Two rebel horsemen appeared to the south a second or two after Adam had taken cover. The two rebels paused, staring at the orchard, and Adam was tempted to keep running, but knew they would spot him as soon as he left the broken stack. He twisted in his nest of hay to look north, but he could see no enemy there, but then a rumble of hooves made him look south again to see a whole troop of enemy horsemen spurring toward the orchard. The sound of the shots had not brought the townsfolk, but a whole pack of rebel soldiers instead.

They were not Jeb Stuart’s cavalry. These men, as the butcher had said, were bushwhackers. They were from the northern counties of Virginia, farmers by day and fighters by night, only on this day they had given up farming to come north and see what pickings could be gleaned from the abandoned rebel camps and to ambush any Northern cavalry patrols probing west toward Lee’s army. Their uniforms were the same coats they wore when they wrestled with a plow or gelded a calf, their weapons were hunting rifles and ox-killing pistols, while their hatred of Yankees had been intensified by the frequent federal invasions of their farmland. They had been robbed, they had been insulted, they had been impoverished, and now, with the fervor of starving dogs seeking carrion, they sought revenge.

Adam checked the percussion caps on his revolver, then looked up to see the newly arrived troop trotting toward the orchard. Dust from the hay clung to the grease on Adam’s gun while the smell of the dry grass reminded him of childhood games with his sister Anna, then, with a shameful pang, an unwanted memory came to his mind of the time when he had glimpsed his father clamber off a haystack, carrying his clothes on his arm, then turn to give a hand to Bessie. She had been a house slave then. A year later his father had freed all his slaves, making them servants instead, but for years Adam had been frightened of Bessie because of what he had seen. He had been confused at the time, but later he was tormented by the memories of her lissome, gleaming black body and the bright sound of her laughter as she had jumped down beside his father and pulled her pale blue dress over her head. Adam hated slavery.

But the men who hunted him now, he knew, were no slaveowners. They had barely enough money to own a horse, let alone a Negro, and they did not fight to preserve slavery, but to defend their land, and in that defense they were grim and unforgiving. He wriggled deeper into the hay, pulling great clumps of it over his body, but keeping a loophole free through which he could watch his pursuers.

The rebels had surrounded the orchard and now the majority of them dismounted, hitched their horses to tree trunks, and walked into the apple grove with rifles leveled. Adam’s horse was still whinnying with pain, but a sudden shot brought silence. None of the mounted rebels who had stayed outside the orchard was looking toward the haystack and that lack of vigilance persuaded Adam to twist round and look for an escape route. There was a patch of dead ground a hundred paces away, and beyond it, in a field of long grass, a surviving rail fence offered a hint of cover that might let him work his way back to the town, where he would be much safer than in this warm but treacherous refuge. When the rebels discovered that he had escaped from the orchard they were bound to search the haystack and Adam did not want to be found hiding like a child and so he crawled to the haystack’s edge, looked back once to check that he was unobserved, then burst out of the hay and ran in a low crouch toward the dead ground.