them Honorary Aides-de-Camp to General Stuart, and each was authenticated by his signature and an impression of his signet ring in wax. After Charles and Miss Ames made love twice in a vigorous but essentially empty way, they found the certificate crumpled under her thin buttocks. He laughed, but she was vexed. Miss Ames never suspected her lover was astonished and disturbed because, right in the middle of things with her, he had seen a vision of Gus Barclay.
'Sir?' the scout said. 'Want me to ride back and try to get a close look at 'em?'
'Why?' von Helm said, pushing his horse up beside theirs. 'Can't be any boys but ours.'
Charles felt tired, colder than ever. 'Sure of that, are you, Lieutenant?'
Von Helm's oddly vacant eyes fixed somewhere beyond him. 'Of course. Aren't you?' The question implied stupidity on Charles's part. 'Best thing is to hail them, so they don't fire at us by mistake. I'll do it.'
'Just a minute,' Charles said, but von Helm was already spurring into the fog.
Second Lieutenant Wanderly beamed admiration. 'Has a touch of the Stuart dash, doesn't he?'
Charles had no chance to express an uncomplimentary opinion. Von Helm's voice rang from the white murk hiding the tracks. Other voices, none Southern, answered the hail, overlapping-almost too quickly for comprehension.
'Who goes there, a reb?'
'Sure he's a reb. Can't you tell?'
'Hey, how many nigger wives you got?'
Gunfire then. Charles yanked his shotgun up and didn't allow himself the luxury of even one curse. 'Trot — march.' He led, ducking, dodging, the fog and low-hanging branches dangerous impediments to speed.
Behind him, Wanderly let out a long yipping cry of excitement or released tension. A ball snipped off a twig that nicked Charles's eye and further hampered his vision. Ahead, von Helm's rifle boomed. Charles took a fearful risk in view of the fog and the terrain but felt compelled to do it to save the witless lieutenant.
'Gallop —
Sport took the touch of spur and the knee pressure perfectly. Charles heard von Helm cursing, trying to reload, he assumed. Damn fool, he thought. Hampton would never fight this way, unsure of the enemy's strength —
He bent beneath branches flying past overhead. Glimpsed squirts of ruddy light in the fog. Heard explosions whose rapidity defied belief. Unless they had run into a much larger body of men than Woolner estimated, some Yank was shooting almost without pause.
He had broken his concentration, failed to see the fallen trunk of an immense elm directly ahead. Because of his speed and his position in the lead, it was too late to turn. The scout galloped behind him, reins in his teeth, a revolver in each hand. 'Woolner, veer left!' he shouted. 'There's a tree down ahead.'
Charles and Sport were nearly on the obstacle. None of the pages in the tactics manual on leaping the ditch and the bar by trooper and by platoon would help; he had to rely on instinct and faith in the gray. He signaled by bunching his thighs and calves in tight, reining slightly.
Charles leaned forward as Sport readied to spring. He raised his buttocks off the saddle, and suddenly, up from the ground and away, man and animal sailed over, stirring the murk. At the top of the arc his heart nearly burst with love. He was riding the strongest, bravest horse on God's earth.
Down they came, striking, jarring Charles's teeth. Woolner's hurrah said the scout had heeded the warning and avoided the obstacle in time. Wanderly, a mediocre rider, reined in too fast before he reached the elm and shot forward over the head of his mount. The two noncoms, frightened, just galloped by, one passing each end of the log.
Riding hard, Charles saw the Yanks between Sport's laid-back ears. Three or four, off their horses, fired from behind the raised roadbed. Von Helm, likewise dismounted, had taken cover and alternately shot with rifle and revolver.
Whoever commanded the Yankees abruptly ordered them to mount and retreat. A ball whizzed past Charles's ear; a noncom following him cried out, slapped his other arm, and almost fell off before he caught the dropped reins again. The wounded man just hung on as his horse galloped away to the left oblique.
Charles searched the line of enemy soldiers, mounted now, for the source of the rapid firing. He found it; the single marksman was within range. He reined Sport to a trot and with the shotgun steadied discharged both barrels. The blast hurled the Yank backward. His eyes rolled up in his head, horrifyingly white, the instant before he dropped.
Woolner blew down two more Yanks and von Helm a third. The rest, their total number still a mystery, quickly vanished in the fog.
As the hoofbeats faded, von Helm stamped toward the track embankment, brandishing his rifle and shouting: 'Go tell the Gorilla we ignore our nigger wives when there are Yanks to be whipped!'
'Whoo-ee!' the corporal cried approvingly. He slapped his kepi on his leg and doubled back to find his fallen comrade. Clearly the enlisted man was impressed with the Dutchman's bravado — even though his rashness could have gotten them all killed.
Charles slid from the saddle, laid the hot shotgun against a tree, and tried to fight away shivers of shock setting in as he realized how close he had come to a fatal spill. He should check on his wounded trooper; but he was distracted by a thought of the shoulder weapon fired with such speed; was distracted from that by the sight of von Helm turning his back and bobbing forward, like some drinking bird. Charles glimpsed a silver flash and something slipped back into a side pocket.
Turning to the rear, Charles shouted into the fog, 'How's Loomis?'
'Just nicked, sir. I'm tying it up.'
Charles walked toward the embankment. The fog was whiting out, thinning as the sun climbed. 'Fortunate that we weren't really facing a platoon or a troop, though it sounded like it,' he said to von Helm, who started moving forward at the same time he did, evidently with the same idea.
'But we weren't.' The Dutchman sounded belligerent.
They found three Union cavalrymen dead and a fourth, a sergeant, groaning from a gory belly wound. They would have to take him back for treatment, but he wouldn't last long; stomach wounds usually proved fatal.
Woolner and the unhurt trooper came racing forward, ready to scavenge. The first time Charles had indulged in it, after a skirmish last fall, he had felt like a ghoul. Now, scarcely bothered at all, he went after anything that would help him fight harder or longer.
He stepped onto the crossties. The trooper knelt on the chest of one dead man, busily went through jacket and pants pockets. He found nothing except some tobacco and a pipe, and said, 'Shit.' Simultaneously, Charles saw what he wanted lying in dead yellow weeds beyond the embankment. Von Helm saw it, too, tried to hurry past his captain. Charles pivoted, nearly causing the lieutenant's shiny head to crash against his jaw.
'Mine,' Charles said. 'And one more thing. Next time, wait for my orders, or I'll have you up on charges.'
Von Helm clenched his denture-filled jaws and wheeled away; Charles had already smelled the spirits. All the warnings were right. He had a bad one on his hands.
'Just proves what they say,' the trooper complained, bending over the feet of the dead soldier. 'Damn Yanks ain't worth nothing but a pair of shoes.' He stripped off the right one, swearing when he saw the upper separated from the sole. He peered inside. 'Lashbrook of Lynn. What's that mean?'
No one bothered to answer him. Calming a little, Charles slipped down the side of the embankment and retrieved the weapon from the weeds. The look of the piece was completely new. About four feet long, it had a mysterious aperture in the butt of the stock. It bore the maker's name on top of its receiver.
SPENCER REPEATING-RIFLE CO.
BOSTON, MASS.
PAT'D. MARCH 6, 1860
A memory door clicked open, showing Charles a paragraph from one of the many Washington papers read behind Southern lines. A specially commissioned corps of marksmen led by some famous New York sharpshooter had received or was to receive a new type of rapid-repeating rifle. Could he be holding one — perhaps stolen? The sharpshooters were still in Washington, so far as he knew.
