He wished he had been in a real cavalry charge—just once. Not one more indecisive skirmish in the woods, but an honest-to-God, full-bore, galloping, saber-clashing spectacle. In the crucible of frontal combat, a man might test himself. He might discover if other men would follow him. He might feel the rapture of the saber arcing in clenched fist, steel against steel, might shudder with the shock of meeting the enemy’s line and turning it.

But a man might, instead, be found wanting.

Or a man might have his legs infected and lose heart. Something might go out of him that could never be put back.

That summer of healing, standing to his waist in the surf, leaning on a brace of canes, he had been visited by a premonition. It troubled him all the more because he didn’t believe in premonitions—all that hillbilly voodoo was for the private soldiers, ignorant farm boys, sharecroppers and river rats and simple hired men. Waddell had studied law at the university in Chapel Hill under the best men of his age—Judge Battle and Samuel F. Phillips. He’d taken his first legal fee back in ‘55, on his twenty-first birthday—a four-dollar note issued by the Bank of Cape Fear. He was a man of reason and faculties.

But there was no denying the power of the vision. He balanced on wobbly, shivering legs, legs that felt like wooden stilts, and squinted toward the horizon, not believing his own eyes. There were ships out there—Yankee ships ranked in spiny silhouette against the rising sun, steaming south toward the river channel to take the fort that guarded the city.

If he watched long enough, they faded into the blear of the horizon. Illusion, he told himself. A trick of pain and medicine and shock. He was not a well man, He saw things that had not happened yet. Even the Yankees knew Fort Fisher was invincible.

Later, he walked the beach, feeling the flesh harden and tone in his legs. Even on cold, raw days, he waded into the frothing sea and remained there as long as he could stand it, gritting his teeth against the cold and the pain. A man’s will could overcome anything. But when he looked out to sea, there was the line of ships, a vision stubborn as bad weather.

Finally, on Christmas 1864, real dreadnoughts darkened the sea. The Yankees swarmed ashore toward the Confederate lines. Every church bell in town tolled the news. Waddell buttoned on his dress grays and brushed them out.

Then a nor’easter blew the fleet back to Virginia, and he put away his uniform.

But three weeks later, the armada returned to finish the job, as he knew it would.

The bells always brought it back.

Fort Fisher, the Sevastopol of the Confederacy, Lee’s last hope.