Thaddeus Bird had found Sergeant Truslow and was now helping carry Adam back to safety. The three men were with the color party and were the very last of the Legion left in the upper wood. Sergeant Major Proctor was carrying one color, a corporal from Company C had the other, but the heavy flags on their unwieldy staffs were difficult objects to carry through the tangle of thorns and undergrowth. The rest of the Legion, indeed the rest of Nathan Evans’s brigade, seemed to have fled, and Bird supposed that this battle was lost. He wondered how the historians would describe the southern revolt. A summer’s madness? An aberration of American history to set alongside the Whiskey Rebellion that George Washington had put down so savagely? A shell cracked through the upper trees, showering the color party with leaves.

“Major Bird!” Starbuck shouted. He was galloping madly, blindly through the trees. Fugitives were shouting all around him, but Starbuck’s world was a blur of sunlight and green shadow, of a panicked horse running, of sweat and thirst. He could hear a Yankee band off in the meadows and he turned the horse away from the sound. He shouted for Major Bird again, but the only reply was a spatter of shots somewhere to his left. Bullets whistled and slapped close to him, but the northerners were firing in close woodland and could not aim properly. A shell crashed smoke and sizzling fragments off to the right, then Starbuck was in a clearing and he saw the flash of red and white that was the Faulconer Legion colors at the far end of the open space and he turned his horse toward it. He thought he saw Thaddeus Bird with about a dozen other men. “Major Bird!”

But Bird had disappeared into the farther trees. Starbuck hurried after the color party, bursting through a skein of smoke that hung over the clearing. Shots sounded in the woods, a bugle called, and still the Yankee band was playing behind. Starbuck crashed into the trees at the far end of the clearing and ripped through a tangle of low branches that slashed painfully across his face. “Major Bird!”

Bird at last turned, and Starbuck saw Adam was there, dark blood on his thigh. Starbuck was about to shout that there were Yankees on the right flank, but he was too late. A squad of blue-coated men was already running through the trees, coming from the dirt road, and it seemed inevitable that the Legion’s colors would fall and that Bird, Adam, Truslow and the other men around the two flags would be captured. “Look out!” Starbuck shouted, pointing.