Except he had not lost. Two Indiana soldiers, a sergeant and a corporal, had finished pitching their tents and had wandered north out of their camp lines, across a dip in the pastureland, to a cleaner stretch of grass that was unsoiled by rebel litter. They planned to make a fire and boil some coffee away from the predatory gaze of their comrades and so they walked toward a rail fence that had miraculously remained unbroken during the rebels’ stay. Rails made good firewood, and the coffee would help pass the long hot afternoon, but just before they reached the fence Corporal Barton Mitchell saw an envelope lying in the grass. It had a curiously bulky look and so he picked it up and shook out the contents. “Bless me, Johnny,” he said as the three cigars appeared. He sniffed one. “Damn good too. You want one?”

Sergeant Bloss took the offered cigar, and with it the sheet of paper that had served to wrap the precious find. As he nipped the cigar’s end with his teeth he glanced at the paper and, after a few seconds, frowned. There were names here he recognized—Jackson, Longstreet, and Stuart—while at its foot the paper was signed by command of General R. E. Lee.

The coffee was forgotten. Instead the two men took the paper to their company commander, who passed it up the chain of command until at last a prewar colleague of Colonel Chilton’s recognized the handwriting. It seemed the order was genuine and it was hurried to General McClellan’s tent.

Thorne heard the excitement and, pulling on his blue coat, ducked out of his tent and strode across to where a throng of people was gathered about the General’s headquarters. Many in the crowd were civilians come to gape at the federal general who, convinced that the order was the real copper-bottomed thing, was exultant. McClellan saw Thorne and brandished the paper triumphantly. “Here’s a paper with which I can whip Bobby Lee, Thorne! And if I can’t I’ll go home tomorrow!”

Thorne, astonished at this sudden enthusiasm on McClellan’s part, could only gape.

“Tomorrow we’ll pitch into his center!” McClellan boasted, “and in two days we’ll have him trapped!”

Thorne managed to secure the order. His astonishment grew as he read it, for here were written all Lee’s dispositions and those dispositions revealed the enemy commander to be a consummate gambler. Lee must have known that McClellan’s army was marching westward, but such was his contempt for his enemy that he had divided his army into five parts, then scattered them across western Maryland and northern Virginia. Most of the Confederate forces were besieging Harper’s Ferry, others had gone north to prepare for the invasion of Pennsylvania, while smaller forces barred the hills that faced McClellan’s troops. It was true that the order was now four days old, but the constant mutter of the distant guns confirmed that the rebels were still swarming about Harper’s Ferry and that sound suggested that the dispositions detailed in the order were still in place, which meant that if McClellan really did march quickly then there was a genuine chance that the Northern army could be placed between the scattered units of Lee’s army. Then they would be destroyed, one by one, slaughter by slaughter, surrender by surrender, page after page of history being made.