There were now six hundred and seventy-eight volunteers in the camp, almost all of them from within a half day’s ride of Faulconer Court House. They had been divided into ten companies, which had then elected their own officers though, as Faulconer cheerfully admitted, a deal of bribery had been needed to make sure that the best men won. “I think I used four barrels of best mountain whiskey,” Faulconer confided in his son, “to make sure that Miller and Patterson weren’t elected.” Each company had selected a captain and two lieutenants, while some had a second lieutenant as well. Washington Faulconer had appointed his own headquarter’s staff with the elderly Major Pelham as his second in command and the egregious Major Bird as his over-promoted clerk. “I tried to rid us of Pecker, but your mother absolutely insisted,” the Colonel confided in Adam. “Have you seen your mother?”

“This morning, sir, yes.”

“And is she well?”

“She says not.”

“She usually improves when I go away,” the Colonel said in a dryly amused voice. “And these are the headquarter tents.” Unlike the bell-shaped tents of the infantry companies the four headquarter tents were large wall-sided ridge tents, each equipped with a groundsheet, camp beds, folding stools, washing bowl, jug and a collapsible camp table which folded into a canvas bag. “That’s mine.” Faulconer gestured at the cleanest tent. “Major Pelham’s is next to me. I’ll put Ethan and Pecker over there, and you and Nate can share the fourth tent. I guess that will please you?” Adam and Ridley had both been appointed as captains, while Starbuck was the lowest of the low, a second lieutenant, and together the three young men formed what the Colonel called his corps of aides. Their job, he told Adam, was to be his messengers, as well as to serve as his eyes and ears on the battlefield. He made it all sound very ominous.

The Legion consisted of more than just the headquarter’s staff and ten companies of infantry. There was a band, a medical unit, a color party, a force of fifty cavalrymen who would be led by a captain and serve as the Legion’s scouts, and the battery of two bronze six-pounder cannon, both twenty years old and with smoothbore barrels that Faulconer had purchased from Bowers Foundry in Richmond where the guns had gone to be melted down and so made into newer weapons. He proudly showed the pair of guns to his son. “Aren’t they marvelous?”

The guns were certainly smart. Their bronze barrels had been buffed to a sun-reflecting dazzle, the wheel spokes and rims were newly varnished, while the guns’ accoutrements, the chains and buckets and rammers and wormscrews, had all been variously polished or painted, yet there was something oddly unsettling about the two weapons. They looked too grim for this summer morning, too full of the menace of death.