He hurried back to the street where he thrust the curious onlookers aside and pulled himself into the saddle. He transferred the gold back to its saddlebag and pushed his horse through the crowd until at last he broke free of them and could spur down the street toward the rail depot. A butcher in a bloodied apron came out of a shed as Adam trotted past. “You want to be careful, soldier!” the butcher shouted. “There were some bushwhackers west of the town not long ago.”

Adam reined in. “Rebels?” he asked.

“Weren’t wearing blue,” the butcher said.

“I thought the rebels were gone?”

“These are bastards from over the river. Come to pick up some plunder, like as not. But they were well to the west when I saw them, but they’ll be circling round to the south to look at the rail depot. You go out that road,” the man pointed due east, “and you’ll be well clear of them. After ten or twelve miles you’ll come to Ridgeville and you can turn south there.”

“Thank you,” Adam said, then he turned the horse, kicked his heels back, and urged the horse into a trot. He had a long journey ahead and he had to save his mare’s strength and so he curbed his instinct to spur her into a canter. He touched his pocket, scarce daring to believe what was hidden there. Delaney? Was Delaney the traitor? And Adam was shocked at himself for having used the word “traitor,” even in his thoughts, for whoever had sent the order was no traitor to the United States. But was it Delaney? Somehow Adam could not imagine the foppish, clever lawyer as a spy, but he could think of no one else who fit both the postmaster’s description of the rebel officer and Colonel Thorne’s portrait of his reluctant agent. Delaney, the sly Richmond lawyer with the glib tongue, skin-deep smile, and watchful eyes.

Adam’s astonishment took him past a schoolhouse, then by an empty livery stable and a Negro chapel. He splashed through a ford and spurred up the far bank onto a long stretch of road that left the town behind to run between fields blotched with the scars left by rebel camps. He passed a small orchard that had been stripped bare by soldiers and it was just past that orchard, where the road bent leftward and began to run gently down toward the Linganore Run, that he saw the rebel horsemen.

He reined in. The five men were a quarter mile away, motionless, and watching him almost as if they had been expecting him. Two of the horsemen were on the road, one was well to the north, while the others were in the pasture south of the road. For a few seconds the six men all watched each other without moving, then Adam wrenched his mare’s head around and spurred her back toward the town.

He had thought of trying to outrun the handful of rebels, but his horse had covered too many miles on a hot day to be capable of a lung-stretching gallop across miles of country. A McClellan-like caution was the best plan and so he kicked his heels to urge the mare back past the plundered orchard.