroubled by the gunfire. "Reckon we'd best ride to see if old Seth's in one piece, boys," he called, and the men of his troop slowly pulled themselves into their saddles and loosened the Colt repeating rifles in their holsters.

"Reckon your troop should stay and keep watch," Blythe told Adam. "I ain't saying we expects any trouble, but you can never tell. These woods are full of bushwhackers and every man jack of them is as mean as a snake and twice as treacherous. So you watch out for partisans while the rest of us make certain old Seth ain't gone to meet his Maker."

Adam watched from the trees as Blythe took his troop down to the farmhouse, which was typical of so many homesteads in the Virginia Piedmont. Adam had often dreamed of settling in just such a farm, miles away from his father's pretensions and wealth. The two-story house was weather-boarded with white-painted planks and handsomely surrounded by a deep veranda, which, in turn, was circled by a straggling but colorful flower garden. A wide vegetable garden stretched between the house and the largest of a pair of barns that formed two sides of a yard that was completed by a rail fence. Orchards ran downhill from the house to where a stream glinted in the distance. The sight of the homestead gave Adam a pang of remorse and nostalgia. It seemed wicked that war should inflict itself on such a place.

At the farm itself Sergeant Seth Kelley waited on the veranda for Captain Blythe. Kelley was a long thin man with a narrow black beard and dark eyes, who now lounged in a wicker chair with his spurred boots propped on the veranda's rail and a cigar in his mouth. His two men were leaning against the posts that flanked the short flight of veranda steps. Kelley took the cigar from his mouth as Captain Blythe dismounted on the parched lawn. "We was fired on, Billy," Kelley said with a grin. "Two shots that came from the top floor. Came damn close to killing me, so they did."

Blythe shook his head and tutted. "But you're all right, Seth? You ain't wounded now?"

"They missed, Billy, they missed. But the rascals had this piece of bunting flying from the house, so they did." Kelley held up a small rebel flag.

"Bad business, Seth, bad business," Blythe said, grinning as broadly as his Sergeant.

"Sure is, Billy. 'Bout as bad as it can be." Kelley put the cigar back in his mouth.

Blythe led his horse across the flower bed and tied its reins to a rail of the porch. His men dismounted as Blythe climbed the veranda steps and used Kelley's cigar to light one of his own. "Any folks inside?" Blythe asked the Sergeant.

"Two women and a passel of brats," Sergeant Kelley said.

Blythe pushed into the house. The hall floor was made of dark wood on which lay a pair of hooked rugs. A long case clock stood by the staircase, its face proclaiming that it had been made in Baltimore. There was a pair of antlers serving as a coatrack, a portrait of George Washington, another of Andrew Jackson, and a pokerwork plaque proclaiming that God was The Unseen Listener to Every Conversation in This House. Blythe gave the clock an appreciative pat as Seth Kelley and two men followed him through the hall and into the kitchen, where three children clung to the skirts of two women. One woman was white-haired, the other young and defiant.

"Well now, well," Blythe said, pausing in the kitchen doorway. "What do we have here?"

"You ain't got no business here," the younger woman said. She was in her thirties and evidently the mother of the three small children. She was carrying a heavy cleaver, which she hefted nervously as Blythe walked into the kitchen.

"The business we got here, ma'am, is the business of the United States of America," Billy Blythe said happily. He strolled past an ancient dresser and picked an apple from a china bowl. He bit a chunk from the apple, then smiled at the younger woman. "Real sweet, ma'am. Just like yourself." The woman was dark-haired with good features and challenging eyes. "I like a woman with spirit," Blythe said, "ain't that so, Seth?"

"You always did have a right taste for such women, Billy." Kelley leaned his lanky form against the kitchen doorpost.

"You leave us alone!" the older woman said, scenting trouble.

"Nothing in this world I'd rather do, ma'am," Blythe said.

He took another bite from the apple. Two of the children had started to cry, prompting Blythe to slam the remnants of the apple hard onto the scrubbed kitchen table. Scraps of the shattered fruit skittered across the kitchen. "I would be obliged if you kept your sniveling infants silent, ma'am!" Blythe snapped. "I cannot abide a sniveling child, no sir! Sniveling children should be whipped. Whipped!" The last word was bellowed so loud that both children stopped crying in sheer fright. Blythe smiled at their mother, displaying scraps of apple between his teeth. "So where's the man of the house, ma'am?"

"He ain't here," the younger woman said defiantly. "Is that because he's carrying arms against his lawful government?" Blythe asked in a teasing voice.

