"All right! All right!" Davies said, frightened by Starbuck's vehemence.

"I'm serious, Davies," Starbuck said, although the Lieutenant had never actually doubted Starbuck's sincerity. "I'll goddamn kill you if you try this again," Starbuck said. "Now go away." Starbuck watched the Lieutenant vanish into the night, then let out a long sigh of relief. "We'll keep this for tomorrow night, Sergeant," he told Truslow, flourishing the whiskey that Davies had abandoned.

"Then put it into Swynyard's tent?"

"Exactly. God damn Davies's thirty bucks. I need money far more than he does."

Truslow walked on beside his Captain. "What that suffering bastard Swynyard really likes is good brandy."

"Then maybe we can find some on the battlefield tomorrow," Starbuck said, and that discovery seemed a distinct possibility, for although three days had passed since the battle, there were still wounded men lying in the woods or hidden in the broken stands of corn. Indeed, there were so many dead and wounded that the rebels alone could not retrieve all the casualties, and so a truce had been arranged and troops from General Banks's army had been invited to rescue their own men.

The day of the truce dawned hot and sultry. Most of the Legion had been ordered to help search the undergrowth in the belt of trees where the Yankee attack had stalled, but Starbuck's company was set to tree-felling and the construction of a massive pyre on which the dead horses of the Pennsylvanian cavalry were to be burned. On the turnpike behind the pyre a succession of light-sprung Northern ambulances carried away the Yankee wounded. The Northern vehicles, specially constructed for their purpose, were in stark contrast to the farm carts and captured army wagons that the rebels used as ambulances, just as the uniformed and well-equipped Northern soldiers looked so much smarter than the rebel troops. A Pennsylvanian captain in charge of the detail loading the ambulances sauntered down to Starbuck's men and had to ask which of the ragamuffins was their officer. "Dick Levergood," he introduced himself to Starbuck.

"Nate Starbuck."

Levergood companionably offered Starbuck a cigar and a drink of lemonade. "It's crystallized essence," he said, apologizing for the lemonade that was reconstituted from a powder mix, "but it doesn't taste bad. My mother sends it."

"You'd rather have whiskey?" Starbuck offered Levergood a bottle. "It's good Northern liquor," Starbuck added mischievously.

Other Pennsylvanians joined the Legionnaires. Newspapers were exchanged and twists of tobacco swapped for coffee, though the briskest trade was in Confederate dollars. Every Northerner wanted to buy Southern scrip to send home as a souvenir, and the price of the ill-printed Southern money was rising by the minute. The men made their trades beside the great pyre that was a sixty-foot-long mound of newly cut pine logs on which a company of Confederate gunners was now piling the horses. The artillerymen were using a sling-cart that had a lifting frame bolted to its bed. The wagon's real purpose was rescuing dismounted cannon barrels, but now its crane jib hoisted the rotting horse carcasses six feet in the air, then swung them onto the logs, where a team of men with their mouths and nostrils scarfed against the stink levered the swollen corpses into place with handspikes. Another two masked men splashed kerosene on the pyre.

Captain Levergood peered at the sling-cart. "That's one of ours."

"Captured." Starbuck confirmed the cart's Northern origins; indeed the sling-cart still had the letters USA stenciled on its backboard.

"No, no," Levergood said. "One of my family's carts. We manufacture them in Pittsburgh. We used to make sulkies, buggies, Deerborns, and horsecars, now we mostly make army wagons. A hundred wagons a month and the government pays whatever we ask. I tell you, Starbuck, if you want to make a fortune, then work for the government. They pay more for a seven-ton wagon than we ever dared charge for an eight-horse coach with leather seats, stove, silk drapes, turkey carpets, and silver-gilt lamps."

Starbuck drew on his cigar. "So why are you being shot at here instead of building carts in Pittsburgh?"

Levergood shrugged. "Wanted to fight for my country." He sounded embarrassed at making the confession. "Mind you, I never dreamed the war would last; more than a summer."

"Nor did we," Starbuck said. "We reckoned one good battle to teach you a lesson and that would be the sum of it."

"Reckon we must be slow learners," Levergood said affably. "Mind you, it won't be long now."

"It won't?" Starbuck asked, amused.

"McClellan's leaving the peninsula, that's what we hear. His men are sailing north and in another couple of weeks his army will be alongside ours and then we'll be down on you like a pack of wolves. Pope's army and McClellan's combined. You'll be crushed like a soft grape. I just hope there are enough beds in Richmond to take care of us all."

"There are plenty of prison beds there," Starbuck said, "but their mattresses ain't too soft."

Levergood laughed, then turned as a voice boomed from the road. "Read it! Read it! Let the word of God work its grace on your sinful souls. Here! Take and read, take and read." An older man dressed in preacher's garb was distributing tracts from horseback, scattering the leaflets down to the rebel soldiers beside the road.

"Jesus!" Starbuck said in astonishment.

"The Reverend Elial Starbuck," Levergood said with evident pride that such a famous man was present. "He preached to us yesterday. My, but he's got a rare tongue in him. It seems he's close to our high command and they've promised him the honor of preaching the very first sermon in liberated Richmond." Levergood paused, then frowned. "You're called Starbuck, too. Are you related?"

"Just a coincidence," Starbuck said. He edged around the end of the pyre. He had faced battle with evident courage, but he could not face his father. He went to where Esau Washbrook was mounting a solitary guard over the company's stacked weapons. "Give me your rifle, Washbrook," he said.

Washbrook, the company's best marksman, had equipped himself with a European-made sniper's rifle: a heavy long-range killing machine with a telescopic sight running alongside the barrel. "You're not going to kill the man, are you?" Levergood asked. The Pennsylvanian had followed Starbuck from the road.

"No." Starbuck aimed the rifle at his father, inspecting him through the telescopic sight. The gunners had set fire to the horses' funeral pyre, and the smoke was beginning to whip across Starbuck's vision while the heat of the fire was quivering the image held in the gun's crosshairs. His father, astonishingly, looked happier than Starbuck had ever seen him. He was evidently exulting in the stench of death and the remnants of battle.

"The flames of hell will burn brighter than these fires!" the preacher called to the rebels. "They will burn for all eternity and lap you with insufferable pain! That is your certain fate unless you repent now! God is reaching His hand out for you! Repent and you will be saved!"

Starbuck lightly touched the trigger, then felt ashamed of the impulse and immediately lowered the gun. For a second it seemed that his father had stared straight at him, but doubtless the preacher's own vision had been smeared by the shimmer of smoky heat, for he had looked away without recognition before riding back toward the Federal lines.

The flames of the pyre leaped higher as fat from the carcasses ran down to sizzle among the logs. The last ambulances were gone north and with them the final wagons carrying the Yankee dead. Bugles now called the Yankee living back to their own lines, and Captain Levergood held out his hand. "Guess we'll meet again, Nate."

"I'd like that." Starbuck shook the Northerner's hand.