“Oh, God, no.” There was an awful pain in Adam’s voice. The day was already bringing Adam the violence he had feared, and yet, he suspected, the battle had not really begun. The two sides had made contact and were hurling shells at each other, but neither seemed to have launched a real assault.

“Blanche will never live with this,” Danson said, struggling to his feet. “I remember when Joe nearly died of the whooping cough and I thought she’d go with him to his grave. Dear God, what a terrible thing.” Around him a ring of soldiers stared aghast at the dead boy. It was not that death was so strange to any of them; all had seen sisters or brothers or cousins or parents laid out in the parlor, and all had helped carry a casket into the church or had helped pull a drowned body from the river, but this was different; this was chance death, war’s lottery, and it could just as easily have been themselves lying there all bloody and still. This was something they were not really prepared for, because nothing in their training had convinced them that young men ended up open mouthed, flat on their backs, fly blown, bloodied and dead.

“Carry him to the back, lads,” Captain Hinton now said. “Lift him up! Careful now!” Hinton supervised the removal of the body, then walked back to Adam. “Where’s your father, Adam?”

“I don’t know.”

“He should be here.” Hinton gathered his horse’s reins and hauled himself laboriously into the saddle.

“I suppose the general’s keeping him,” Adam suggested lamely. There was a glistening patch of blood beside Joe Sparrow’s fallen cap on the grass. “Poor Blanche,” Adam said. “We took Joe out of the color party because we reckoned he’d be safer in the ranks.”

But Hinton was not listening. Instead he was frowning eastward to where a horseman had appeared on the brow of the hill. “Is that Starbuck? It is, by God!”

Adam turned and, to his astonishment, saw that it was indeed Starbuck who was galloping toward the Legion and, for a second, Adam thought he must be seeing ghosts, then he saw that it really was his friend who, not three hours before, had been dispatched back north to his own people, but who had now returned coatless, pale, hurried, and urgent. “Where’s your father?” Starbuck shouted.

“I don’t know, Nate.” Adam had ridden to meet his friend. “What are you doing here?”

“Where’s Pecker?” Starbuck’s voice was curt, ungiving, out of tune with the melancholy mood of Sparrow’s death.

“What are you doing here, Nate?” Adam asked again, spurring his horse after Starbuck. “Nate?”

But Starbuck had already kicked his horse down the front of the Legion to where Major Bird stood beneath the Legion’s colors that hung limp in the windless air.

“Sir!” Starbuck reined in close to Bird.