Starbuck stopped the horse and just stared. The axemen were a hundred paces ahead of him. They were stripped to their waists and their axe blades shattered the sunlight into brilliant reflections as chips of wood skittered bright from the blades’ hard strokes. They were working on a tangled barricade of felled trees that completely blocked the narrow road. Half the roads of northern Virginia had been so barricaded by patriots trying to impede the northern invasion, and for a moment Starbuck supposed he had come across local men fashioning just such another obstacle, then he wondered why makers of a barricade would assault it with axes? And behind the axemen were teams of horses harnessed with drag chains to pull the sectioned tree trunks off the road, and behind those horse teams and half-hidden by the deep shadows, was a throng of blue-uniformed men above whom a flag showed bright in a slanting shaft of newly risen sunlight. The flag was the Stars and Stripes, and Starbuck suddenly realized these were Yankees, northerners, on a road where there were not supposed to be any northerners, and they were not just a few men, but a whole host of blue-uniformed soldiers who patiently waited for their pioneers to clear the narrow road.

“You there!” A man in officer’s braid shouted at Starbuck from behind the half-dismantled barricade. “Stop where you are! Stop, you hear me?”

Starbuck was gaping like a fool, yet in truth he comprehended all that was happening. The northerners had fooled the South. Their plan was not to advance dully on Manassas Junction, nor to wait for the southerners to attack their left flank, but rather to attack here in the undefended Confederate left, and thereby to hook deep into the belly of the secessionist army and so rip it and tear it and savage it that all the vestiges of southern rebellion would die in the weltering horror of one Sabbath day’s bloodletting. This, Starbuck grasped instantly, was Brigadier General McDowell’s version of Thermopylae, the grand encircling surprise that would give the Yankee Persians victory over the Confederate Greeks.

And Starbuck, understanding all, understood that he no longer needed to become a northern soldier nor break his promise to a southern whore. He was saved.

Faulconer Should Be...

FAULCONER SHOULD BE HERE.” MAJOR THADDEUS BIRD SCOWLED eastward into the rising sun. Bird might have his sharp opinions about how soldiering should be managed, but left alone in notional command of the Faulconer Legion, he was not entirely certain he wanted the responsibility to enact those ideas. “He should be here,” he said again. “The men need to know their commanding officer is with them, not lollygagging on his horse. Your future father-in-law,” he spoke to Ethan Ridley, “is altogether too fond of excursions by quadruped.” Major Bird found this remark amusing, for he raised his angular head and uttered a bark of laughter. “Excursions by quadruped, ha!”