"He ain't here," the woman said again, and then, after a pause, "There's only us women and children here. You ain't got no quarrel with women and children."

"My quarrels are my business," Blythe said, "and my business is to discover just why one of you two ladies fired a couple of shots at my nice Sergeant here."

"No one fired at him!" the older woman said scornfully. "He fired his own revolver. I saw him do it!"

Blythe shook his head disbelievingly. "That's not what Mr. Kelley says, ma'am, and he wouldn't tell me a lie. Hell, he's a sergeant in the army of the United States of America! Are you telling me that a sergeant of the army of the United States of America would tell a lie?" Blythe asked the question with feigned horror. "Are you really trying to suggest such a thing?"

"No one fired!" the younger woman insisted. The children were almost buried in her skirts. Blythe took a step closer to the woman, who raised the cleaver threateningly.

"You use that, ma'am," Blythe said equably, "and you'll be hanged for murder. What's your name?"

"My name's none of your business."

"So I'll tell you what is my business, ma'am," Blythe said, and he reached out for the cleaver and plucked it from the woman's unresisting grasp. He raised it, then slashed it hard down to bury its blade tip in the table. He smiled at the younger woman, then blew cigar smoke toward the bunches of herbs hanging from a beam. "My business, ma'am," he said, "is with General Order Number Five, issued by Major General John Pope of the United States Army, which General Order gives me the legal right and solemn duty to feed and equip my men with any food or goods we find in this house that might be necessary to our well-being. That is an order, given me by the General in command of my army, and like a good Christian soldier, ma'am, I am duty-bound to obey it." Blythe turned and jabbed a finger toward Sergeant Kelley. "Start searching, Seth! Outhouses, upstairs, cellars, barns. Give the place a good shaking now! You stay here, Corporal," he added to one of the other men who had come into the kitchen.

"We ain't got nothing!" the old woman protested.

"We'll be the judge of that, ma'am," Blythe said. "Start searching, Seth! Do it thorough now!"

"You damned thieves," the younger woman said.

"On the contrary, ma'am, on the contrary." Blythe smiled at her, then sat at the head of the kitchen table and took a preprinted form from a leather pouch at his belt. He found a pencil stub in a pocket. The pencil was blunt, but he tried its lead on the tabletop and was satisfied with the mark it made. "No, ma'am," he went on, "we ain't thieves. We are just trying to put God's own country back into one piece, and we need your help to do it. But it ain't thieving, ma'am, because our Uncle Sam is a kind uncle, a good uncle, and he'll pay you folks real well for everything you give us today." He smoothed out the form, licked the pencil, and looked up expectantly at the younger woman. "Your name, honey?"

"I ain't telling you."

Blythe looked at the older woman. "Can't pay the family without a name, Grandma. So tell us your name."

"Don't tell him, Mother!" the younger woman cried.

The older woman hesitated, then decided that giving the family's name would not cause much harm. "Rothwell," she said reluctantly.

"A mighty fine name," Blythe said as he wrote it on the form. "I knew a family of Rothwells down home in Blytheville. Fine Baptists, they were, and fine neighbors too. Now, ma'am, you happen to know what today's date is?" The house echoed with men's laughter and the heavy sound of boots thumping up the staircase; then a burst of cheering erupted as some treasure was discovered in one of the front rooms. More feet clattered on the stairs. The young woman looked at the ceiling, and a frown of distress crossed her face. "Today's date, ma'am?" Blythe insisted.

The older woman thought for a second. "Yesterday was the Lord's Day," she said, "so today must be the eleventh."

"My, how this summer is just flying by! August the eleventh already." Blythe wrote the date as he spoke, "in the year of Our Lord, eighteen hundred and sixty-two. This danged pencil is scratchy as hell." He finished the date, then leaned back in the chair. Sweat was pouring down his plump face and staining the collar of his uniform coat. "Well now, ladies, this here piece of paper confirms that me and my men are about to commandeer just about any gol-darned thing we take a fancy to in this property. Anything at all! And when we've got it, you're going to tell me the value of all that food and all those chattels, and I'm going to write that value down on this piece of paper and then I'm going to sign it with my God-given name. And what you're going to do, ladies, is keep ahold of this piece of paper like it was the sacred word in the good Lord's own handwriting, and at the end of the war, when the rebels are well beaten and kind Uncle Sam is welcoming you all back into the bosom of his family, you're going to present this piece of paper to the government and the government, in its mercy and goodness, is going to give you all the money. Every red cent. There's just one small thing you ought to know first, though." He paused to draw on his cigar, then smiled at the frightened women. "When you present this piece of paper you'll have to prove that you've stayed loyal to the United States of America from the date on this form until the day the war ends. Just one little piece of evidence that anyone in the Rothwell family might have borne arms or, God help us, even a grudge against the United States of America will make this piece of paper worthless. And that means you'll get no money, honey!" He laughed.

