Moxey's ratlike face appeared next; then the three horsemen cantered down into the open ground beside the ruins of Mad Silas's cabin. 'Starbuck!' Faulconer shouted again.
'Sir?' Starbuck shouldered his half-loaded rifle and walked to meet his Brigade commander.
Faulconer's horse was nervous of the distant storm and edged sideways as a volley of thunder roared in the mountains. Faulconer gave the beast a hard cut with his riding crop. 'I gave orders, Mr. Starbuck, that no changes of disposition were to be made without my express permission. You disobeyed those orders!'
'Sir!' Major Hinton protested, wanting to point out that Starbuck had only been obeying Swynyard's instructions. Hinton himself had been busy at a neighboring brigade's court-martial all day, else he would have reinforced Colonel Swynyard's instructions himself. 'Captain Starbuck received orders, sir,' Hinton began.
'Quiet!' Faulconer rounded on Hinton. 'There is a conspiracy, Major Hinton, to subvert authority in this Brigade. That conspiracy is now at an end. Major Hinton, you will take these three companies back to the Legion's lines immediately. Captain Moxey, you will escort Starbuck to headquarters. You are under arrest, Mr. Starbuck.'
'Sir—' Starbuck began his own protest.
'Quiet!' Faulconer shouted. His horse pricked its ears back and tossed its head.
'There's a horseman down the path—' Starbuck tried again.
'I said quiet!' Faulconer shouted. 'I do not give a damn, Mr. Starbuck, if the archangel Gabriel is on the goddamned path. You have disobeyed my orders and you are now under arrest. Give that rifle to Major Hinton and follow Captain Moxey.' Faulconer waited for Starbuck to obey, but the Northerner remained stubbornly motionless. 'Or do you intend to disobey those orders, too?' Faulconer asked, and underscored his implied threat by unbuttoning • the flap of his revolver's holster. Truslow and Coffman, their faces dim in the lantern's small light, watched from the tree line.
Starbuck felt an insane urge to fight Faulconer, but then Paul Hinton leaned down from his saddle and took Starbuck's rifle away. 'It's all right, Nate,' he murmured soothingly.
'It is not all right!' Faulconer was exultant. His evening, which had begun so ill with his precipitate flight from Gordonsville, had turned into a triumph. 'Discipline is the first requisite of a soldier, Major,' Faulconer went on, 'and Starbuck's insolence has corrupted this regiment. There'll be no more of it, by God, none! There are going to be changes!' Lightning ripped the west, shattering the night over the mountains, and its sudden light betrayed the blissful happiness on Washington Faulconer's face. He had confronted his enemies and he had routed them both, and the General, for the first time since he had donned his country's uniform, felt like a soldier triumphant.
And Starbuck was under arrest.
Starbuck was put into Colonel Swynyard's tent. An embarrassed private from A Company stood guard outside, while inside the tent Starbuck discovered Swynyard sitting slumped on his camp bed and cradling what Starbuck supposed was a Bible. A wax taper burned on a folding table to shed a sickly and wan light. The Colonel's head was bowed, so that his hair fell lank across his bony face. Starbuck sat at the other end of the bed and announced his presence with an oath.
'A contagion,' Swynyard responded mysteriously, without offering any more formal greeting to his fellow prisoner, 'that's what I am, Starbuck, a contagion. A contamination. An infection. A plague. Unclean. Out of step. Do you ever feel out of step with all mankind?' The Colonel raised his head as he asked the question. His eyes were red. 'I tell you, Starbuck, that the world would be a better place without me.'
Starbuck, alarmed at the wild words, looked more closely at the object in the Colonel's hands. He had presumed it was a Bible and now feared to see a revolver, but instead he saw it was an uncorked bottle. 'Oh, no,' Starbuck said, astonished at his own disappointment. 'Are you getting drunk?'
Swynyard did not answer. He just stared at the bottle, turning it in his hands as though he had never seen such an object before. 'What did Faulconer say to you?' the Colonel asked finally.
'Nothing much,' Starbuck said, using a tone of indifference to show defiance. 'He said I'd disobeyed orders.'
