'You heard me?' Starbuck asked.
'It ain't our fight, Starbuck.' Medlicott summoned his courage to articulate his defiance of Starbuck. 'Besides, if we leave here the Yankees could attack straight into the pit again and then where would we be?'
Starbuck did not answer. Instead he looked sideways at Coffman. 'Go and send Sergeant Waggoner to me,' he said softly so that only Coffman could hear, 'then tell Truslow that he's got to hold the railbed with Companies G and H. He's to ignore my order to charge. Understated?'
'Yes, sir.' Coffman ran off on his errand. Medlicott had not heard the orders Starbuck gave but sneered anyway. 'Sending for Swynyard?'
Starbuck could feel his heart beating flabbily in his chest. 'Major Medlicott,' he said very slowly and distinctly, 'I'm ordering you to fix bayonets and go to Colonel Hudson's assistance.'
Medlicott's big red face seemed to twist in a spasm of loathing, but he managed to make his answer sound respectful. 'It's my judgment we should guard our own position,' he said just as formally as Starbuck.
'You're disobeying an order?' Starbuck asked.
'I'm staying here,' the miller said stubbornly, and when Starbuck did not respond immediately, Medlicott grinned in anticipation of victory. 'No one's to move!' he called to his men. 'Our job's to stay here and—'
He stopped speaking because Starbuck had shot him.
Starbuck did not really believe he was doing it. He was aware that the act would either seal the Legion as his regiment or else condemn him to a court-martial or a lynching. He drew the heavy Adams revolver and straightened his right arm while his thumb clicked the hammer smoothly back; then his finger took the trigger's pressure so fast that the look of triumph on Medlicott's face had scarcely started to change when the bullet struck him just beneath his right eye. Blood and bone made a cloud of droplets about the Major's shattering skull as he was thrown backward. His hat went straight up in the air while his body flew back three yards, twitching as it flew, then flapping like a landed fish as it thumped heavily onto the dirt. There the body lay utterly still with its arms outstretched. 'Oh, my God,' Starbuck heard himself saying, 'just lay me down.' He began to laugh.
Medlicott's ashen-faced men watched him. None of them moved. Medlicott's dead fingers slowly curled.
Starbuck pushed the revolver into its holster. 'Captain Moxey?' he said very calmly.
Moxey did not wait for the rest of the sentence. 'Company!' he shouted. 'Fix bayonets!'
Moxey's men ran south along the railbed to help Hudson's left-hand company. Medlicott's men still stared dumbly at the body of their officer, then up at Starbuck. This was the moment that Starbuck had half expected to turn mutinous, but none of the company made any move to avenge the dead miller. 'Anyone else want to disobey my orders?' Starbuck asked them.
No one spoke. The men seemed dazed; then Peter Waggoner ran up, panting. 'Sir?'
'You're a Lieutenant now, Waggoner,' Starbuck said, 'in charge of A Company. Take over, follow Captain Moxey, and get rid of those Yankees.'
'Sir?' Waggoner was slow to understand.
'Do it!' Starbuck snapped. Then he unslung his rifle and pushed his bayonet into place. He turned toward the rest of the regiment. 'Legion! Fix bayonets!' He waited a few seconds. 'Follow me!'
It was a risk, because if the Yankees were waiting to attack the Legion's positions, then Starbuck was giving them victory, but if he did not help the North Carolinians, then the Yankees would probably break through into the woods, and so he took three-quarters of the Legion down the railbed to help Hudson's men. Some of those men were out of ammunition and were hurling rocks at the Yankees, throwing so hard that the heavy stones drew blood when they struck on sweat-streaked faces.
'Follow me!' Starbuck shouted again. Moxey and Waggoner were helping Hudson's left-hand companies, but the biggest threat was in the center of the Colonel's line, and Starbuck now led his reinforcements down the back of the embankment to where that Yankee pressure was fiercest. Some of the Northerners had gained the flat summit of the embankment, where they were struggling to take Hudson's two standards, and it was there that Starbuck intervened. 'Come on!' he screamed, and he heard his men begin the terrible, shrill rebel yell as they scrambled up the slope and into the fight. Starbuck pulled his rifle's trigger as he neared the melee, then rammed the bayonet hard into a blue jacket. He was screaming like a banshee, suddenly feeling the extraordinary release of Medlicott's death. My God, but he had cut the rot clean out of the Legion's soul!