"You damned thief," the younger woman said.

"If you're a good girl," Blythe said mockingly, "then you'll get the money. That's what General Order Number Five says, and we shall obey General Order Number Five, so help us God." He stood. He was a tall man, and the feather in his hat brushed the kitchen's beams as he walked toward the frightened family. "But there's also General Order Number Seven. Have you folks ever heard of General Order Number Seven? No? Well General Order Number Seven decrees what punishment must be given to any household that fires on troops of the United States of America, and a shot was fired at my men from this house!"

"That's a lie!" the older woman insisted, and her vehemence made the three children start to cry again.

"Quiet!" Blythe shouted. The children whimpered and shivered but managed to keep silent. Blythe smiled. "By orders of Major General Pope, who is duly authorized by the President and by the Congress of the United States of America, it is my duty to burn this house down so that no more shots can be fired from it."

"No!" the younger woman protested. "Yes," Blythe said, still smiling. "We didn't fire any shots!" the young woman said. "But I say you did, and when it comes right down to the scratch, ma'am, whose word do you think the President and the Congress will believe? My word, which is the word of a commissioned officer of the United States Army, or your word, which is the caviling whine of a secessionist bitch? Now which of us, ma'am, is going to be believed?" He took a silver case from his pocket and clicked open the lid to reveal the white phosphorus heads of lucifer matches. "No!" The younger woman had started to cry. "Corporal Kemble!" Blythe snapped, and Kemble pushed himself off the kitchen wall. "Take her to the barn," Blythe ordered, pointing to the younger woman.

The woman lunged for the cleaver that was still stuck in the table, but Blythe was much too fast for her. He knocked the cleaver out of her reach, then drew his revolver and pointed it at the woman's head. "I'm not a hard-hearted man, ma'am, just a simple horse trader turned soldier, and like any good horse trader I do sure appreciate a bargain. So why don't you and I go and discuss matters in the barn, ma'am, and see if we can't work out an accommodation?"

"You're worse than a thief," the woman said, "you're a traitor."

"Sir?" Kemble was worried by Blythe's order.

"Take her, Kemble," Blythe insisted. "But no liberties! She's mine to deal with, not yours." Blythe smiled at the woman and her children. "I do so love war, ma'am. I do so love the pursuit of war. I reckon war is in my blood, my hot blood."

Kemble took the woman away, leaving her children crying while Billy Blythe went to reserve the pick of the house's plunder before snatching the real pleasure of his day.

On the Saturday after the battle Captain Anthony Murphy opened a book on how long it would take for Colonel Swynyard to begin drinking again. It had been a miracle, the whole Legion agreed, that the Colonel had lasted two nights, even if he had been concussed for much of the first, but no one believed he could last another two nights without the succor of raw spirits. Ever since his alleged conversion the Colonel had been shaking visibly, such was the strain he endured, and on the Friday night he was heard moaning inside his tent, yet he endured that night, and the next, so that on Sunday he appeared at the Brigade's church parade with his once-ragged beard trimmed and clean, his boots polished, and a determined smile on his haggard face. His was the most earnest voice in prayer, the most enthusiastic to shout amen, and the loudest in singing hymns. Indeed, when the Reverend Moss led the Legion in singing "Depth of mercy, can there be mercy still reserved for me? Can my God His wrath forbear? Me the chief of sinners spare?" Swynyard looked directly at Starbuck and smiled confidingly as he sang.

General Washington Faulconer took his second-in-command to one side after the open-air service. "You're making a damned fool of yourself, Swynyard. Stop it."

"The Lord is making a fool of me, sir, and I praise Him for it."

"I'll cashier you," Faulconer threatened.

"I'm sure General Jackson would like to hear of an officer being cashiered for loving the Lord, sir," Swynyard said with a touch of his old cunning.

"Just stop making a fool of yourself," Faulconer growled, then walked away.

Swynyard himself sought out Captain Murphy. "I hear you have a book on me, Murphy?"

The Irishman reddened but confessed it was so. "But I'm not sure I can let you have a wager yourself, Colonel, if that's what you'll be wanting," Murphy said, "seeing as how you might be considered partial in the matter, sir, if you follow my meaning?"

"I wouldn't have a wager," Swynyard said. "Wagering is a sin, Murphy."

