“Major!” Starbuck had to shout to make Bird hear. “Look to your left! Your left!” A fresh northern regiment had come up on the Legion’s left and now threatened to wrap itself round the open flank of the Virginians. The new attack would not only drive back this failed bayonet attack, but would overlap the wood. Evans’s defenders had been outflanked and outfought at last.

“Goddamn!” Bird stared at the new threat. His oath sounded very unconvincing, like a man unused to cursing. “Sergeant Major! Take the colors back.” Bird gave the order, but did not yet retreat himself.

“Come back, sir, please! Come back!” Starbuck pulled at Major Bird’s sleeve, and this time the major began to withdraw. Bullets screamed in the air as Bird and Starbuck stumbled back, preserved from the northern marksmen by the fog of battle smoke that obscured proper aiming.

Only Adam would not retreat. He was shouting at his men to join him, that there was no danger, that all they had to do was push on to the far side of the meadow, but E Company had seen the retreat of the whole Confederate line, and so they edged backward themselves. Adam stopped and turned toward them, shouting at them to advance, but then he staggered and almost dropped his revolver. He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. He somehow managed to hold his balance as, very slowly and very carefully, like a drunken man pretending to be sober, he pushed the revolver into its holster. Then, with an oddly puzzled look on his face, he fell onto his knees.

“You stupid bastard.” Sergeant Truslow had seen Adam fall and now ran across the face of advancing northerners. The rest of the Legion was hurrying back toward the safety of the trees. The whole southern charge had failed utterly and the northerners were in full cry.

“It’s my leg, Truslow,” Adam said in a puzzled voice.

“Should have been your goddamn brain. Give me your arm.” Truslow, even when rescuing Adam, sounded grimly hostile. “Come on, boy. Hurry!”

Adam had been struck in his left thigh. The bullet had hit like a hammer blow, but had not hurt much at the time. Now suddenly there was pain searing white hot from his groin down to his toes. He hissed with the agony and could not resist a half-scream. “Leave me here!” he gasped to Truslow.

“Shut your bleating, for Christ’s sake.” Truslow half-dragged and half-carried Adam back toward the trees.

Neither Major Bird nor Starbuck had seen Adam’s plight. They were hurrying back toward the wood, or rather Starbuck was hurrying and Thaddeus Bird was strolling calmly. “Do you notice?” Bird asked yet again, “just how many bullets go high?”

“Yes.” Starbuck was trying to run and crouch at the same time.

“We should do something about that,” Bird remarked purposefully. “Because we must have been firing high too, wouldn’t you say?”