The Colonel’s servant, who had been waiting beside the Legion’s piled knapsacks, tents and baggage, brought Starbuck his old sword, pistol and coat. Starbuck nodded his thanks, pulled on the coat, then strapped on the sword belt with its heavy pistol. “I seem to be over-weaponed,” he said, looking at his own revolver, at Joe Sparrow’s rifle and at Major Bird’s Le Mat revolver. He threw down the rifle, then grimaced at the ugly Le Mat. “It’s a nasty-looking brute, isn’t it?” The revolver had two barrels, the upper one rifled for bullets, the lower a smoothbore barrel that took a shotgun cartridge. Starbuck broke the gun open and laughed, then showed Adam that the cylinder’s nine chambers were all empty. The shotgun barrel was loaded, but the revolving hammer, by which the user could select which barrel to fire, had been twisted upward to fall on one of the empty chambers. “It wasn’t loaded,” Starbuck said, “Pecker was bluffing.”

“He’s not bluffing now!” Adam protested and gestured at his father’s Legion, which was now halfway down the hill. “Look what you’ve done!”

“Adam! For Christ’s sake, I saw the Yankees. They are coming straight toward us, and if we don’t stop them then this war is over.”

“Isn’t that what we want?” Adam demanded. “One battle, you promised me, then we could talk.”

“Not now, Adam.” Starbuck had neither the time nor patience for his friend’s scruples. He belted his saber and holster belt over his jacket and hauled himself into his saddle just as Ethan Ridley rode back to the hilltop.

“I’m going to find your father, Adam.” Ridley ignored Starbuck.

Adam stared downhill to where his neighbors and friends were marching northward. “Nate? Are you sure you saw northerners?”

“I saw them, Adam. After I left you. They were beyond the Sudley Fords and marching this way. They fired at me, Adam, they chased me! I didn’t imagine it.” The chase had been brief, confused by the woods, and his northern pursuers had given up five minutes before Starbuck had been captured by the two Louisianan cavalrymen who had refused to cross the fords to discover the truth of Starbuck’s story for themselves.

“He’s lying,” Ridley said calmly, then blanched as Starbuck turned toward him.

Starbuck said nothing to Ridley. Instead he was thinking that he was going to kill this man, but not in front of Adam. He would do it in the chaos of battle where no witness could bring a charge of murder. “The Yankees are coming across at Sudley,” Starbuck said, turning back to his friend, “and there’s no one else who can stop them.”

“But…” Adam seemed wholly unable to grasp the enormity of Starbuck’s news—that this left wing of the rebel army really was threatened, and that his confident, wealthy, assured father had been wrong.