The column still marched north. Once, when the road rose to offer a view of the moonlit western hills, Starbuck saw the notch that marked where the Manassas Gap carried the railroad through the Blue Ridge and into the fertile Shenandoah Valley. In the moonlight the gap looked a far way off, and Starbuck's spirits fell at the thought of marching all that long way. His muscles were slowly unknotting, but only to hurt even more. The Legion passed between two rows of houses, their windows dimly lit with candlelight. A tethered dog barked at the passing soldiers, and an unseen woman called from a window to offer the soldiers her blessings.
Then, abruptly, the road climbed a steep few feet, and Starbuck almost tripped on a steel rail. He recovered his footing and stepped safely over the metal to realize that the Legion had at last reached the Manassas Gap Railroad. The road divided here, one branch climbing west toward the Blue Ridge and the other going east toward the Yankees. A mounted staff officer dominated the junction, and he was pointing the troops east. So they were not going to the Shenandoah Valley after all but were instead to march toward the rising sun that climbed through the vast smear of smoke marking where a waking army's cooking fires burned. They were to march east toward battle.
The sun rose like hellfire in their eyes. It dazzled them and cast their shambling shadows long on the dusty road behind. Every now and then Starbuck would see the rails of the Manassas Gap Railroad lying alongside the road like twin streaks of reflected fire, but no trains ran on those strips of molten steel. All the locomotives and stock had been taken south or else commandeered by the Yankees to shuttle their supplies from Alexandria through Manassas Junction to their forces on the Rappahannock.
And now, Starbuck realized, Stonewall Jackson was behind those forces. And maybe, Starbuck thought, the Yankees knew he was coming, for how could twenty-four thousand men hope to avoid a hostile army's scouts? Ahead of the marching column lay a low range of hills, so low that in peacetime the hills would scarcely have been noticeable, but Starbuck could see that the apparently innocuous slopes were more than steep enough to check an infantry attack. And if the Federals had put guns in the dark trees at the crest of those hills, then Jackson's long march must end in bloody defeat.
The road and the empty railroad arrowed side by side toward a pass through the low hills. Jackson's cavalry advanced either side of the rail embankment, their carbines cocked as they nervously watched every fence and wood and house. The passage through the unregarded hills was called Thoroughfare Gap, and if the Yankees had been shadowing Jackson's march, then Thoroughfare Gap was the place to put their ambush, and as the steep walls of the pass narrowed, the horsemen advanced ever more slowly and cautiously. They tried not to think of hidden gunners waiting with taut lanyards or of lines of concealed infantry poised with loaded rifles. Every creak of a saddle or rustle of wind or clatter of a horseshoe on stone startled the scouting horsemen's nerves; then suddenly they reached the pass's summit and the whole eastern countryside lay open before them, and it was empty. There were no limbers, no guns, no caissons, no Federals at all. There was nothing but low hills and thick woods stretching into the long blue distance. Stonewall Jackson had hooked his small army clean and undetected into the Yankees' unprotected belly.
Now all he had to do was twist the hook and start the killing.
'Close up!' the officers shouted. 'Close up!' The men marched in silence, too tired to talk or sing. From time to time a man would break ranks to snatch a green apple or an ear of unripe corn from the farmlands on either side of the road, while other men broke ranks to be ill behind a hedge, but always they hurried on after their comrades and pushed themselves back into line. The horses pulling the guns labored under the whips, and their guns' wheels ripped the road's surface into broken ruts that turned men's ankles, but still they marched at the same cracking pace behind a cavalry vanguard that, late in the morning, rode into a small town where a Federal band was practicing in the main street. The band belonged to a regiment that had gone on a daylong route march, leaving their musicians to entertain the sullen Virginian townspeople. Those sullen people cheered up as the band fell slowly silent. The music ended with one last astonished and froglike grunt of a saxhorn tuba as the musicians realized that the horsemen in the street were pointing guns straight at their heads. The bandsmen had been assured that they were at least twenty miles from any enemy forces, yet now they were faced by a gray-coated pack of grinning men on dusty, sweat-foamed horses. 'Let's hear you play Dixie, boys,' the cavalry leader ordered. Some of the bandsmen began to edge backward, but the cavalry officer cocked his rifle one-handed and the bandmaster hastily turned around, raised his hands to ready the musicians, and then led them in a ragged rendition of the rebel anthem.
