incandescent rage that had nothing whatever to do with the point at issue. Indeed, had Swynyard merely told Faulconer that an unguarded ford had been discovered on the Brigade's open flank, then the General would doubtless have ordered two or three companies of riflemen to watch the crossing, but the mention of Starbuck's name had tipped Washington Faulconer into instant fury.
For a few seconds it was a fury so profound that Faulconer was incapable of speaking, but then the words flowed and soldiers fifty yards from the farmhouse listened in awe, while men bivouacked further away hurried closer to hear the diatribe. Swynyard, Faulconer said, was a shadbellied weakling who if he was not sucking at his goddamned bottle was clasped to the tit of his new religion. 'For Christ's sake, you fool, stand on your own goddamned feet!' This was unfair, for the apparent point of Faulconer's rage was that Swynyard had dared to take responsibility for moving part of the Brigade without Faulconer's express permission, but for these first few moments the flow of white-hot anger was not directed but simply went wherever Faulconer's frustrations let it fly, and so the General's anger encompassed Swynyard's breeding, his ugly appearance, and his family's involvement in the slave trade. Then Washington Faulconer raked over Swynyard's apparent conversion, scorning the Colonel's piety as fraudulent and his newfound efficiency as a pose.
It was a spectacular explosion. Washington Faulconer was already feeling cheated because his stay in Gordonsville had been cut short, but now all the bitterness over his traitor son and his resentments over Starbuck and the mulish manner in which the Brigade reacted to his simplest orders fed the bitter torrent. Two decades of being despised by his wife and scorned by his wife's damned schoolmaster brother poured in an ugly spew from Faulconer's mouth as he screamed his insults at Swynyard, and finally, when breathlessness alone made him drop his voice from a half scream into mere loudness, he suspended Swynyard from his duties. 'You will consider yourself under arrest!' the General finished.
There was silence in the room. Moxey, his face white with fear, stood backed against the flags on the wall, while not a sound came from the astonished audience outside. The tic in Swynyard's cheek had begun to quiver, and he was clenching and unclenching his maimed left hand, but when at last he spoke, he used the mildest tone. 'I have to protest, sir,' he began.
'You can protest all you like, damn you, but it'll do no good! I've endured too much! Too much! You're either drunk or praying, either flat on your back or down on your knees, and in either position you're no more damned good to me than a spavined bitch. You're under arrest, Swynyard, so get the hell out of my sight. Go!' Faulconer shouted the order, unable to bear the sight of the man for one instant longer. Then he stumped one-booted onto the veranda. 'Major Hinton!' he shouted into the dark, confident that the summons would be passed on and obeyed swiftly. 'Major Hinton! Come here!'
The General, at last, was taking command.
Starbuck took his supper in the bivouac, sitting beside a small fire with Truslow and Coffman. The night was warm and humid, darkening every moment as clouds heaped higher and higher above the Blue Ridge Mountains. For a time the moon silvered the trees; then the clouds misted and finally shrouded its light. Supper was a piece of corn bread and fat bacon. The corn had been badly milled, and Starbuck broke a tooth on a scrap of cob embedded in the grain. He swore. 'Dentists' favorite bread,' Truslow said as Starbuck spat out the cob and tooth fragment together; then the Sergeant offered a ghastly grin to show how many of his own teeth were missing. 'Pulled half of them myself, the rest old McIlvanney yanked. He was a well-digger who doubled up as a dentist.'
Starbuck flinched with pain when he took his next bite. 'I don't know why God invented teeth,' he said.
'I don't know why God invented Yankees,' Truslow added.
'Because otherwise there'd only be Indians and Mexicans for Christians to shoot,' Lieutenant Coffman unexpectedly observed.
'I know why God invented junior lieutenants,' Truslow observed. 'For target practice.' He climbed to his feet, stretched his arms, and picked up his rifle in readiness to relieve the pickets in the rifle pits above the river. 'I wish it would rain,' he said.