"Is it now, sir?" Murphy asked innocently. "Then it must be a Protestant sin, sir, and more's the pity for you."

"But you should be warned that God is on my side, so not a drop of ardent spirits will pass my lips ever again."

"I'm overjoyed to hear that, sir. A living saint, you are." The Irishman smiled and backed away.

That night, after the Colonel had testified at the Legion's voluntary prayer meeting, he was heard praying aloud in his tent. The man was in plain agony. He was lusting after drink, fighting it, and calling on God to help him in the fight. Starbuck and Truslow listened to the pathetic struggle, then went to Murphy's shelter. "One more day, Murph'." Starbuck proffered the last two dollars of his recent salary. "Two bucks says he'll be sodden tight by this time tomorrow night," Starbuck offered.

"I'll take two bucks for tomorrow night as well," Truslow added, offering his money.

"You and a score of others are saying the exact same thing," Murphy said dubiously, then showed the two men a valise stuffed with Confederate banknotes. "Half of that money is saying he won't last this night, and the other half is only giving him till tomorrow sundown. I can't give you decent odds, Nate. I'll be hurting myself if I offered you anything better than two to one against. It's hardly worth risking your money at those odds."

"Listen," Starbuck said. In the silence the three men could hear the Colonel sobbing. There was a light in Swynyard's tent, and the Colonel's monstrous shadow was rocking back and forth as he prayed for help. His two slaves, who had been utterly taken aback by the change in their master's demeanor, crouched helplessly outside.

"The poor bastard," Murphy said. "It's almost enough to stop you from drinking in the first place."

"Two to one on?" Starbuck asked. "For tomorrow night?"

"Are you sure you don't want to put your money on tonight?" Murphy asked.

"He's survived this far," Truslow said. "He'll be asleep

soon." -

"For tomorrow night, then," Murphy said and took Starbuck's two dollars and then the two dollars that Sergeant Truslow had offered. When the wagers were recorded in Murphy's book, Starbuck walked back past the Colonel's tent and saw Lieutenant Davies on his knees beside the entrance.

"What the ..." Starbuck began, but Davies turned with his finger to his lips. Starbuck peered closer and saw that the Lieutenant was pushing a half-full bottle of whiskey under

the flap.

Davies backed away. "I've got thirty bucks riding on tonight, Nate," he whispered as he climbed to his feet, "so I thought I'd help the money."

"Thirty bucks?"

"Even odds," Davies said, then dusted the dirt off his pants. "Reckon I'm onto a sure thing. Listen to the bastard!"

"It's not fair to do that to a man," Starbuck said sternly. "You should be ashamed of yourself!" He strode to the tent, reached under the flap, and took out the whiskey.

"Put it back!" Davies insisted.

"Lieutenant Davies," Starbuck said, "I will personally pull your belly out of your goddamned throat and shove it up your stinking backside if I ever find you or anyone else trying to sabotage that man's repentance. Do you understand me?" He took a step closer to the tall, pale, and bespectacled Lieutenant. "I'm not goddamn joking, Davies. That man's trying to redeem himself, and all you can do is mock him! Christ Almighty, but that makes me angry!"

"All right! All right!" Davies said, frightened by Starbuck's vehemence.

"I'm serious, Davies," Starbuck said, although the Lieutenant had never actually doubted Starbuck's sincerity. "I'll goddamn kill you if you try this again," Starbuck said. "Now go away." Starbuck watched the Lieutenant vanish into the night, then let out a long sigh of relief. "We'll keep this for tomorrow night, Sergeant," he told Truslow, flourishing the whiskey that Davies had abandoned.

"Then put it into Swynyard's tent?"

"Exactly. God damn Davies's thirty bucks. I need money far more than he does."

Truslow walked on beside his Captain. "What that suffering bastard Swynyard really likes is good brandy."

"Then maybe we can find some on the battlefield tomorrow," Starbuck said, and that discovery seemed a distinct possibility, for although three days had passed since the battle, there were still wounded men lying in the woods or hidden in the broken stands of corn. Indeed, there were so many dead and wounded that the rebels alone could not retrieve all the casualties, and so a truce had been arranged and troops from General Banks's army had been invited to rescue their own men.

