Major Thaddeus Bird, who had always been fond of long walks and was the only one of Faulconer’s officers who resolutely refused to ride a horse, contended that Truslow was right and that the men had been provided with altogether too much equipment. “A man can’t march cumbered like a mule,” he contended. The schoolmaster was ever ready to express such military opinions, which were just as readily ignored by the Colonel, though as the summer passed a group of younger men found themselves drawn more and more to Bird’s company. They would meet in his yard of an evening, sitting on the broken church bench or on stools fetched from the schoolhouse. Starbuck and Adam went frequently, as did Bird’s deputy, Lieutenant Davies, and a half dozen other officers and sergeants.

The men would bring their own food and drink. Priscilla would sometimes have prepared a salad or a plate of biscuits, but the real business of the evenings was either to make music or else to raid Bird’s jumbled pile of books for passages to read aloud. Then they would argue into the darkness, setting the world to rights as Adam and Starbuck used to do when they were at Yale, though these new evenings of discussion were laced with news and rumors of the war. In western Virginia, where the Colonel’s raid had been so damply disappointing, the Confederacy suffered new defeats. The worst was at Philippi where northern forces won a humiliatingly easy victory that the northern newspapers dubbed the “Philippi Races.” Thomas Jackson, fearing to be cut off in Harper’s Ferry, abandoned the river town, and that event made it seem to the young officers in Faulconer Court House that the North was invincible, but then, a week later, came reports of a skirmish on the seaboard of Virginia where northern troops had sallied inland from a coastal fortress only to be bloodily repulsed in the fields around Bethel Church.

Not all the news was true. There were rumors of victories that never happened and peace talks that never occurred. One day it was announced that the European powers had recognized the Confederacy and that the North was consequently suing for peace, but that turned out to be false even though the Reverend Moss had sworn on a stack of Bibles that it was the gospel truth. Bird was amused by the summer’s alarms. “It’s just a game,” he said, “just a game.”

“War is hardly a game, Uncle,” Adam chided.

“Of course it’s a game, and the Legion is your father’s toy and a very expensive one too. Which is why I hope we never get used in battle because then the toy will be broken and your father will be inconsolable.”