“Me, too.”

“I haven’t seen Maitland,” Swynyard said. “Thank you, Nate,” this was for loading the revolver that the colonel now returned to its holster.

“Maitland’s still here,” Starbuck said.

“So he didn’t run away? Good for him.” The colonel glanced up and down his line. On paper he commanded a brigade, but the men left in the firing line would hardly have constituted a regiment in the prewar army and the brigade’s various battalions had become inextricably mixed as Swynyard had fed men into the battle, so that now men simply clung to their friends or nearest neighbors while officers and sergeants looked after whoever was within sight. “The textbook,” Swynyard said, “would probably suggest we disentangle ourselves and get back into our proper battalions, but I think we’ll forget the textbook. They’ll fight just as well as they are.” He meant, Starbuck suspected, that they would die just as well, and indeed, at that moment, it seemed impossible that they should do anything but die. The Yankees were quiet, but that lull would not last, for Starbuck could see more blue coats showing beyond the jagged wreckage of the cornfield. The enemy had attacked twice, and twice they had been thrown back, but now the Yankees gathered their forces for the next advance.

Starbuck sent Lucifer to Maitland with a canteen of water. The boy came back grinning. “One happy man, the Colonel,” he said.

“He’s not the first to get drunk on a battlefield,” Starbuck said.

“Mister Tumlin,” Lucifer happily reported more news, “is wearing a new coat. All bloody.”

Starbuck no longer cared about Tumlin, nor Dennison. He would deal with them after the battle, if there was anything left to deal with. Now, back among the dead who sheltered the living in the shell-blackened pasture, he waited for the Yankees.

Whose drums began to sound again. Whose guns opened fire again.

For the third attack was coming.

Two miles to the south, where the Antietam Creek turned sharply westward as it ran down to the Potomac, a whole corps of the United States army waited in hiding on the creek’s eastern bank. Twenty-nine battalions of hardened troops, backed by guns, were ready to cross the river and slash north toward the road that ran west from Sharpsburg. Once that road was captured then all Lee’s troops north of the town would be cut off from their retreat, and this corps was the lower jaws of that terrible trap.

Some of the troops were sleeping. Others cooked breakfast. The rebels knew they were there, for the rebel artillery across the creek kept up a harassing fire, but the Northern troops were concealed by woods and reverse slopes and the rebel shells whirred overhead to explode harmlessly in woods or pastures.

No orders came to cross the creek, and for that the commanders of the battalions closest to the water were grateful. The stone bridge that crossed the creek was narrow, and the far bank was precipitous and crowded with rebel infantry who had dug rifle pits into the slope so that any attack down the road and onto the bridge would be a bloody affair.