“Back where you started from!” Colonel Swynyard called. “Back to your positions! Back! Captain Truslow! Here!”

He put Truslow in charge of the wood, giving him every skirmisher in the brigade as his force. The Pennsylvanians would probably return, resupplied with their unique cartridges. Truslow had found one of the Sharps rifles and was exploring its mechanism. “Clever,” Truslow said sourly, reluctant to praise anything Northern.

“Accurate, too,” Starbuck said, looking at his own dead skirmishers. Sergeant Rothwell was alive, and so was Potter, but too many good men had died. Case was alive, leading a small coterie of his cronies. Case, like a couple of his friends, had pinned a dead Pennsylvanian’s buck’s tail to his own hat to show he had killed one of the feared skirmishers and Starbuck liked the gesture. “Case!” he shouted.

Case turned his gaze on Starbuck, saying nothing.

“You’re a sergeant.”

A flicker of a smile showed on the grim face, then Case turned away. “He don’t like you,” Truslow said.

“He’s the one I fought.”

“The one you should have killed,” Truslow said.

“He’s a good soldier.”

“Good soldiers make bad enemies,” Truslow observed, then spat tobacco juice.

The brigade formed again where it had started the day, though now its ranks had been thinned by death. Men from Haxall’s Arkansas regiment helped the wounded back to the graveyard, while others brought water from the springhouse of the burned farm. Starbuck sent a dozen men to loot the cartridge pouches of the dead and distribute the ammunition. Lucifer brought Starbuck a full canteen of water. “Mister Tumlin,” Lucifer said gleefully, “is in the graveyard.”

“Dead?” Starbuck asked savagely.

“Hiding behind the wall.”

“Dennison?”

“Him too.” Lucifer grinned.

“Sons of bitches,” Starbuck said. He turned to run over to the graveyard, but just then a bugle sounded and the Yankee artillery began to fire again and Starbuck turned back.

The second Northern attack was coming.

In Harper’s Ferry the noise of battle was like distant thunder, but a thunder that never ended. Vagaries of wind would sometimes dull the sound to a grumble, or else magnify it so that the ominous crack of individual guns could be heard.

The captured Federal garrison had been marched away to captivity and now the last rebel soldiers prepared to leave the small, ransacked town. The troops were General Hill’s Light Division, three thousand of Jackson’s best men, and they had seventeen miles to march to reach the source of the bruising noise that filled the sky.

It promised to be a hot day, a searing hot day, a day when marching would be hell, but nothing to the hell that waited for them at their journey’s end. General Hill wore his red shirt, a sign he expected to fight.

The Light Division began its march, while ten miles north, but blocked from them by the wide Potomac River, their comrades pushed new powder into blackened rifle barrels and a new mass of Yankees, more numerous then the first, came down the turnpike.