Starbuck paused to watch the companies being drilled. There seemed small point to the activity, for the men were proficient enough, though every tiny fault was enough to force the sergeant in charge to a barrage of obscene abuse. The sergeant was a tall, gangling man with an unnaturally long neck and a voice that could have carried clean across the river to Manchester. The troops had no weapons, but were simply being marched, halted, turned, and marched again. Some were in gray coats, but most wore the increasingly common butternut brown that was easier to produce. At least half the men, Starbuck noted with alarm, had no boots, but were marching barefoot.

Sally put her arm into Starbuck’s elbow as they walked closer to the headquarters, where a group of four officers was stretched out in camp chairs on the verandah. One of the idling officers trained a telescope toward Starbuck and Sally. “You’re being admired,” Starbuck said.

“That was the point of me wasting an afternoon, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Starbuck said proudly.

Sally paused again to watch the troops on the parade ground who, so far as the screaming sergeant allowed, returned her inspection. “They’re your men?” she asked.

“All mine.”

“The pick of a bad bunch, eh?”

“They look all right to me,” Starbuck said. He was already trying to imbue himself with a loyalty toward these despised troops.

“They can kill Yankees, can’t they?” Sally said, sensing Starbuck’s apprehension. She brushed at the ingrained dirt on his uniform sleeve, not because she believed the dirt could be swept off, but because she knew he needed the small consolation of touch. Then her hand paused. “What’s that?” she asked.

Starbuck turned to see that Sally was gazing at a punishment horse that had been erected between two of the huts. The horse was a long beam that was mounted edgewise on a pair of tall trestles, and the punishment consisted of a man being forced to straddle the beam’s edge and stay there while his own weight turned his groin into a mass of pain. A prisoner was on the horse with his hands bound and his legs tied to prevent him dismounting, while an armed guard stood beside the steps that were used to mount the instrument. “A punishment,” Starbuck explained, “called a horse. Hurts like hell, I’m told.”

“That’s the point of punishment, ain’t it?” Sally said. She had taken her share of beatings as a child and the experience had thickened her skin.

The man beneath the horse appeared to ask a question of the straddling man. The prisoner shook his head and the man yanked down on his bound ankles so that the man screamed.

“Shit,” Starbuck said.

“Ain’t that a part of it?” Sally demanded.

“No.”

Sally looked at the distaste on Starbuck’s face. “You going soft, Nate?”

“I don’t mind punishing soldiers, but not torture. Besides, think of them.” He nodded toward the companies on the parade ground who were mutely watching the horse. “A regiment’s a fragile thing,” he said, echoing Swynyard’s words to Maitland. “It works best when the men are fighting the enemy, not each other.” He flinched as the guard tugged on the prisoner’s ankles again. “Hell,” he said, reluctant to intervene, but also unwilling to watch any more brutality. He strode toward the horse.