The saber pricked at Adam’s chin. “What were you doing here, Major?”

“No damn good,” one of the rebels answered for Adam, then laughed.

“Son of a bitch,” the rebel leader said, then stood and sheathed the lovely saber. He pulled out his revolver and aimed it at Adam’s head. “I don’t have all day, Major, and nor do you, and I ain’t got the patience to wait on you seeing sense. So talk now, you son of a bitch. Just what were you doing here?”

Adam closed his eyes. In heaven, he was telling himself, there would be no tears and no pain and no regrets. No tangle of crossed allegiances. No war. No slavery. There would just be joy and peace and endless calm happiness. He smiled. Such happiness in heaven, he thought, such warm, dreamy happiness.

“He ain’t going to talk,” a man said.

“He’s Faulconer’s son,” a new voice intervened. “You remember? The son of a bitch deserted in the spring.”

“Faulconers never were any damned good,” a voice growled, “nigger-loving rich bastards.”

The rebel leader fired. The sound of the shot crackled along the hollow and faded as the bullet thumped with a terrible force into the dirt beside Adam’s head. “What’s your name?” the leader demanded.

Adam opened his eyes. “Faulconer,” he said proudly, “and I’m a Virginian.”

“So what were you doing here, you bastard?” the rebel asked.

“Dreaming of heaven,” Adam said and would say no more.

“You’re a traitor, you son of a bitch,” the leader said when he realized Adam was determined to stay silent. He fired a second bullet, and this one slammed into Adam’s head, making it jerk up once as the bullet drove a fist-sized chunk out of the back of his skull. The head flopped back, blood on the fair hair and with its eyes open, then was still.

The rebel holstered the revolver. “Leave the son of a bitch where he is.”

A fly crawled onto one of Adam’s eyeballs, then flew down to the wound in his open mouth. The rebels walked away. They had made a good haul: gold, a fine saddle and bridle, a saber and a revolver. They did not find the envelope.

When the Virginian horsemen had gone back south a group of men came from the town to investigate what the shooting had been about. They discovered Adam’s body. One of them sent for two slaves and a handcart on which the corpse was wheeled into the town, where there was a discussion about what to do with it. Some wanted to wait until McClellan’s army reached Frederick City and then hand the body over, but the Episcopalian minister insisted that no one knew whether the Northern army would even come to the town and that by the time anyone did arrive the corpse would surely be stinking and so a hole was dug in the graveyard where Adam, uncoffined, but in the uniform of the country he had loved, was buried with prayers. The postmaster remembered the dead officer’s name, though not how to spell it, and “Adam Falconer” was burned into the wooden cross that marked the heap of soil.