Evans turned to stare intently at the trees edging the Bull Run stream where his half-brigade was defending the stone bridge carrying the turnpike west from Washington. If the northerners did attack this section of the Run then Evans’s defense would be desperate, for his brigade consisted only of a handful of light cavalry, four obsolete smoothbore cannon, an understrength infantry regiment from South Carolina and another, equally undermanned, from Louisiana. Beauregard had left the brigade thus thinly defended because he was certain that the battle would be fought far out on the Confederate right wing. So far, and fortunately for Evans, the northern assault on the brigade had been restricted to harassing rifle and artillery fire, though one of the enemy’s cannon delivered a shell so monstrous that the sky seemed to tremble each time one passed overhead.

Evans watched the trees with his head cocked to one side as though he was judging the course of the fighting by the noise of battle. To Starbuck the rifle and musket fire sounded oddly like the fierce crackling of burning dry undergrowth, while above it boomed the artillery fire. The flight of the shells made a noise like ripping cloth, or perhaps bacon frying, except that every now and then the sizzling would swell into a sudden ear-hurting crash as a missile exploded. A few rifle bullets snickered close by Evans’s small group, some of them making an eerie whistling. It was all very odd to Starbuck, who was aware of his heart thumping in his chest, yet, in all truth, he was not so frightened of the shells and bullets as he was of the fierce, bow-legged Shanks Evans, who now turned back to the prisoner. “Goddamn Faulconer was sending you to your people?” Evans asked. “What the hell do you mean?”

“My family, sir. In Boston.”

“Oh, Boston!” Evans guffawed the name gleefully, inviting his staff to join his mockery. “A shit hole. A piss hole. A city of puling crap. Christ, but I hate Boston. A city of black-assed Republican trash. A city of interfering, hymn-singing, lickbelly women who are no damned good for anything.” Evans spat a lavish gob of tobacco-laced spittle onto Starbuck’s shoes. “So Faulconer was sending you back to Boston, was he, boy? Why?”

“I don’t know, sir.”