The cavalry strung out a line nearly twenty miles long. Behind it, Lee's divisions maneuvered, ready to strike clear to Pennsylvania, some said. Below the line, over the blurry hills — McClellan, surely. Coming out in force from Washington. Slow as ever, but coming out. Bogus rustics on horseback had been spied along the Potomac, watching the movement through White's Ford. Scouts for the other side.
Hampton encamped at Hyattstown, a few miles south of Urbana. Charles packed all but essential possessions into the field trunk holding his original legion sword and the Solingen blade. Out of the trunk he took his gray captain's coat. It didn't take many brains to conclude that the invasion would lead to some heavy fighting. He wanted his own side to be able to identify him. He watched his trunk lifted into one of the baggage wagons as if for the last time.
He bundled his coat and tied it behind his saddle — his well-worn McClellan model, bought new in Columbia. The saddle had been adapted from a Prussian design by the man so earnestly trying to destroy them. Queer war, this.
Hungry war, too. Ab Woolner complained half the evening. 'Nobody around here gonna feed us. It's more green corn for the two-legged as well as the four-legged. We ought to name this the green corn campaign, Charlie boy.'
Charles said nothing, seeing to his powder and ball so he could get some sleep. They might need it, wish for it, pray for it soon.
Tenth of September. Charles and eight other scouts out after nightfall, probing. They damn near rode into blue-coated videttes. They charged the videttes on the white-drenched road and heard no yells about
Gunfire. One scout blown down — and luckless Doan lost another mount. The scouts galloped off carrying two wounded; Charles carried Doan, hot wind in his face under the moon. Had they met Pleasonton's men, he wondered. Those boys had shot straight and ridden better than any Yankees he had seen so far. Maybe the shoe salesmen and machinery operators were learning how to fight on horseback. Maybe the Union cavalry would be something to worry about one day.
At Urbana, quite a few hurt Hampton riders went for treatment at a hilltop academy that General Stuart had lit up for the evening. A goddamned ball, of which the vainglorious Virginian couldn't seem to get too many. The sight of bleeding men sort of spoiled the festivities. Most of the girls went home; some — a few — stayed to help. But even their pretty round eyes glared in the candlelight, fearful of the dirt and odors of the strange wild men who had ridden in to say a great force was moving beyond the night horizon.
Ninety thousand, it was, although straggling quickly bled it to less. Bob Lee did not yet know the strength of his opponent. And that army, for a change, did not have the usual McClellan slows. It was not exactly prancing along, but it didn't have the slows. Old Bob didn't know that, either.
Twelfth of September. Westward, Lee boldly, crazily split his army — that much Charles learned, guessing at the rest. Old Bob wanted his supply line down to Winchester open and secure before he struck fiercely north to Hagerstown; hell, maybe even to Philadelphia. That meant nullifying the Harpers Ferry garrison. That meant dividing his forces. The order had been written on the ninth, but Charles didn't know it then.
He had met Lee in Texas, dined with him, talked with him at length — but that wasn't battle, just field duty with occasional Indian skirmishing. Besides, Lee had been away a lot, leaving the command to subordinates. So now, as others did, Charles got reacquainted by sixth-hand hearsay.
Old Bob was universally acknowledged as a polite fellow, slow to anger — and who had ever heard him curse or seen him do a discourteous or ungentlemanly deed? But the sound of guns got his blood up, and when he was making military bets, he sometimes pushed in all the chips he had, like a flash gambler on a Mississippi boat. Charles and Ab decided he had done it again. He had figured he could split his forces — the very idea of which would produce foam on the mouths of writers of strategy texts — and put them back together with time to spare. Because Little Mac, as always, would have the slows. The general had also politely, eloquently asked Marylanders to rise up and embrace their deliverers. Nobody paid attention to that, unfortunately.
Stuart went west out of Frederick, behind Lee, the morning of the twelfth. Charles and Ab and Hampton's troopers lingered behind, the rear guard, looking for men in blue—And God, there they came, marching at incredible speed. What had cured Mac's slows? A cup of Bruised Ego Tea, brewing since the peninsula? A promise of a dose of Dr. Lincoln's Elixir of Demotion?
No time or means to answer that now. Away the rearguard troopers went across the Catoctin Ridge, Charles already fevered with the tiredness he knew would not pass or be relieved, except slightly, for days, possibly weeks.
The threat, the sense of building forces, rose up like the temperature. Something was wrong, but what?
Not many signs of great joy greeted the deliverers. Near Burkittsville, with blue riders clearly visible, chasing them, raising dust, Charles sped past a tiny girl with yellow braids who hung on a farm fence waving a tiny Stars and Bars, but that was the extent of any patriotic uprising he witnessed. Doan, who had appropriated the horse of a dead man, screamed at the girl to get out of the obscene way of the obscene bluebellies coming over the near hill. The child kept waving her tiny flag.
Hampton's boy Preston held his father's overcoat at Burkittsville in a swirling little fight. Charles shotgunned a Yankee from the saddle — he never did such a thing but that it wrenched his stomach — and got his left cheek shaved by another's saber before they were away.
Thirteenth of September. Old Marse Bob's men moving swiftly through the cuts in the beautiful heights of the northern spur of the Blue Ridge, which the locals called South Mountain. Now the army was split for fair, Old Jack whipping around one way, over the Potomac and hooking back, his scab-footed demons marching and marching to invest Harpers Ferry from the southwest, while McLaws's division aimed for the Maryland heights and Walker's for Loudoun Heights, a triangle of force closing upon the point of land at the confluence of the Potomac and the river of that sweet-song name, Shenandoah.
Charles and the scouts exchanged fire with some marching men they thought to be Jacob Cox's Ohioans, but of course there was no way for a man riding fast, hungry, and sleepy, but needing to watch and shoot, to know for certain. The heat grew, and the tiredness.
And that was the day of the cigars, which changed everything. Charles learned of it only later.
Three cigars — found by some dumb-luck Yankee on ground where Daniel Harvey Hill's men had encamped at Frederick. More interesting than the cigars was the paper in which they were wrapped: a beautifully scripted, apparently authentic copy of Order 191. Who left it nobody knew. Who read it was soon clear. McClellan read it and knew Lee had split his army. Fueled with that information, Little Mac began to move like a blue storm. Surprise, initiative, time all began to run like water between Old Bob's fingers.
Fourteenth of September. In the morning, Charles emptied his revolver four times in forty-five minutes of fighting at Crampton's Gap, southernmost of the three mountain passes the Confederates sought to hold. Out of ammunition for the Colt and starting to worry, really worry, that Sport would be hit, he drew his shotgun. Running low on ammunition for that, too.
Stuart ordered Hampton away hastily to support and protect McLaws, with Lee in desperate need of time to reassemble the split army lest Little Mac eradicate its separate parts with hardly any effort. Orders: dig in; hold the passes.
But the passes slowly gave, the shells coming in true and blowing holes in the hillsides and in the gray lines, and all it gained Lee was a day.
Galloping horsemen sped for Harpers Ferry. Nobody knew what would happen next. Charles was uneasy. Had the advantage been lost? As they rode on through the night, he sometimes shut his eyes to sleep ten minutes, trusting Sport to carry him without falter or fall.
Then, soon after dawn, in mist the color of a reb's sleeve, Charles and Ab and Doan and a fourth scout circled back and exchanged shots with more videttes in dark blue jackets that looked black in the foggy gloom — Yanks who had forced through Crampton's Gap and were coming on — coming on — to squeeze them between their guns and the garrison at Harpers Ferry. The passes were lost, surely. The advantage, too. Could Lee save anything
