“We’ll give the shit-eating bastards hell, so we will,” Evans said, looking northward again, though nothing moved in that empty landscape, not even a wind to stir the far trees where the road to the fords vanished under the thick canopy of leaves. A small group of men, women and children were standing by the Sudley Church on the hill to the left of the road, and Evans guessed they must be worshipers come to the church only to discover that God’s service had been overtaken by war. Behind Evans, dulled by distance now, the sound of the northern cannonade thundered softly in the hot still air. Evans had left just four understrength companies at the stone bridge, a tiny force to hold off any determined Yankee attack down the turnpike, and he suddenly felt a terrible fear that he had been deceived and that this rumored flank attack was a feint, a cheat, a deception to strip the stone bridge of its defenders so that the damned Yankees could end the war in one maneuver. And where the hell was Beauregard? Or General Johnston’s men, who were rumored to be arriving from the Shenandoah Valley? Christ on his cross, Evans thought, but this was agony. Evans had fought the Comanches in his years of soldiering, but he had never been forced into making a decision as momentous as the one he had just made, a decision that had left the northern flank of the Confederate army stripped perilously thin. Would history mock him as the fool whose stupidity had handed an easy victory to the northerners? “Boston!” Evans twitched round in his saddle to glare at Starbuck.

“Sir.”

“You didn’t lie to me, boy, did you?” Evans remembered the wig-wagger’s message and tried to convince himself he had done the right thing, but God in his heaven, just what had he done? Far behind him, out of sight beyond the trees and the turnpike, the shells rumbled and crashed on the empty land he had left virtually unguarded. “Did you lie to me, boy?” he shouted at Starbuck. “Did you lie?”

But Starbuck did not answer. Starbuck was not even looking at the fierce-eyed Colonel. Instead Starbuck was staring down the long pale slope to where, out of the distant trees, the northerners were at last appearing. Rank upon rank of men with the sunlight glinting from their belt buckles and cap badges and rifle butts and saber scabbards and from the polished muzzles of their artillery to make the mirrored lights of a righteous army come to remake God’s country.