Nantucket, cheese from Vermont, and dried apples from New York. There was kerosene, medical sulfur, calcined magnesia, sugar of lead, and laxatives made of powdered rhubarb. There was so much material that if two armies the size of Jackson's force had plundered the depot for a month, they could not have opened every box or explored every dusty stack of crates.
'What you can't carry away, we'll have to burn,' a staff officer called to Starbuck, 'so search it well!' and the Legion, like small boys released to a toyshop, splintered open the crates and whooped with glee at every fresh discovery. Patrick Hogan of C Company was distributing officers' shoulder boards, while Cyrus Matthews was cramming his face with a nauseating mix of dried apple and chipped beef. One man had discovered a cabin trunk that seemed to contain nothing but chess sets, and he was now disgustedly scattering knights, rooks, and bishops as he dug down in search of greater treasures. Bandmaster Little had found a box of sheet music, while Robert Decker, one of the best men in Truslow's company, had discovered a cased match rifle, precision-made for a marksman and equipped with a barrel-length telescopic sight, a hair trigger, a separate cocking trigger, and a small pair of legs at the barrel's muzzle to support the weapon's huge weight. 'It'll kill a mule at five hundred paces, sir!' Decker boasted to Starbuck.
'It'll be heavy to carry, Bob,' Starbuck warned him.
'But it'll even things against the sharpshooters, sir,' Decker answered. Every rebel hated the Yankee sharpshooters, who were lethally equipped with similar long-range target rifles.
Captain Truslow had commandeered two brand-new seven-ton wagons that both carried small brass plates proclaiming them to be the products of Levergood's Carriage Factory of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There were boxes attached to the wagon sides that were filled with repair tools, lanterns, and cans of axle grease, and Truslow, always reluctant to concede that anything could be well made in the hated North, nevertheless admitted that the Levergood's Company built a half-decent vehicle. The two gray-painted wagons would replace the old ammunition carts burned in Galloway's raid, and Truslow had his men busy stacking the wagon beds with boxes of rifle ammunition and crates of percussion caps. The draught horses were fitted with brand-new collars, hames, and traces, then backed into the shafts.
Captain Pine's men were distributing boots, while Lieutenant Patterson's company was handing out sacks of coffee. Captain Davies's company was employed in taking down the barn doors from a warehouse; the doors were needed as ramps so that a Georgian artillery battery could maneuver some brand-new Northern cannons off their gondola cars. The Georgians were presently equipped with Napoleon twelve-pounders that were, in their commander's word, 'tired,' but now they would be armed with a half-dozen Parrott twenty-pound rifles so new that the packing grease from the foundry was still sticky on their barrels. The artillerymen wrecked the wheels and spiked the vents of their old guns, then dragged away their new weapons, each of which displayed a neatly stenciled legend on its trail: PROPERTY OF THE USA.
Colonel Swynyard watched the plunder from horseback. He had helped himself to a brand-new saddle and was sucking on a strip of beef jerky. 'Sixteen men,' he said gnomically to Starbuck. 'Sir?'
'That's all we lost to straggling. Out of the whole Brigade! And most of them will turn up, I don't doubt. Some other brigades lost hundreds.' Swynyard grimaced as the strip of beef aggravated a sore tooth. 'I don't suppose you came across any false teeth, did you?' 'No, sir, but I'll keep a lookout.'
'I think I'll have Doc Billy take all mine out. They're nothing but trouble. I confess, Starbuck, that my new faith in Almighty God is shaken by the existence of teeth. Do your teeth hurt?' 'One does.'
'You probably smoke too much,' Swynyard said. 'Tobacco smoke might be good for keeping the lungs open, but I've long believed that the juice of the weed rots the teeth.' He frowned, not for the thought of tobacco juice, but because a train whistle had sounded in the warm morning wind. Swynyard gazed toward the northern horizon, where a billow of smoke showed above distant trees. 'We've got company, I guess,' Swynyard said.
The thought of Northerners reminded Starbuck that Stonewall Jackson would not have marched fifty miles in two days just to replenish his army's stock of ammunition and food. 'Does anyone know what's happening?' Starbuck asked the perennial soldier's question.
'I'm told that General Jackson is not given to confiding in his inferiors,' Swynyard said, 'or in his superiors either, for that matter, so I can only guess, and my guess is that we've been sent here as bait.'
'Bait.' Starbuck repeated the word flatly. It did not sound good.
