it'll work.'
Swynyard thought about that answer. 'So you didn't really want to be replaced?'
'I'll let you know tomorrow, Colonel.'
Starbuck spent the night in the railbed, where he slept for a few precious moments, but it seemed he was woken every time a sharpshooter let a bullet fly across the ground separating the armies. In the morning, before the mist lifted to make him into an easy target, he climbed the hill to watch the land emerge from the vapor. In the distance, beyond the trees, a swarm of smoke tendrils marked the enemy's cooking fires, while off to the left, and much closer than he had expected, a bright gleam between two stands of trees briefly showed beneath the shifting skeins of mist. He borrowed a rifle from one of Haxall's sharpshooters and used its telescopic sight to inspect the gleam. 'I guess that's the Bull Run,' he said to the sharpshooter.
The man shrugged. 'Can't think there's another river that big 'round here. Sure ain't the Big Muddy though.'
Nearer at hand Starbuck could see a stretch of road running between two pastures. He suspected it was the Sudley road, which meant the Legion was less than half a mile from the twin fords across the Catharpin and Bull runs. He had crossed those fords a year before on the day that Washington Faulconer had tried to eject him from the Legion, and if that far gleam was indeed the run and the road really was the highway leading from Manassas to Sudley, then it meant that the Legion was close, tantalizingly close, to the Galloway farm.
With nothing but an army between the Legion and its vengeance.
Starbuck handed the sharpshooter's rifle back, then went downhill to where the surgeons still worked on the previous day's wounded. He talked with the Legion's casualties, and then, with a dead man's rifle on his shoulder and a handful of salvaged cartridges in his haversack, he ran back to the railbed. A sharpshooter tried to kill him as he crossed the scrubland, but the Yankee's bullet whipped a foot wide to thump into a bloated corpse and startle a swarm of flies into the warm morning air. Then Starbuck leaped the parapet and slid down into the railbed's cutting to begin his new day's work.
***
THE FIRST ATTACK OF the Saturday morning was an advance by two companies of Northern infantry who emerged from the trees in skirmish order. They walked gingerly and with bayonets fixed, almost as if they suspected that their orders to advance on the railbed were a mistake. 'Oh, my God.' Captain Davies began the idiotic refrain that had the mysterious power to convulse Jackson's army.
'Don't,' Starbuck growled, but he could have saved his breath.
'Just lay me down.' A half-dozen of Davies's men finished the sentence and immediately began laughing.
'Imbeciles,' Starbuck said, though no one could tell whether he referred to the Legionnaires or to the handful of Yankees who were crossing the open ground where hundreds had died the day before.
'Some idiot got his orders confused,' Davies commented with an indecent relish. 'Lambs to the slaughter, march!' He eased his rifle over the parapet.
'Hold your fire!' Starbuck called. He was waiting for the enemy's main body to appear at the edge of the trees, but it seemed the handful of Northern skirmishers was expected to capture the railbed on their own. Such suicidal behavior suggested Davies was right and that some poor Northern officer had misunderstood his orders, or perhaps the enemy believed the rebels had abandoned the railbed during the night. Starbuck disabused them of the notion. He used just two of his companies. He wanted the other companies to conserve their ammunition, but the fire of F and G Companies was sufficient to send the Northern soldiers scuttling ignominiously back to the tree line. Two skirmishers were left on the ground and another half-dozen limped as they fled. One of the wounded men repeatedly flapped an arm as though gesturing at the rebels not to fire again. None did. 'I suspect our Northern neighbors were feeling us out, Starbuck. Taking our pulse to see if any life remains in us. Good morning to you!' The speaker was the exuberant Colonel Elijah Hudson, who was ambling down the railbed as though he were merely taking a morning stroll. 'I trust you slept well?'
'Half well,' Starbuck said. 'It was a noisy night.' 'So it was, so it was. I confess I abandoned my efforts to sleep and retired into the woods to read Homer by lantern light. I was struck by the line about arrows rattling in their quivers as the archers advanced to battle. You remember it? He must have heard the noise to have described it. Those were the days, Starbuck. None of this loitering in a trench, but up with the sun, a quick sacrifice to all-seeing Zeus, and then a chariot ride to glory. Or to death, I suppose. You breakfasted?'
