fellow Bay Staters. The 20th all had rifles, and their more accurate fire forced Duff to retreat still farther down the long slope. His forty men backed over a rail fence into a field of stubble where stooked oats stood in shocks. There was no more cover for a half mile, and Duff did not want to yield too much ground to the Yankees, so he halted his men in the middle of the field and told them to hold the bastards off. Duff’s men were horribly outnumbered, but they came from Pike and Chickasaw counties, and Duff reckoned that made them as good as any soldiers in America. “Guess we’re going to have to give this pack of black-assed trash a lesson, boys,” Duff said.
“No, Captain! They’re rebs! Look!” one of his men shouted in warning, then pointed to the tree line where a company of gray-clad troops had just appeared. Duff stared in horror. Had he been firing at his own side? The advancing men wore long gray coats. The officer leading them had his coat open and was carrying a drawn sword that he used to slash at weeds as he advanced, just as though he were out for a casual stroll in the country.
Duff felt his belligerent certainties drain away. He was dry-mouthed, his belly was sour, and a muscle in his thigh kept twitching. The firing all across the slope had died away as the gray-coated company marched down toward the oat field. Duff held up his hand and shouted at the strangers, “Halt!”
“Friends!” one of the gray-coated men called back. There were sixty or seventy men in the company, and their rifles were tipped with long shining bayonets.
“Halt!” Duff tried again.
“We’re friends!” a man shouted back. Duff could see the nervousness on their faces. One man had a twitching muscle in his cheek, while another kept looking sideways at a mustachioed sergeant who marched stolidly at the flank of the advancing company.
“Halt!” Duff shouted again. One of his men spat onto the stubble.
“We’re friends!” the northerners shouted again. Their officer’s open coat was lined with scarlet, but Duff could not see the color of the man’s uniform because the sun was behind the strangers.
“They ain’t no friends of ours, Cap’n!” one of Duff’s men said. Duff wished he could feel the same certainty. God in His heaven, but suppose these men were friends? Was he about to commit murder? “I order you to halt!” he shouted, but the advancing men would not obey, and so Duff shouted at his men to take aim.
Forty rifles came up into forty shoulders.
“Friends!” a northern voice called. The two units were fifty yards apart now, and Duff could hear the northern boots breaking and scuffing the oat stubble.
“They ain’t friends, Cap’n!” one of the Mississippians insisted, and just at that moment the advancing officer stumbled and Duff got a clear view of the uniform beneath the scarlet-lined gray coat. The uniform was blue.
“Fire!” Duff shouted, and the southern volley cracked like a canebreak burning and a northerner screamed as the rebel bullets slapped home.
“Fire!” a northerner shouted and the Massachusetts’s bullets whipped back through the smoke bank.
“Keep firing!” Duff shouted and emptied his revolver into the haze of powder smoke that already obscured the field. His men had taken cover behind the shocks of oats and were steadily reloading. The northerners were doing the same, except for one man who was twitching and bleeding on the ground. There were more Yankees off to Duff’s right, higher up the slope, but he could not worry about them. He had chosen to make his stand here, plumb in the middle of the field, and now he would have to fight these bastards till one side could stand no more.
Six miles away, at Edwards Ferry, more northerners had crossed the Potomac and cut the turnpike that led to Centreville. Nathan Evans, thus caught between the two invading forces, refused to show any undue alarm. “One might be trying to fool me while the other one gets ready to rape me, ain’t that how it’s done, Boston?” “Boston” was his nickname for Starbuck. They had met at Manassas where Evans had saved the Confederacy by holding up the northern attack while the rebel lines reformed. “Lying, thieving, black-assed, hymn-singing bastards,” Evans said now, evidently of the whole northern army. He had ridden with an order for the Faulconer Legion to stay where it was, only to discover that Thaddeus Bird had anticipated him by canceling the Legion’s departure. Now Evans cocked his ear to the wind and tried to gauge from the intensity of the rifle fire which enemy incursion offered the most danger. The church bell in Leesburg was still ringing, summoning the militia. “So you’re not going to stay with me, Boston?” Evans remarked.
“I like being a company officer, sir.”
Evans growled in response, though Starbuck was not at all sure the small, foulmouthed South Carolinian had heard his answer. Instead Evans was switching his attention back and forth between the competing sounds of the two northern incursions. Otto, his German orderly, whose main duty consisted of carrying a barrel of whiskey for the General’s refreshment, also listened to the gunfire so that the two men’s heads twitched back and forth in unison. Evans was the first to stop, clicking his fingers for a drop of whiskey instead. He drained the tin mug, then looked back at Bird. “You’ll stay here, Pecker. You’re my reserve. I don’t reckon there’s so many of the bastards, they’re not making enough noise for that, so we might as well stay put and see if we can’t give the bastards a bloody nose. Killing Yankees is as good a way to start the week as any, eh?” He laughed. “Of course, if I’m wrong we’ll all be stone dead by nightfall. Come on. Otto!” Evans put spurs to his horse and galloped back toward the earth-walled fort that was his headquarters.
Starbuck climbed onto a wagon loaded with folded tents and slept as the sun burned the mist off the river and dried the dew off the fields. More northern troops crossed the river and climbed the bluff to mass under the trees. General Stone, the commander of the Federal forces guarding the Potomac, had decided to commit more troops to the crossing and sent orders that the invaders should not just occupy Leesburg but reconnoiter the whole of Loudoun County. If the rebels had gone, Stone commanded, then the Yankees should occupy the area, but if a strong Confederate force opposed the reconnaissance, then the Federal forces were free to withdraw across the river with whatever foodstuffs they might confiscate. Stone dispatched artillery to add firepower to the invading force, but also made plain that he was leaving the decision whether to stay in Virginia to the man he now placed in command of the whole northern operation.
That man was Colonel Ned Baker, a tall, clean-shaven, silver-haired, golden-tongued politician. Baker was a California lawyer, a United States senator from Oregon and one of President Lincoln’s closest friends, so close that Lincoln had named his second son after the Senator. Baker was an impetuous, emotional, warmhearted man, and his arrival at the river crossing sent ripples of excitement through those men of the 15th Massachusetts who still waited with the New York Tammany Regiment on the Maryland bank. Baker’s own regiment, the 1st Californian, now joined the invasion. The regiment was from New York, but had been recruited from men who had ties to California, and with them came a fourteen-pounder rifled cannon from Rhode Island and a pair of howitzers manned by U.S. Army regulars. “Take everything across!” Baker shouted ebulliently. “Every last man and gun!”
“We’ll need more boats,” the Colonel of the Tammanys cautioned the Senator.
“Then find them! Build them! Steal them! Fetch gopher wood and build an ark, Colonel. Find a beautiful woman and let her face launch a thousand ships, but let us press on to glory, boys!” Baker strode down the bank, cocking his ear to the staccato crackle of musketry that sounded from the river’s far shore. “Rebels are dying, lads! Let’s go and kill some more!”
The Tammany Colonel attempted to ask the Senator just what his regiment was supposed
