Starbuck dragged himself out of the filthy water. A sentry saw him and dropped to one knee with his rifle leveled. “Who are you?” he shouted.

“Major Starbuck. Swynyard’s brigade.” Starbuck holstered the revolver and brushed stinking water off his pants. “Put the gun down, lad.”

An officer arrived demanding to know who had fired and why. Starbuck gestured at the river. “Thought I saw a man swimming. I reckoned it was an escaping Yankee.”

The officer stared at the moon-glossed river that foamed over the rocks. “I can’t see anyone.”

“So I was dreaming,” Starbuck said. “Now I’m going to bed.”

He walked away. He heard the word “drunk” being used, but he did not care. He knew what he had seen, but he had not known whom he had seen. Two men, his men, he guessed, and somewhere in the battalion they were still loose and waiting for their chance.

Them and a hundred thousand Yankees. Across the river. Marching toward a town no one had ever heard of. Called Sharpsburg.

PART TWO

THE CREEK WELLED FROM A MOSSY SPRING IN A LOW pass of the South Mountains, then flowed west and south through a rocky landscape of thin soil and old trees. Little disturbed the stream’s flow in its first few miles, for there were no settlements in that part of Pennsylvania, but just east of Waynesborough the creek flowed into farmland and became muddied with the feet of cattle. There were still no bridges, for the stream was shallow enough to be forded even during the winter spate, and so it flowed on across the border into Maryland where, deepened and broadened by other streams, it reached its first bridge at Hagerstown. Fish lay in the bridge’s shadow, and in summer children played in the waist-deep water.

Past Hagerstown the creek ran southward, flowing deeper and stronger as more tributaries joined, but still it was little more than a stream. In places it ran shallow over rocks, foaming and swirling through the flickering shadows of the woods before it swung in great serpent loops between lush green fields. Deer drank from the creek, men fished from it, and cattle stood in its summer pools to cool themselves.

The Beaver creek joined the stream five miles south of Hagerstown and now the creek was almost a river. It could still be forded by horsemen, but the local folk had built handsome stone bridges to keep their feet dry. The creek flowed on, still looping, but hurrying now to its confluence with the Potomac River, where the creek was swallowed into the massive flow of water running to the eastern sea.

Some four miles north of where the creek joined the Potomac River there was a spot where a shelving bank of shingle edged the water beneath a stand of great elms. It was a pretty place, cool in summer and a favorite spot for children who liked to run into the river down the shingle bank or else swing on a rope hung from an elm bough above the water, but on a couple of Sunday mornings every summer there was no playing at the place, for on those days a procession would walk up the Smoketown Road, skirt the East Woods, then follow a track across the Miller farmland that led to the creek’s steep, wooded slope. There might be fifty people in the procession, rarely more, and they walked in a solemn silence that would only be broken when someone started a hymn. Then they would all join in, their voices strong as they wended between cornfields and woods toward the water. The men would be in their suits, all of them ill-cut from a dark, thick cloth, but the discomfort of the formal clothes was a tribute to the day. The women were shawled and bonneted while the children were held firmly by the hand so that no unseemly behavior would mar the occasion. At the head of the procession strode a preacher in a wide-brimmed black hat.