But the Yankees encamped to the north would have no hills to climb, for they were already on the high ground. Those men would attack down the line of the pike where two long stands of timber, the West Woods and the East Woods, formed a natural funnel some six or seven hundred yards wide. The funnel was a swathe of farmland that led into the heart of Lee’s position. Not that the Yankees could be seen yet from that heart, for, though they were camped in the woods that grew at the northern lip of the funnel, a thirty-acre cornfield stood between them and the rebel line. The corn stretched across the funnel and was near to harvest and so stood as tall as a paraded regiment. The stalks whispered together in the small evening breeze; a screen to hide two enemies from each other, and in the morning, Lee guessed, a place where the attacking Federals would meet his hard-bitten troops.

“So you’re not my reserve after all, Nate,” Swynyard said when news of the Yankee flanking march arrived. The Yellowlegs were camped at the base of the East Woods and that meant they guarded one lip of the funnel and so could expect to fight the Yankees in the dawn. “I can change you over,” Swynyard volunteered.

“They’ll fight,” Starbuck said of his men. Besides, it was dusk, and to change the position now would mean confusion among men too tired to change bivouacs. “You ain’t expecting an attack up the slope now?” he asked, indicating the farmland where the battalion commanders had met and where the farm buildings now blazed from the work of Miles’s incendiarists.

“Maybe they’ll come both ways,” Swynyard said. “If McClellan’s got any sense, that’s what they’ll do. And that’ll mean hard work, Nate. But those boys,” he waved a hand northward to indicate the Yankees who were camped higher on the turnpike, “are closest, so worry about them first.” He dragged his hand with the missing fingers through his tangled beard. “Earn our pay tomorrow, that’s for sure. Your boys are all right?”

“They’ll fight,” Starbuck said, ignoring his doubts about Tumlin and Dennison.

“Tell them I’m holding prayers in half an hour,” Swynyard said. “I’ll invite you, even though I know you won’t come.”

“I might,” Starbuck said unexpectedly.

Swynyard was tempted to make a joke of Starbuck’s answer, then he saw that maybe his prayers for Starbuck’s soul were being answered and so he bit back his jest. “I’d like it if you did, Nate,” he said instead.

But Starbuck did not come to the colonel’s prayer meeting. Instead he walked to the very right-hand end of his short line where Captain Dennison’s A Company was bivouacked. Starbuck was nervous that the gesture he was about to make would be construed as weakness, but the bad blood inside the Special Battalion needed to be lanced and so he looked for Private Case and, finding the big man, jerked his head toward the trees. “I want you,” he said.