The day of the truce dawned hot and sultry. Most of the Legion had been ordered to help search the undergrowth in the belt of trees where the Yankee attack had stalled, but Starbuck's company was set to tree-felling and the construction of a massive pyre on which the dead horses of the Pennsylvanian cavalry were to be burned. On the turnpike behind the pyre a succession of light-sprung Northern ambulances carried away the Yankee wounded. The Northern vehicles, specially constructed for their purpose, were in stark contrast to the farm carts and captured army wagons that the rebels used as ambulances, just as the uniformed and well-equipped Northern soldiers looked so much smarter than the rebel troops. A Pennsylvanian captain in charge of the detail loading the ambulances sauntered down to Starbuck's men and had to ask which of the ragamuffins was their officer. "Dick Levergood," he introduced himself to Starbuck.

"Nate Starbuck."

Levergood companionably offered Starbuck a cigar and a drink of lemonade. "It's crystallized essence," he said, apologizing for the lemonade that was reconstituted from a powder mix, "but it doesn't taste bad. My mother sends it."

"You'd rather have whiskey?" Starbuck offered Levergood a bottle. "It's good Northern liquor," Starbuck added mischievously.

Other Pennsylvanians joined the Legionnaires. Newspapers were exchanged and twists of tobacco swapped for coffee, though the briskest trade was in Confederate dollars. Every Northerner wanted to buy Southern scrip to send home as a souvenir, and the price of the ill-printed Southern money was rising by the minute. The men made their trades beside the great pyre that was a sixty-foot-long mound of newly cut pine logs on which a company of Confederate gunners was now piling the horses. The artillerymen were using a sling-cart that had a lifting frame bolted to its bed. The wagon's real purpose was rescuing dismounted cannon barrels, but now its crane jib hoisted the rotting horse carcasses six feet in the air, then swung them onto the logs, where a team of men with their mouths and nostrils scarfed against the stink levered the swollen corpses into place with handspikes. Another two masked men splashed kerosene on the pyre.

Captain Levergood peered at the sling-cart. "That's one of ours."

"Captured." Starbuck confirmed the cart's Northern origins; indeed the sling-cart still had the letters USA stenciled on its backboard.

"No, no," Levergood said. "One of my family's carts. We manufacture them in Pittsburgh. We used to make sulkies, buggies, Deerborns, and horsecars, now we mostly make army wagons. A hundred wagons a month and the government pays whatever we ask. I tell you, Starbuck, if you want to make a fortune, then work for the government. They pay more for a seven-ton wagon than we ever dared charge for an eight-horse coach with leather seats, stove, silk drapes, turkey carpets, and silver-gilt lamps."

Starbuck drew on his cigar. "So why are you being shot at here instead of building carts in Pittsburgh?"

Levergood shrugged. "Wanted to fight for my country." He sounded embarrassed at making the confession. "Mind you, I never dreamed the war would last; more than a summer."

"Nor did we," Starbuck said. "We reckoned one good battle to teach you a lesson and that would be the sum of it."

"Reckon we must be slow learners," Levergood said affably. "Mind you, it won't be long now."

"It won't?" Starbuck asked, amused.

"McClellan's leaving the peninsula, that's what we hear. His men are sailing north and in another couple of weeks his army will be alongside ours and then we'll be down on you like a pack of wolves. Pope's army and McClellan's combined. You'll be crushed like a soft grape. I just hope there are enough beds in Richmond to take care of us all."

"There are plenty of prison beds there," Starbuck said, "but their mattresses ain't too soft."

Levergood laughed, then turned as a voice boomed from the road. "Read it! Read it! Let the word of God work its grace on your sinful souls. Here! Take and read, take and read." An older man dressed in preacher's garb was distributing tracts from horseback, scattering the leaflets down to the rebel soldiers beside the road.

"Jesus!" Starbuck said in astonishment.

"The Reverend Elial Starbuck," Levergood said with evident pride that such a famous man was present. "He preached to us yesterday. My, but he's got a rare tongue in him. It seems he's close to our high command and they've promised him the honor of preaching the very first sermon in liberated Richmond." Levergood paused, then frowned. "You're called Starbuck, too. Are you related?"

"Just a coincidence," Starbuck said. He edged around the end of the pyre. He had faced battle with evident courage, but he could not face his father. He went to where Esau Washbrook was mounting a solitary guard over the company's stacked weapons. "Give me your rifle, Washbrook," he said.

Washbrook, the company's best marksman, had equipped himself with a European-made sniper's rifle: a heavy long-range killing machine with a telescopic sight running alongside the barrel. "You're not going to kill the man, are you?" Levergood asked. The Pennsylvanian had followed Starbuck from the road.

"No." Starbuck aimed the rifle at his father, inspecting him through the telescopic sight. The gunners had set fire to the horses' funeral pyre, and the smoke was beginning to whip across Starbuck's vision while the heat of the fire was quivering the image held in the gun's crosshairs. His father, astonishingly, looked happier than Starbuck had ever seen him. He was evidently exulting in the stench of death and the remnants of battle.

