“They tell us from time to time,” Davies answered laconically.

“Maybe they have gone,” Starbuck said, but no sooner had he spoken than one of the Yankee field guns fired. It had been loaded with canister, a tin cylinder crammed with musket balls that shredded apart at the gun’s muzzle to scatter its missiles like a giant charge of buckshot, and the balls ripped through the trees above Starbuck. The gun had been aimed fractionally too high and its fire wounded no one, but the blast of metal cascaded a deluge of water and leaves onto Starbuck’s miserable infantrymen. Starbuck, crouching low beside Davies, shivered from the unwanted shower. “Bastards,” he said again, but the useless curse was drowned by a crack of thunder that split the sky and rumbled into silence. “There was a time,” Starbuck said sourly, “when I thought guns sounded like thunder. Now I think thunder sounds like guns.” He considered that thought for a second. “How often did you ever hear a cannon in peacetime?”

“Never,” Davies said. His spectacles were mottled with rainwater. “Except maybe on the Fourth.”

“The Fourth and Evacuation Day,” Starbuck said.

“Evacuation Day?” Davies asked, never having heard of it.

“March seventeenth,” Starbuck said. “It’s the day we kicked the English out of Boston. There are cannon and fireworks in Boston Garden.” Starbuck was a Bostonian, a northerner who fought for the rebel South against his own kind. He did not fight out of political conviction, but rather because the accidents of youth had stranded him in the South when the war began and now, a year and a half later, he was a major in the Confederate army. He was barely older than most of the boys he led, and younger than many, but a year and a half of battles had put a grim maturity into his lean, dark face. By rights, he sometimes reflected wonderingly, he should still be studying for the ministry at Yale’s Divinity School, but instead he was crouched in a soaking wet uniform beside a soaking wet cornfield plotting how to kill some soaking wet Yankees who had managed to kill some of his men. “How many dry charges can you muster?” he asked Davies.

“A dozen,” Davies answered dubiously, “maybe.”

“Load ’em up and wait here. When I give the order I want you to kill those damn gunners. I’ll fetch you some help.” He slapped Davies’s back and ran back into the trees, then worked his way further west until he reached A Company and Captain Truslow, a short, thick-set, and indefatigable man whom Starbuck had promoted from sergeant to captain just weeks before. “Any dry cartridges?” Starbuck asked as he dropped beside the captain.

“Plenty.” Truslow spat tobacco juice into a puddle. “Been holding out fire till you needed it.”

“Full of tricks, aren’t you?” Starbuck said, pleased.

“Full of sense,” Truslow said dourly.

“I want one volley into the gunners. You and Davies kill the gunners and I’ll take the rest of the Legion over the field.”