“As you are now, General?”

Lee smiled. “Poor McClellan will be getting reports from here, there, and everywhere. He won’t know where we are or what we’re doing. He’ll know we’re besieging Harper’s Ferry, of course, because he’ll hear the guns, but I doubt if McClellan will raise a finger to help those poor men. Ah, Chilton! You look harassed.”

Delaney felt a surge of fear, but Colonel Chilton’s harassment arose from a lack of varnish rather than the loss of Special Order 191.

“Varnish?” Lee asked, finally abandoning his attempt to manipulate fork and spoon with hampered fingers. “Are we trying to smarten this army? A hopeless task, I should have thought.”

“News from the North, sir. Parrott guns.” Chilton collapsed into a camp chair and fanned his face with his hat brim.

“You’ve lost me, Chilton,” Lee said. “Varnish? Parrott guns?”

“The tubes of the twenty pounders are liable to explode, sir. One of our fellows in the North knows an inspector in the factory and he claims they reckon it’s because of friction inside the shell caused by the sudden acceleration upon firing. That friction ignites the shell and causes it to explode inside the tube. The factory’s solution is to empty the shells of their explosive and varnish the interior walls before refilling them. Worth a try, I’d say, only we can’t find any varnish.”

“Grease?” Delaney suggested, “or wax?”

“We could try that,” Chilton said grudgingly. “But wouldn’t wax melt?”

“Try grease,” Lee said, “but eat first. The beans are excellent.” The general wiped sweat off his forehead. The heat was again stupefying.

Delaney might have suggested a solution for exploding Parrott guns, but he had still not devised a method of passing the stolen order back to McClellan’s army. During the night, as he had tossed sleeplessly on the hard ground, he had imagined riding desperately eastward until he met a Yankee cavalry patrol, but he knew his horsemanship was not up to such cross-country work. Besides, any rebel cavalry seeing him would be bound to be curious and that curiosity could well lead to the gallows’ steps. Now, desperate to rid himself of the incriminating document, he had hit upon one last pathetic idea. “I thought, if you wouldn’t mind,” he said to Lee, “that I might look at the town before we leave?”

“By all means,” Lee said. “Chilton will write you a pass.”

“No danger of the Yankees arriving today?” Delaney asked anxiously.

“My dear Delaney!” Lee laughed. “None whatsoever, not with McClellan in command. We’ll leave tomorrow, but I doubt he’ll be here for at least another three days.”

“There’s nothing to see in the town,” Chilton observed sourly, resenting that he was required to write Delaney a pass.

“One of my mother’s cousins was a minister there for a time,” Delaney said, inventing a reason for his curiosity, “and I have a notion he might be buried there.”

“Your mother’s cousins?” Lee said, frowning as he tried to remember Delaney’s family tree. “So he was a Mattingley?”