"I'm not sure I ever mastered gerunds," Starbuck said.

"Hardly difficult," Bird said, "so long as you remember that they are nouns which provide—"

"And I'm not sure I ever want to master the damn things," Starbuck interrupted.

"Wallow in your ignorance, then," Bird said grandly. "But you're also to look after young Coffman. I couldn't bear to write to his mother and tell her he's dead, and I have a horrid feeling that he's likely to prove stupidly brave. He's like a puppy. Tail up, nose wet, and can't wait to play battles with Yankees."

"I'll look after him, Pecker."

"But you're also to look after yourself," Bird said meaningfully. He stopped and looked into Starbuck's eyes. "There's a rumor, only a rumor, and God knows I do not like passing on rumors, but this one has an unpleasant ring to it. Swynyard was heard to say that you won't survive the next battle."

Starbuck dismissed the prediction with a grin. "Swynyard's a drunk, not a prophet." Nevertheless he felt a shudder of fear. He had been a soldier long enough to become inordinately superstitious, and no man liked to hear a presentiment of his own death.

"Suppose," Bird said, taking two cigars from inside his hatband, "that Swynyard has decided to arrange it?"

Starbuck stared incredulously at his Colonel. "Arrange my death?" he finally asked.

Bird scratched a lucifer match alight and stooped over its flame. "Colonel Swynyard," he announced dramatically when his cigar was drawing properly, "is a drunken swine, a beast, a cream-faced loon, a slave of nature, and a son of hell, but he is also, Nate, a most cunning rogue, and when he is not in his cups he must realize that he is losing the confidence of our great and revered leader. Which is why he must now try to do something which will please our esteemed lord and master. Get rid of you." The last four words were delivered brutally.

Starbuck laughed them off. "You think Swynyard will shoot me in the back?"

Bird gave Starbuck the lit cigar. "I don't know how he'll kill you. All I know is that he'd like to kill you, and that

Faulconer would like him to kill you, and for all I know our esteemed General is prepared to award Swynyard a healthy cash bonus if he succeeds in killing you. So be careful, Nate, or else join another regiment."

"No," Starbuck said immediately. The Faulconer Legion was his home. He was a Bostonian, a Northerner, a stranger in a strange land who had found in the Legion a refuge from his exile. The Legion provided Starbuck with casual kindnesses and a hive of friends, and those bonds of affection were far stronger than the distant enmity of Washington Faulconer. That enmity had grown worse when Faulconer's son Adam had deserted from the Southern army to fight for the Yankees, a defection for which Brigadier General Faulconer blamed Captain Starbuck, but not even the disparity in their ranks could persuade Starbuck to abandon his fight against the man who had founded the Legion and who now commanded the five regiments, including the Legion, that made up the Faulconer Brigade. "I've got no need to run away," he now told Bird. "Faulconer won't last any longer than Swynyard. Faulconer's a coward and Swynyard's a drunk, and before this summer's out, Pecker, you'll be Brigade commander and I'll be in command of the Legion."

Bird hooted with delight. "You are incorrigibly conceited, Nate. You! Commanding the Legion? I imagine Major Hinton and the dozen other men senior to you might have a different opinion."

"They might be senior, but I'm the best."

"Ah, you still suffer from the delusion that merit is rewarded in this world? I suppose you contracted that opinion with all the other nonsense they crammed into you when Yale was failing to give you mastery of the gerund?" Bird, achieving this lick at Starbuck's alma mater, laughed gleefully. His head jerked back and forth as he laughed, the odd jerking motion explaining his nickname: Pecker.

Starbuck joined in the laughter, for he, like just about everyone else in the Legion, liked Bird enormously. The schoolmaster was eccentric, opinionated, contrary, and one of the kindest men alive. He had also proved to possess an unexpected talent for soldiering. "We move at last," Bird now said, gesturing at the stalled column that had begun edging toward the ford where the solitary, strange figure of Jackson waited motionless on his mangy horse. "You owe me two dollars," Bird suddenly remarked as he led Starbuck back to the road.

"Two dollars!"

"Major Hinton's fiftieth birthday approaches. Lieutenant Pine assures me he can procure a ham, and I shall prevail on our beloved leader for some wine. We are paying for a feast."

"Is Hinton really that old?" Starbuck asked.

"He is indeed, and if you live that long we shall doubtless give you a drunken dinner as a reward. Have you got two bucks?"

"I haven't got two cents," Starbuck said. He had some money in Richmond, but that money represented his cushion against disaster and was not for frittering away on ham and wine.

"I shall lend you the money," Bird said with a rather despairing sigh. Most of the Legion's officers had private means, but Colonel Bird, like Starbuck, was forced to live on the small wages of a Confederate officer.

The men of Company H stood as Starbuck and Bird approached the road, though one of the newly arrived conscripts stayed prone on the grass verge and complained he could not march another step. His reward was a kick in the ribs from Sergeant Truslow. "You can't do that to me!" the man protested, scrabbling sideways to escape the Sergeant.

Truslow grabbed the man's jacket and pulled his face close in to his own. "Listen, you son of a poxed bitch, I can slit your slumbelly guts wide open and sell them to the Yankees for hog food if I want, and not because I'm a sergeant and you're a private, but because I'm a mean son of a bitch and you're a lily-livered louse. Now get the hell up and march."

"What comfortable words the good Sergeant speaks," Bird said as he jumped back across the dry ditch. He drew on his cigar. "So I can't persuade you to join another regiment, Nate?"

"No, sir."

Pecker Bird shook his head ruefully. "I think you're a fool, Nate, but for God's sake be a careful fool. For some odd reason I'd be sorry to lose you."

"Fall in!" Truslow shouted.

"I'll take care," Starbuck promised as he rejoined his company. His thirty-six veterans were lean, tanned, and ragged. Their boots were falling to pieces, their gray jackets were patched with common brown cloth, and their worldly possessions reduced to what a man could carry suspended from his rope belt or sling in a rolled blanket across his shoulder. The twenty conscripts made an awkward contrast in their new uniforms, clumsy leather brogans, and stiff knapsacks. Their faces were pale and their rifle muzzles unblackened by firing. They knew this northward march through the central counties of Virginia probably meant an imminent battle, but what that battle would bring was a mystery, while the veterans knew only too well that a fight would mean screaming and blood and hurt and pain and thirst, but maybe, too, a cache of plundered Yankee dollars or a bag of real coffee taken from a festering, maggot-riddled Northern corpse. "March on!" Starbuck shouted, and fell in beside Lieutenant Franklin Coffman at the head of the company.

"You see if I'm not right, sir," Coffman said. "Old Mad Jack's got feet bigger than a plowhorse."

As Starbuck marched into the ford, he looked at the General's feet. They were indeed enormous. So were Jackson's hands. But what was most extraordinary of all was why the General still held his left hand in midair like a child begging permission to leave a schoolroom. Starbuck was about to ask Coffman for an explanation when, astonishingly, the General stirred. He looked up from the water, and his gaze focused on Starbuck's company. "Coffman!" he called in an abrupt, high-pitched voice. "Come here, boy."