'You obeyed my orders, but that won't make any difference with Faulconer. He hates you. He hates me, too, but he hates you more. He thinks you took his son away.' The Colonel went on staring at the bottle, then shook his head wearily. 'I'm not drinking. I took a sip and spat it out. But I was going to drink it. Then you came in.' He held the bottle close to the dripping, spluttering taper, so that the feeble light refracted through the green glass and amber liquid. 'Faulconer gave it to me. He says I deserve it. It's the best whiskey in America, he says, from Bourbon County, Kentucky. None of your bust-head tonight, Starbuck. No rotgut or pop-skull, no red-line special, no brain- buster, no skull-splitter, no tanglefoot tonight.' The mention of tanglefoot whiskey evidently prompted some memory that made the Colonel close his eyes in sudden pain. 'No, sir,' he went on sadly, 'only the best of Bourbon County whiskey for Griffin Swynyard. Clear as a dewdrop, do you see?' He again held the bottle to the taper's light. 'Isn't that beautiful?'
'You don't need it, Colonel,' Starbuck said softly.
'But I do, Starbuck. I need either God or whiskey, and whiskey, I have to tell you, is a great deal more convenient than God. It is more available than God and it is more predictable than God. Whiskey, Starbuck, does not make demands like God, and the salvation it offers is every bit as certain as God's, and even if that salvation is not as long in duration as God's salvation it is still a true and tried remedy for the miseries of life. Whiskey is a consolation, Starbuck, and a very present help in times of trouble, and never more so than when it comes from Bourbon County, Kentucky.' He swirled the bottle slowly, gazing reverently at its contents. 'Are you going to preach to me, Starbuck?'
'No, sir. I've been preached at all my damned life and it didn't do neither me nor the preacher one damned bit of good.'
Swynyard lifted the bottle to his nose and sniffed. He closed his eyes at the smell of the liquor, then touched the bottle's rim to his lips. For a second Starbuck was sure that the Colonel was going to tip the whiskey down his throat; then Swynyard lowered the bottle again. 'I guess preaching didn't do you any good, Starbuck, because you're a preacher's son. Probably hurt you rather than helped. If a man tells you all your born days to keep away from the women and the whiskey, then what else will you look for when they let go of the leash?'
'Is that why you looked for them?' Starbuck asked.
The Colonel shook his head. 'My father was no preacher. He went to church, sure, but he was no preacher. He was a dealer in slaves, Starbuck. That's what it said on our house-front. Said it in scarlet letters three feet high: 'Jos Swynyard, Dealer in Slaves.'' The Colonel shrugged at the memory. 'Respectable people didn't come near us, Starbuck, not near a dealer in slaves. They sent their overseers and managers to buy the human flesh. Not that my father minded; he reckoned he was as respectable as any man in Charles City County. He kept a respectable household, I'll say that for him. None of us dared cross him. He was a flogger, you see. He flogged his slaves, his women, and his children.' Swynyard went silent, staring down at the bottle. The sentry shifted his feet outside the tent, and pots clattered in the farmhouse kitchen as the servants cleaned up after Washington Faulconer's late supper. Swynyard shook his head sadly. 'I treated my slaves bad.'
'Yes, you did,' Starbuck said.
'But he never flogged his dogs.' Swynyard was thinking of his father again. 'Never once, not in all his years.' He smiled ruefully, then lifted the bottle to his nose and smelt it again. 'It really ain't a bad kind of whiskey, judging by its smell,' he said. 'Have you ever drunk Scottish whiskey?'
'Once or twice.'
'Me, too.' Swynyard was silent for a few heartbeats. 'I reckon I drunk just about everything a man can pour down his throat, but I once knew a man who called himself a connoisseur of whiskeys. A real connoisseur'— Swynyard rolled the word round his tongue—'and this connoisseur told me there wasn't nothing in the whole wide world he didn't know about whiskeys, and do you know which whiskey he reckoned was the best?'
'Tanglefoot?' Starbuck guessed.
Swynyard laughed. 'Tanglefoot! Well, it works, I'll say that for tanglefoot. It works like a mule kick to the head, tanglefoot does, but it ain't the best liquor in the world, not if you want your mule kick to taste better than horse liniment. No, this man reckoned he'd drunk every kind of whiskey that this vale of tears has to offer us, and the best, the very best, the absolute real stuff, Starbuck, was whiskey from Ireland. Ain't that the strangest thing?'
'Maybe he was drunk when he tasted it?' Starbuck suggested.
Swynyard thought about that for a second, then shook his head. 'No, I reckon he knew what he was saying. He was a rich man and rich folks don't get rich by being fools. At least they might, but they sure don't stay rich by
