The two Northern battalions, their careful lines disordered by the need to step around the dead and dying in the corn, crossed the remnants of the first rail fence, then Starbuck shouted at his men to fire. The opening volley stunned the Yankees, throwing them down in a new tideline of dead and dying. The rear ranks stepped forward and fired at the rebel rifle smoke, but the Yankees were firing at shadows in shadows and the rebels had flesh-and-blood targets. Starbuck pulled his trigger, crying aloud with the pain of the rifle’s recoil as it pounded back into the raw bruise of his right shoulder. At this range it was impossible to miss; the Yankees were not even a hundred yards away and the rebel bullets were thumping into the shrinking lines, banging on rifle stocks, jetting blood from men who were thrown two paces back by the force of the bullets, yet somehow the enemy clung to their position and tried to return the dreadful fire.

Sergeant Case was at the right-hand end of Starbuck’s line, though by now there were so many rebel units firing at the Yankees that it was hard to tell where one battalion began and another ended. The sergeant wriggled back from the firing line. He had not shot once, saving his three bullets for his own purposes, but now he worked his way north until he could see Starbuck standing beside a tree. Case edged into some brush, then raised his head and watched Starbuck fire. He saw him drop the rifle’s butt to reload, and Case glanced around to make sure no one was watching him and then he brought up the Sharps rifle and aimed at Starbuck’s head. He had to be quick. The rifle’s leaf sight was folded flat, for he was so close to his target that the heavy half-inch bullet would not drop as much as its own width in its brief flight. He put the front leaf sight on Starbuck’s head, lined the rear notch, and pulled the trigger. Smoke billowed to hide him as he scrambled out of the brush and back toward the tree line.

Starbuck had lowered his head to spit the bullet into his rifle. A bullet whipped past his skull to whack the tree beside him with the force of an ax hitting timber. Splinters of bark lodged in his hair. He cursed the Yankees, brought up the gun, primed, aimed, and fired. A Northern flag-bearer whipped about as he was hit in the shoulder and his flag rippled prettily through the smoke as it fell. Someone snatched up the banner and was immediately hit by a pair of bullets that threw him back across the broken fence. The Yankees were at last going back from the galling fire. They went reluctantly, holding their ravaged ranks as they stepped rearward so that no man would show his back to the enemy.

None of the rebels pursued. They fired as the Yankees retreated, and kept firing until the two battalions had disappeared into the smoke hanging over the cornfield. The two battalions went as mysteriously as they had arrived, their contribution to the day a row of bodies by the pike’s bullet-riddled fences. There was a pause after the Yankees vanished, then the shells began to come again, crackling through the high branches, exploding leaves and twigs in showers, and spitting metal fragments down to the woods’ floor.