Doctor Danson extracted the bullet from Adam Faulconer’s leg, working fast and without chloroform. “You’re lucky, Adam. No major blood vessels hit. You may even have a slight limp to attract the ladies, but that’s all. You’ll be dancing with the ladies in ten days.” He poured lunar caustic into the wound, bandaged it, and moved on to the Colonel. He worked just as swiftly to extract the bullet from Washington Faulconer’s belly muscles, sewed up the mangled flesh of his arm, then splinted the broken bone. “You’re not quite as lucky as your son, Washington”—the doctor could still not get used to treating his neighbor as a superior officer—“but in another six weeks you’ll be back to rights.”

“Six weeks?” Colonel Faulconer was still furious that his precious Legion had been decimated under Thaddeus Bird’s command and at Nathaniel Starbuck’s bidding. He wanted his revenge, not on Bird, whom he had always known was a fool, but on Starbuck, who had become the Colonel’s personification for the Legion’s failure. Instead of marching to glorious victory under Washington Faulconer’s personal command the regiment had been thrown away in some miserable skirmish at the wrong end of the battlefield. The Legion had lost all its baggage and at least seventy men. No one knew the full total, though the Colonel had established that Starbuck was himself among the missing.

Doctor Danson had heard that Starbuck had been captured by the pursuing Yankees, or maybe worse. “A boy in B Company thought Starbuck might have been shot,” he told the Colonel as he bandaged the splinted arm.

“Good,” the Colonel said with a savagery that might have been excusable in a man suffering from the pain of a newly broken arm.

“Father!” Adam nevertheless protested.

“If the damned Yankees don’t shoot him, we shall. He killed Ridley! I saw it.”

“Father, please,” Adam pleaded.

“For God’s sake, Adam, must you always take Starbuck’s side against me? Does family loyalty count for nothing with you?” The Colonel shouted the hurt words at his son who, appalled by the accusation, said nothing. Faulconer flinched away from the splints that Danson was trying to put on his upper arm. “I tell you, Adam,” Faulconer went on, “that your damned friend is nothing but a murderer. Christ, but I should have known he was rotten when he first told us that tale of thieving and whores, but I trusted him for your sake. I wanted to help him for your sake, and now Ethan’s dead because of it and, I promise you, I’ll snap Starbuck’s neck myself if he has the gall to come back here.”

“Not with that arm, you won’t,” Doctor Danson said dryly.

“Damn the arm, Billy! I can’t leave the Legion for six weeks!”