Truslow suddenly laughed. “I keep forgetting you’re a preacherman. Or half a preacherman.” He tossed Starbuck the ring of keys. “One of those will open the boxcar. Get inside, search it. You don’t have to steal anything”—the sarcasm was heavy—“but you can look for military supplies and if you see anything else worth stealing, you can tell me about it. And take this.” Truslow whipped his enormous bowie knife from its scabbard and tossed it to Starbuck.

Starbuck missed the catch, but retrieved the clumsy blade from the railbed. “What’s it for?”

“It’s for cutting throats, boy, but you can use it for opening boxes. Unless you were planning on using your teeth to get into the crates?”

The heavy brass padlock on the boxcar’s sliding door was a good ten feet above the railbed, but a rusted iron stirrup suggested how Starbuck could reach the lock. He pulled himself up and clung precariously to the hasp as he fiddled with the keys. He eventually found the right one, unlocked and slid the heavy door aside, then stepped inside.

The wagon was filled with boxes and sacks. The sacks were more easily opened than the crates and proved to hold seed, though Starbuck had no idea what kind of seed. He trickled the grains through his fingers, then gaped up at the stacked boxes and wondered how he was ever to search them all. The easiest way would have been to hurl the boxes out onto the ground, but the boxes were probably private property and he did not want to risk breaking anything. Most of the crates were marked for collection at either the Baltimore or Washington depot, proof that the occupation of Harper’s Ferry had not entirely closed federal traffic through the mountains. One of the crates marked for Washington was a dark-painted box that bore a stenciled and misspelled legend on its side: “1000 Rifle Musket 69IN Cartridgs.”

That at least had to be war matériel, and thus fair plunder. He used the clumsy bowie knife to cut the ropes that had tethered the stacks in place, then began shifting the obstructing crates onto the sacks of seed. It took him the best part of five minutes to reach the dark-painted crate and still more time to lever the well-nailed lid off the heavy box to discover that it was indeed packed with paper cartridges, each one containing a bullet and a measure of powder. Starbuck did his best to hammer the lid back into place, then manhandled the box down to the ground. It was still raining, so he thumped the lid with the heel of his right boot, trying to bang the top down tight and thus keep out the rain.