Next morning Starbuck confronted Ridley. They had hardly spoken in the last few weeks, not out of distaste, but simply because they kept separate friends. Ridley was leader of a small group of hard-riding, hard-drinking young officers who thought of themselves as rakes and daredevils and who despised the men who gathered in Pecker Bird’s garden to talk away the long evenings. Ridley, when Starbuck found him, was stretched full-length in his tent, recovering, he said, from a night in Greeley’s Tavern. One of his cronies, a lieutenant called Moxey, was sitting on the other bed with his head in his hands, groaning. Ridley similarly groaned when he saw Starbuck. “It’s the Reverend! Have you come to convert me? I’m beyond conversion.”

“I’d like a word with you.”

“Go ahead.” Under the sunlit canvas Ridley’s face looked a sickly yellow.

“A word alone.”

Ridley turned to look at Moxey. “Go away, Mox.”

“Don’t mind me, Starbuck, I am oblivious,” Moxey said.

“He said to go away,” Starbuck insisted.

Moxey looked up at Starbuck, saw something hostile in the tall northerner’s face, so shrugged. “I am gone. I am vanishing. Good-bye. Oh, my God!” This last was in greeting to the brightness of the morning sun.

Ridley sat up and swung round so that his stockinged feet were on the groundsheet. “Oh, God.” He groaned, then groped inside one of his boots where he evidently kept his cigars and matches at night. “You’re looking awful grim, Reverend. Does goddamn Pelham want us to march to Rosskill and back? Tell him I’m sick.” He lit the cigar, inhaled deeply, then looked up at Starbuck with bloodshot eyes. “Lay your word on me, Starbuck. Do your worst.”

“Where’s Sally?” Starbuck blurted out the question. He had meant to be altogether more circumspect, but when the moment of confrontation came he could find no words other than the simple, bald question.

“Sally?” Ridley asked, then feigned disbelief. “Sally! Who in the name of God is Sally?”

“Sally Truslow.” Starbuck was already feeling foolish, wondering just what obscure yet undeniable passion was driving him to this humiliating enquiry.

Ridley shook his head tiredly, then sucked on the cigar. “Now why in the name of God, Reverend, would you think that I would know the first goddamned thing about Sally Truslow?”

“Because she ran away to Richmond. To you. I know that.” Starbuck knew no such thing, but Pecker Bird, pressed hard, had admitted giving Sally the address of Ridley’s brother in Richmond.

“She never found me, Reverend,” Ridley said. “But what if she had? Would it have mattered?”

Starbuck had no answer to that question. Instead he stood foolish and uncertain between the folded back flaps of Ridley’s tent.

Ridley hawked a gob of spittle that he shot past Starbuck’s boots. “I’m interested, Reverend, so tell me. Just what is Sally to you?”

“Nothing.”