The countryside was curiously silent. It was the absence of cocks crowing that was strange, but that, Adam knew, was because rebel foragers must have combed these gentle farms for their supplies. It would be a hungry winter in Maryland.

He watered his horse at Middlebrook, then rode on past the bottomland where he had outgalloped the rebel patrol. His spirits, which had been depressed by the futility of his assignment, began to rise with the sun as he rode through the good country. Haystacks stood neatly in well-tended fields and woodlots were stacked high, though doubtless the advancing army would soon make short work of all that hard labor. It was an image of peace and it warmed Adam’s soul that now soared into a sunlit daydream of the war’s ending. He doubted he could go back to Virginia, and doubted that he even wanted to return. Instead, he thought, he would go to New England and study for the ministry. He had a vision of a shingled town built about a steepling white church amidst the heavy woods; a place of honesty and hard work, a place where a man could study and preach and minister and write. He saw a study heavy with books, and maybe with his father’s ivory-hilted saber, which Adam had captured and now wore at his side, hanging above the fireplace. The saber had been a gift to Adam’s great-grandfather from Lafayette, and its blade was handsomely inscribed. “To my friend Cornelius Faulconer,” the inscription read in French, “who joined me in the fight for liberty, Lafayette,” and Adam imagined his own great-grandchildren treasuring the weapon as a memento of two wars in which virtue had triumphed over evil. He envisioned a kitchen with a heavy black range, steaming pots, drying herbs, and heaped bowls of fruit picked from his own yard. He thought of Julia Gordon in Richmond, and wondered if at the war’s ending she would acknowledge the South’s sins and come north to share his imagined haven in the deep, pious silence of the New England woods.

These thoughts carried him through Clarkstown, Hyattstown, and Urbana, until at last he crossed the Baltimore and Ohio. The rebels had prized up the rails and uprooted the ties to leave a scar across the good land, but Adam knew the North’s engineers would soon repair the track and have the cars running east and west again. Ahead of Adam now was Frederick City, but all around him was nothing but deserted fields dotted with the pale marks where tents had stood and the dark smears where fires had burned. The rebels had vanished.

It was late morning when he entered the town. “Hey! Soldier!” a woman called, spotting Adam’s blue coat, “where are the rest of you?”

“They’re coming, ma’am,” Adam answered, courteously touching the brim of his hat.

“Lee’s boys are gone, all gone,” the woman said, then plunged her washing down the scrub board. “Thought you’d be here sooner.”