“Connolly, sir. John Connolly.”

“Then pray hard, John Connolly, and shoot low.”

“I will that, sir.”

Starbuck’s battalion, a tiny regiment, was at the southern edge of the pastureland, a hundred paces behind the cornfield. His two left-hand companies were in the open, facing the corn, while his right companies were huddled in the East Woods. Potter’s skirmishers were higher up the wood, waiting for the Yankees. The rest of Swynyard’s Brigade was bent back at right angles, lining the wood’s edge and then strung across the plowed field toward the family graveyard.

Swynyard joined Starbuck. “A quarter to six,” he announced, “or thereabouts. My watch stopped in the night.” He glanced to the left. “They look good,” he said of the neighboring brigade.

“Georgians,” Starbuck said. He had introduced himself to the colonel of the battalion next to him and the man had been cordial, but Starbuck had seen the flicker of worry when the Georgian colonel had learned that the Yellowlegs were guarding his right flank.

Swynyard turned and stared southward across the pasture toward the Smoketown Road, which was just becoming visible in the thinning fog. “Lots of troops ready to back us up,” he said.

“Lots?” Starbuck answered wryly, knowing that Swynyard was merely trying to reassure him.

“There are some, anyway,” Swynyard admitted wryly. A new battery of rebel guns was being positioned in the pasture, its muzzles pointed ominously northward in a sign that Lee expected the first Yankee attack to come straight down the funnel between the woods. Straight across the cornfield. Straight at the waiting men who crouched beyond the corn. Some Georgian skirmishers were already up among the stalks that stood high as a standing man.

Swynyard dragged his maimed hand through his straggling beard, a gesture that betrayed his nervousness. He was worried about the eastern flank, the long slope that fell with ever-increasing steepness toward the creek. His fear was that the Yankees would embroil his brigade in a fight at the funnel’s mouth, then attack up that slope to smash in behind his men. And once the Yankees were up on the high ground about the Smoketown Road there was nothing to stop them carving Lee’s army into fragments, but so far there were no signs of Yankee activity on the creek itself. There were no reports of men trying to cross the river, no sounds of guns being dragged down to the fords and bridges, and no glimpses of blue-coated troops filing down the farm tracks toward the Antietam’s eastern bank.

A new barrage of guns sounded. These were the rebel guns positioned on the hill to the west of the turnpike and they were firing slantwise across the funnel’s northern mouth. “I suspect,” Swynyard said, “that our erstwhile brethren are stirring.”

“God help us,” Starbuck blurted out.

Swynyard put a hand on Starbuck’s shoulder. “He does, Nate, He does.” The hand on Starbuck’s shoulder suddenly convulsed as the sound of rifles crackled through the morning. The skirmishers were engaged. “Not long now,” Swynyard said in the unconvincing tone of a dentist trying to soothe a nervous patient. “Not long.” His hand convulsed again. “Last night,” he said quietly, “I had to fight the temptation for a drink. It was as bad as those first few nights. I just wanted a mouthful of whiskey.”