“Hold it!” Truslow suddenly shouted, and Starbuck had an instant fear that his muttered imprecations had been heard, but instead the halt had merely been called so that the work could be adjusted. The saw had cut to within a few inches of the pit’s side, so now the trunk had to be moved. “Catch hold, boy!” Truslow tossed down a stout branch that ended in a crutch. “Ram that under the far end and heave when I tell you.”

Starbuck heaved, moving the great trunk inch by painful inch until it was in its new position. Then there was a further respite as Truslow hammered wedges into the sawn cut.

“So what’s Faulconer offering me?” Truslow asked.

“Fifty dollars.” Starbuck spoke from the pit and wondered how Truslow had guessed that anything was being offered. “You’d like me to read you the letter?”

“You suggesting I can’t read, boy?”

“Let me give you the letter.”

“Fifty, eh? He thinks he can buy me, does he? Faulconer thinks he can buy whatever he wants, whether it’s a horse, a man or a whore. But in the end he tires of whatever he buys, and you and me’ll be no different.”

“He isn’t buying me,” Starbuck said, and had that lie treated with a silent derision by Truslow. “Colonel Faulconer’s a good man,” Starbuck insisted.

“You know why he freed his niggers?” Truslow asked.

Pecker Bird had told Starbuck that the manumission had been intended to spite Faulconer’s wife, but Starbuck neither believed the story nor would he repeat it. “Because it was the right thing to do,” he said defiantly.

“So it might have been,” Truslow allowed, “but it was for another woman he did it. Roper will tell you the tale. She was some dollygob church girl from Philadelphia come to tell us southrons how to run our lives, and Faulconer let her stroll all over him. He reckoned he had to free his niggers before she’d ever lie with him, so he did but she didn’t anyway.” Truslow laughed at this evidence of a fool befuddled. “She made a mock of him in front of all Virginia, and that’s why he’s making this Legion of his, to get his pride back. He thinks he’ll be a warrior hero for Virginia. Now, take hold, boy.”

Starbuck felt he had to protect his hero. “He’s a good man!”