“Cannon, eh? I am frightened! Shitting in my pants, I am,” Evans sniggered and the men around him laughed. The colonel was famous for the filth of his language, the depth of his thirst and the ferocity of his temper. He had graduated from West Point in 1848, though barely, and now ridiculed the academy’s curriculum by claiming that what made a soldier was the talent to fight like a wildcat, not some prinking ability to speak French or to solve fancy problems in trigonometry or to master the complexities of natural philosophy, whatever the hell that was. “You saw the cannon, did you?” he now demanded fiercely.

“Yes, sir.” In truth Starbuck had seen no northern guns, but he had watched the federal troops dismantling the barricade and he reasoned they would surely not waste their time clearing the road for infantry. An infantry column could have skirted the felled trees, but guns would need an unobstructed passage, which surely suggested that the concealed flank attack was bringing artillery.

Nathan Evans cut a new slice of tobacco that he plugged into one of his cheeks. “And just what in the name of God were you doing in the woods beyond Sudley Fords?”

Starbuck paused and another shell cracked apart in black smoke and a stab of red flame. The intensity of the explosion was extraordinary to Starbuck, who again flinched as the percussive clap shivered the air, though Colonel Nathan Evans appeared entirely unworried by the sound apart from another enquiry of his mounted orderly that all was still well.

“Ja, Colonel. All is vell. Don’t vorry yourself.” The German orderly was a huge man with a woeful face and a curious stoneware barrel that was strapped like a rucksack on his broad back. His master, Colonel Evans, whom Starbuck had gathered from his captors was nicknamed “Shanks,” did not look any more prepossessing by daylight than he had in the small hours of the morning; indeed, to Starbuck’s jaundiced eye, Evans most resembled one of the bent-backed Boston coal heavers who scuttled with hundredweight sacks of fuel from the street to the kitchen cellars, and it was hardly surprising, Starbuck thought, that the fastidious Washington Faulconer had refused to put himself under the South Carolinian’s command.

“Well? You ain’t answered my question, boy.” Evans glared at Starbuck. “What were you doing on the far side of the Run, eh?”

“Colonel Faulconer sent me,” Starbuck said defiantly.

“Sent you? Why?”

Starbuck wanted to salve his pride and say that he had been sent to reconnoiter the woods beyond Bull Run, but he sensed the lie would never hold, and so he settled for the ignominious truth. “He didn’t want me in his regiment, sir. He was sending me back to my people.”