"So you did, sir," Swynyard confirmed.

"But you can't keep a rogue away from his liquor, is that what you were going to say, Colonel?" Faulconer asked nastily.

"I was going to say, sir, that McComb keeps a pair of whores, and plenty of men will risk punishment for that."

"McComb keeps women?" Faulconer growled. "Then have the filthy creatures arrested! Goddamn it. I don't want half the Brigade felled by pox." He lit a cigar and half listened as Swynyard went on with his report, but while appearing to pay attention Faulconer was really thinking just how much he disliked this new manifestation of Swynyard's idiocy. The old, drunken Swynyard had been largely invisible, an embarrassment to be sure, but a predictable embarrassment and a small price to pay for the support of his cousin, the editor of the Richmond Examiner. Yet the new Swynyard was a man who flaunted his morality with an assiduity that Faulconer found grating. Where Swynyard had once been oblivious of the Brigade's affairs, he was now endlessly busy, and endless, too, in bringing complaints and suggestions to Faulconer's attention. Tonight there was a problem with a consignment of percussion caps from the Richmond Arsenal. At least half of the caps had proved defective. "Then send the damn things back!" Faulconer snapped.

"I need your signature," Swynyard pointed out.

"Can't you forge it?"

"I can, but would rather not."

"Damn your scruples, give it to me then," Faulconer said.

"And sadly there were three more desertions, sir," Swynyard said, placing the deserters' report sheets beside the document needing the General's signature. Swynyard's hand shook, not from nerves, but because sobriety had still not wholly calmed his alcohol-ravaged body.

"Who ran?" Faulconer asked in a dangerous voice. He hated desertions, translating the crime as a criticism of his leadership.

"Two are Haxall's men," Swynyard said, referring to the Arkansas battalion, "and Haxall suspects they're making for home, and the third is one of the new men from Richmond, who reckons his wife is cheating on him. He's the same fellow who ran two weeks ago."

"So catch the bastard again and this time shoot him," Faulconer said, slapping at a moth that annoyed him. "And how the hell did they run? Aren't the pickets awake?"

"All three were part of a work party carrying ammunition to Starbuck's position, sir," Swynyard said.

Faulconer pulled his left boot back from Moxey's grasp, then looked up at the scarred, bearded Colonel. "Explain," Faulconer said in a very menacing voice.

Swynyard was well aware that the mention of Starbuck's name put him in a risky position, but the Colonel possessed both the courage of his military convictions and the strength of his newfound faith, and so he confidently explained the discovery of the unsuspected ford and told how Starbuck had suggested garrisoning the river crossing. "I gave him three companies, sir, and inspected him at dusk. He's well entrenched and can't be outflanked."

"Goddamn it!" Faulconer shouted, thumping the table beside his chair. "What orders did I give you?" He paused, but he was not waiting for any answer. Indeed the General could not have listened to any answer, for all the frustrations of his last few months had swollen into an abrupt explosion that was now unstoppable. Like a volcano's molten core that had been cribbed too long by a cap of cold, hard rock, Faulconer's temper erupted into an incandescent rage that had nothing whatever to do with the point at issue. Indeed, had Swynyard merely told Faulconer that an unguarded ford had been discovered on the Brigade's open flank, then the General would doubtless have ordered two or three companies of riflemen to watch the crossing, but the mention of Starbuck's name had tipped Washington Faulconer into instant fury.

For a few seconds it was a fury so profound that Faulconer was incapable of speaking, but then the words flowed and soldiers fifty yards from the farmhouse listened in awe, while men bivouacked further away hurried closer to hear the diatribe. Swynyard, Faulconer said, was a shadbellied weakling who if he was not sucking at his goddamned bottle was clasped to the tit of his new religion. "For Christ's sake, you fool, stand on your own goddamned feet!" This was unfair, for the apparent point of Faulconer's rage was that Swynyard had dared to take responsibility for moving part of the Brigade without Faulconer's express permission, but for these first few moments the flow of white-hot anger was not directed but simply went wherever Faulconer's frustrations let it fly, and so the General's anger encompassed Swynyard's breeding, his ugly appearance, and his family's involvement in the slave trade. Then Washington Faulconer raked over Swynyard's apparent conversion, scorning the Colonel's piety as fraudulent and his newfound efficiency as a pose.

It was a spectacular explosion. Washington Faulconer was already feeling cheated because his stay in Gordonsville had been cut short, but now all the bitterness over his traitor son and his resentments over Starbuck and the mulish manner in which the Brigade reacted to his simplest orders fed the bitter torrent. Two decades of being despised by his wife and scorned by his wife's damned schoolmaster brother poured in an ugly spew from Faulconer's mouth as he screamed his insults at Swynyard, and finally, when breathlessness alone made him drop his voice from a half scream into mere loudness, he suspended Swynyard from his duties. "You will consider yourself under arrest!" the General finished.

There was silence in the room. Moxey, his face white with fear, stood backed against the flags on the wall, while not a sound came from the astonished audience outside. The tic in Swynyard's cheek had begun to quiver, and he was clenching and unclenching his maimed left hand, but when at last he spoke, he used the mildest tone. "I have to protest, sir," he began.

"You can protest all you like, damn you, but it'll do no good! I've endured too much! Too much! You're either drunk or praying, either flat on your back or down on your knees, and in either position you're no more damned good to me than a spavined bitch. You're under arrest, Swynyard, so get the hell out of my sight. Go!" Faulconer shouted the order, unable to bear the sight of the man for one instant longer. Then he stumped one-booted onto the veranda. "Major Hinton!" he shouted into the dark, confident that the summons would be passed on and obeyed swiftly. "Major Hinton! Come here!"

The General, at last, was taking command.

Starbuck took his supper in the bivouac, sitting beside a small fire with Truslow and Coffman. The night was warm and humid, darkening every moment as clouds heaped higher and higher above the Blue Ridge Mountains. For a time the moon silvered the trees; then the clouds misted and finally shrouded its light. Supper was a piece of corn bread and fat bacon. The corn had been badly milled, and Starbuck broke a tooth on a scrap of cob embedded in the grain. He swore. "Dentists' favorite bread," Truslow said as Starbuck spat out the cob and tooth fragment together; then the Sergeant offered a ghastly grin to show how many of his own teeth were missing. "Pulled half of them myself, the rest old McIlvanney yanked. He was a well-digger who doubled up as a dentist."

Starbuck flinched with pain when he took his next bite. "I don't know why God invented teeth," he said.

"I don't know why God invented Yankees," Truslow added.

"Because otherwise there'd only be Indians and Mexicans for Christians to shoot," Lieutenant Coffman unexpectedly observed.

"I know why God invented junior lieutenants," Truslow observed. "For target practice." He climbed to his feet, stretched his arms, and picked up his rifle in readiness to relieve the pickets in the rifle pits above the river. "I wish it would rain," he said.