Bird blinked up at the horseman. “Starbuck? I was told to discharge you! Are you certain you’re meant to be here?”

“Sir.” Nathaniel Starbuck sounded stilted and formal. “Colonel Evans sent me, sir. He wants us to advance on the Sudley Road. The enemy has crossed the stream by Sudley Church, and are marching this way.”

Pecker Bird blinked up at the young man and noted that Starbuck had sounded remarkably calm, which calmness, he supposed, was a perverse symptom of the boy’s excitement, and then Bird thought how astonishingly well everyone was playing their soldierly parts on this unlikely morning. “Aren’t those orders more properly addressed to Colonel Faulconer?” Bird heard himself asking, and was amazed that his natural inclination was so to avoid taking the responsibility.

“If I could find the Colonel, sir, I’d tell him. But I don’t think there’s time, and if we don’t move, sir, there won’t be anything left of this army.”

“Is that so?” Bird also sounded calm, but his hands were clawing through his beard with the stress of the moment. He opened his mouth to speak again, but no sound came. He was thinking that he too would have to play a soldierly part, now that fate had dropped this responsibility into his lap, and then he pusillanimously thought that a soldier’s duty was to obey and Colonel Faulconer’s orders had been very specific: that he was to ignore any instructions from Colonel Nathan Evans. Faulconer was even now attempting to have the Legion deployed southward to where Beauregard expected the main battle to be fought, but Colonel Nathan Evans wanted the Legion to march northward and was evidently claiming that the Confederacy’s entire future depended on Bird’s obedience.

“Sir!” Starbuck was evidently not so calm as he seemed for he was pressing Major Bird for a decision.