are out here? Hell, Billy, our horses ain't been fed proper in three days and they ain't been rested proper neither. You reckon we can outrun Jeb Stuart's boys on these nags?' The men murmured their agreement.
Blythe waved at the serene, heat-hazed countryside. 'What enemy, Sergeant? Do you see an enemy?'
Kelley frowned. There was a smear of dust way off to the northwest, but that was so far beyond the Rappahannock that it was surely being kicked up by Northern troops, while to the west, where the mysterious column had supposedly disappeared, there was nothing but trees and sun-glossed fields and gentle hills. 'So what the hell are we doing here?' the Sergeant asked again.
Blythe smiled. 'Like I told you, Seth, chasin' our tails. So why in hell's name don't we do something more useful instead? Like give our horses a proper feed.' He tugged at his reins, turning his horse's head south. 'I seem to remember a farm not so far away. A den of rebel vipers, it was, but there was fodder there and maybe it didn't all burn up to hell and I reckon you and I have got unfinished business there.'
Kelley grinned. 'You mean that Rothwell woman and her children?'
'I hate children,' Blythe said, 'I do so hate young children. But their mothers?' Blythe smiled. 'Ah, I do so love a ripe young mother.'
Twenty miles to the east Major Galloway found Kelly's Ford guarded by a strong rebel garrison on the southern bank. That garrison sniped ineffectually at Galloway's horsemen as they explored the northern side of the river, where they discovered no hoofprints nor any other evidence of a rebel force across the river. The local black population, always the best source of information for Northern scouts, said that no Confederates had crossed the river in two days, and those men had only come across to get fodder for their horses. Galloway dutifully searched the riverbank for five miles east and west, but neither he nor Adam found any rebels. The rumor had been false, and Galloway, knowing his day had been wasted, rode slowly home.
A dozen miles north of the ford was Warrenton Junction, where the branch rails from Warrenton joined the main Orange and Alexandria line. Confusion besieged the junction. Two trains loaded with guns and ammunition were trying to pass south to the Bealeton depot, while another was trying to haul twenty-four boxcars loaded with hardtack, uniforms, percussion caps, and artillery shells down to Warrenton. Meanwhile three empty trains and a hospital train waited in the pitiless sun for clearance northward. The sweet smell of pinewood lay over the depot, coming from the log stacks that waited to feed the locomotive furnaces.
The Reverend Elial Starbuck's passenger car was attached to the hospital train. The preacher escaped the heat in the car's stifling interior by walking up and down in the train's long shadow, where he was forced to watch as a succession of newly dead men were carried from the red-flagged cars. The men were not dying from their wounds but from heat prostration, and their fate angered the Reverend Elial Starbuck. These were good, decent young Americans who had gone to fight for their country, and their reward was to be dumped beside a rail track where their corpses crawled with flies. If the hospital train did not move soon, then every sick man in the cars would be dead, and so the Reverend Starbuck discovered an engineer colonel who appeared to possess some authority over the railroad and of whom he demanded to know when the trains would be cleared north. 'In Boston,' the Reverend Starbuck assured the Colonel, 'we have such things as timetables. We find them useful.'
'In Boston, sir,' the Colonel retorted, 'you don't have Jeb Stuart.' The delay on the railroad was caused by the raid Stuart had made on Catlett's Station, the next depot on the line, where the rebel cavalry had taken scores of prisoners, captured a paychest, and even snaffled up General Pope's best uniform coat. A teeming rain had prevented the raiders from burning the bridge that carried the rails over Cedar Run, yet even with the bridge intact the raid had inflicted chaos on the rail schedule. 'But your train will be the first one north tomorrow afternoon,' the Colonel promised the Reverend Starbuck. 'You'll be in Washington by Wednesday, sir.'
'I had hoped to be in Richmond by then,' the Reverend said caustically.
The Colonel bit back any retort, and instead arranged for the hospital cars to be moved into the shade of a warehouse and for water to be brought to the surviving wounded. Some fugitive slaves who were now employed as laborers on the railroad were ordered to dig graves for the dead.