"The flames of hell will burn brighter than these fires!" the preacher called to the rebels. "They will burn for all eternity and lap you with insufferable pain! That is your certain fate unless you repent now! God is reaching His hand out for you! Repent and you will be saved!"

Starbuck lightly touched the trigger, then felt ashamed of the impulse and immediately lowered the gun. For a second it seemed that his father had stared straight at him, but doubtless the preacher's own vision had been smeared by the shimmer of smoky heat, for he had looked away without recognition before riding back toward the Federal lines.

The flames of the pyre leaped higher as fat from the carcasses ran down to sizzle among the logs. The last ambulances were gone north and with them the final wagons carrying the Yankee dead. Bugles now called the Yankee living back to their own lines, and Captain Levergood held out his hand. "Guess we'll meet again, Nate."

"I'd like that." Starbuck shook the Northerner's hand.

"Kind of crazy, really," Levergood said in half-articulated regret at meeting an enemy he so liked; then he shrugged. "But watch out next time we meet. McClellan will be leading us, and McClellan's a regular tiger. He'll have you beat soon enough."

Starbuck had met the tiger once and had watched him being beaten, too, but he said nothing of that meeting nor of the beating. "Be safe," he told Levergood.

"You too, friend."

The Northerners marched away pursued by the evil-smelling smoke of the burning carcasses. "Did you know your father was here?" Colonel Swynyard's harsh voice suddenly sounded behind Starbuck.

Starbuck turned. "I saw him, yes."

"I spoke with him," Swynyard said. "I told him I had the honor to command his son. You know what he said?" Swynyard paused to dramatize the moment, then grinned. "He said he had no son called Nathaniel. You do not exist, he said. You have been written out from his life; expunged, condemned, disinherited. I said I would pray that you would be reconciled."

Starbuck shrugged. "My father ain't the reconciling kind, Colonel."

"Then you will have to forgive him instead," Swynyard said. "But first get your fellows ready to march. We're pulling back over the Rapidan."

"Tonight?"

"Before first light tomorrow. It'll be a fast march, so tell your boys not to carry unnecessary baggage. Can't have them laden down with things like this, eh, Starbuck?" Swynyard took a bottle of brandy from his pocket. "Found this in my tent, Starbuck. Just after you took that whiskey away. I heard you reprove Davies, and I'm grateful that you did, but a dozen other people brought me liquor anyway."

Starbuck felt a twinge of shame at having planned to place Davies's whiskey back in Swynyard's tent this very night. "Were you tempted?" he asked the Colonel.

"Of course I was tempted. The devil has not relinquished me yet, Starbuck, but I shall beat him." Swynyard gauged the distance to the funeral pyre, then heaved the brandy at the flames. The bottle scored a direct hit, breaking to splash a pale blue light in the heart of the fire. "I'm saved, Starbuck," Swynyard said, "so tell Murphy's friends to keep their liquor to themselves."

"Yes, Colonel. I'll do that," Starbuck said, then walked back to Sergeant Truslow. "He's saved and we're poor, Sergeant," Starbuck said. "I reckon we've just lost our damned money."

Truslow spat in the dust. "Bugger may not last the night," he said.

"Two bucks says he will."

Truslow thought about it for a second. "What two bucks?" he finally asked.

"The two bucks I'll win from you tomorrow morning if Swynyard lasts the night."

"Forget it."

The smoke blew north, there to meld with dark clouds that heaped in the summer sky. Somewhere beneath those clouds the armies of the United States were gathering to march south, and Jackson's men, outnumbered, could only retreat.

Adam waited with his troop at a place where he had a view toward the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. He was watching for partisans, but Sergeant Tom Huxtable kept glancing back toward the farmhouse. "Tidy place," he finally commented.

"Kind of house a man could live in forever," Adam agreed.

"But not after Billy Blythe's finished searching it." Huxtable could no longer keep his concern silent. "Our job's to hunt down rebels," he said, "not persecute womenfolk."

Adam was acutely uncomfortable with this direct criticism of his fellow officer. He suspected the criticism might be justified, but Adam always tried to give all men the benefit of the doubt, and now he tried to find some saving grace in Blythe's character. "The Captain's simply investigating gunfire, Sergeant. I didn't hear anything said of womenfolk."

"Gunfire that Seth Kelley shot," Huxtable said, "like as not."