There was a rebel on the ground trying to fight off a Northern sergeant who had his hands around the rebel's throat. Starbuck kicked the Northerner's head up, then sliced his bayonet back and upward so that the blade slit the man's throat open. The sergeant collapsed, gushing blood over his intended victim. Starbuck clambered over both men and rammed the bayonet forward again. Men were grunting and cursing, tripping on the dying and slipping in blood, but the Yankees were giving ground. They had been trying to fight up the embankment's slope, and the rebels had managed to keep most of them on that forward slope and at a consequent disadvantage until the Legion's arrival tipped the balance. The Northerners retreated.
They went down the embankment, but they were not beaten yet. The woods here grew close to the railbed, so close that the Yankees could retreat to the tree line and still fire over open sights at the rebel position, and once back among the trees they poured an immense fire at the embankment. The storm of bullets drove the rebel defenders back from the crest and down into cover. The bullets whistled and hissed overhead; they thumped into the bodies of the dead or else ricocheted off the embankment to tear through the leaves behind. Every few moments a group of Yankees would charge the apparently empty parapet only to be met by a sparse rebel volley, a shower of stones, and the sight of waiting bayonets.
'They don't yield easily, do they? My God, Starbuck, but I owe you thanks. Upon my soul, I do.' Colonel Hudson, his long hair matted with blood and his eyes wild, tried to shake Starbuck's hand.
Starbuck, encumbered with a rifle, ramrod, and cartridge, fumbled the handshake. 'You're wounded, Colonel?'
'Dear me, no.' Hudson pushed the long, blood-thick hair out of his face. 'Other fellow's blood. You killed him, remember? Cut his throat. Dear me. But upon my soul, Starbuck, I'm grateful. Grateful, truly.'
'Are you sure you're not hurt, sir?' Starbuck asked, for Hudson seemed unsteady on his feet.
'Just shocked, Starbuck, just shocked, and I shall be just dandy in a moment or two.' The Colonel looked up at the railbed, where a rock had just landed. It seemed the Yankees were throwing the stones back now. Starbuck finished loading his rifle, wriggled up the bank, and pushed the gun between two bodies. He sighted on a blue jacket, pulled the trigger, and slid back to reload. He had five cartridges left, while most of his men were now reduced to just one or two. Elijah Hudson was similarly short of ammunition. 'One more attack, Starbuck,' the North Carolinian said, 'and I suspect we're done for.'
The attack came almost as he spoke. It was a frantic, desperate charge of tired, bloodied men who burst out of the woods to throw themselves up the embankment. For two days these Northerners had tried to break the rebel line, and for two days they had been frustrated, but now they were on the very brink of success, and they summoned their last reserves of strength as they scrambled up the scorched bank with fixed bayonets.
'Fire!' Hudson shouted, and the rebels' last guns flamed as a barrage of rocks hurtled overhead. 'Now charge, my dears! Charge home!' the Colonel called, and the tired men threw themselves forward to meet the Yankee assault. Starbuck thrust with the bayonet, twisted the blade, and thrust again. Coffman was beside him, firing a revolver; then he glimpsed Lucifer, of all people, firing his Colt. Then Starbuck's bayonet stuck in a man's belly, and he tried to kick it free, then tried to twist it free, but nothing would loosen the flesh's grip on the steel. He cursed the dying man, then felt a gush of warm blood on his hands as he unslotted the blade and pulled the rifle away from the trapped blade. He reversed the rifle and swung it overhand like a club. He was keening a mad noise, half exultation, half lamentation, expecting death at any second, but determined not to give an inch against the mass of men who pushed into the rebels' blades and rifle stocks.
Then, suddenly, without any apparent reason, the pressure eased.
Suddenly the great charge was gone, and the Northerners were running back into the trees and leaving behind a tide-line of bodies heaped on bodies, some of the bodies moving slow beneath their pall of blood, others lying still. And there was silence except for the panting of the wild-eyed rebels who stood on the embankment they had held against the charge.
'Back now!' Starbuck broke the silence. 'Back!' There might still be sharpshooters in the woods, and so he pulled his men back down the embankment into cover.
'Don't leave me, don't leave me!' a wounded man cried aloud, and another wept because he had been blinded. The stretcher bearers went across the railbed. No one shot at them. Starbuck cleaned the blood from his rifle's
