"Bitch!" Blythe said, slapping her. "Goddamned bitch!" There was the sound of cloth ripping; then Blythe realized the door had been thrown open, and he turned angrily around. "What the hell do you want?" He could not recognize the intruder who was silhouetted against the light outside.

"Leave her alone, Blythe!" Adam said.

"Faulconer? You son of a bitch!" Blythe scrambled to his feet and brushed scraps of hay from his hands. "I'm just questioning this lady, and what I do here is none of your damned business."

The woman clutched the remnants of her dress to her breasts and pushed herself across the floor. "He was attacking me, mister!" she called to Adam. "He was going to —"

"Get out!" Blythe shouted at Adam.

But Adam knew the time had come to make his stand. He drew his revolver, cocked it, then aimed the weapon at Blythe's head. "Just leave her alone."

Blythe smiled and shook his head. "You're a boy, Faulconer. I ain't attacking her! She's a rebel! She fired on us!"

"I never!" the woman called.

"Step away from her!" Adam said. He could sense his heart pounding and recognized his own fear, but he knew Blythe had to be confronted.

"Shoot the interfering son of a bitch, Kemble!" Blythe shouted past Adam to the Corporal.

"Touch the trigger, Corporal, and I'll kill you." Sergeant Huxtable spoke from beyond the door.

Blythe seemed to find the impasse amusing, for he still grinned as he brushed scraps of hay from his uniform. "She's a traitor, Faulconer. A damned rebel. You know what the penalty is for firing on a Northern soldier? You've read General Order Number Seven, ain't you?" He had taken the silver case of lucifers from his pocket.

"Just step away from her!" Adam repeated.

"I never wanted to be near her!" Blythe said. "But the bitch kept trying to stop me from doing my job. And my job, Faulconer, is to burn this property down like Major General John Pope ordered." He began to strike the lucifers, then to drop the burning matches into the hay. He laughed as the woman tried to beat the flames out with her bare hands. Her torn dress dropped open and Blythe gestured at her. "Nice titties, Faulconer. Or can't you make a comparison on account of never having seen none?" Blythe chuckled as he dropped more matches and started more fires. "So why don't you shoot me, Faulconer? Lost your nerve.

"Because I don't want to tell the partisans we're here. There's a group of them a mile north of here. And coming this way."

Blythe stared at Adam for a heartbeat, then smiled. "Nice try, boy."

"Maybe two dozen of them," Sergeant Huxtable said flatly from the barn door.

Behind Blythe the hay had started to burn fiercely. The woman retreated from the heat, crying. Her hair had come loose to hang either side of her face. She clasped her bodice, then spat at Blythe before running out of the barn. "Thank you, mister," she said as she passed Adam.

Blythe watched her go, then looked back to Adam. "Are you lying to me, Faulconer?" he asked.

"You want to stay here and find out?" Adam asked. "You want to run the risk of meeting that woman's husband?"

"Goddamn partisans!" Sergeant Seth Kelley shouted his sudden warning from the sunlight outside. "'Bout a mile away, Billy!"

"Jesus hollering Christ!" Blythe swore, then ran past Adam and shouted for his horse. "Come on, boys! Get out of here! Take what you can, leave the rest! Hurry now! Hurry!"

The hay was well alight, the smoke churning out the barn door. "Where to?" Sergeant Kelley asked.

"South! Come on!" Blythe was desperate to escape the farm before the partisans arrived. He snatched a bag of plunder, rammed his spurs back, and galloped south toward the woods.

His men followed in ragged order. Adam and his troop were the last to go. They found Blythe a half-mile inside the woods, hesitating over a track leading west and another going south. There were men's voices in the distant air, and that was enough to make Blythe choose the southward track that promised a faster escape because it went downhill. Adam's horses were tired, their lungs wheezing asthmatically and their flanks wet with white sweat, yet still Blythe pressed the pace, not stopping until they had ridden a good six or seven miles from the farmhouse. There was no evidence of any pursuit. "Bastards probably stopped to put out that fire, Billy," Seth Kelley opined.

"Can't tell with partisans," Blythe said. "Cunning as serpents. Could be anywhere." He looked nervously around the green woods.

The horsemen had stopped beside a stream that flowed eastward through sunlit woodlands. The horses were all winded, and a couple of the beasts were lamed. If the partisans had followed, Adam knew, then every man in Blythe's command would either be killed or captured. "What do we do now?" one of the men asked Blythe.

"We find out where the hell we are," Blythe snapped irritably.

"I know where we are," Adam said, "and I know where we're going."

Blythe, panting hard and with his red face covered in sweat, looked at his fellow officer. "Where?" he asked curtly.

"We're going to get some decent horses," Adam said, "and then we're going to fight like we're supposed to."

"Amen," Sergeant Huxtable said.

Blythe straightened up in his saddle. "Are you saying I don't want to fight, Faulconer?"

For a second Adam was tempted to accept the challenge and make Blythe either fight him or back down in front of his men. Then he remembered the partisans and knew he could not afford the luxury of fighting a duel so deep behind the enemy's lines.

Blythe saw Adam's hesitation and translated it as cowardice. He grinned. "Lost your tongue?"

"I'm going south, Blythe, and I don't care if you come or stay."

"I'll let you go, boy," Blythe said, then pulled his horse around and spurred westward. He planned to take his men to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, then follow the mountains north until he came to the Federal lines.

Adam watched Blythe go and knew he had merely postponed their confrontation. Then, after dusk, when his horses and men were rested, Adam led the troop south to where he planned a victory.

JACKSON, LIKE A SNAKE THAT HAD STRUCK, hurt, but not killed its prey, retreated sullenly back across the Rapidan River, thus abandoning the battlefield at the foot of Cedar Mountain with its blackened swathes of scorched turf and long raw mounds of newly turned graves where turkey vultures gorged on bodies uncovered by dogs.

The Yankees were left in possession of Culpeper County and counted its possession as a victory, though no one really believed Jackson was defeated. The snake still had fangs, which meant that the Northern generals must try to scotch it again. Yankee troops poured southward and spread their camps along the Rapidan's northern bank while, south of the river in Gordonsville, the railcars brought fresh rebel troops from Richmond.

On both banks of the river there was a nervous sense of great events waiting to happen, and inevitably rumors fed that apprehension. The rebels feared that McClellan's Army of the Potomac had joined forces with Pope's Army of Virginia, and if that prospect was not frightening enough, a Northern newspaper hinted that the Yankees had emptied every jail between Washington and the Canadian border and put the convicts in uniform, handed them guns, and sent them to lay Virginia waste. Another tale insisted that the North was recruiting mercenaries in Europe, Germans mostly, and that each foreigner had been promised an acre of Indian territory for every rebel killed. "I knew we'd end up fighting Hessians," Truslow remarked, "but we beat the sumbitches in '76 so we'll beat the sumbitches in '62 as well." Yet the most persistent rumor of all was that Abe Lincoln was enlisting freed slaves into his army. "Because he can't find anyone else willing to fight against us," Lieutenant Coffman averred patriotically.