Again Starbuck said nothing. Evans spat derision of Starbuck’s silence, then turned to see a gray-coated infantryman limping back along the turnpike. “Where in hell are you going?” Evans exploded in sudden fury at the soldier, who just stared back in blank astonishment. “You can still shoot a rifle, can’t you?” Evans screamed. “So get back! Unless you want those black-assed Republicans fathering your wife’s next bastards? Get back!” The man turned and limped painfully back toward the bridge, using his rifle-musket as a crutch.

A solid shot slapped dust from the turnpike, then ricocheted on without hitting anyone in Evans’s headquarter’s group, but the wind of the shot’s passing seemed to stagger the injured infantryman who swayed on his makeshift crutch, then collapsed at the roadside close by the two reserve six-pounder guns. Evans’s other two guns were closer to the Bull Run, returning the enemy’s fire with shrapnel shells that burst in the distant air like sudden small gray clouds from which fizzing white smoke trails spiraled crazily earthward. Whether the shells were finding their targets no one knew, but in truth Evans was merely firing to keep up his men’s morale.

The reserve gunners bided their time. Most lay on their backs, apparently dozing. Two men tossed a ball back and forth while an officer, spectacles perched low on his nose, leaned on a bronze barrel and turned the pages of a book. A shirt-sleeved gunner with bright red suspenders sat with his back against the gun’s offside wheel. He was writing, dipping his pen into an ink bottle that rested in the grass by his side. The men’s insouciance did not seem out of place for, though the fighting was generating a carapace of noise and smoke, there was no great sense of urgency. Starbuck had expected battle to be more vigorous, like the newspaper accounts of the Mexican War that had told of General Scott’s brave troops carrying the American flag through shot and screaming shell into the Halls of Montezuma, but there was almost an abstracted air about this morning’s events. The gunner officer slowly turned a page, the letter writer carefully drained ink from his pen’s nib before lifting it to the page, while one of the ball players missed a catch and laughed lazily. The wounded infantryman lay in the ditch, hardly moving.

“So what do I do with the sumbitch, Colonel?” one of the Louisiana cavalrymen guarding Starbuck asked.