Adam kept silent while he examined the woods and fields to the south. The trees lay still in the windless air as he turned the field glasses back to the mountains.

"A man should have beliefs, you see," Sergeant Huxtable said. "A man without beliefs, Captain, is a man without purpose. Like a ship without a compass."

Adam still said nothing. He turned the glasses northward. He watched an empty track, then slid the lenses across a wooded ridge.

Huxtable shifted his lump of chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other. He had been a cooper in his native Louisiana and then apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in his wife's village in upstate New York. When the war had broken out, Tom Huxtable had visited the white-spired village church, knelt in prayer for twenty minutes, then gone home and taken his rifle from its hooks over the fireplace, a Bible from the drawer in the kitchen table, and a knife from his workshop. Then he had told his wife to keep the squash well watered and gone to join the Northern army. His grandfather had been killed by the British to establish the United States of America, and Tom Huxtable was not minded to let that sacrifice go for nothing.

"It mayn't be my place to say it," Huxtable now went remorselessly on, "but Captain Blythe don't have a belief in his body, sir. He'd fight for the devil if the pay was right." Adam's men were of a like mind with their Sergeant and murmured agreement. "Mr. Blythe's not in the North by choice, Captain," Huxtable continued doggedly. "He says he's fighting for the Union, but we hear he left his hometown a pace ahead of a lynching party. There's talk of a girl, Captain. A white girl of good family. She says Mr. Blythe wrestled her down and—"

"I don't want to know!" Adam said abruptly. Then, thinking he had spoken too fiercely, he turned apologetically to his Sergeant. "I'm sure Major Galloway has considered all this."

"Major Galloway's like yourself, sir. A decent man who doesn't believe in evil."

"And you do?" Adam asked.

"You've seen the plantations in the deep South, sir?" Huxtable asked. "Yes, sir, I believe in evil."

"Sir!" The conversation was interrupted by one of Adam's men, who pointed northward. Adam turned and raised the field glasses. For a second his view was of nothing but blurred leaves; then he focused the lenses to see mounted men on a crestline. He counted a dozen riders, but guessed there were more. They were not in uniform but carried rifles slung from their shoulders or thrust into saddle holsters. A second group of horsemen came into view. They had to be partisans: the Southern horsemen who rode Virginia's secret paths to harass the Northern armies.

Huxtable stared at the distant horsemen. "Captain Blythe will run away," he said disgustedly.

"He needs to be warned. Come on." Adam led his troop down from the hilltop. They spurred east, and Adam wished their horses were not so decrepit.

The parched lawn in front of the farmhouse was now a bizarre array of furniture and household goods, which Blythe's men were picking through in search of plunder. There were buckets, spittoons, pictures, lamps, and rush-bottom chairs. There was a sewing machine, a long case clock, two butter churns, a chamber pot, and meal sifters. Some men were trying on suits of clothes while two more were swathed in women's scarves. A man threw a bolt of cloth from an upstairs window, and the bright cloth cascaded across the veranda roof and down to where the horses were picketed in the flower beds. "Where's Captain Blythe?" Adam demanded of one of the scarfed men.

"In the barn, Cap'n, but he won't thank you for finding him there," the man answered. Children screamed in the house. Adam threw his reins to Sergeant Huxtable, then ran to the barn, where Corporal Kemble was standing guard. "You can't go in, sir," the Corporal said unhappily.

Adam just pushed past the Corporal, unlatched the door, and pushed into the barn. Two empty horse stalls were on the right, an oat cutter stood in the floor's center, while a mound of hay filled the barn's farther end. Blythe was in the hay, struggling with a crying woman.

"Bitch!" Blythe said, slapping her. "Goddamned bitch!" There was the sound of cloth ripping; then Blythe realized the door had been thrown open, and he turned angrily around. "What the hell do you want?" He could not recognize the intruder who was silhouetted against the light outside.

"Leave her alone, Blythe!" Adam said.

"Faulconer? You son of a bitch!" Blythe scrambled to his feet and brushed scraps of hay from his hands. "I'm just questioning this lady, and what I do here is none of your damned business."

The woman clutched the remnants of her dress to her breasts and pushed herself across the floor. "He was attacking me, mister!" she called to Adam. "He was going to —"

"Get out!" Blythe shouted at Adam.

But Adam knew the time had come to make his stand. He drew his revolver, cocked it, then aimed the weapon at Blythe's head. "Just leave her alone."

Blythe smiled and shook his head. "You're a boy, Faulconer. I ain't attacking her! She's a rebel! She fired on us!"

"I never!" the woman called.