In the middle of the afternoon, with the musicians now silent prisoners under guard, General Jackson's column struck southeast on a wide road that passed through harvested fields and plundered orchards. The men could guess where they were going now, for ahead of them was a great moving plume of smoke that showed where the Orange and Alexandria Railroad carried the Northern army's supplies south to the Yankee troops. Every bullet, every cartridge, every slab of hardtack, every percussion cap, every shell, every pair of boots, every bayonet, every small and large thing that an army needed to fight was being carried down that single track, and Jackson's leading infantry was now within earshot of the wailing, whippoorwill cadence of the locomotives' whistles. They could even hear the distant and rhythmic clatter of car wheels crossing the rail joints.
The trains were running out from Manassas Junction, which lay only a few miles to the north. For a time Jackson had been tempted by the thought of marching directly on the Junction, but it seemed inconceivable that the largest Federal supply base in Virginia would not be guarded by earthworks and guns and regiments of prime infantry, so instead the General planned to cut the railroad at Bristoe Station, which lay just four miles south of the depot. Local people said that Bristoe Station was guarded by a mere handful of cavalry and only three companies of Northern infantry.
Dusk was falling as the leading rebel infantry breasted a slight rise and started down the long slope to Bristoe. Rebel cavalry had ridden ahead of the infantry, but those horsemen were nowhere in sight, and all the leading infantry could see were the twin rails gleaming empty in the day's dying light and a scatter of clapboard houses from which kitchen smoke trickled skyward. The small garrison had no idea that danger threatened. A Northern cavalryman, stripped to the waist and with his suspenders dangling, carried a canvas pail of water from a well to a horse trough. Another man played a fiddle, assiduously practicing the same phrase over and over again. Men smoked pipes in the small warm breeze or read hometown newspapers in the last light of the setting sun. A few men saw the infantry on the western road, but they assumed the approaching soldiers must be Federal troops. The infantry's flags were flying, but the sinking sun was huge and red behind the rebel column, and so the Yankees could make out no details of the approaching banners or uniforms.
The leading rebel regiment was from Louisiana. Its Colonel gave the order for his men to put percussion caps on the cones of their loaded rifles. Till now they had marched with their guns unprimed in case a stumbling man set off a cartridge and so alerted the enemy. 'I guess we arrived here before the cavalry,' the Colonel said to his adjutant as he scraped his sword clear of its scabbard.
The sound of the steel on its scabbard's throat seemed to release the village to hell. For just as the Colonel pulled his sword into the sun's scarlet light, so the hidden rebel horsemen launched their charge from a belt of trees north of the settlement. Bugles ripped the sky and hooves pounded the earth as a screaming line of rebel cavalry broke from cover and stormed down on the village.
The man with the pail of water stood frozen for a second. Then he dropped the pail and ran toward a house. Halfway there he changed his mind and ran back toward his tethered horse. More Northerners mounted up and, abandoning everything except their weapons, fled eastward. A few of the Yankee horsemen were too late and were trapped in the small village as the rebel cavalry thundered into the single street. A Northerner wheeled his horse and cut with his saber, but before his stroke was half completed, a Southern blade was in his belly. The Southerner rode on, dragging his saber free from the clinging flesh.
Rifles crashed and smoked from the houses where the Northern infantry had taken cover. A horse and man went down, their blood splashing together across the dusty road. The Southern cavalry fired back with revolvers until their Colonel shouted at them to forget the sheltering infantry and capture the rail depot instead.
Another volley splintered from the houses, and a horseman was snatched back from the saddle. His comrades spurred on to the depot, where scattered groups of Northern infantry gathered under the water tower and alongside the fuel bunkers where the pine logs were stacked. The largest group of Yankees rallied around the green-painted shed where a terrified telegrapher was sheltering under the table rather than sending a message. The man was still cowering with his head in his arms when the victorious Southern horsemen scattered the infantry and threw open the shed's door and ordered the telegrapher out. 'I ain't done nothing!' the telegrapher called desperately. He had been too frightened to send any message, so that no Northerner yet knew that the army's vital rail line was
