“No.”

“I do. Someone to feed me, to clothe me, to pick me up every time my wings fold. You know what I’m frightened of, Starbuck? I’m frightened of peace, when there’ll be no army to be my refuge. There’ll just be people expecting me to make a living. Now that’s hard, that’s hard, that’s real cruel, that is. What the hell will I do?”

“Work,” Starbuck said.

Potter laughed. “And what will you do, Major Starbuck?” he asked knowingly.

Hell if I know, Starbuck thought, hell if I know. “Work,” he said grimly.

“Stern Captain Starbuck,” Potter said, but Starbuck had gone back into the car. Potter shook his head and watched the passing night and thought of all the trains clanking and banging and thrusting through this night carrying their loads of blue-coated troops to meet this train that rattled and screeched and shuddered its lonely way north. All mad, he thought, all mad. As flies to wanton boys. He could have wept.

If there was one thing that terrified Belvedere Delaney it was the fear of being discovered and captured, for he knew only too well what his fate would be. The cell in a Richmond prison, the merciless questions, the trial before scornful men, and the vengeful crowd staring white-faced at the high scaffold where he would stand with a rope about his neck. He had heard that men pissed themselves when they were hung, and that if the executioner bungled the job, and the executioner usually did bungle it, then death was agonizingly slow. The onlookers would jeer while he pissed himself and as the rope bit into his neck. The very thought made his bowels feel liquid.

He was no hero. He had never thought of himself as a hero, but merely as a quick-witted, amoral, genial sort of fellow. It amused him to make money, just as it amused him to be generous. Every man thought Delaney a friend, and Delaney took care to keep it that way. He disliked rancor, reserving his enmities for his private thoughts, and if he did wish to hurt someone he would do it so secretly that the victim would never suspect that Delaney had engineered the misfortune. It was thus that Delaney had betrayed Starbuck during the North’s spring campaign to capture Richmond, and Starbuck had come as close as a whisker to a Northern scaffold, and Delaney would have genuinely regretted that fate, but he had never once regretted his part in so nearly causing it. Delaney had been pleased when Starbuck returned, delighted even, for he liked Starbuck, but he would still betray him tomorrow if he thought there was profit in the treachery. Delaney did not feel badly about such a contradiction; he did not even perceive it as a contradiction, merely as fate. Some Englishman had just written a book that was upsetting all the preachers because it implied that man, like all other species, had not originated in a divine moment of creation, but was muckily descended from God knows what primitive things with tails and claws and bloody teeth. Delaney could not recall the author’s name, but one phrase from his book had lodged in Delaney’s mind: the survival of the fittest. Well, Delaney would survive.