Battle Flag

troop lining the ditch at the end of the farm's garden from where they were blazing rifle fire into the shadowy lines of the Brigade. The repeater rifles made it seem as if a whole company of infantry was attacking across the ditch.

Corporal Kemp joined Adam in the farmhouse. 'Burn the place, sir?' he asked.

'Not yet,' Adam said. He has found his father's precious revolver and priceless saber hanging in the hall. Explosions sounded outside, then the ripping noise of gunfire.

'Sir!' Sergeant Huxtable shouted. 'We can't hold here much longer, sir!' The Faulconer Brigade had begun to fight back, and the rifle bullets were whipping thick above the farm's yard and orchard. Adam seized his father's sword and revolver, then turned as Kemp called him from the parlor.

'Look here! Look at this!' Kemp had discovered the twin standards of the Faulconer Legion on the parlor wall.

Huxtable called again from the dark outside. 'Hurry, sir! For God's sake, hurry!' The bugle sounded again from the artillery park, its call sweet and pure in the night's angry fusillades.

Adam and Kemp pulled the two crossed flagstaffs off their nails. 'Come on!' Adam ordered.

'We're to burn the house, sir, you heard the Major,' Kemp insisted. He saw Adam's reluctance. 'Belongs to a family called Pearce, sir,' Kemp went on, 'rebels through and through.'

Adam had forgotten that Corporal Kemp was a local man. A bullet smacked into the upper floor, splintering wood. 'Go! Take the flags!' Adam told him, then snatched up some papers that lay on a claw-footed table and held their corners into a flickering candle flame. He held the papers there, letting the fire take a good hold, then dropped the burning documents among the slew of other papers. There was a brandy bottle open on the table, and Adam spilt it across the floor's rush matting, then threw a burning paper onto the floor. Flames leaped up.

Adam ran outside. A bullet whipped past his head to shatter a window. He jumped the veranda's rail. The pair of captured rebel flags trailed huge and bright across the flanks of Corporal Kemp's horse. Sergeant Huxtable had the bridle of Adam's mare. 'Here, sir!'

'Back!' Adam shouted as he pulled himself into the saddle.

The horsemen retreated past the farmhouse, where a fiery glow was already suffusing the parlor windows. Kemp had managed to furl the captured flags and now handed them to one of the troopers, then drew his saber to slash at the guy ropes of the nearest tents. A voice was shouting for water. Another voice shouted Adam's name, but Adam ignored the summons as he galloped toward the wagon park that now looked like a corner of hell. Flames were searing sixty feet high while the exploding ammunition spat trails of vivid smoke in every direction. The bugle sounded again, and Adam and his men spurred down the road toward Major Galloway's party. 'Count!' Adam shouted.

'One!' That was Sergeant Huxtable.

'Two!' Corporal Kemp.

'Three!' the next man called, and so on through the whole troop. Every man was present.

'Anyone hurt?' Adam asked. Not one man was hurt, and Adam felt his heart leap with exultation.

'Well done, Adam!' Galloway greeted him just beyond the small stand of trees. 'All well?'

'Everyone's present, sir! No one's hurt.'

'And us!' Galloway sounded triumphant. Another limber of ammunition exploded, punching red fire across the wounded camp. Then, from the southern darkness, there sounded a crash of rifle fire so sudden and furious that Galloway looked momentarily alarmed. He feared his men were being cut off, then realized the noise was coming from the tavern at the crossroads, which meant that Billy Blythe and his men were in a fight. 'Come on!' he shouted, dug in his spurs, and galloped to the rescue.

'I don't feel fifty,' Major Hinton told Captain Murphy. 'I don't even feel like forty. But I'm fifty! An old man!' 'Nonsense!' Murphy said. 'Fifty's not old.' 'Ancient,' Hinton lamented. 'I can't believe I'm fifty.' 'You will tomorrow morning, God willing,' Murphy answered. 'Have another drink.'

