“Hell, yes.” She laughed briefly, though at what she did not explain. “He’s kind of nice,” she added in lame explanation, and Thaddeus Bird, even though he was as newly married as a man could be, felt a sudden surge of jealousy against Starbuck. He immediately chided himself for having had such an unworthy envy, then marveled that a daughter of Truslow’s could have provoked it. “Is Mister Starbuck a proper preacherman?” Sally frowned at Bird as she asked the odd question.

“A preacherman!” Bird exclaimed. “He’s a theologian, certainly. I’ve not heard him preach, but he isn’t ordained, if that’s what you mean.”

“What’s ordained?”

“It is a superstitious ceremony entitling a man to administer the Christian sacraments.” Bird paused, wondering if he had confused her with his impiety. “Is it important?”

“To me it is, yes. So he ain’t a minister? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, he is not.”

Sally smiled, not at Bird, but at some inner amusement, then she ducked into the hall and so out into the wet street. Bird watched the girl climb into the saddle and felt as though he had been scorched by a sudden fierce flame.

“Who was that?” Priscilla called from the kitchen as she heard the front door close.

“Trouble.” Thaddeus Bird bolted the door. “Double toil and trouble, but not for us, not for us, not for us.” He carried the candle back into the small kitchen where Priscilla was arranging the leftovers from the wedding feast onto a plate. Thaddeus Bird stopped her work, gathered her into his thin arms, and held her close and wondered why he would ever want to leave this small house with this good woman. “I don’t know that I should go to war,” he said softly.

“You must do what you want,” Priscilla said, and felt her heart leap at the prospect that perhaps her man would not march to the guns. She loved and admired this awkward, difficult, clever man, but she could not see him as a soldier. She could imagine the handsome Washington Faulconer as a soldier, or even the unimaginative Major Pelham, or almost any of the sturdy young men who carried a rifle with the same assurance with which they had once wielded a spade or a pitchfork, but she could not envisage her irascible Thaddeus on a battlefield. “I can’t think why you should ever have wanted to go for a soldier,” she said, but very mildly so that he would not construe her words as criticism.

“Do you know why?” Thaddeus asked, then answered his own question. “Because I have a fancy that I might be good at soldiering.”

Priscilla almost laughed, then saw her new husband was serious. “Truly?”