Then a whole column of blue horse soldiers appeared at the ford. Their spurs, scabbards, and curb chains jingled as they urged their horses through the river. The three men who had scouted the ford seized their reins and heaved themselves up into their saddles. Silas watched them go out of sight, then listened as their hoofbeats faded away to the south, and then he went on listening until there was nothing more to hear but the run of the river and the song of the birds.
Then, with a dead rabbit in his hand, he went back to tell his Mary just what excitements were happening at her ford this morning, while far to the south, unsuspected and unseen, the Yankee raiders went to ground and waited.
***
THE YANKEES' SPRING OFFENSIVE might have failed, stranding McClellan's Army of the Potomac on the muddy shore of the James River below Richmond, but now John Pope's Army of Virginia gathered its strength in Virginia's northern counties. More and more supplies crossed the Potomac's bridges to be piled high in the gaunt warehouses at Manassas Junction while, on the sun-ruffled water of Virginia's tidal rivers, boat after boat carried McClellan's veterans north from the James River to Aquia Creek on the Potomac. The two Northern armies were joining forces, and though that process of union was excruciatingly slow, once the Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac were united, then they would far outnumber Robert Lee's rebel Army of Northern Virginia.
"So we have to strike first," Lee said in a murmur that was intended only for his own ears. The General was staring northward in the dawn, scrying his enemies from the high vantage point of Clark Mountain, which lay on the southern bank of the Rapidan River. Lee's own veterans, who had first stopped and then chased McClellan away from Richmond, had all now come north to face Pope's threatened attack. Stonewall Jackson had served to deter Pope's belligerence for the best part of a month, but now the rebel army was once again united with Robert Lee at its head, and so the time had come to drive Pope back in utter defeat.
To which purpose Lee had come to Clark Mountain. He was surrounded by mounted aides, but Lee himself was on foot and using the back of his placid gray horse, Traveller, as a rest for his telescope. The morning light was pearly soft. Great swathes of rain smoked across the western countryside, but it was dry to the north, where Lee could see folds of hills, small fields, white-painted farms, long dark woods, and, everywhere he looked, Yankees. The enemy's white-hooded wagons filled the meadows, their guns were parked on every road and farm track, and their tents dotted the fields, while above it all, like strands of tenuous mist, the smoke of their cooking fires mingled to make a blue-gray haze. In another ten days, two weeks at the most, that army would be doubled in size, and Lee knew there would be small chance of ever beating it out of his native Virginia.
But now, while McClellan's men still thumped north in their requisitioned river steamers and sleek transatlantic packets, there was a chance of victory. That chance arose because John Pope had placed himself in a trap. He had brought the bulk of his army close to the Rapidan so that it was ready to strike south, but behind Pope's new position ran the Rapidan's wide tributary, the Rappahannock, and if Lee could turn Pope's right flank, he stood a chance of driving the Northern army hard toward the rivers' junction, where Pope would be trapped between a horde of screaming rebels and the deep, fast-running confluence of the two rivers. But to make that maneuver Lee needed cavalry to screen his march and still more cavalry to mislead the enemy and more cavalry still to ride into the enemy's rear and capture the Rappahannock bridges and thus give the Yankees no way out from their water-bound slaughter yard.
"General Stuart says he's real sorry, sir, but the horses just ain't ready," an aide now told Lee in the dawn on Clark Mountain.
Lee nodded abruptly to show he had heard the gloomy report, but otherwise he showed no reaction. Instead he stared for a long last moment at the encamped enemy. Lee was not a vengeful man—indeed, he had long learned to school his emotions to prevent passion from misleading common sense—but in the last few weeks he had contracted a deep desire to humiliate Major General John Pope. The Northern general had come to Virginia and ordered his men to live off the land and to burn the houses of loyal Virginians, and Lee despised such barbarism. He more than despised it, he hated it. Carrying war to civilians was the way of savages and heathens, not of professional soldiers, but if John Pope chose to fight against women and children, Robert Lee would fight against John Pope, and if God permitted it, Lee would ruin his enemy's career. But the spring to snap the trap's lid shut was not quite ready, and Lee resisted the temptation to close that lid without the help of his horsemen. "How long before the cavalry will be ready?" Lee asked the aide as he collapsed the telescope.
"One day, sir." Most of the rebel cavalry had only just come north from its duty of screening McClellan's army beyond Richmond, and the horses were bone tired after the long march on dry, hard roads.
"By tomorrow's dawn?" Lee sought the clarification.
The aide nodded. "General Stuart says for certain, sir."
Lee showed no evident disappointment at the enforced delay but just stared at the long strands of smoke that laced the far woods and fields. He felt a twinge of regret that he could not attack this morning, but he knew it would take him the best part of a day to move his cumbersome guns and long lines of infantry over the Rapidan, and Jeb Stuart's horsemen would have to entertain and deceive the Yankees while those men and cannon moved into position. So he must wait one full day and hope that John Pope did not wake to his danger. "We'll attack tomorrow," Lee said as he climbed onto Traveller's back.
And prayed that the Yankees went on sleeping.
Major Galloway arrived just after dawn, guided by Corporal Harlan Kemp to where Adam's men waited in a stand of thick trees two miles south of the Rapidan. Galloway's troop was accompanied by Captain Billy Blythe and his men, who had returned from their frustrating reconnaissance. Blythe claimed the enemy held all the high passes through the Blue Ridge Mountains and had thus prevented him from crossing into the Shenandoah Valley, but Galloway's own foray beyond the Rapidan had convinced him that the rebels were not using the Shenandoah Valley to threaten Pope's army. Instead their regiments were bivouacking all along the Rapidan's southern bank, and it was there, in the heart of Virginia, that the threat existed, and it was there, thanks to Adam's timely message, that Galloway could both strike at the enemy and establish a rakish, hell-raising reputation for his fledgling regiment of cavalry. Which was why all Galloway's sixty-eight troopers were now concealed in a thicket just three miles from the western flank of Lee's army. Sixty-eight men against an army sounded like long odds, even to an optimist like Galloway, but he had surprise and the weather both on his side.
The weather had turned that same morning when, just one hour after dawn, a rainstorm had come from the mountains to hammer at the western rebel encampments. The roads had been turned into instant red mud. The rain poured off roofs and streamed down gutters and flooded gullies and overflowed ditches and spread along the plowed furrows of low-lying fields. Thunder bellowed overhead, and sometimes, way off in the rain-silvered distance, a slash of lightning sliced groundward. "Perfect," Galloway said as he stood at the edge of the trees and watched the rain claw and beat at the empty fields. "Just perfect. There's nothing like a good hard rain to keep a sentry's head down." He crouched under his cloak to light a cigar, then, because his own horse needed rest, asked to borrow one of Adam's newly acquired mares. "Let's look at your father's rebels," he told Adam.