'I'm guessing that we've been sent up here to pull the Yankees out of their defenses on the Rappahannock,' Swynyard said, then paused to watch a soldier shake loose yards and yards of mosquito netting, 'which could mean that in a few hours we'll have every blessed Yankee in Virginia trying to kill us.' He finished, then stared northward to where a brisk rattle of rifle fire had sounded. The volley was followed by the heavier sound of artillery. 'Someone's getting thumped,' Swynyard said with a bloodthirsty relish, then twisted in his saddle to watch a sad procession come into sight beside the warehouse. A group of rebel soldiers were escorting a long line of black men and women, some crying but most walking with a stiff dignity. 'Escaped slaves,' Swynyard explained curtly.
A woman tried to break away from the column but was shoved back into place by a soldier. Starbuck counted almost two hundred of the slaves, who were now ordered to form a line close beside a captured portable forge. 'What they should have done,' Swynyard said, 'is keep running north of the Potomac.' 'Why didn't they?'
'Because the Yankees declared Manassas a safe refuge for contrabands. They want to keep the darkies down here, you see, south of the Mason-Dixon line. It's one thing to preach emancipation, but quite another to have them living in your street, ain't that the case?'
'I don't know, sir.' Starbuck grimaced as he saw a leather-aproned blacksmith test the heat of the forge's furnace. The portable forge was a traveling blacksmith's shop mounted on the back of a heavy wagon that could travel with the army and shoe horses or provide instant repairs to broken metal. The smith dragged a length of chain out of a barrel, and Starbuck immediately understood what was about to happen to the recaptured slaves.
'So how many blacks live in your father's street?' Swynyard demanded.
'None, except for a couple of servants.' 'And has your father ever had a black at his dinner table?' 'Not that I know of,' Starbuck said. A hammer clanged on the anvil. The smith was fashioning manacles out of barrel hoops, then brazing the open manacles onto the chain. Heat shimmered over the small open furnace, which was being fanned by two soldiers pumping a leather bellows. Every minute or so a recaptured slave was forced to the forge to have one of the newly made manacles closed around an ankle. A huge-bellied captain with a bristling black beard was supervising the operation, cuffing the slaves if they showed any resistance and boasting how they would suffer now they had been recaptured. 'What happens to them?' Starbuck asked.
'You can never trust a black that's run away,' Swynyard said, speaking with the authority of a man born into one of Virginia's oldest slave-trading families. 'It don't matter how valuable he is, he's been spoilt for good if he's tasted a bit of liberty, so they'll all get sold down the river.' 'Women too?'
The Colonel nodded. 'Women too. And children.' 'So they'll all be dead in a year?'
'Unless they're real lucky,' Swynyard said, 'and die sooner.' Being sold down the river meant going to the sweated chain gangs on the cotton plantations of the deep South. Swynyard looked away. 'I guess my two boys had the good sense to keep on running. They ain't here, anyway, I looked for them.' He paused as the gunfire to the north reached a crackling crescendo. Powder smoke was whitening the sky, indicating that a skirmish of some severity was taking place, but the fact that no staff officers were demanding reinforcements from the troops rifling the depot suggested that the enemy was well in hand. 'Right now,' Swynyard said, 'I'd guess that we've just got a few odds and ends coming to attack us. The real attack won't hit till tomorrow.'
'Something to look forward to,' Starbuck said dryly. The Colonel grinned and rode on, leaving Starbuck to stroll among his happy men. There was no grumbling now about missing a chance to join the Richmond garrison; instead the Legion was reveling in its chance of loot. Captain Moxey had found some frilled shirts and was pulling them on one above another to save himself the trouble of cramming them into a haversack already stuffed with tins of chicken in aspic. Sergeant Major Tolliver had unpacked a whole case of long-barreled Whitney revolvers and was attempting to stow as many as possible in his clothing, while Lieutenant Coffman had discovered a handsome black cloak edged with blue silk braid that he swirled dramatically around his body. At least two men were already blind drunk.
Starbuck dragged one of the drunken men off a case marked 'Massachusetts Arms Co. Chicopee Falls.' The man groaned and protested, but Starbuck snarled at him to shut up, then levered the case open to find a shipment of Adams .36-caliber revolvers. The guns, with their blued barrels and cross-hatched black-walnut grips, looked deadly and beautiful. Starbuck discarded the clumsier long-barreled Colt he had taken from a dead New Yorker at Gaines
