“What now?” Moxey asked him.

“Your men can stand picket,” Starbuck said. “Coffman? Go and find the Colonel, tell him we’re across the cornfield.” There were the dead to bury and the wounded to patch up.

The intermittent sounds of battle died utterly, leaving the field to rain and thunder and the cold east wind. Night fell. A few feeble fires flickered in the depths of woods, but most men lacked the skill to make fires in such rain, so instead they shivered and wondered just what they had done and why and where the enemy was and whether the next day would bring them warmth, food, and rest.

Colonel Swynyard, lean, ravaged, and ragged bearded, found Starbuck after nightfall. “No trouble crossing the cornfield, Nate?” the Colonel asked.

“No, sir, no trouble. No trouble at all.”

“Good man.” The Colonel held his hands toward Starbuck’s fire. “I’ll hold prayers in a few minutes. I don’t suppose you’ll come?”

“No, sir,” Starbuck answered, just as he had answered every other evening that the Colonel had invited him to prayers.

“Then I’ll pray for you, Nate,” the Colonel responded, just as he had every other time. “I surely will.”

Starbuck just wanted sleep. Just sleep. Nothing but sleep. But a prayer, he thought, might help. Something had to help, for he feared, God how he feared, that he was becoming a coward.

Starbuck took off his soaking clothes, unable to bear their chafing any longer, and hung them to take what drying warmth they could from the remains of his fire, then he wrapped himself in the clammy embrace of his blanket and slept despite the rain, but the sleep was a wicked imitation of rest for it was a waking sleep in which his dreams were mingled with rain and dripping trees and thunder and the spectral figure of his father, the Reverend Elial Starbuck, who mocked his son’s timidity. “Always knew you were rotten, Nathaniel,” his father said in the dream, “rotten all the way through, rotten like decayed timber. No backbone, boy, that’s your trouble,” and then his father capered unscathed away through a gunfire that left Starbuck dreaming that he was clinging to damp soil. Sally was in his dream too, yet she was no comfort for she did not recognize him, but just walked past him into nothingness, and then he was woken as someone shook his shoulder.

At first he thought the shaking was a part of his dream, then he feared the Yankees must be attacking and rolled quickly out of his wet blanket and reached toward his rifle. “It’s all right, Major, ain’t the Yankees, just me. There’s a man for you.” It was Lucifer who had woken him. “Man for you,” Lucifer said again, “a real smart man.” Lucifer was a boy who had become Starbuck’s servant; an escaped slave with a high opinion of himself and an impish helping of sardonic humor. He had never revealed his true name and instead insisted on being called Lucifer. “You want coffee?” he asked.