“I’m not here to work.”

Truslow grinned. “You’ve got a gun, boy, you’d better be prepared to use it.”

“I’m here to give you this letter.” Starbuck took the envelope from an inside pocket.

“You could kill a buffalo with that pistol, boy. You want to use it on me? Or you want to work for me?”

“I want you to read this letter…”

“Work or fight, boy.” Truslow stepped closer to Starbuck. “I don’t give a sack of shit which one you want, but I ain’t waiting all day for you to make up your mind on it either.”

There was a time for fighting, Starbuck thought, and a time for deciding he would be bottom man in a saw pit. He jumped, landing in a slurry of mud, sawdust and woodchips.

“Take your coat off, boy, and that hog pistol with it.”

“Mister Truslow!” Starbuck made one last effort to retain a shred of control over this encounter. “Would you just read this letter?”

“Listen, boy, your letter’s just words, and words never filled a belly yet. Your fancy Colonel is asking me for a favor, and you’ll have to work to earn him his answer. You understand me? If Washington Faulconer himself had come I’d have him down that pit, so leave off your whining, get off your coat, take hold of that handle, and give me some work.”

So Starbuck left off his whining, took off his coat, took hold of the handle and gave him some work.

It seemed to Starbuck that he was mired in a pit beneath a cackling and vengeful demon. The great pit saw, singing through the trunk, was repeatedly rammed down at him in a shower of sawdust and chips that stung Starbuck’s eyes and clogged his mouth and nostrils, yet each time he took a hand off the saw to try and cuff his face, Truslow would bellow a reproof. “What’s the matter, boy? Gone soft on me? Work!”

The pit was straddled by a pinewood trunk that, judging by its size, had to be older than the Republic. Truslow had grudgingly informed Starbuck that he was cutting the trunk into planks which he had promised to deliver for a new floor being laid at the general store at Hankey’s Ford. “This and two other trunks should manage it,” Truslow announced before they were even halfway through the first cut, by which time Starbuck’s muscles were already aching like fire and his hands were smarting.