A dozen officers had walked to McComb's Tavern to celebrate the Major's half-century. It was not much of a tavern, merely a cavernous house where ale and home-distilled whiskey were sold and where two whores worked upstairs and two kitchen slaves served huge plates of dumplings, bacon, and corn bread downstairs. Major Hinton's private supper party was held in a back room, where the day's menu, such as it was, was crudely chalked on the plank wall. Not that the Major needed to read the bill of fare, for his officers had generously subscribed to buy a rare and expensive ham that Liam McComb's cooks had boiled especially for the dinner. Captain Murphy asked for Irish potatoes to accompany the ham, but McComb had refused the request by saying that he would be happy if he never saw another damned potato in all his born days. 'Unless it's been liquidated, if you follow my meaning, Captain,' he said. McComb was a giant man, more than sixty years old and with a belly on him like one of his own beer barrels.

'You mean poteen?' Murphy asked. 'Christ, and I haven't tasted poteen in seven years.'

'You'll find it will have been worth the wait, Captain,' McComb said, and when the supper was finished and the shirtsleeved officers were sharing a bottle of fine French brandy taken at Cedar Mountain, the tavern keeper brought a gallon stone jug downstairs. 'A few sips of that, Captain,' he told Murphy, 'and you'll swear you're back in Ballinalea.'

'If only I was,' Murphy said wistfully. 'The wife made it,' McComb said as he placed the stone jug on the table, 'before she was taken bad.' 'Not fatally, I trust?' Hinton asked politely.

'God bless you, no, Major. She's lying upstairs with a fever, so she is. It's the heat that does it to her. They're not natural, these summers, not natural at all.'

'We'll pay for the poteen, sure we will,' Murphy said, sounding more Irish than he had for many a long year.

'You'll not pay me a ha'penny, Captain,' McComb said. 'Roisin and I have two boys serving in the 6th Virginia, and they'd want you to be having a taste of it for nothing. So enjoy it now! But not too much now, not if you want to enjoy the upstairs pleasures later!' A cheer greeted this remark, for part of the night's entertainment would doubtless be afforded by the two rooms upstairs.

'But not me!' Hinton said when McComb had gone. 'I'm a married man. I can't afford the pox.'

'Starbuck hasn't got the pox,' Murphy said, 'and he must have sneaked down here at least a dozen times.' 'He never did!' Hinton said, shocked at the news. 'Starbuck and women?' Murphy asked. 'My God, Major, it's like whiskey and priests, you couldn't keep the two apart with a pry bar. God knows what they fed him up in Boston to give him the energy, but I wouldn't mind a bottle or two of it myself. Now try the poteen.'

The poteen was passed around the table. Every captain from the Legion was there except for Daniel Medlicott, who had been summoned to Faulconer's headquarters, and Starbuck, who was under guard in Colonel Swynyard's tent. No one, not even Major Hinton, was entirely sure what fate the General planned for Starbuck, but Lieutenant Davies was certain Faulconer wanted a court-martial. Hinton averred that a court- martial was impossible. 'Maybe Swynyard disobeyed Faulconer, but Nate only did what Swynyard ordered him to do.' Hinton lifted the poteen jug to his nose and smelt it suspiciously. 'It'll all blow over,' he said, speaking of Starbucks predicament rather than the liquor. 'Faulconer will sleep on it, then forget all about it. He's not a man for confrontation, not like his father was. Do I drink this stuff or use it as a liniment?'

'Drink that,' Murphy said, 'and you'll feel fifteen instead of fifty.'

'What in God's name is it?' Hinton asked as he poured a few drops of the spirit into a tin mug.

'Potato whiskey,' Murphy told him, 'from Ireland. If you get the recipe right, Major, it's a drink from heaven, but get it wrong and it'll blind you for life and tear your guts into tatters for good measure.'

Hinton shrugged, hesitated, then decided that at fifty years old he had nothing to lose and so downed the colorless liquor in one gulp. He took a deep breath, shook his head, then let out a hoarse sound that seemed to indicate approval. He poured himself some more.

'What was that?' Captain Pirie, the Legion's quartermaster, was seated beside a window.

'That was amazing,' Hinton said. 'It takes your breath clean away!'

'Gunfire,' Pirie said and pulled aside the gauze curtain that kept the insects away from the candlelight.

The sound of an explosion thumped across the damp landscape, followed by the splintering noise of rifles firing. A great red suffusion of light blossomed to the north, silhouetting the trees that lay between the crossroads and the Brigade's lines. 'Jesus,' Murphy said softly, then pulled his revolver from the holster that he had hung from a nail on