“Tell your man to add your baggage to ours. I’ll give you a tent, then get some rest. I’ll send you some vitriol for your stomach if it’s still troubling you. You’re dining tonight with us?” Chilton spoke about these domestic arrangements as he gummed a wafer over the unsealed envelope’s flap. He had not looked inside the envelope and so had not detected Delaney’s substitution. “Signatures, gentlemen,” he reminded the junior officers who would now carry the orders to their destinations. “Make sure they’re all signed for. On your way, now!”

The staff officers rode away. Delaney wondered if Hill would think it odd to receive Lee’s proclamation, for surely he would already have received his own copy of the document that tried to justify the South’s invasion of the North. “Our army has come among you,” the proclamation said, “and is prepared to assist you with the power of its arms in regaining the rights of which you have been despoiled.” But Delaney, if he was not caught, and if he could just devise a way of reaching Thorne or Adam Faulconer, would despoil the South of its victory. There would be no peace, no truce, no Southern triumph; just Northern victory, complete, crushing, and implacable.

If only Delaney knew how to achieve it.

STARBUCK NEVER DID LEARN THE COLONEL’S NAME. HE was a tall, wispy-haired man in his late fifties who was plainly overwhelmed by the responsibilities that had been thrust on him. “The town,” he told Starbuck, “isn’t fit to be a depot. Isn’t fit, you hear me? The Yankees have been here more than once and what they didn’t steal our own skulkers took. You need boots?”

“No.”

“You can’t have any. General Lee demands boots. What boots?” He gestured about his cluttered office that had once been a dry goods store as if to demonstrate the obvious absence of any footwear. “You don’t need any?” The colonel suddenly understood Starbuck’s reply.

“No, sir.”

“Do you have any to spare?” the colonel asked eagerly.

“Not a pair, sir. But I do need axes, tents, wagons. Especially a wagon.” The battalion’s only transport was a handcart that had proved a brute on the short marches the Yellowlegs had so far completed. The cart carried the precious rifles and as much spare ammunition as could be piled on top, but Starbuck doubted whether the rickety vehicle would last another ten miles.

“No good asking me for wagons,” the colonel said. “You can try commandeering from the local farms, but I doubt you’ll have any luck. Too many troops have been through this place. They’ve stripped it bare.” The colonel was in charge of the town of Winchester, which lay at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley and was now the supply base for Lee’s army across the Potomac. Starbuck’s battalion had abandoned its train at Starsburg and marched north through a glorious summer dawn. Now, as the sun’s heat grew stifling, the exhausted men waited in Winchester’s main street as Starbuck reported for his orders. “I don’t have any orders,” the colonel said as he finished searching among his disordered papers. “None for you, anyway. Who do you say you are?”