Starbuck led the relief party through the trees to where the river flickered white in the night. The far bank was utterly black and impenetrable, its only lights the tiny white and evanescent sparks of fireflies. Then, to the west, where the clouds were building, a spike of lightning shattered the dark above the mountains and shed a sudden blue-white light that silhouetted the half-ruined barn where the outlying picket guarded the riverside track. Sergeant Mallory was now in charge of that picket, and he sent Edward Hunt back along the riverbank to find Starbuck. 'Captain! Captain!' Hunt called.
'What is it?'
'Bob reckons there's some son of a bitch on the track, Captain.'
Starbuck climbed to his feet. 'Truslow!' he called. 'I'm down at the barn.'
A grunt acknowledged the information; then Starbuck followed Hunt along the river. 'It was that lightning,' Hunt explained.
'You saw the man?'
'Man and a horse,' Hunt said cheerfully. 'Plain as a pair of planks.'
Starbuck was skeptical. He had learned in the last year just how deceptive the night could be. A bush that would not attract a second glance in daylight could be transformed by darkness into a monstrous threat. A herd of cows could be changed into a rampaging troop of enemy cavalry while, just as easily, a whole battalion of enemy troops could resemble a field of standing corn. Night fed the imagination, and the imagination feared enemies or craved security and made the dark fit its desires. Now Starbuck groped his way to where the picket was positioned behind the barn's broken wall. Sergeant Mallory was nervous. 'There's someone out there, sir,' he said. 'We all saw him.'
Starbuck could see nothing except the darkness and the slight quivering sheen of the river. 'Did you challenge?' he asked.
'No, sir,' Mallory answered.
Starbuck placed his rifle on the makeshift parapet, then cupped his hands. 'Who goes there?' he shouted as loud as he could.
Nothing answered except the small stir of the wind and the sound of the river running.
'We saw something, sir,' Mallory insisted.
'We did, sir, truly,' one of the men put in.
'Are you sure it isn't the old black fellow?' Starbuck asked.
'This was a man and a horse, sir,' Mallory said.
Starbuck challenged again and again received no reply. 'Maybe they got the hell out of here?' Starbuck suggested, and just as he spoke the far mountain range was raked with another stab of forked lightning, the streaks slashing down to silhouette the tree-lined crests with fire, but closer, much closer, the splinter of light touched a figure standing beside a horse not fifty paces away—or so it seemed to Starbuck, who had but a second to focus his eyes and make sense of the sudden stark contrasts of white night-fire and pitch-black dark. 'Who are you?' he shouted as the light faded, leaving nothing behind but an imprinted image on his retinas that seemed to suggest that the man was wearing a saber scabbard and carrying a carbine.
No one answered. Starbuck cocked his rifle, taking satisfaction from the solid heft of the spring-loaded hammer. He felt with a finger to make certain a percussion cap was in place, then pointed the gun just above where he thought the man was standing. He pulled the trigger.
The explosion rebounded across the river valley, echoing back from the trees on the far bank, then fading like the crackle of the thunder in the distant mountains. The muzzle flash lit a few square yards of ground beyond the barn but could not reach as far as the solitary, silent, unmoving man whom Starbuck was now certain he had glimpsed in the lightning's glare.
'Hoofbeats, sir!' Mallory said excitedly. 'Hear them?' And sure enough the sound of horses' hooves and the jingling of curb chains sounded above the endless river noise. 'Cavalry coming!' Starbuck shouted to warn the men in the rifle pits behind. He began to reload his rifle as Mallory's picket slid their guns across the wall. 'We'll give the bastards a volley,' Starbuck said, then checked his words because the hoofbeats were not coming from the west but from behind him, from the direction of the Brigade's lines. He turned to see a light moving among the trees above the ford, and after a few seconds he saw that the light was a lantern being carried by a horseman.
'Starbuck!' the horseman shouted. It was Major Hinton. 'Starbuck!'
'Stand down,' Starbuck told the picket. 'Major?' A second horseman appeared from the trees. 'Starbuck!' the newcomer shouted, and in the lantern's light Starbuck saw it was General Washington Faulconer who had shouted.
