Starbuck, still lost in a daze, began to load his revolver again. He was not sure why he did it, or whether he could ever use the weapon, but he just wanted to be doing something, and so he fumbled the powder and bullets into the Savage’s six chambers, then smeared the bullet cones with grease to seal each chamber and thus prevent the ignited powder in the firing chamber setting off the other charges. His hands still shook. In his mind’s eye he could still see that gorgeous banner, all shining red and white, being lifted from the blood-streaked grass to wave again in the sunlight.

“Fire!” Sergeant Truslow shouted from the flank.

“Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards!” That was Major Bird who, only an hour before, had been ridiculing the idea that he wanted to be involved in the day’s fighting.

“Aim low! Aim at the bastards’ bellies!” That was Captain Murphy, who had abandoned his horse and was firing a rifle like his men. The smoke of the first volley thinned to show that the Yankee officer’s gray horse was down in the grass. There were bodies there, puffs of smoke, knots of men.

Adam stayed back at the tree line with Starbuck. He was breathing hard, as though he had just run a race. One of Evans’s small smoothbore cannon fired a barrel of canister down the meadow. A northern shell whistled fragments above the Legion’s color party. A man reeled back from G Company, blood soaking his left shoulder. He leaned against a tree, breathing hard, and a bullet slapped into the trunk just above his head. The man cursed and pushed himself upright, then stumbled back toward the gun line. Adam, seeing the man’s resolve, pulled his revolver from his holster and urged his horse forward.

“Adam!” Starbuck called, remembering his promise to Miriam Faulconer to keep Adam safe, but it was too late. Adam had taken his horse through the bank of bitter gunsmoke, over the fallen fence rails and into the smoke-free air where he was now calmly priming his revolver’s chambers with percussion caps in apparent oblivion of the bullets that whipcracked around him. Some of the Legion’s men shouted warnings that a man on a horse made a much choicer target than a foot soldier, but Adam ignored them.