The crowd surged toward the prisoners, then checked, uncertain exactly what they wanted of their captives. A handful of ringleaders had emerged from the crowd’s anonymity, and those ringleaders now shouted for the crowd to be patient. The commandeered wagon had gone to fetch the road mender’s tar, the crowd was assured, and in the meantime a sack of feathers had been fetched from a mattress factory in nearby Virginia Street. “We’re going to teach you gennelmen a lesson!” the big bearded man crowed to the two prisoners. “You Yankees think you’re better than us southrons, isn’t that what you think?” He took a handful of the feathers and scattered them in the dentist’s face. “All high and mighty, are you?”

“I am a mere dentist, sir, who has been practicing my trade in Petersburg.” Burroughs tried to plead his case with dignity.

“He’s a dentist!” the big man shouted delightedly.

“Pull his teeth out!”

Another cheer announced the return of the borrowed wagon, which now bore on its bed a great black steaming vat of tar. The wagon clattered to a halt close to the two prisoners, and the stench of its tar even overwhelmed the smell of tobacco, which permeated the whole city.

“Starbuck’s whelp first!” someone shouted, but it seemed the ceremonies were to be conducted in the order of capture, or else the ringleaders wanted to save the best till last, for Morley Burroughs, the Philadelphia dentist, was the first to be cut free of the bars and dragged toward the wagon. He struggled, but he was no match for the sinewy men who pulled him onto the wagon bed that would now serve as a makeshift stage.

“Your turn next, Yankee.” The small bespectacled man who had first discovered Starbuck’s identity had come to stand beside the Bostoner. “So what are you doing here?”

The man’s tone had almost been friendly, so Starbuck, thinking he might have found an ally, answered him with the truth. “I escorted a lady here.”

“A lady now! What kind of lady?” the small man asked. A whore, Starbuck thought bitterly, a cheat, a liar and a bitch, but God, how he had fallen in love with her, and how he had worshiped her, and how he had let her twist him about her little finger and thus ruin his life so that now he was bereft, impoverished and homeless in Richmond. “I asked you a question,” the man insisted.

“A lady from Louisiana,” Starbuck answered mildly, “who wanted to be escorted from the North.”

“You’d better pray she comes and saves you quick!” the bespectacled man laughed, “before Sam Pearce gets his hands on you.”