from K Company.
Starbuck walked with Bird into the open meadow that was scarred with the pale round shapes showing where the regiment’s few tents had been pitched. Between the bleached circles were smaller scorched patches where the campfires had burned, and out beyond those scars were the large cropped circles marking where the officers’ horses had grazed the grass out to the limit of their tethering ropes. The Legion could march away from this field, Starbuck reflected, yet for days afterward it would hold this evidence of their existence.
“Have you made a decision, Nate?” Bird asked. He was fond of Starbuck, and his voice reflected that affection. He offered the younger man a cheap, dark cigar, took one himself, then struck a match to light the tobacco.
“I’ll stay with the regiment, sir,” Starbuck said when his cigar was drawing.
“I hoped you’d say that,” Bird said. “But even so.” His voice trailed away. He drew on his cigar, staring toward Leesburg, over which a filmy haze of morning smoke shimmered. “Going to be a fine day,” the Major said. A splutter of distant rifle fire sounded, but neither Bird nor Starbuck took any notice. It was a rare morning that men were not out hunting.
“And we don’t know that the Colonel really is taking over the Legion, do we, sir?” Starbuck asked.
“We know nothing,” Bird said. “Soldiers, like children, live in a natural state of willful ignorance. But it’s a risk.”
“You’re taking the same risk,” Starbuck said pointedly.
“Your sister is not married to the Colonel,” Bird answered just as pointedly, “which makes you, Nate, a great deal more vulnerable than I. Allow me to remind you, Nate, you did this world the signal service of murdering the Colonel’s prospective son-in-law, and, while heaven and all its angels rejoiced at your act, I doubt that Faulconer has forgiven you yet.”
“No, sir,” Starbuck said tonelessly. He did not like being reminded of Ethan Ridley’s death. Starbuck had killed Ridley under the cover of battle’s confusion and he had told himself ever since that it had been an act of self-defense, yet he knew he had cradled murder in his heart when he had pulled the trigger, and he knew, too, that no amount of rationalizing could wipe that sin from the great ledger in heaven that recorded all his failings. Certainly Colonel Washington Faulconer would never forgive Starbuck. “Yet I’d still rather stay with the regiment,” Starbuck now told Bird. He was a stranger in a strange land, a northerner fighting against the North, and the Faulconer Legion had become his new home. The Legion fed him, clothed him, and gave him intimate friends. It was also the place where he had discovered the job he did best and, with the yearning of youth to discern high purpose in life, Starbuck had made up his mind that he was destined to be one of the Legion’s officers. He belonged.
“Good luck to us both, then,” Bird said, and they would both need luck, Bird reflected, if his suspicions were right and the order to march to Centreville was part of Colonel Washington Faulconer’s attempt to take the Legion back under his control.
Washington Faulconer, after all, was the man who had raised the Faulconer Legion, named it for himself, kitted it with the finest equipment his fortune could buy, then led it to the fight on the banks of the Bull Run. Faulconer and his son, both wounded in that battle, had ridden back to Richmond to be hailed as heroes, though in truth Washington Faulconer had been nowhere near the Legion when it faced the overpowering Yankee attack. It was too late now to set the record straight: Virginia, indeed all the upper South, reckoned Faulconer a hero and was demanding that he be given command of a brigade, and if that happened, Bird knew, the hero would expect his own Legion to be at the heart of that brigade.
“But it isn’t certain the son of a bitch will get his brigade, is it?” Starbuck asked, trying in vain to suppress a huge yawn.
“There’s a rumor he’ll be offered a diplomatic post instead,” Bird said, “which would be much more suitable, because my brother-in-law has a natural taste for licking the backsides of princes and potentates, but our newspapers say he should be a general, and what the newspapers want, the politicians usually grant. It’s easier than having ideas of their own, you see.”
“I’ll take the risk,” Starbuck said. His alternative was to join General Nathan Evans’s staff and stay in the camp near Leesburg where Evans had command of the patchwork Confederate brigade that guarded the riverbank. Starbuck liked Evans, but he much preferred to stay with the Legion. The Legion was home, and he could not really imagine that the Confederate high command would make Washington Faulconer a general.
Another flurry of rifle fire sounded from the woods that lay three miles to the northwest. The sound made Bird turn, frowning. “Someone’s being mighty energetic.” He sounded disapproving.
“Squabbling pickets?” Starbuck suggested. For the last three months the sentries had faced each other across the river, and while relations had been friendly for most of that time, every now and then a new and energetic officer tried to provoke a war.
“Probably just pickets,” Pecker Bird agreed, then turned back as Sergeant Major Proctor came to report that a broken wagon axle that had been delaying the Legion’s march was now mended. “Does that mean we’re ready to go, Sergeant Major?” Bird asked.
“Ready as we’ll ever be, I reckon.” Proctor was a lugubrious and suspicious man, forever fearing disaster.
“Then let us be off! Let us be off!” Bird said happily, and he strode toward the Legion just as another volley of shots sounded, only this time the fire had not come from the distant woods, but from the road to the east. Bird clawed thin fingers through his long, straggly beard. “Do you think?” he asked of no one in particular, not bothering to articulate the question clearly. “Maybe?” Bird went on with a note of growing excitement, and then another splinter of musketry echoed from the bluffs to the northwest and Bird jerked his head back and forth, which was his habitual gesture when he was amused. “I think we shall wait awhile, Mr. Proctor. We shall wait!” Bird snapped his fingers. “It seems,” he said, “that God and Mr. Lincoln might have sent us other employment today. We shall wait.”
The advancing Massachusetts troops discovered the rebels by blundering into a four-man picket that was huddled in a draw of the lower woods. The startled rebels fired first, sending the Massachusetts men tumbling back through the trees. The rebel picket fled in the opposite direction to find their company commander, Captain Duff, who first sent a message to General Evans and then led the forty men of his company toward the woods on the bluffs summit where a scatter of Yankee skirmishers now showed at the tree line. More northerners began to appear, so many that Duff lost count. “There are enough of the sumbitches,” one of his men commented as Captain Duff lined his men behind a snake fence and told them to fire away. Puffs of smoke studded the fence line as the bullets whistled away up the gentle slope. Two miles behind Duff the town of Leesburg heard the firing, and someone thought to run to the church and ring the bell to summon the militia.
Not that the militia could assemble in time to help Captain Duff, who was beginning to understand just how badly his Mississippians were outnumbered. He was forced to retreat down the slope when a company of northern troops threatened his left flank, which withdrawal was greeted by northern jeers and a volley of musket fire. Duff’s forty men went on doggedly firing as they backed away. They were a ragged company dressed in a shabby mix of butternut-brown and dirty gray uniforms, but their marksmanship was far superior to that of their northern rivals, who were mostly armed with smoothbore muskets. Massachusetts had taken immense pains to equip its volunteers, but there had not been enough rifles for everybody, and so Colonel Devens’s 15th Massachusetts regiment fought with eighteenth-century muskets. None of Duff’s men was hit, but their own bullets were
