The rebel guns crashed back, bucking on their trails, smashing down on their wheels, sizzling as the sponges cleaned out their barrels, then firing again to feed the cloud of smoke that thickened like a Nantucket fog. More guns came from Beauregard’s right wing. The rebel general sensed that disaster had been averted though it was none of his doing, but rather because his farmhands and college boys and store clerks had withstood the northern assault and were now counterattacking everywhere along Jackson’s makeshift line. Two amateur armies had collided and luck was running Beauregard’s way.

General Joseph Johnston had brought his men from the Shenandoah Valley, but, now that they were here, he had no duties except to watch them die. Johnston outranked Beauregard, but Beauregard had planned this battle, knew the ground, while Johnston was a stranger, and so he was letting Beauregard finish the fight. Johnston was ready to take over if Beauregard were hit, but till then he would stay silent and just try to understand the flux of the huge event that had come to its terrible climax on the hilltop. Johnston understood clearly enough that the North had wrong-footed Beauregard and turned his flank, but he also saw how the southern forces were fighting back hard and could yet scrape through to victory. Johnston also understood that it was Colonel Nathan Evans, the unregarded South Carolinian, who had probably saved the Confederacy by planting his feeble force across the path of the northern flank attack. Johnston sought out Evans and thanked him, then, working his way back to the east, the general came to where the wounded Washington Faulconer lay on the ground with his back propped against a saddle. Faulconer had been stripped to the waist and his chest was swathed in bandages while his right arm was in its blood-stained sling.

The general reined in and looked sympathetically down at the wounded Colonel. “It’s Faulconer, isn’t it?”

Washington Faulconer looked up to see a dazzle of yellow braid, but the smoke-diffused sun was behind the horseman and he could not make out the man’s face. “Sir?” he answered very warily, already rehearsing the arguments he would use to explain his Legion’s failure.

“I’m Joseph Johnston. We met in Richmond four months ago, and of course we had the pleasure of dining together at Jethro Sanders’s house last year.”

“Of course, sir.” Faulconer had been expecting a reprimand, yet General Johnston sounded more than affable.

“You must be feeling foul, Faulconer. Is the wound bad?”