“My horse!” Evans yelled. A shell screamed overhead, thumping into the hill behind. At the very same moment a solid shot struck the wounded man beside the road, killing him instantly and flinging his blood ten feet into the air. Starbuck saw what he thought was the man’s severed leg spinning through the air, then instantly rejected the sight as unreal. Another solid shot cracked into a tree, splitting a three-foot lance of fresh wood from the trunk and showering leaves onto the raggedly torn leg. Then Lieutenant Meadows, who had repeated the wig-wagger’s alarming message, suddenly gulped and widened his eyes. He was staring at Starbuck and his eyes seemed to grow wider and wider as his hand slowly strayed to his throat, where a bead of blood swelled and glistened. His notebook slipped to the ground, its pages fluttering, as the bead of blood grew and split, then suddenly he choked a flood of gore down his tunic’s front. He swayed, gargling blood, then his whole body twitched violently as he slid out of the saddle and onto the grass. “I’ll take Meadows’s horse,” Evans snapped, and grabbed the gray’s reins. The dying man’s foot was caught in the stirrup. Evans jerked it free, then pulled himself up onto the horse’s back.

Starbuck drained the tin cup, gasped for breath, then reached for Pocahontas’s reins. He clambered awkwardly into the saddle, wondering what he was supposed to do now that he was free.

“Boston!” Evans turned his horse toward Starbuck. “Will that bastard Faulconer listen to you?”

“I think so, sir,” Starbuck said, then, more honestly, “I don’t know, sir.”

Evans frowned as a thought came to him. “Why are you fighting for us, Boston? This ain’t your fight.”

Starbuck did not know what to say. His reasons were more to do with his father than with America’s destiny, still more to do with Sally than with slavery, but this did not seem the time or the place to explain such things. “Because I’m a rebel.” He offered the explanation feebly, knowing its inadequacy.

But it pleased Nathan Evans, who had just taken a mug of whiskey from his stern-looking orderly. He drained the mug. “Well, you’re my rebel now, Boston, so find Faulconer and tell him I want his precious Legion. Tell him I’m moving most of my troops to the Sudley Road, and I want his Virginians up there too. Tell him to form on my left.”

Starbuck, dizzied by the whiskey, his change of fortune and by the sense of panic whirling in the humid air, tried to insert a note of caution into Evans’s planning. “Colonel Faulconer was determined to move to the right wing, sir.”