Ridley screamed and arched his back. “Ridley!” Starbuck shouted again, and the air about him whistled with a volley of northern bullets and Ridley’s mare reared up, screaming. Ridley was wounded, but he automatically kicked his boots free of the stirrups as he twisted to stare at Starbuck. “This is for Sally, you bastard!” Starbuck shouted hysterically, all sense gone, “for Sally!” He had promised that her name would be the last thing Ridley heard and he shouted it again as he worked the Savage’s lower trigger, then pulled the top one again.

Ridley twitched as the second bullet struck and as he fell to earth. He and his horse were both screaming now, but the horse was trying to limp away while Ridley thumped onto the grass.

“You bastard, Ridley!” Starbuck was on his feet, pointing the revolver. He fired again, but his third bullet just drove scraps of soil up from the ground beside the fallen Ridley whose wounded horse was limping away. The Colonel was fifty yards off, but had turned to stare in horror at Starbuck. “This is for Sally,” Starbuck said and fired his last bullet into his enemy’s body, and suddenly the whole ground in front of Starbuck erupted in dirt and flying blood as a Confederate shell crashed into Ridley’s dying body, eviscerating the twitching flesh and throwing up a screen of bloody scraps to hide Starbuck from the retreating Legion.

The warm and bloody blast of the shell threw Starbuck back and soaked his gray tunic with Ridley’s blood. More shells screamed across the valley to crack black and red on the meadow where the advancing northerners had appeared from beneath the trees. The crest of the far hill grew a low cloud that pulsed as more smoke poured from the artillery. Starbuck had fallen to his knees again, while Ridley was nothing but a butcher’s mess on the grass. Ahead of Starbuck the beaten Confederates were retreating across the turnpike and climbing the farther hill with its crown of gray-white, flame-streaked smoke, but Starbuck stayed in the meadow, staring at the mess of flesh and blood, of white ribs and blue guts, and he knew he had committed murder. Oh dear sweet forgiving Christ, he tried to pray, shivering in the heat, but suddenly a rush of northerners swept past him and one man kicked the revolver out of Starbuck’s nerveless fingers and then a brass-bound rifle butt smacked the back of his head and he pitched forward as a northern voice snarled that he should lie still.