encampment, and there they would wait in case they were needed to reinforce the men serving their turn of duty in the ruins or in the rifle pits.
Colonel Swynyard approved all he saw. 'Have you sent anyone over the river?' he asked.
'Sergeant Truslow!' Starbuck called, and Truslow came and told the Colonel what he had found on the far bank.
'Nothing,' Truslow said. He spat tobacco juice, hitched his pants higher, then told how he had led a dozen men up the far track until the trees ended. 'That's a fair ways, 'bout a long mile. Beyond that's a farm. Family called Kemp lived there, but they're gone.' He spat again. 'Yankee lovers,' he explained both his expectoration and the absence of the Kemp family. 'Saw a neighbor at the farm. She lives another half-mile north and says she ain't seen a live Yankee in weeks.'
'So you're probably in for a restful time, Captain,' Swynyard said. 'Did you consider putting pickets on the far bank?'
'I'd rather not,' Starbuck said. 'I don't want anyone shooting one of our own men by mistake.'
'I told the woman at the Kemp farm to stay away from the river,' Truslow said. 'And the Captain said the same to the old nigger.'
'But a sentry post a hundred yards up that track would give you more time to rouse your reserves,' Swynyard pointed out.
Truslow answered for his Captain. 'I laid a dozen felled trees over the track, Colonel. There ain't a Yankee born who can come down that road without waking the dead.'
Swynyard nodded his approval, then turned and gazed westward, where another track followed the riverbank. 'Where does that lead?' he asked.
'To Lieutenant Davies and twelve men,' Starbuck answered. 'There's a ruined barn just out of sight. That's our western picket.'
'You seem to have thought of everything!' Swynyard said approvingly. 'Including, I hope, the need to provide me with supper? And after that, Captain, you'll doubtless allow me to lead a small prayer group for those men who care about their souls?'
Starbuck shrugged. 'We're pretty short of food, Colonel. Not that you ain't welcome, but supper's nothing but rough rice, stewed squirrel, and pea coffee if you're lucky. But I'm staying here.' He wanted to see the night fall across the river so he would know what to expect when he took the late sentry watch.
'Don't get too tired,' Swynyard advised; then he strode back to where the cooking fires sifted their smoke into the leaves. Starbuck stayed at the tree line and watched as darkness fell and as the moon climbed above the far trees to silver the shallow water hurrying across its gravel bed. He walked along the rifle pits and was filled with pride because this was his first independent command. If a Yankee cavalry patrol should come south and prove foolish enough to force its way past the felled trees, then Starbuck would fight his very own battle, and if he recognized the truth, he wanted to fight that battle because he knew he would win. He would turn the silver ford bloody and add a pack of Yankee ghosts to join the unquiet spirit of poor Dead Mary.
The river ran quick, the moon threw black shadows, and Starbuck prayed that God would send him his own, his very own, small battle.
***
THERE WERE TIMES WHEN General Washington Faulconer needed to leave the problems of the Brigade behind him. Such times, he said, gave him an opportunity to assess his Brigade from what he called the distant perspective, though most of his officers suspected that the distant perspective merely served to relieve the General's distaste for the discomforts of campaigning. Washington Faulconer had been raised to luxury and had never lost his taste for cosseted living, and a month of bivouacs and army food inevitably drove him to discover a hotel where clean sheets were smoothed onto a properly stuffed mattress, where hot water was available at the pull of a bell rope, and where the food was not hardtack, worm-ridden, or rancid. The General even believed he deserved such trifling luxuries, for had he not raised the Legion with his own money? Other men had marched enthusiastically to war, but Washington Faulconer had added an open wallet to mere enthusiasm. Indeed, few men in all the Confederacy had spent as much on a regiment as Washington Faulconer, so why should he not reward himself with a few civilized trappings from time to time?
