Adam touched the brim of his hat in ironic salute, then turned away. Neither of the two surviving horsemen bothered with their carbines, though the third man, splashing in the welter of mud and water being churned by his wounded horse, drew his revolver and prayed that the half dunking he had received had not soaked the powder loaded into the cylinder’s chambers. He cocked the weapon, then cursed his loss. Southern cavalrymen provided their own horses, and a good horse was worth gold. His own horse was useless now, a thing in pain, a broken-shouldered gelding of no use to anyone. He grabbed the bridle and hauled the horse’s head toward him. He looked into the beast’s terrified eye for a heartbeat, then aimed and fired. The sound of the single shot faded across the warm countryside as the horse, a bullet in its brain, thrashed briefly, then died. “Son of a bitch,” the rebel said, watching Adam ride calmly away, “son of a god damned bitch.”

The train crept forward, jerking its couplings in a metallic rattle that concertinaed down the long line of cars, then it stopped again.

It was nighttime. The engine panted for a few moments, then went silent. A trail of moon-silvered woodsmoke trickled from its huge-bellied funnel to drift across dark fields and black woods. Far off in the night a yellow light showed where some soul was still awake, but otherwise the land was swallowed by blackness shot through with moon-cast shadows. Starbuck rubbed the pane of glass by his elbow and peered out, but he could see nothing beyond a window glazed gold by the flickering light of the car’s lamps and so he stood and edged his way through the sleeping bodies to the platform at the car’s rear, from where he could keep a wary eye on the dozen boxcars that formed the train’s tail and which held the men of his Special Battalion. If any of his men wanted to desert, then this stuttering nighttime journey gave them a prize opportunity, but the land either side of the stalled train seemed empty. He looked back up the car to see that Captain Dennison was awake and playing solitaire. His face was still not cured, but the sores had dried up and in a week or two there would be no trace of the croton oil’s ravages.

It was three days since Starbuck had faced Dennison at the dueling ground, three days in which the Special Battalion had scrambled to prepare itself for this journey north, a journey that had already taken them as far as Catlett’s Station, where they had disembarked from the first train and then marched five miles across country to Gainesville where they had waited until this train of the Manassas Gap Railroad had appeared. The cross-country march had saved the battalion from the chaos at Manassas where Confederate engineers where still trying to patch together the junction recaptured from the Yankees the previous month. “Consider yourself lucky,” Holborrow had told Starbuck, “that they’re sending you by train.” The truth, Starbuck knew, was that the authorities did not believe the battalion would survive the long march north. They reckoned the men would either straggle disastrously or else desert in droves, and so the battalion was being carried in comparative luxury to where they must fight. North to Manassas, west now across the Blue Ridge Mountains, and in the morning they would face a two-day march north along the Valley Turnpike to Winchester, which had become Lee’s depot for the campaign across the Potomac.