"Step away from her!" Adam said. He could sense his heart pounding and recognized his own fear, but he knew Blythe had to be confronted.

"Shoot the interfering son of a bitch, Kemble!" Blythe shouted past Adam to the Corporal.

"Touch the trigger, Corporal, and I'll kill you." Sergeant Huxtable spoke from beyond the door.

Blythe seemed to find the impasse amusing, for he still grinned as he brushed scraps of hay from his uniform. "She's a traitor, Faulconer. A damned rebel. You know what the penalty is for firing on a Northern soldier? You've read General Order Number Seven, ain't you?" He had taken the silver case of lucifers from his pocket.

"Just step away from her!" Adam repeated.

"I never wanted to be near her!" Blythe said. "But the bitch kept trying to stop me from doing my job. And my job, Faulconer, is to burn this property down like Major General John Pope ordered." He began to strike the lucifers, then to drop the burning matches into the hay. He laughed as the woman tried to beat the flames out with her bare hands. Her torn dress dropped open and Blythe gestured at her. "Nice titties, Faulconer. Or can't you make a comparison on account of never having seen none?" Blythe chuckled as he dropped more matches and started more fires. "So why don't you shoot me, Faulconer? Lost your nerve.

"Because I don't want to tell the partisans we're here. There's a group of them a mile north of here. And coming this way."

Blythe stared at Adam for a heartbeat, then smiled. "Nice try, boy."

"Maybe two dozen of them," Sergeant Huxtable said flatly from the barn door.

Behind Blythe the hay had started to burn fiercely. The woman retreated from the heat, crying. Her hair had come loose to hang either side of her face. She clasped her bodice, then spat at Blythe before running out of the barn. "Thank you, mister," she said as she passed Adam.

Blythe watched her go, then looked back to Adam. "Are you lying to me, Faulconer?" he asked.

"You want to stay here and find out?" Adam asked. "You want to run the risk of meeting that woman's husband?"

"Goddamn partisans!" Sergeant Seth Kelley shouted his sudden warning from the sunlight outside. "'Bout a mile away, Billy!"

"Jesus hollering Christ!" Blythe swore, then ran past Adam and shouted for his horse. "Come on, boys! Get out of here! Take what you can, leave the rest! Hurry now! Hurry!"

The hay was well alight, the smoke churning out the barn door. "Where to?" Sergeant Kelley asked.

"South! Come on!" Blythe was desperate to escape the farm before the partisans arrived. He snatched a bag of plunder, rammed his spurs back, and galloped south toward the woods.

His men followed in ragged order. Adam and his troop were the last to go. They found Blythe a half-mile inside the woods, hesitating over a track leading west and another going south. There were men's voices in the distant air, and that was enough to make Blythe choose the southward track that promised a faster escape because it went downhill. Adam's horses were tired, their lungs wheezing asthmatically and their flanks wet with white sweat, yet still Blythe pressed the pace, not stopping until they had ridden a good six or seven miles from the farmhouse. There was no evidence of any pursuit. "Bastards probably stopped to put out that fire, Billy," Seth Kelley opined.

"Can't tell with partisans," Blythe said. "Cunning as serpents. Could be anywhere." He looked nervously around the green woods.

The horsemen had stopped beside a stream that flowed eastward through sunlit woodlands. The horses were all winded, and a couple of the beasts were lamed. If the partisans had followed, Adam knew, then every man in Blythe's command would either be killed or captured. "What do we do now?" one of the men asked Blythe.

"We find out where the hell we are," Blythe snapped irritably.

"I know where we are," Adam said, "and I know where we're going."

Blythe, panting hard and with his red face covered in sweat, looked at his fellow officer. "Where?" he asked curtly.

"We're going to get some decent horses," Adam said, "and then we're going to fight like we're supposed to."

"Amen," Sergeant Huxtable said.

Blythe straightened up in his saddle. "Are you saying I don't want to fight, Faulconer?"

For a second Adam was tempted to accept the challenge and make Blythe either fight him or back down in front of his men. Then he remembered the partisans and knew he could not afford the luxury of fighting a duel so deep behind the enemy's lines.

Blythe saw Adam's hesitation and translated it as cowardice. He grinned. "Lost your tongue?"

"I'm going south, Blythe, and I don't care if you come or stay."

"I'll let you go, boy," Blythe said, then pulled his horse around and spurred westward. He planned to take his men to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, then follow the mountains north until he came to the Federal lines.

Adam watched Blythe go and knew he had merely postponed their confrontation. Then, after dusk, when his horses and men were rested, Adam led the troop south to where he planned a victory.