Nor was Adam Faulconer feeling fear. He could not say he was enjoying the morning, but at least the experience of battle had reduced life’s turmoil to simple questions, and Adam was reveling in that freedom. Like all the other officers, he had abandoned his horse, sending it back among the trees. The Legion’s officers had learned that the enemy’s rifle fire was too high to be of much danger to crouching men, but not so high that the bullets could miss a man on horseback, and so they had abandoned the Colonel’s precious orders to stay mounted and had become infantrymen.

Nathaniel Starbuck noted how some men like Truslow and, more surprisingly, Major Bird and Adam, seemed effortlessly brave. They went calmly about their business, stood straight in the face of the enemy, and kept their wits sharp. Most of the men oscillated wildly between bravery and timidity, but responded to the leadership of the brave men. Each time Truslow went forward to shoot at the northerners a dozen skirmishers went with him, and whenever Major Bird stalked along the line of the trees the men grinned at him, took heart from him and were pleased that their eccentric schoolmaster was so apparently unmoved by the dangers. Harness those middling men, Starbuck understood, and the Legion could achieve miracles. There was also a minority of men, the cowards, who huddled far back in the trees, where they pretended to be busy loading or repairing their guns, but who were in fact just cowering from the eerie whistling sound of the minié bullets and the sizzling crack of the shellfire.

The bullets and shellfire had reduced Nathan Evans’s Confederate brigade to a ragged line of men crouched in the shadows at the edge of the trees. Every now and then a group of soldiers would dash to the open ground, fire their shots, then scurry back, but the Yankees now had a horde of skirmishers in the pasture and every appearance of a rebel sparked a bitter flurry of rifle fire. The bravest rebel officers strolled at the wood’s margin, speaking encouragement and making small jokes, though Adam, determined to be seen by his father’s Legion, refused to walk in the shadow but strolled openly in the sunlight, calling aloud as he strolled to warn men not to fire as he passed in front of their guns. The men shouted at him to take cover, to get back in the trees, but Adam would have none of it. He flaunted himself, as though he believed his life was charmed. He told himself he feared no evil.

Major Bird joined Starbuck and watched Adam in the sunlight. “Do you note,” Bird said, “how the bullets are going high?”

“High?”

“They’re aiming at him, but are shooting high. I’ve been noting it.”