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
