The Yankee prisoners marched disconsolately out of the town, going to the heights where they would bivouac before being sent south to the prison camps. Harper’s Ferry was left to its new owners who, as night fell, lit cooking fires that flickered low as men rolled themselves in blankets and slept on ground still littered with fragments of shell casing. Starbuck had made his quarters in an abandoned railroad box wagon, but he could not sleep and so he pulled on his boots and, careful not to wake Lucifer who, after nights of watching Starbuck, had at last fallen fast asleep, slipped out of the wagon and walked between his sleeping men toward the bank of the Shenandoah.

He was bone tired, but he could not sleep, for the same fears that had prompted his morning conversation with Jackson were nagging at him. He felt presentiments of failure and suspected they sprang from within himself. He had failed to unite the Special Battalion, just as he had failed with the Legion. No battalion, he told himself, could fight well if it was riven with jealousies and hatred, but discerning the problem did not help him find a solution. It was true that he had made some allies in the battalion, but they numbered fewer than half of the total, and many of the rest were bitter enemies. He thought about Elijah Hudson and Pecker Bird and Robert Lee and decided that their popularity sprang from character, and if character was lacking, he chided himself, leadership was a hopeless ambition. Griffin Swynyard had changed his character through the grace of God and that had made all the difference; a once-hated major had become an admired colonel. Starbuck picked up a piece of rubble and tossed it into the river that here flowed fast and white over rocky outcrops to its junction with the Potomac.

So was God the answer? Was there nothing he could do for himself? Starbuck, gloomier than ever, suspected that the ambition in his own soul was the flaw that revealed itself to his men. That and the cowardice that he saw in himself. Or perhaps Maitland was right, and some men were born to lead. Starbuck swore softly. He had a vision of a perfect battalion, one that operated as smoothly as the newly greased mechanism of the captured Springfield rifles. A machine that worked.