The rebel pursuit stopped at the plateau’s edge. A spattering of musket fire hurried the northerners’ retreat, but no one on the rebel side had the energy to pursue. Instead they reveled in the slow realization of victory and in the scurrying defeat of the panicked horde beneath them. The rebel gunners brought their surviving cannon to the hillcrest and the southern shells screamed away into the afternoon warmth to explode in bursts of smoke along the crowded turnpike and in the farther woods. One of the shots burst in the air plumb above the wooden bridge that carried the turnpike over the deep tributary of the Run just as a wagon was crossing. The wagon’s wounded horses panicked and tried to bolt, but the fatal shell had torn off a front wheel and the massive vehicle slewed round, its broken axle gouging timber so that the heavy wagon body was jammed immovably between the bridge’s wooden parapets, and thus the northern army’s main escape road was blocked and still more shells screamed down to explode among the fleeing northerners. The federal guns, carriages, limbers and wagons still on the Bull Run’s western bank were abandoned as their teamsters fled for safety. A shell exploded in the stream, spouting tons of water. More shells smacked behind, driving the panicked mass of men in a maddened scramble down the steep slippery bank and into the Run’s quick current. Scores of men drowned, pushed under by their own desperate comrades. Others floundered across the deep stream and somehow pulled themselves free and then ran toward Washington.

Nathaniel Starbuck had watched the rout spill over the plateau’s edge. At first he had not believed what he saw, then disbelief turned to amazement. The sergeant guarding the prisoners had taken one look at the hillside, then ran. A wounded northerner, recuperating in the yard, had limped away, using his musket as a crutch. The red-bearded doctor came to the door in his blood-spattered apron, took one incredulous look at the whole scene, then shook his head and went back inside to his patients.

“What do we do now?” one of the rebel prisoners asked Starbuck, as if an officer might know the etiquette of handling victory in the middle of a defeated rabble.