“You’re a major now, Ethan. You can take Pecker’s place. Goddamn Pecker, and Goddamn Starbuck! Damn him, damn him, damn him! I’ll kill him! I’ll feed his guts to the hogs! Now come on, Ethan, come on!” The Colonel slashed his spurs back.

Major Ridley, following as fast as he could, suddenly remembered the wig-wagger’s message for Beauregard. He pulled the wafer-sealed paper from his pocket and wondered whether he should mention its existence to the Colonel, but the Colonel was already pounding ahead, his horse kicking up dust, and Ridley did not want to be left too far behind, not now that he was a major and the Colonel’s second in command, and so he threw the message away, then galloped after the Colonel toward the sound of the guns.

On the tree-lined crest where Evans’s scratch brigade had repelled the first northern attack the battle had become a grim one-sided pounding match. For the Yankee gunners it was little more than a session of unopposed target practice, for both of the small Confederate cannon had been destroyed; the first thrown off its carriage by a direct hit from a twelve-pounder roundshot, while the second had lost a wheel from another plumb hit and, within minutes, another twelve-pound ball had shattered the spokes of its replacement wheel. The two stricken cannon, still loaded with unfired canister, lay abandoned at the edge of the wood.

Major Bird wondered whether there was anything he should be doing, but nothing suggested itself. He tried to analyze the situation and came up with the simple fact that the southern troops were holding off a far greater number of northerners, but that every moment the southerners spent at the tree line the more men they lost and that eventually, by a process as ineluctable as a mathematical equation, there would be no living southerners left and the northerners would march across the rebel corpses to claim the battle and, presumably, the war. Major Bird could not stop that happening because there was nothing clever he could do; no flank attack, no ambush, no manner of outthinking the enemy. The time had simply come to fight and die. Major Bird regretted it had come to such a hopeless plight, but he saw no elegant way out, and so he was determined to stay where he was. The odd thing was that he felt no fear. He tried to analyze that lack and decided he was privileged by possessing a sanguine temperament. He celebrated that happy realization by sneaking a fond look at his wife’s picture.