“God knows.” Starbuck raised himself to peer over the corpse that sheltered him and saw a Yankee flag carrier kneeling in the corn. He fired and dropped back.

“Truslow says there are Yankees beyond the wood, sir.” Decker pointed east.

Starbuck swore. Till now that open flank had been blessedly free of Yankees, but if an attack did come from the open country to the east then there was no way that the survivors in the pasture could cope with it. The Yankees would sweep into the East Woods, then out into the pasture, and the Yankees pinned down in the cornfield would join the attack. “You find Swynyard,” he ordered Decker, “and tell him I’ve gone to take a look.”

He ran eastward. Bullets whipped past him, but the lingering smoke spoiled the Yankees’ aim. Starbuck saw Potter and shouted at him to bring his company, then he was in the trees. He jumped a newly fallen branch, twisted past two rebel corpses, then ran on until he reached the Smoketown Road. He paused there, wondering if the Yankees still held the trees beyond, but he could see no movement and so he crossed the dirt track and ran on through the trees. A wounded Yankee called out for water, but Starbuck ignored the man. He headed toward the wood’s edge through trunks gouged and splintered and drilled by bullets.

He dropped in the shadows at the tree line. To the east, where the land dropped away to the creek, he could see nothing, but to the north, where the Smoketown Road emerged from the trees to vanish beneath a crest neatly plowed into furrows, were Yankees. Another damned horde of Yankees. They were two wide fields away and for the moment they were not moving. Starbuck could see officers riding up and down the ranks, he could see the banners hanging in the still air, and he knew that the Yankees were being readied to attack. And all that stood between them and Lee’s center were two shrunken companies of skirmishers.

“The good Lord is surely testing us today,” Swynyard said, catching sight of Starbuck. The colonel knelt beside him and stared at the waiting Yankees. Potter was behind him with a dozen men; all that remained of his company.

Starbuck felt a vast relief that Swynyard had arrived. “What do we do, sir?”

“Pray?” Swynyard shrugged. “If we bring out men here then we open up the cornfield, if we leave them there, we open up this door.”

“So we pray,” Starbuck said grimly.

“And send for help.” Swynyard backed away. “Leave someone here to watch them, Nate, and let me know when they advance.” He ran off through the woods.

Starbuck left Sergeant Rothwell to watch the Yankees, while he led Potter and his men back across the Smoketown Road to the inner edge of the East Woods, where Truslow was harassing the Yankee flank in the cornfield. “What are those sons of bitches doing?” Truslow asked, meaning the Yankees formed on the Smoketown Road.