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.
PART TWO
***
JACKSON, LIKE A SNAKE THAT HAD STRUCK, hurt, but not killed its prey, retreated sullenly back across the Rapidan River, thus abandoning the battlefield at the foot of Cedar Mountain with its blackened swathes of scorched turf and long raw mounds of newly turned graves where turkey vultures gorged on bodies uncovered by dogs.
The Yankees were left in possession of Culpeper County and counted its possession as a victory, though no one really believed Jackson was defeated. The snake still had fangs, which meant that the Northern generals must try to scotch it again. Yankee troops poured southward and spread their camps along the Rapidan's northern bank while, south of the river in Gordonsville, the railcars brought fresh rebel troops from Richmond.
On both banks of the river there was a nervous sense of great events waiting to happen, and inevitably rumors fed that apprehension. The rebels feared that McClellan's Army of the Potomac had joined forces with Pope's Army of Virginia, and if that prospect was not frightening enough, a Northern newspaper hinted that the Yankees had emptied every jail between Washington and the Canadian border and put the convicts in uniform, handed them guns, and sent them to lay Virginia waste. Another tale insisted that the North was recruiting mercenaries in Europe, Germans mostly, and that each foreigner had been promised an acre of Indian territory for every rebel killed. 'I knew we'd end up fighting Hessians,' Truslow remarked, 'but we beat the sumbitches in '76 so we'll beat the sumbitches in '62 as well.' Yet the most persistent rumor of all was that Abe Lincoln was enlisting freed slaves into his army. 'Because he can't find anyone else willing to fight against us,' Lieutenant Coffman averred patriotically.
Most men dismissed the rumor of armed slaves as unthinkable, but a week after the Legion retreated from Cedar Mountain, Captain Murphy found confirmation of the story in a two-week-old copy of the
'Though how many of us ever owned a slave?' Lieutenant Davies asked resentfully.
'I own some,' Murphy said mildly and then, after a pause, 'Mind you, I pay the buggers well enough. I don't think we Irish are very good at slaveholding.'
'Major Hinton owns a dozen,' Lieutenant Pine of Murphy's D Company added.
'And Swynyard's owned plenty enough in his lifetime,' Starbuck said.
'Though not any longer,' Lieutenant Davies observed in wonderment, and indeed, to everyone's astonishment, the Colonel had manumitted his two slaves when Jackson pulled the army back across the river. The Colonel, despite coming from one of Virginia's most prominent slave-trading families, had set free at least a thousand dollars' worth of prime Negroes by sending the two men north to the Federal lines. Somehow it was that sacrifice, even more than the Colonel's astonishing achievement of staying away from liquor, that had impressed on the whole Brigade that their second-in-command truly was a converted man. 'He's even given up cigars,' Davies added.
Murphy took the stone jug from Starbuck. 'God knows why you Protestants have such an unpleasant religion.'
'Because it's the true religion,' Lieutenant Ezra Pine averred, 'and our reward will be in heaven.'
'And heaven,' Murphy insisted to his Lieutenant, 'is a place of all pleasures, is it not? Which means that there'll be rivers running brimful with the tastiest of whiskeys and boxes of the choicest cigars waiting ready lit at every corner, and if those pleasures are good enough for the angels they're good enough for me. God's blessing on you, Pine,' Murphy added and lifted the stone jug to his lips.
Ezra Pine wanted to start a theological argument about the nature of heaven, but he was shouted down. Out in the darkness a man sang a love ballad, and the sound of it made the officers silent. Starbuck guessed they were all thinking about that horde of convicts, Hessian mercenaries, and vengeful freed slaves that was supposedly massing on the Rapidan's far bank.
'If Lee was here,' Murphy broke the silence, 'he'd have us all digging trenches. It'd be sore hands, so it would.'
Everyone agreed that Robert Lee would have fought a defensive battle, but no one understood what Thomas Jackson might do. 'I wish Lee would come,' Murphy said wistfully, 'for there's nothing on God's earth so good for stopping a bullet as a yard or two of good clean dirt.'
The next day Starbuck heard the first rumor that confirmed that Lee was indeed coming to take command of the rebel forces on the Rapidan. Starbuck heard the rumor from an old friend who rode into the Legion's encampment brandishing two bottles of fine French wine. 'We took ten cases off the Yankees three miles beyond the Rappahannock!' The jubilant speaker was a Frenchman, Colonel Lassan, who was ostensibly a foreign military observer, but who actually rode with the rebel cavalry for the sheer delight of fighting. He had just come back from a raid deep behind the Yankee lines and brought news of the enemy's preparations. 'There are lines of wagons as far as the eye can see, Nate! Mile after mile of them, and every one crammed full with food, powder, and shot.'
'Is that McClellan's army?' Starbuck asked.
Lassan shook his head. 'That's Pope's army, but McClellan's coming.' The Frenchman sounded happy at such a gathering of armies with its implicit promise of fighting.
'And if McClellan comes,' Starbuck said, 'Lee will come, and that'll mean digging mile after mile of trenches.'
The Frenchman gave Starbuck a look of surprise. 'Dear Lord, no. Lee can't afford to wait. He dug trenches to protect Richmond, but trenches won't help here'—he waved at the open country—'and Lee has to break the Yankees before they join their armies together. Lee's no fool, Nate. He knows which end of a pig makes the mess.'
Starbuck laughed at the quaint phrase. Lassan spoke perfect English, the legacy of a British father, but at times he transposed a Norman peasant's language into his father's tongue. Lassan himself was no peasant but a professional soldier who had fought in Italy, the Crimea, and North Africa, and who bore the scars of those wars across his eye-patched face. They were terrible scars, scars to terrify a child to nightmare, yet Lassan himself was