'Cold chicken and hot coffee,' Starbuck said. Lucifer was proving adept at feeding Starbuck, though admittedly the boy still had the supplies taken from the Manassas depot as his larder. Lucifer's real test would come when all he had was weevil-ridden hardtack, rancid bacon grease, and rotting salt beef. If the boy even stayed long enough to face such a culinary test. So far the fugitive slave seemed amused at being a part of the Confederate army, but doubtless he would run whenever the whim took him.
'My son came to see me last night,' Hudson now told Starbuck, who had to think for a second before remembering that Hudson's eldest son was an aide of Robert Lee. 'Tom told me that Lee arrived yesterday,' the Colonel went on, 'but Pete Longstreet declined the order to attack. Our Mr. Longstreet is a meticulous fellow. He likes to make certain he has a sufficiency of mud and water before he makes his pies. Let us hope the Yankees stay long enough to be attacked. Or maybe I shouldn't hope that. My boys are wicked low on cartridges.'
'Mine too,' Starbuck said.
'Well, if all else fails,' Hudson said, 'we shall just have to throw rocks at them!' He smiled to show he was jesting, then prodded his stick into the cutting's bank like a farmer testing the dirt at planting season. 'Did your fellows suffer badly yesterday?' He asked the question in a deceptively casual tone.
'Badly enough. Twenty-three killed and fifty-six with the doctors.'
'Much the same, much the same,' Hudson said, shaking his head at the news. 'A bad business, Starbuck, a bad business. But can't be helped. What fools we mortals be. I have some coffee on the boil if you want to make a neighborly call.' Hudson gave a wave with his stick and strode back to his own regiment.
Lieutenant Coffman had resumed his role as Starbuck's aide. He had been slightly wounded the day before by a bullet that had cut a ragged, dirty groove in the flesh of his upper left arm. Truslow had cleaned and dressed the wound, and Coffman kept touching the makeshift bandage as if to make certain that the badge of his courage was still in place. He bore no other badges; indeed, it was now impossible to tell that the ragged Coffman was an officer, for he carried a rifle, had a haversack and cap box on his belt, and had the half-starved, half-fearful, dirty face of a common soldier. 'What happens now, sir?' he asked Starbuck.
'That's up to the Yankees, Coffman,' Starbuck said. He was watching Sergeant Peter Waggoner lead a small prayer group and remembering how another group of men had willingly followed the big Sergeant into the railbed's cutting, where Waggoner had swung his rifle like a club to break apart a knot of Yankee resistance. It was not so much the Sergeant's bravery that now impressed Starbuck as the fact that men had so willingly followed Waggoner into the fight. 'Captain Pine!' Starbuck shouted at Company D's commanding officer.
'Six cartridges apiece,' Pine said, leaping to the conclusion that Starbuck needed to know the bad news of how many rounds his men had left.
'Who's your best sergeant after Waggoner?' Starbuck asked instead.
Pine thought about it for a second. 'Tom Darke.'
'You might have to lose Waggoner, that's why.'
Pine flinched at that news, then shrugged. 'To replace poor Patterson?'
'Maybe,' Starbuck said vaguely. 'But don't say anything to Waggoner yet.' He walked back to the south, passing the remnants of Patterson's Company C, now under the command of Sergeant Malachi Williams, who offered a curt nod as Starbuck passed. None of Company C had joined Medlicott's retreat the day before, nor indeed had every man in A and B Company. The rot, Starbuck decided, was confined to a stubborn handful who doubtless assumed that Washington Faulconer still wielded more power in the Legion than Nathaniel Starbuck.
Starbuck resisted the temptation to crouch as the trench became shallower. 'Keep your head down,' he told Coffman.
'You're not keeping yours down,' the Lieutenant replied.
'I'm a Yankee. I lack your valuable blood,' Starbuck said just as a sharpshooter in the Northern-held woods tried for him. The bullet struck a branch in the new abatis and ricocheted up into the air while the sound of the gun echoed back from the hillside. Starbuck gave a derisive wave to his unseen assailant, then jumped down into the spoil pit, where Medlicott and Moxey were standing beside a small fire over which a coffeepot was suspended. A half-dozen of their men were lounging near the fire and looked up suspiciously as Starbuck and Coffman arrived. 'Is
