three pieces of artillery and four regiments of prime, unbloodied troops, which gave him the necessary power to offer President Lincoln and the country the victory they so badly needed. “On to Richmond, boys!” Baker shouted as he pushed through the troops on the riverbank. “On to Richmond, and may the devil have no mercy their souls! On for the union, boys, on for the union! Let’s hear you cheer!”
They cheered loud enough to obliterate the splintering sound of musketry that came from the river’s far bank where, beyond the wooded bluff, powder smoke lingered among the stooked oats where the day’s long dying had begun.
MAJOR ADAM FAULCONER ARRIVED AT THE FAULCONER Legion a few moments after midday. “There are Yankees on the turnpike. They gave me a chase!” He looked happy, as though the hard riding of the last few minutes had been a cross-country romp rather than a desperate flight from a determined enemy. His horse, a fine roan stallion from the Faulconer Stud, was flecked with white foam, its ears were pricked nervously back, and it kept taking small nervous sidesteps that Adam instinctively corrected. “Uncle!” he greeted Major Bird cheerfully, then turned immediately back to Starbuck. They had been friends for three years, but it had been weeks since they had met, and Adam’s pleasure at their reunion was heartfelt. “You look as if you were fast asleep, Nate.”
“He was at a prayer meeting late last night,” Sergeant Truslow interjected in a voice that was deliberately sour so that no one but he and Starbuck would know he made a joke, “praying till three in the morning.”
“Good for you, Nate,” Adam said warmly, then turned his horse back toward Thaddeus Bird. “Did you hear what I said, Uncle? There are Yankees on the turnpike!”
“We heard they were there,” Bird said casually, as though errant Yankees were as predictable a feature of the fall landscape as migrating wild fowl.
“The wretches fired at me.” Adam sounded astonished that such a discourtesy might occur in wartime. “But we outran them, didn’t we, boy?” He patted the neck of his sweating horse, then swung down from the saddle and tossed the reins to Robert Decker, who was one of Starbuck’s company. “Walk him for a while, will you, Robert?”
“Pleased to, Mr. Adam.”
“And don’t let him drink yet. Not till he’s cooled,” Adam instructed Decker, then he explained to his uncle that he had ridden from Centreville at dawn, expecting to encounter the Legion on the road. “I couldn’t find you, so I just kept going,” Adam said cheerfully. He walked with a very slight limp, the result of a bullet he had taken at the battle at Manassas, but the wound was well-healed and the limp hardly noticeable. Adam, unlike his father, Washington Faulconer, had been in the very thick of the Manassas fight even though, for weeks before, he had been assailed by equivocation about the war’s morality and had even doubted whether he could take part in the hostilities at all. After the battle, while he was convalescing in Richmond, Adam had been promoted to major and given a post on General Joseph Johnston’s staff. The General was one of the many Confederates who was under the misapprehension that Washington Faulconer had helped stem the surprise northern attack at Manassas, and the son’s promotion and staff appointment had been intended as a mark of gratitude to the father.
“You’ve brought us orders?” Bird now asked Adam.
“Just my good self, Uncle. It seemed too perfect a day to be stuck with Johnston’s paperwork, so I came for a ride. Though I hardly expected this.” Adam turned and listened to the sound of rifle fire that came from the far woods. The gunfire was fairly constant now, but it was nothing like the splintering crackle of battle. Instead it was a methodical, workmanlike sound that suggested the two sides were merely trading ammunition because it was expected of them rather than trying to inflict slaughter upon each other. “What’s happening?” Adam demanded.
Major Thaddeus Bird explained that two groups of Yankees had crossed the river. Adam had already encountered one of the invading parties, while the other was up on the high ground by Harrison’s Island. No one was quite sure what the Yankees intended by the double incursion. Early on it had seemed they were trying to capture Leesburg, but a single company of Mississippi men had turned back the Federal advance. “A man called Duff,” Bird told Adam, “stopped the rascals cold. Lined his fellows up in the stark middle of a field and traded them shot for shot, and damn me if they didn’t go scuttling back uphill like a flock of frightened sheep!” The story of Duff’s defiance had spread through Evans’s brigade to fill the men with pride in southern invincibility. The remainder of Duff’s battalion was in place now, keeping the Yankees pinned among the trees at the bluffs summit. “You should tell Johnston about Duff,” Bird told Adam.
But Adam did not seem interested in the Mississippian’s heroism. “And you, Uncle, what are you doing?” he asked instead.
“Waiting for orders, of course. I guess Evans doesn’t know where to send us, so he’s waiting to see which pack of Yankees is the more dangerous. Once that’s determined, we’ll go and knock some heads bloody.”
Adam flinched at his uncle’s tone. Before he had joined the Legion and unexpectedly became its senior officer, Thaddeus Bird had been a schoolmaster who had professed a sardonic mockery of both soldiering and warfare, but one battle and a few months of command had turned Adam’s uncle into an altogether grimmer man. He retained his wit, but now it had a harsher edge, a symptom, Adam thought, of how war changed everything for the worse, though Adam sometimes wondered if he alone was aware of just how the war was coarsening and degrading all it touched. His fellow aides at the army headquarters reveled in the conflict, seeing it as a sporting rivalry that would award victory to the most enthusiastic players. Adam listened to such bombast and held his peace, knowing that any expression of his real views would be met with scorn at best and charges of chickenhearted cowardice at worst. Yet Adam was no coward. He simply believed the war was a tragedy born from pride and stupidity, and so he did his duty, hid his true feelings, and yearned for peace, though how long he could sustain either the pretense or the duplicity, he did not know. “Let’s hope no one’s head needs to be bloodied today,” he told his uncle. “It’s much too fine a day for killing.” He turned as K Company’s cooks lifted a pot off the flames. “Is that dinner?”
The midday dinner was cush: a stew of beef, bacon fat, and cornbread that was accompanied by a mash of boiled apples and potatoes. Food was plentiful here in Loudoun County where the farmland was rich and Confederate troops few. In Centreville and Manassas, Adam said, supplies were much more difficult. “They even ran out of coffee last month! I thought there’d be a mutiny.” He then listened with pretended amusement as Robert Decker and Amos Tunney told of Captain Starbuck’s great coffee raid. They had crossed the river by night and marched five miles through woods and farmland to raid a sutler’s stores on the outskirts of a northern camp. Eight men had gone with Starbuck and eight had come back, and the only northerner to detect them had been the sutler himself, a merchant whose living came from selling luxuries to troops. The sutler, sleeping among his stores, had shouted the alarm and pulled a revolver.
“Poor man,” Adam said.
“Poor man?” Starbuck protested his friend’s display of pity. “He was trying to shoot us!”
“So what did you do?”
“Cut his throat,” Starbuck said. “Didn’t want to alert the camp, you see, by firing a shot.”
Adam shuddered. “You killed a man for some coffee beans?”
“And some whiskey and dried peaches,” Robert Decker put in enthusiastically. “The newspapers over there reckoned it was secesh sympathizers. Bushwhackers, they called us. Bushwhackers! Us!”
“And next day we sold ten pounds
