“I presume the Colonel is making a reconnaissance,” Ethan Ridley protested. Ridley had watched Starbuck ride away with the Faulconers and was jealous that he had not been invited. In two months Ridley would become Washington Faulconer’s son-in-law, with all the privileges that kinship implied, yet still he feared that some other person might usurp his place in the Colonel’s affections.

“You presume the Colonel is making a reconnaissance?” Major Bird scoffed at the supposition. “Faulconer’s lollygagging, that’s what he’s doing. My brother-in-law lives under the misapprehension that soldiering is a sporting occupation, like hunting or steeplechasing, but it is mere butchery, Ethan, mere butchery. Our responsibility is to make ourselves into efficient butchers. I had a great-uncle who was a pork butcher in Baltimore, so I feel that soldiering might well be in my blood. Do you have any such fortunate ancestry, Ethan?”

Ridley sensibly made no answer. He was sitting on his horse beside Bird who, as ever, was on foot, while the Legion was lounging on the grass watching the night shadows shrink and fade in the far countryside and wondering what this day would bring. Most of the men were confused. They knew they had spent two days traveling, but where they had come to, or what they were expected to do now that they had arrived, they did not know. Ethan Ridley, seeking answers to the same troubling questions, had sought enlightenment from Thaddeus Bird.

“I doubt anyone knows what will happen today,” Thaddeus Bird answered. “History is not marshaled by reason, Ethan, but by the idiocies of lethal fools.”

Ethan struggled to elicit a sensible answer. “They reckon we’ve got twenty thousand men, is that right?”

“Who are ‘they’?” Major Bird asked serenely, intentionally infuriating Ridley.

“How many troops do we have, then?” Ridley tried again.

“I have not counted them,” Bird said. The rumors at Manassas Junction said that Beauregard’s Army of Northern Virginia numbered slightly less than twenty thousand men, but no one could be sure.

“And the enemy?” Ethan asked.

“Who knows? Twenty thousand? Thirty? As the sands of the sea, maybe? A mighty host, perhaps? Shall I guess twenty thousand, will that make you happy?” Again, no one knew how many northern troops had crossed the Potomac into Virginia. Rumor put the number as high as fifty thousand, but no American had ever led an army even half that size so Thaddeus Bird distrusted the rumor.

“And we are attacking on the right? Is that what you hear?” Ridley would normally have avoided Thaddeus Bird altogether, for he found the pedantry of the ragged-bearded schoolteacher annoying in the extreme, but the nervousness that accompanied the anticipation of battle had made even Bird’s company acceptable.