Dark was falling as Starbuck climbed the hill to where the southern army made its weary bivouac. A few officers had tried to order their men off the hilltop and down to where the ground did not stink of blood, but the men were too tired to move. Instead they sat around their fires and ate captured hard tack and cold bacon. A man played a fiddle, its notes wondrously plangent in the graying light. The far hills were darkening and the first stars gleaming pale and sharp in a clean sky. A Georgia regiment held a service, the men’s voices strong as they sang praises for their victory.

It took Starbuck an hour to find the Legion. It was almost full dark by then, but he saw Pecker Bird’s distinctive face in the light of a fire made from a dozen fence rails which radiated out from the flames like spokes. Every man about the fire was responsible for a rail, nudging it into the fire as the rail burned down. The men around the fire were all officers who looked up astonished as Starbuck limped into the flame light. Murphy nodded a pleased greeting to see the Bostonian, and Bird smiled. “So you’re alive, Starbuck?”

“So it seems, Major.”

Bird lit a cigar and tossed it to Starbuck who caught it, sucked in the smoke, then nodded his thanks.

“Is that your blood?” Murphy asked Starbuck, whose uniform was still thick with Ridley’s blood.

“No.”

“But it’s very dramatic,” Bird said in gentle mockery, then twisted himself around. “Colonel!”

Colonel Faulconer, his shirt and jacket now wrapped around his wounded arm, was sitting outside his tent. He had made a huge commotion about the Legion’s missing baggage and finally a reluctant search party had discovered Nelson, the Colonel’s servant, still guarding as much of the Colonel’s baggage as he had managed to carry away from the Yankee attack. Most of the baggage was gone, looted by successive waves of northerners and southerners, but the Colonel’s tent had been salvaged and a bed of blankets laid down inside. Adam was lying on the bed while his father sat on a barrel in the tent’s door.

“Colonel!” Bird called again, his insistence at last making Washington Faulconer look up. “Good news, Colonel.” Bird could hardly keep from grinning as he made his mischief. “Starbuck is alive.”

“Nate!” Adam reached for the makeshift crutch that a man had cut from a thicket nearby, but his father pushed him down.

Faulconer stood and walked toward the fire. A mounted staff captain chose that same moment to approach the fire from farther along the plateau, but the captain, who had a message for Colonel Faulconer, sensed the tension around the camp fire and checked his horse to watch what happened.