The Reverend Starbuck wondered if he should witness for Christ to the laboring blacks but decided his mood was too bleak for effective evangelism. His opinion of the army had slipped all week but now reached fulminating bottom. In all his born days he had never witnessed any organization so chaotic, so incapable, or so sluggish. The smallest Boston grocery shop displayed more managerial acumen than these uniformed incompetents, and it was no wonder that the lumpen-skulled rebels were making such fools of the North's generals. The preacher sat on the open platform at one end of his passenger car, and as the sun sank huge in the west, he wiped the sweat from his forehead and took on the pleasurable chore of making notes in his diary for a pungent letter he planned to send to the Massachusetts congressional delegation.
Five miles away, in Warrenton itself, Major Galloway reported to the army headquarters. He found the same Colonel who had dispatched him that morning and who now seemed disappointed that no enemy had crossed Kelly's Ford. 'You're sure,' the Colonel asked.
'Certain. Absolutely certain.'
The Colonel scratched at his beard, found a louse, and squashed it between his thumbnails. 'What about the twenty thousand Johnnies in the west?' the Colonel asked.
'I sent my second-in-command that way, but he hasn't reported yet.'
The Colonel yawned, then stretched his arms. 'No news is good news, eh? If your fellow had found anything he'd have doubtless sent word. And no one else is squealing about twenty thousand rebels, so it's probably all moonshine, pure moonshine. Which reminds me.' He turned in his chair and reached for two glasses and a whiskey bottle.
'You'll join me? Good.' He poured the whiskey. 'But even if there are twenty thousand Johnnies loose, what damage can they do?' He paused, thinking about his question, then laughed at the very thought of the whole United States Army being frightened of such a tiny force. 'Twenty thousand men,' he said disparagingly, 'what harm can they do?'
Captain Davies woke Starbuck. 'Reveille, sir.'
Starbuck thought he had to be dreaming. No, worse, he thought he was not dreaming. His muscles were strips of pain, his bones were set solid.
'Starbuck! Up!' Davies said.
Starbuck groaned. 'It's dark.'
'They want us marching in twenty minutes.'
'Oh, no, Jesus no,' Starbuck muttered. He groaned again, then turned onto one side. The mere effort of rolling over hurt. Everything hurt. He could not bear to think of trying to stand on his blistered feet.
'Water.' Davies, who had taken over picket duty from Medlicott, offered Starbuck a canteen. Starbuck drank, then felt for a cigar. He had two left, both preserved from harm by being wrapped in his hat. He borrowed Davies's cigar to light one of his own, then coughed some life into his lungs.
'Jesus,' he said again, then remembered he had to set an example, and so he struggled to his feet. He blasphemed again.
'Stiff?' Davies asked.
'Why didn't I join the cavalry?' Starbuck asked, then tottered a few steps. It was night-dark still, without even a hint of dawn in the eastern sky. Stars were bright overhead, while the moon hung low above the Blue Ridge to mark its forested draws deep black and starkest white. He sat to pull on his boots. It hurt just to tug them over his raw feet. 'Awake?' Colonel Swynyard's voice asked.
'I think I died and went to hell,' Starbuck said as he forced himself to stand again. 'Maybe that's it, Colonel. Maybe none of this is real. We're all in hell.'
'Nonsense! We're heavenbound, praise Him.'
'Then I wish He'd hurry,' Starbuck complained. Around him the field heaved and groaned as waking men realized the ordeal that waited for them. Starbuck scratched at a louse, transferred the one remaining cigar to his pocket, pulled the hat onto his head, slung his rolled blanket over his left shoulder and the rifle on his right, and thus was ready to start.
Breakfast was taken on the march. For Starbuck it was a slate-hard slab of hardtack that gnawed at his aching tooth. He tried to remember when he had last had a decent meal. His uniform trousers were belted with rope that gathered in at least five inches of material that had been well stretched before the war's first battle. Then the blisters on his feet began hurting again and the sore spot on his right shoulder began to chafe, and he forgot about food and just concentrated on walking through the pain.
