“They’re not the last word in guns.” Faulconer took his son’s silence for an unspoken criticism. “They’re hardly Parrotts, and not even rifled, but I fancy we can strew a few Yankee corpses across the field with these beauties. Ain’t that so, Pelham?”

“If we can find some ammunition for them, Colonel.” Major Pelham, who was accompanying the Colonel on this inspection tour, sounded very dubious.

“We’ll find ammunition!” Now that his son had returned from the North, the Colonel’s ebullient optimism was wholly restored. “Ethan will find us ammunition.”

“He’s sent none yet,” Pelham answered gloomily. Major Alexander Pelham was a tall, thin, white-haired man whom Starbuck, in the days before the raiding party had ridden north and west, had discovered to be almost perpetually morose. Pelham now waited till the Colonel and his son had ridden out of earshot then cocked a rheumy eye at Starbuck. “The best thing that can happen, Lieutenant Starbuck, is that we never find the ammunition for these cannon. The barrels will probably crack apart if we do. Artillery isn’t for amateurs.” He sniffed. “So the raid went badly?”

“It was disappointing, sir.”

“Aye, so I heard from Murphy.” Major Pelham shook his head, as though he had known all along that such adventurousness would be doomed. He was dressed in his old United States uniform that he had last worn in the War of 1812—a faded blue tunic with washed-out braid, buttons bereft of their gilt and crossbelts made of leather as cracked as sun-dried mud. His saber was a huge, black-scabbarded hook of a blade. He winced as the band, which had been practicing in the shade of the Legion’s meeting tent, started playing “My Mary-Anne.” “They’ve been playing that all week,” he grumbled. “Mary-Anne, Mary-Anne, Mary-Anne. Maybe we can drive the Yankees off with bad music?”

“I like the tune.”

“Not when you’ve heard it fifty times, you won’t. They should be playing marching tunes. Good solid marches, that’s what we need. But how much drill are we doing now? Four hours a day? It should be twelve, but the Colonel won’t permit it. You can rest on it that the Yankees won’t be playing baseball like us.” Pelham paused to spit tobacco juice. He had an almost mystical belief in the necessity of endless drill and was supported in that creed by all the old soldiers in the Legion, and opposed by the Colonel, who still feared that too much close-order drill would dull his volunteers’ enthusiasm. “Wait till you’ve seen the elephant,” Pelham said, “then you’ll know why you should be drilling.”