The problem was that the Legion had never really rehearsed maneuvers in anything but the flat pastureland at Faulconer Court House, and now they were advancing across a landscape that contained inconvenient ditches, rail fences, bushes, dips, knolls, blackberries, streams and impenetrable thickets of trees. They managed to cross the turnpike successfully enough, but the trees about the stone house and the rail fences of the pastures beyond caused the companies to lose all their cohesion and, naturally enough, the men preferred to use the road and so the column of companies became a long straggling line of men that jostled onto the dirt track before advancing toward the trees at the top of the farther hill.

But at least the men were cheerful. Most were glad to be moving, and happier still to have escaped the bare hillside where the overshot enemy shells fell so randomly, and somehow the morning took on a sportive atmosphere like the sylvan days of training back in Faulconer County. They joked as they climbed the hill, boasting what they would do to the Yankees they only half-expected to meet on the farther slope. Many of the men suspected that Pecker Bird had got everything plain bad wrong and that the Colonel would wring his damned neck as soon as he came back from his meeting with the general, but that was Pecker’s problem, not theirs. No one expressed any such suspicions to Truslow, who had begun the whole march and who now stolidly led the Legion north.

Starbuck and Adam galloped their horses up the side of the column until they found Thaddeus Bird striding along with the color party. Starbuck leaned precariously from his saddle to offer Major Bird the big Le Mat revolver. “Your pistol, sir. Did you know it wasn’t loaded?”

“Of course it wasn’t loaded.” Bird took the gun from Starbuck. “Did you really think I wanted you to shoot someone?” Bird chuckled, then turned to look at the straggle of men advancing in shambolic order up the dirt road and into the woods. So this was Washington Faulconer’s elite force? Faulconer’s Imperial Guard? The thought made Bird laugh aloud.

“Sir?” Starbuck thought Bird had spoken.

“Nothing, Starbuck, nothing. Except I have a suspicion that we should be advancing in more soldierly order.”

Starbuck pointed ahead to where a patch of sky promised open country at the far side of the thick belt of woodland which crowned the ridge. “There are fields over the hillcrest, sir. You can shake the men into proper line there.”

It occurred to Bird that Starbuck had ridden this road when the Colonel had tried to get rid of him. “Why didn’t you go when Faulconer gave you the chance?” he asked Starbuck. “Do you really want to fight for the South?”