Dennison nodded again, and the small movement was enough to dislodge the sights from his target. He hurriedly reaimed and had only just realized that he was sighting the wrong man when Lucifer ducked away from the gun and yanked the lanyard.

The Napoleon crashed back, its wheels bucking six inches up from the turf as the lunette at the end of its tail plowed hard back through the dirt. The noise was immense, a crack to hurt the ears of anyone within fifty paces. Smoke gushed ahead, writhing with flame, and under the cover of the noise, while the remnants of the Yellowlegs cheered, Case and Dennison fired.

Potter pitched violently forward onto the ground.

Starbuck was turning as the bullet hit Potter and, as he turned, a mist of blood exploded from the side of his face and then he too fell.

The shell screamed across the field. The elevation had been much too low and the smoking case shot ricocheted off a patch of dry ground to explode harmlessly behind the Yankees. It killed no one.

“It’s all yours,” Case said, lowering the Sharps rifle. “All yours.” And soon, Case thought, it would all be his. The Virginia Fusiliers, the smartest regiment in the Confederacy.

“Thank you, Captain,” Dennison managed to answer.

While to the south the great guns boomed and the Yankees closed on Sharpsburg.

Lee could only watch as disaster threatened. He stood on the low height above the town, where his guns were lined along the edge of Sharpsburg’s cemetery, and he watched as a flood of Yankees filled the countryside to the east and to the south.

His men were still fighting. Their cannons were tearing huge holes in the Northern files while the gray infantry was stubbornly defending every fence, wall, and farm building, but it was the Yankees who had the advantage. There seemed so many of them. Wherever Lee looked another battalion or brigade would appear from hidden ground to join the advance on the town and toward the road that ran south toward the Confederate states. An aide checked each new appearance through a telescope and each time, just as Lee hoped that it might be one of the Light Division’s battalions appearing on the flank, the aide would laconically announce, “It’s Yankee, sir.”

“Are you sure?” Lee asked once.

“Sir?” the aide offered the telescope.

“Can’t use it,” Lee said, gesturing with his bandaged hands.

The guns banged on, layering a new mist of smoke across the high ground. Some of the guns had been dismounted by the heavy Yankee counterfire, others lay canted on splintered wheels that gunners struggled to change. One of the army’s few heavy Parrott guns had exploded, killing two of its crew and foully wounding another three. “Try to find out if they varnished their shells,” Lee said to the aide.

“Sir?” The aide frowned in puzzlement.

“The gun crew. The Parrott,” Lee explained. “Find out if they greased the shells. Not now, just when you have a moment.”