Thaddeus Bird first strode across town to Boyle and Gambles’s huge warehouse where he placed an order for ammunition. “Minié bullets. The nascent Legion is firing them faster than the factories can make them. We need more, and still more. You can provide minié bullets?”

“Indeed we can, Mister Bird.”

“I am not Mister Bird!” Bird announced grandly, “but Major Bird of the Faulconer Legion.” He clicked his heels together and offered the elderly salesman a bow.

Starbuck gaped at Bird. Major Bird? This ludicrous man whom Washington Faulconer had declared would never be commissioned? A man, Faulconer claimed, not fit to be a cookhouse corporal? A man, if Starbuck remembered rightly, who would be commissioned only over Faulconer’s dead body? And Bird was to be made a major while professional European soldiers, veterans of real wars, were being turned down for mere lieutenancies?

“And we need still more percussion caps”—Bird was oblivious of Starbuck’s astonishment—“thousands of the little devils. Send them to the Faulconer Legion Encampment at Faulconer Court House in Faulconer County.” He signed the order with a flourish, Major Thaddeus Caractacus Evillard Bird. “Grandparents,” he curtly explained the grandiose names to Starbuck, “two Welsh, two French, all dead, let us go.” He led the way out of the warehouse and downhill toward Exchange Alley.

Starbuck matched strides with the long-pacing Bird and broached the difficult subject. “Allow me to congratulate you on your commission, Major Bird?”

“So your ears work, do they? That’s good news, Starbuck. A young man should possess all his faculties before age, liquor and stupidity erase them. Yes, indeed. My sister bestirred herself from her sickbed to prevail upon the Colonel to commission me a major in his Legion. I do not know upon what precise authority Colonel Brigadier General Captain Lieutenant Admiral the Lord High Executioner Faulconer makes such an appointment, but perhaps we do not need authority in these rebellious days. We are, after all, Robinson Crusoes marooned upon an authority-less island, and we must therefore fashion what we can out of what we find there, and my brother-in-law has discovered within himself the power to make me a major, so that is what I am.”

“You desired such an appointment?” Starbuck asked very politely, because he could not really imagine this extraordinary man wanting to be a soldier.