In the meantime someone had hijacked two dozen slaves from his property, taking them downriver to New Orleans through a Confederate blockade, murdering one of his paddy rollers in the bargain. Ira could not get the image of the dead paddy roller out of his mind. Three of his overseers had carted the body up to the front porch, stuffed in a lidless packing case, the knife wound in his throat like a torn purple rose.

Ira did not believe in coincidences. One of his own men had now died in the same fashion as the young sentry in the New Orleans hospital the night Ira escaped from Yankee custody.

Nor was it coincidence that a woman with a Northern accent was on board the boat that transported a cargo of Negroes supposedly infected with yellow jack to a quarantine area north of New Orleans the same night two dozen of his slaves had disappeared from the plantation.

Abigail Dowling, he thought.

Every morning he woke with her name in his mind. She bothered him in ways he had difficulty defining. She had a kind of pious egalitarian manner that made him want to slap her face. At the same time she aroused feelings in him that left his loins aching. She was the most stunning woman he'd ever seen, with the classical proportions of a Renaissance sculpture, and she bore herself with a dignity and intellectual grace that few beautiful women ever possessed.

The spring rains came and the earth turned green and the fruit trees bloomed outside Ira's window. But the name of Abigail Dowling would not leave his thoughts, and sometimes he woke throbbing in the morning and had images of her moaning under his weight. Nor did it help for him to remember that she had rebuffed him and made him feel obscene and sexually perverse.

He looked out upon the sodden feilds and at an oak tree that was stiff and hard-looking in the wind. What was it that bothered him most about her? But he already knew the answer to his own question. She was intelligent, educated, unafraid and seemed to want nothing he was aware of. He did not trust people who did not want something. But most of all she bothered him because she had looked into his soul and seen something there that repelled her.

What was her weakness? he asked himself. Everybody had one. Maybe he had been looking in the wrong place. She seemed to have male friends rather than suitors or lovers. A woman that beautiful? He gazed out the window at the white bloom on his peach trees and a slave girl pulling weeds inside the drip lines. His side ached miserably. He placed a small lump of opium under his lip and felt a sensation like warm water leaking through his nervous system.

He had thought of Abigail Dowling as a flesh-and-blood replication of Renaissance sculpture, an Aphrodite rising from a tidal pool on the Massachusetts coast. He watched the slave girl drop a handful of weeds into her basket and get to her feet, the tops of her breasts exposed to his view. Maybe he had been only partially correct about Abigail's classical origins.

Were her antecedents on the island of Lesbos rather than Melos? He wondered.

AFTER the retreat from Shiloh, Willie began to dream about a choleric-faced man, someone he did not know, advancing out of a mist with a bayonet fixed to the end of his rifle. The choleric-faced man would not fall down when Willie fired upon him. He also dreamed about the sound of a distant siege gun coughing in a woods, then a shell arcing in a dark blur out of a blue sky, exploding in a trench full of men with the force of a ship's boiler blowing apart. He began to take his dreams into the waking day, and his anxieties and fears would be so great with the passage of each hour that contact with the enemy became a welcomed release.

That's when a line sergeant gave him what the sergeant considered the key to survival for a common foot soldier: You never thought about it before you did it and you never thought about it when it was over.

Nor did thinking make life easier for a commissioned officer, Willie told himself later.

Lieutenant Willie Burke peered through the spyglass at the steam engine and the line of freight cars parked on the railway track. The sun was white in the sky, the woods breathless, the leaves in the canopy coated with dust. His clothes stuck to his skin; his hair was drenched with sweat inside his hat. There was a humming sound in his head, like the drone of mosquitoes, except the woods were dry and there were no mosquitoes in them.

But their eggs were in his blood, and at night, and sometimes in daylight, he would see gray spots before his eyes and hear mosquitoes humming in his head, as was now the case, and he wished he was lying in a cold stream somewhere and not sighting through a spyglass, breathing dust inside a sweltering woods.

The train was deserted, the steam engine pocked with holes from caseshot. Two of the boxcars that had been loaded with munitions had burned to the wheels. Another boxcar, a yellow one with sliding doors that had carried Negro troops, was embedded from stem to stern with iron railroad spikes, like rust-colored quills on a porcupine.

The black soldiers, almost all of them newly emancipated slaves, untrained, with no experience in the field, had melted away into thickly wooded river bottoms and had taken a mule-drawn field piece with them, whipping the mules across the flanks, powdering dust in the air as they crushed through the palmettos and underbrush.

Willie moved the spyglass over the river bottoms but could see no movement inside the trees. The train tracks shimmered in the heat and he could smell the hot odor of creosote in the ties. He focused the glass far down the line on an observation balloon captured from the Federals. It was silver, as bright as tin, tethered to the earth by a rope that must have been two hundred feet long. A bearded man in a wicker basket was looking back in Willie's direction with a spyglass similar to his own.

Willie got down on one knee and gestured for Sergeant Clay Hatcher to do the same. The sudden movement made his head swim and his eyes momentarily go out of focus. He spread a map on the ground and tapped on it with his finger.

"That woods yonder is probably a couple of miles deep. Their officers are dead, so my guess is they're bunched up," he said.

Hatcher nodded as though he understood. But in reality he didn't. He carried a Henry repeater he had taken off the body of a Federal soldier. He was unshaved and sweaty, his kepi crimped wetly into his hair.

"Take two men and get around behind them. When you do I want you to make life very uncomfortable for them."

"I can do that," he said.

"I don't think you follow me, Hatch."

Hatcher looked at him, his eyes uncertain.

"I want them to unlimber that field piece. You'll be on the receiving end of it. You up for that?" Willie said.

"As good as the next," Hatcher said.

"Better get moving, then," Willie said.

Hatcher kept his gaze on the map without seeming to see it.

"You want prisoners?" he asked.

"If they surrender," Willie said.

"The rumor is there ain't a great need for them in the rear."

"Well, you hear this. If I catch you operating under a black flag, I'll take you before a provost and you'll be off to your heavenly reward before the sun sets."

Hatcher nodded, his eyes looking at nothing, a lump of cartilage flexing in his jaw. "One of these days all this will be over," he said.

"Yes?"

"That's all. It'll be over and my stripes and those acorns on your hat won't mean very much."

"I look forward to the day, Hatch."

Willie watched Hatcher crunch across the floor of the woods toward the train track, his spine slightly bent, his clothes stiff with salt and dirt, his Henry repeater cupped in a horizontal position, like a prehistoric creature carrying a spear. Two other men joined him, both of them dressed in tattered butternut, and the three of them crossed the railway embankment and disappeared into the trees on the far side.