Dennison scooped the cards up, yawned, then shuffled them with practiced fingers. Starbuck, unseen, watched him. Dennison, he had discovered, had been raised by an uncle who had punished the boy because his parents had died impoverished. The result was a vast pride in Dennison, but that knowledge had not increased Starbuck’s sympathy for the captain. Dennison was an enemy pure and simple. He had been humbled by Starbuck and he would choose to take his revenge when he could. Probably, Starbuck reflected, in battle, and the thought of facing Yankee shells and bullets immediately made Starbuck shudder. The cowardice was debilitating him, sapping his confidence.

The locomotive suddenly roared. The firebox was momentarily opened so that the furnace glare blazed across the fields, then the light snapped off as the train crashed and juddered forward. Matthew Potter swayed down the crowded car and pushed open the door. “I don’t think,” he said, “that we’ve traveled faster than ten miles an hour since we left Richmond. Not once.”

“It’s the rails,” Starbuck said. “Old, misaligned, half-loose iron rails.” He spat into the darkness. “And you can bet the Yankees ain’t coming toward us on broken-down rails.”

Potter laughed, then offered Starbuck a lit cigar. “Do I hear an echo of Northern superiority?”

“They can build railroads up there, that’s for sure. We just have to pray they don’t start making soldiers half as good as ours.” Starbuck drew on the cigar. “I thought you were sleeping.”

“Can’t,” Potter said. “It must be the effect of sobriety.” He half smiled. He had not taken a drop of drink in three days. “Can’t say as how I feel any better,” he said, “but I guess I’ve felt worse.”

“Your wife’s all right?” Starbuck asked.

“She seemed so, thanks to you,” Potter said. Starbuck had inveigled Delaney into paying the Potters’ arrears of rent, then he had arranged for Martha Potter to stay with Julia Gordon’s parents in Richmond. Julia herself now lived at the Chimborazo Hospital where she was a nurse and Starbuck had only seen her for a few moments, but those moments had been enough to confuse him. Julia’s grave intelligence made him feel shallow, gauche, and tongue-tied, and he wondered why he could summon the courage to cross a rain-soaked cornfield into the maws of Yankee guns, but could not raise the nerve to tell Julia he was besotted by her. “You’re looking miserable, Major,” Potter said.

“Martha will be happy enough with the Gordons,” Starbuck said, ignoring the Lieutenant’s comment. “The mother can be overpowering, but the Reverend Gordon is a decent man.”

“But if she stays too long in that house,” Potter said grimly, “I’ll find myself married to a born-again Christian.”

“Is that so bad?”

“Hell, it ain’t exactly the quality that attracted me to Martha,” Potter said with his lopsided grin. He leaned on the platform’s balustrade and stared at the passing countryside. Small red sparks whirled in the locomotive’s smoke trail, some sinking to the ground to lie like fallen fireflies that vanished behind as the train labored up the eastern flank of the Blue Ridge. “Poor Martha,” Potter said softly.