Lee nodded. “He got wind of our dispositions. We don’t know how, but some sympathizers at Frederick sent us a message telling us that McClellan was boasting that he had us in the bag. Well, so he did, but it’s one thing to have a bag and it’s quite another to stuff the wildcat inside the bag. Believe me, Delaney, his caution will return. It already has returned! If I was across that river I wouldn’t be bivouacking now. I’d be pushing brigades over the valley, I’d be thrusting hard, I’d be fighting, but McClellan is waiting, and every hour that he waits brings Jackson’s men closer to us.”

But even when Jackson’s men came, Delaney thought, Lee’s army would be less than half the size of McClellan’s. The rebellion was surely doomed and Delaney, rejoicing in that thought and in the part he had played in the destruction, still felt a regret for Lee. The General was a good man, a very good and honorable man, but Lee had no ambassadorships in his pocket and so Delaney prayed that on the morrow he would watch the Confederacy die in the ripe fields beside the Antietam.

Tuesday, September 17, dawned hot and sultry. The Confederate pickets, warned of an enemy attack, stared across the river through a heavy fog that slowly lightened as the sun rose above the Red Hill. The pickets feared the blast of cannons loaded with canister and the splashing of men carrying bayonets and loaded rifles through the river’s fords, but no such attack came. McClellan, if he did but know it, had succeeded in the dearest wish of all fighting generals: He had trapped his enemy’s army while it was split into two parts, and if McClellan had laughed across the stream he could have destroyed Lee’s small army, then marched against Jackson’s scattered men as they hurried north from Harper’s Ferry.

But McClellan did not move. He waited.

The sun burned the last of the fog from the creek and nervous rebel pickets stared across the water at green leaves from which the smoke of campfires drifted gently. Confederate cavalry reconnoitered the Antietam’s backs north and south of Lee’s position, but no Northern troops were attempting the crossing, nor, astonishingly, were any Northern cavalry making similar patrols in the drowsy, heavy countryside. There were Yankee troops marching, but those men formed the tail of McClellan’s huge army as it crossed the hills toward the Antietam’s eastern bank. The sixty thousand Yankees became seventy-five thousand and still McClellan did not advance. He waited.

He waited just two and a half miles east of the Dunker church, on the Yankee bank of the Antietam, in the Pry family farmhouse. The farm had a substantial house, ample barns, and well-drained fields that sloped from the Red Hill down to the creek’s banks. Most of the fields were stubble now, though some were tall with corn that was almost ready to be harvested. One meadow was stacked with hay, a second had a fine crop of clover, while the higher fields had just been plowed for the planting of winter wheat. Yankees were bivouacked in all the meadows and had torn down the haystacks to make their mattresses. Some played baseball, some wrote home, others lay reading in whatever shade they could discover on this hot, humid day. Once in a while a man would peer through the trees at the distant line of rebel guns crowning the western skyline, but until they received orders to attack they were content to rest. Little Mac would see them right. The newspapers might call McClellan the Young Napoleon, but to the Northern soldiers he was always Little Mac and the one thing they knew and loved in Little Mac was that he would never risk their lives unnecessarily. They trusted him, and so they were content to wait.