Waddell was a rational man. He understood that all dreams come from knowledge. In the night, his legs had gone stiff, he had tossed about and wrapped his nightshirt around them. His imagination had processed the information as a dream of crushed legs.

And the horse? Waddell sighed, enjoying his own company in the quiet of the cool room. Cavalry days. The time, on the Petersburg Pike, advancing on Richmond, when he had nearly been thrown during a sudden thunderstorm. Lightning had forked out of a purple anvil in the hot, turbulent sky. An oak tree split and burst into flame, scattering the column like an artillery barrage. Horses and riders reared and plunged, men hollered and cursed, raindrops big as pennies stung their necks and puffed dust in the road like ricocheting minie balls. It was as if they’d been ambushed, that was the feeling—the icy needle in the heart, lungs suddenly breathless, eyes instantly sharp as field glasses, ears blooming with sound.

Waddell’s horse, Black Major, had careered off the road and up the high cutbank, out of control. He sawed back on the reins, and the horse wheeled, nearly toppling. Black Major flung his head backward, champing at his rider’s knee, then rolled a wild brown eye. He was a big, spirited animal.

At the top of the hill, they had spun around in the rain, horse and rider. The world dissolved into a wet blur—the rain fell in a hard, gray screen, and he was blind. He just kept sawing the reins and Black Major kept spinning, head down, panic shivering along his spine, his flanks. He could feel the muscles tuning like wires even through the stiff cavalry saddle.

Then at last, the thunder had moved away, the rain had calmed to a slow patter, and the horse had stilled, bowing his head and snorting. Waddell had been so dizzy he could hardly keep his seat.

He sipped his water, put down the glass, then slid out of bed and used the chamber pot. This new house had an indoor privy complete with plumbing, but he preferred the pot first thing out of bed.

Black Major hadn’t lasted the summer. Eighteen sixty-four, they lost the best of their horses that summer, rode them right into the ground. Lost them to artillery and Gatling guns. The Yankees fought like thugs, no respect for the forms. Horses stumbled and died and wound up in the bellies of marching men.

And now Black Major—one horse among all the mounts he had ridden during that campaign of quick advances and long retreats—had come back in a dream. Waddell hadn’t sat a warhorse in years, except in parades.

Waddell did not dream often. Whenever he dreamed so exotically, he woke refreshed and certain that something important was about to happen.