“I can’t make cars, laddie! I can’t make locomotives!” Reynolds leaned across his table, sweat dripping down his face into his ginger beard and mustaches. “I am not a miracle worker!”

“But I am,” Starbuck said, and he took out the big Savage revolver from the holster at his waist, pointed it just to one side of Reynolds and pulled the trigger. Smoke and noise filled the room as the heavy bullet smashed through the timber wall to leave a ragged, splintered hole. Starbuck holstered the smoking gun. “I am not a laddie, Mister Reynolds,” he calmly told the gaping, astonished manager, “but an officer in the army of the Confederate States of America and if you insult me once again I shall put you against that wall and shoot you.”

For a second Starbuck thought that Reynolds was going to follow Major Pelham into an early grave. “You’re mad!” the railroad man finally said.

“I think that’s probably true,” Starbuck agreed placidly, “but I shoot better when I am mad than when I am sane, so let us now decide how you and I are going to move the Faulconer Legion north to Manassas Junction, shall we?” He smiled. It was Sally, he decided, who had released this confidence in him. He was actually enjoying himself. Goddamn it, he thought, but he was going to be a good soldier.

Yet Reynolds suspected there were no available passenger cars within fifty miles. All he had in the depot were seventeen old house cars. “What are house cars?” Starbuck asked politely, and the frightened manager pointed through his window at a boxcar.

“We call them house cars,” he said in the same nervous voice that he had used to reassure the telegraph operator and two assistants who had run to his office to enquire about the shooting.

“How many men can we fit into a house car?” Starbuck asked.

“Fifty? Sixty, maybe?”

“Then we have just enough.” The Legion had not reached Faulconer’s target of one thousand men, but over nine hundred had volunteered, making it into a formidable regiment. “What other cars do you have?” Starbuck asked.

There were just two gondola cars, which were simple open wagons, and that was all. One of the gondola cars and eight of the boxcars were in desperate need of repair, though Reynolds thought they could be used, but only at the slowest possible speed. There were, he said, no locomotives available, though when Starbuck put a hand toward the big Savage revolver, Reynolds hastily remembered that a locomotive was expected to pass through the depot on its way to Lynchburg, where it was going to collect a train of platform cars loaded with cut timber that was being carried to the coast to build artillery revetments.

“Good!” Starbuck said. “You’ll stop the locomotive and turn it round.”

“We don’t have a roundhouse here.”

“The engine can travel backward?”

Reynolds nodded. “Yes, sir.”