Ridley turned his horse and rode back to the stream, then began quartering the country between the Bull Run and the railroad. The guns thundered in the distance, their bass sound punctuated by the brushfire sound of rifles and muskets. The noise lent urgency to Ridley’s quest, except he had no idea how to expedite the urgency. The general, his staff and hangers-on seemed to have been swallowed into this warm huge countryside. He stopped his tired horse at a crossroads beside a small wooden cabin. The vegetables in its trim garden had been torn out, all but for a row of unripe squash. An elderly Negress, smoking a pipe, watched him warily from her cabin door. “Ain’t nothing to steal, massa,” she said.

“You know where the general is?” Ridley asked her.

“Ain’t nothing to steal, massa, all stolen already.”

“Stupid cuffee bitch,” Ridley said, then louder and slower, as though he were talking to a child, “Do you know where the general is?”

“All stolen already, massa.”

“And damn you, too.” A shell screamed far overhead, tumbling and wailing as it shrieked across an empty Sunday sky. Ridley swore at the woman again, then chose one of the roads at random and let his weary horse walk at its own slow pace. Dust drifted from the mare’s hooves onto a drunken soldier sleeping beside the road. A few paces farther on a black and white farm dog lay dead in the road, shot in the head by some soldier who had presumably resented the dog worrying his horse. Ridley passed the dog by and began to worry that perhaps Beauregard, and Faulconer with him, had ridden north and west to where the battle sounded, for surely no general could stay in this somnolent, buzzing countryside while his men were dying just three miles away? Then, as his horse cleared the margin of a grove of trees, he saw another of the strange lattice signal towers standing beside a farmhouse, and beneath the tower a huddle of horses picketed by the farm’s fence, and on the farm’s veranda a group of men glinting with gold braid, and so Ridley gave his horse spurs, but, just as he kicked her into reluctant speed, so a single horseman mounted a tall black horse in front of the farm and galloped hard down the drive toward him. It was the Colonel.

“Sir! Colonel Faulconer!” Ridley had to shout to get the Colonel’s attention. Washington Faulconer would otherwise have galloped clean past Ridley.

The Colonel glanced at the tired horseman, recognized Ridley, and slowed. “Ethan! It is you! Come with me! What on earth are you doing here? Never mind! I’ve got good news, wonderful news!”