Thus, when his Brigade was properly settled into its bivouac on the western flank of Jackson's army, General Faulconer soon found reason to visit Gordonsville for a night of comfort. He was not supposed to leave his Brigade without General Jackson's permission, but in the certain knowledge that such permission would not be forthcoming, Faulconer found his own justification. 'I need spectacles,' he told Swynyard airily. 'Can't see the fine detail on maps these days,' and upon that medical excuse he mounted his horse and, with Captain Moxey in attendance, rode eastward. The town was barely three hours' ride away, so the dereliction was hardly serious, and Swynyard had been left with the strictest instructions that nothing was to be done without Faulconer's permission and that, if any emergency did arise, a messenger must be sent to Gordonsville immediately. The General considered that even a fool could understand those simple commands, and Swynyard, in the General's opinion, was a fool. The man had made an idiot of himself with the bottle but was now making himself an even more conspicuous idiot with his ludicrous addiction to the Holy Spirit.
The General's own spirits began to soar the moment he rode away from the encampment. He always felt such an elation when he could leave behind the small-minded irritations of the Brigade, where nothing was ever straightforward and where the simplest order provoked a flurry of queries, obstructions, misunderstandings, and even downright disobedience, and the more he pondered those frustrations, the more convinced he became that the root cause of all his problems lay in the hostility of men like Thaddeus Bird, Colonel Swynyard, and Nathaniel Starbuck. Especially Captain Nathaniel Starbuck. Take the simple matter of the crescent patches. It had been no small achievement to have the cloth badges made, for such furbelows were a luxury in the war-straitened Confederacy, yet Faulconer had succeeded in having the insignia manufactured in France and then smuggled into Wilmington on a swift blockade-runner. The cost of the badges alone demanded respect! And certainly the proposed function of the badges was admirable, for the red crescent had been intended both to foster pride in the Faulconer Brigade and to serve as an identification mark in the smoky chaos of battle.
Yet what had happened? Grinning soldiers had employed the patches for gambling counters or given them to girl-friends. Others had cleaned their rifles with the badges or else used them to patch the seat of their pants, an insult that had driven the General to decree severe punishment for any man not displaying the red crescent insignia on his uniform jacket, whereupon there had been a religious outcry against the wearing of a Mohammedan symbol in a Christian country! Letters had been written to hometown newspapers, prayer meetings were held to intercede for Washington Faulconer's heathen soul, and seven army chaplains had carried their protests to the War Department itself, forcing Faulconer to explain that the crescent moon was not intended to be a religious symbol but was merely a part of his family's escutcheon, yet that explanation had only prompted new complaints about the restoration of aristocratic privileges in America. The campaign against the insignia had been an outrageous farrago of lies, and now the cause was utterly lost because any man who objected to wearing the red crescent could plausibly claim to have lost the badge in battle. Which all meant that Washington Faulconer had little choice but to accept defeat—a defeat made all the more odious because he was convinced it had been Nathaniel Starbuck who had orchestrated the whole controversy. Only Starbuck could have dreamed up the religious objection or have invented the fantastic claim that wearing the patch reduced the Brigade to the level of European serfs.
Yet even the memory of that humiliation receded as Washington Faulconer rode the summer roads toward Gordonsville. He was contemplating the pleasures of a long bath, a clean bed, and a full table, and the anticipation was more than rewarded when he entered the public parlor of the Rapidan House Hotel to be surprised by the presence of four old friends from Richmond whose visit to the town happily coincided with his own. Two of the men were Confederate congressmen and the other two, like Faulconer himself, were directors of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. The four men formed a commission that was supposed to be reporting to the War Department on how the army's supply system could be improved, but so far not one of the four commissioners had ventured further than the house of assignation that lay next door to the hotel. Happily all four men had read and admired the account in the Richmond!
Faulconer told the story modestly, claiming to have been momentarily unsighted when the enemy standard fell, though the modesty was beautifully calculated to encourage his listeners to draw the very opposite conclusion. 'The
