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
