“You can’t bring that in! Don’t be a fool. Oh, I see! Tie it to the hitching ring. There’s a ring somewhere. There, by the step.”

Eventually the two young people were ushered into Bird’s front parlor. His house had two rooms downstairs, the kitchen and parlor, and a bedroom upstairs, which was reached by a flight of stairs in the next-door schoolroom. The parlor contained a fireplace, a broken armchair, a wooden bench discarded by the church and a table piled high with schoolbooks and sheet music. “It’s been a long time since I last saw you,” Bird remarked to Robert Decker.

“Six years, Mister Bird.”

“That long?” Bird remembered that the Decker family had fled Faulconer Court House after their father had been involved in an abortive robbery on the Rosskill Road. They had taken refuge in the hills where, judging by Robert Decker’s clothes, they had not prospered. “How is your father?” Bird now demanded of Robert.

Decker said his father had been killed by a fall from a bolting horse. “And I’m married now.” Decker, who was standing dripping in front of the empty fireplace, gestured at Sally, who was perched warily among the tufts of horsehair that protruded from Bird’s sorry armchair. “This is Sally,” Decker said proudly, “my wife.”

“Indeed, indeed.” Bird felt oddly embarrassed, maybe because Sally Decker was a girl of such extraordinary looks. Her clothes were rags and her face and hair were filthy and her shoes were held together with twine, but she was nevertheless as breathtaking a beauty as any of the girls who paraded in their carriages around Richmond’s Capitol Square.

“I ain’t his real wife,” Sally said cattily, trying to hide a ring on her wedding finger.

“Yes, you are,” Decker insisted. “We were minister married, Mister Bird.”

“Good, good. Whatever.” Bird, mindful of his own new minister-married wife in the kitchen, wondered what on earth these two wanted of him. An education? Sometimes a grown pupil came back to Bird and asked the schoolmaster to repair the years of inattention or truancy.

“I came to see you, Mister Bird, because they said you could enlist me in the Legion,” Decker explained.

“Ah!” Bird, relieved at the commonplace explanation, glanced from the honest-faced boy to the sullen beauty. They were, he thought, an ill-assorted couple, then he wondered if folks thought the same of Priscilla and himself. “You want to enlist in the Faulconer Legion, is that it?”

“I reckon I do,” Decker said, and glanced at Sally, which suggested that she, rather than he, had engendered the wish.

“Is it a petticoat?” Bird asked suddenly, struck by a sudden and unsavory thought.

Decker looked puzzled. “Petticoat, Mister Bird?”

“You haven’t received a petticoat?” Bird asked intensely, clawing his left hand through his ragged beard. “Left on your doorstep?”

“No, Mister Bird.” Decker clearly thought his old schoolmaster was at best eccentric, at worst crazy.