Swynyard frowned at the hearse. “Are you sure you want to keep it?” he asked Starbuck.

“The men like it. It makes them feel special.”

“I suppose it would,” Swynyard said, then raised his head to listen to the far off sound of gunfire. “We’re marching in the morning,” he said grimly. “No rest for the wicked.”

“What’s happening?”

“Yankees are attacking,” Swynyard said vaguely, then shrugged as if to say that he knew no more. “Lee wants us all together again. It’ll be hard marching, Nate. Tell your fellows they have to suffer the blisters and keep going. Just keep going.” The colonel had a map that he unfolded to show Starbuck the route they would take. “We go up the southern bank of the Potomac,” he said, tracing the westward road with a nail-bitten finger, “to a ford here, near Shepherdstown, then we march east as far as here.” He tapped the map.

Starbuck peered at the rendezvous, which was a town situated at a road junction just a few miles inside Maryland. “Sharpsburg,” he said. The map showed a small town positioned on a wide strip of land formed by the Potomac River and one of its tributaries, Antietam Creek. “Sharpsburg,” Starbuck said again. “Never heard of it.”

“You’re sleeping there tomorrow night,” Swynyard said, “God willing.”

“My men’s feet willing, more likely,” Starbuck said. He lit one of the captured cigars that Lucifer had discovered along with a haul of new underwear, shirts, sugar, and coffee. “Did we get any horses for the wagons?” he asked.

“A few, none of them good.” The colonel folded his map. “Early start, Nate. Get some sleep.”

Getting sleep was easier said than done, for the men did not want to sleep. They had won a victory and the ease of that victory was cause for celebration and the Yankee supplies had yielded enough liquor to make that celebration rousing. Others, like Starbuck, wanted to look at the sights. They marveled at the captured cannons that were lined wheel to wheel in the armory yard and that would now take their place in the Confederate battle line, then they explored the engine house where John Brown had been surrounded with his hostages. The little firefighter’s building had a handsome cupola, reminding Starbuck of the widow’s walks on the houses beside the sea in Massachusetts, though this cupola, like the engine house’s brickwork, was pitted by the scars made by the bullets of the U.S. Marines who, under Colonel Robert Lee’s command, had forced John Brown’s surrender. Some rebels were all in favor of pulling the engine house down in case it became a Yankee shrine, but no one had the energy for the demolition and so the building remained intact. Starbuck climbed to the church flying the British flag to discover it was a Catholic building that had sheltered its parishioners beneath a neutral flag. A nearby church had been shelled to destruction, but the Catholic congregation had escaped the bombardment.