Jackson had said that only God could give a man strength, and only strength could make a battalion work together. A battalion was composed of men with different fears and suspicions and ambitions, and the trick of it was to swamp those desires with a greater desire: the desire to work together toward victory. In a day or two, Starbuck feared, the Yellowlegs would face a real Yankee army, the same army that had made the northern horizon vague with smoke these last two days, and how would they fight then? Of the officers Potter alone was loyal, and Potter, God knew, was a weak reed. Starbuck closed his eyes. A part of him yearned for the grace of God to drench him with strength, but whenever he was tempted to yield to his Maker’s will another temptation intervened, and this was a more beguiling temptation. It consisted of memories of firelit bodies, not dead and twisted and lice-ridden and scarred and filthy, but bodies on sheets. Sally pushing her hair back from her face. The girl who had died under Blythe’s bullets at the tavern. He remembered her crouching by the fire, her red hair falling down her naked back, laughing as she toasted a scrap of bread on which she had melted a scrap of cheese taken from a mousetrap. Heaven, Starbuck liked to think, lay in those moments and he was unwilling to call them hell. His father had always said that being a Christian was not easy, but it had taken these last two years to show Starbuck how desperately hard it really was. He did not want to abandon sin, yet he feared that he would fail as a soldier if he did not. He wondered if he should pray. Maybe a prayer by this hurrying river would hurtle its way through the smoky air to the ear of God, who alone could give a man the strength to overcome temptation.

A stone slid on stone to Starbuck’s right. He opened his eyes and saw a shadow flicker among the rubble and stunted trees on the riverbank. “Who’s there?” he called.

No one answered. He decided it must have been a rat, or else one of the rake-thin cats that lived wild in the ruined armory. The lights of the town showed through trees, but they revealed nothing on this broken riverbank where weeds grew thick among fallen stones. He turned back to the water. Maybe, he thought, he should pray. Maybe he should claw and crawl his way back to God, but where would that journey end? On the Yankee side? On his knees to his father?

A click sounded and he knew it was a gun being cocked. For a second he froze, hardly daring to believe what he suspected, then he threw himself backward just as a gun flamed and banged to his right. The shot screamed over his head and a billow of smoke gusted across the water. He scrambled into a half-choked culvert that was brimming with scummy water and he dragged the Adams revolver from his holster. He heard footsteps, but could see no one. A sentry was shouting, demanding to know who had fired and why, then Starbuck saw a shape silhouetted against the tree-shrouded lights of the town and he leveled the revolver. Then a second man sprang up and he changed his aim, but both were running away, bent double, unrecognizable, scuttling toward the rusted tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio rails. He fired once, but over their heads for if he had aimed and missed then the bullet could have struck home among the encamped soldiers. More men were running toward the river, shouting warnings and questions.