“Unless you want a few bad years in prison. Of course, they could just shoot you, but most court-martials end in prison, don’t they? You and some niggers chained together picking cotton or breaking up rocks?” Blythe was making it up as he went along, but he could see his words were getting through to Dennison’s dulled senses. “My name ain’t Billy Tumlin,” Blythe went on, “if you don’t have an urgent need to take care of Starbuck. Starbuck and Rothwell.”

“Starbuck and Rothwell?” Dennison asked.

“And Potter, too,” Blythe said. “And that damned nigger boy. Get your enemies out of the way, Tom, then you can soar! You can be a great soldier. My, I envy you. I won’t be here to see it on account of being back home in Louisiana, but I’ll watch your career. Upon my soul, I will.”

“You reckon Case will help me?” Dennison asked nervously. He was afraid of Case. There was something very dangerous in Case’s big, brooding presence and unreadable eyes. “You sure he’ll help?”

“I know he will,” Blythe said firmly. It had been Case who had helped Blythe during the night in Harper’s Ferry, but that attack on Starbuck had been both opportunistic and clumsy. Things would be much easier now, for what was one pair of deaths among so much carnage? “I told Bobby you’d make him into an officer,” Blythe said. “I reckon Bobby Case deserves to be an officer, don’t you?”

“I reckon,” Dennison agreed vigorously.

“So find him, Tom, and do your duty. Hell, you don’t want to see Starbuck throw a whole battalion away, do you?”

Dennison settled back to think about matters while Blythe leaned contentedly against the wall and drew on his cigar. It was as easy, Blythe reckoned, as stealing from a country church poor-box. He would have his inconvenient enemies killed, then he would somehow cross the lines to his reward in the North. He touched his federal commission, which was still hidden in his pants pocket, then waited.

To Starbuck it was like a nightmare from which he had awoken, only to find the nightmare was real. The rebel line had hurled one attack back, but now another identical assault tramped stolidly down the funnel between the East and West Woods. It was like Ezekiel’s valley of dead bones on which the sinews were stretched, the flesh placed, and the skin wrapped before the breath of God animated the dry bones into a great army. And now, in this waking nightmare, that army advanced on Starbuck and he wondered, in the name of God, just how many more warriors the Yankees could produce.

The new attack again filled the space between the West and East Woods. It came beneath flags, accompanied by drums, trampling over the blood and horror of what was left of the first attack. Yankee skirmishers ran forward, dropped to their knees in the remnants of the corn, and opened fire.

The rebel guns, charged with canister, roared at the advancing line. Starbuck saw one skirmisher lifted from the ground by the strike of the canister and flung backward like a rag doll hurled by a petulant child. The man sprawled back to earth, then, amazingly, picked himself up, found his rifle, and limped away. A rebel skirmisher shot him in the back and the man pitched forward onto his knees, hesitated, then fell flat.