Truslow made a face as if to suggest that he was tired of single-handedly correcting Starbuck’s education, but then deigned to explain anyway. “If you grow up in the country you’re always being told about the circus. All the wonders of it. The freak shows and the animals acts, and the elephant, and all the children keep asking what the elephant is, and you can’t explain, so one day you take the children and they see for themselves. That’s what a man’s first battle is like. Like seeing the elephant. Some men piss their pants, some run like hell, some make the enemy run. You’ll be all right, but Faulconer won’t.” Truslow jerked a scornful head at the Colonel, who was riding alone at the head of the small column. “You mark me well, boy, but I tell you Faulconer won’t last one battle.”

The thought of battle made Starbuck shiver suddenly. Sometimes the anticipation was exciting, other times it was terrifying, and this time the thought of seeing the elephant was scaring him, perhaps because the raid’s failure had shown just how much could go wrong. He did not want to think about the consequences of things going wrong in battle, so changed the subject by blurting out the first question that came to his tongue. “Did you really murder three men?”

Truslow gave him a strange look, as though he did not understand why such a question would ever be asked. “At least,” Truslow said scornfully. “Why?”

“So how does it feel to murder someone?” Starbuck asked. He had really wanted to ask why the murders had been committed, and how, and whether anyone had tried to bring Truslow to justice, but instead he asked the stupid question about sensation.

Truslow mocked the query. “How does it feel? Jesus, boy, there are times when you make more noise than a cracked pot. How does it feel? You find out for yourself, boy. You go and murder someone, then you tell me the answer.” Truslow spurred ahead, evidently disgusted with Starbuck’s prurient question.

They camped that night on a wet ridge above a small settlement where a smelting furnace blazed like the maw of hell and seeped the foul stench of coal smoke up to the ridge where Starbuck could not sleep. Instead he sat with the guards, shivering and wishing the rain would stop. He had eaten his supper of cold dried beef and damp bread with the other three officers, and Faulconer had been livelier than on the previous nights and had even sought some consolation for the raid’s failure. “Our powder might have let us down,” he said, “but we showed we could be a threat.”

“That’s true, Colonel,” Hinton said loyally.

“They’ll have to post guards on every bridge,” the Colonel claimed, “and a man guarding a bridge can’t be invading the South.”