The company advanced out of the trees and ran down the grassy slope. A few Yankee shots came over the river, but in the dark the enemy's aim was much too high, and the bullets simply ripped their way through the black canopy of leaves. Starbuck ran past the ruined house, where Mad Silas was cradling his dead Mary. The company began screaming the rebel yell, wanting to scare the men who were still trying to rescue their wounded comrade from the river. Starbuck reached the ford first, dropped his rifle, and threw himself into the water. He gasped at the storm-given strength of the current, then grabbed at the shadows in front and found himself clasping a wet handful of uniform. A gun exploded a foot from his face, but the bullet went wide; then a man screamed as Starbuck dragged him back toward the southern bank. More rebels splashed into the river to help Starbuck. One of them fired at the Yankees, and the flash of his rifle's muzzle showed a group of Northerners wading to the far bank and a horse and rider being swept downstream.
Starbuck's prisoner gasped for breath while the drowning horse smashed the river's surface with its flailing hooves. "Give them a goodbye shot, boys!" Colonel Swynyard called, and a handful of Starbuck's men fired across the water.
"Come on, you bastard," Starbuck grunted. His prisoner was struggling like a fiend and throwing wild fists at Starbuck's face. Starbuck hammered the man hard with his right hand, kicked him, and finally dragged him back to the southern bank, where a rush of men overpowered the Yankee.
"Rest of the bastards got away," Truslow panted ruefully as the hoofbeats receded across the river.
"We got all we needed," Starbuck said. He was soaked through, bruised, and winded, but he had won the victory he wanted. He had proof that the ford had needed guarding, and it had been Washington Faulconer who had removed the guard and so let the Northern raiders cross the river. "Just let that son of a bitch put us on trial now," he told Swynyard, "just let that son of a goddamned bitch try."
***
GENERAL STUART'S AIDE reached Lee's headquarters before dawn and found the army's commander standing outside his tent in contemplation of a crude map scratched in the dirt. The map showed the rivers Rapidan and Rappahannock, while the fords across the further river were marked by scraps of twig. It was those fords that the cavalry needed to capture if Pope was to be trapped at the rivers' confluence, but it seemed there was to be no chance of success this day, for the aide brought only a repetition of the previous day's bad news. "The cavalry just aren't ready, sir. General Stuart's real sorry, sir." The aide was very sheepish, half expecting a tirade from an angry Lee. "It's the horses, sir," he went on lamely, "they ain't recovered. The roads are wicked hard, sir, and General Stuart was expecting to find more forage up here, and . . ." The aide let his hopeless explanations trail away.
Lee's grave face scarce registered his disappointment; indeed, he seemed much more disappointed in the taste of the coffee than in the failure of his cavalry. "Is this really the best coffee we have, Hudson?" he asked one of his younger staff officers.
"Until we can capture more from the Yankees, sir, yes."
"Which we can't do without our cavalry. Upon my soul, we can't." He sipped the coffee again, grimaced, then laid the tin mug on a washstand that was set with his aides' shaving tackle. On the General's own washstand, inside his tent, there lay a dispatch that reported that 108 Federal ships had steamed up the Potomac River in the previous twenty-four hours, and what that figure meant, Lee knew, was that McClellan's forces were well on their way to reinforcing Pope's army. The ships' sidewheels and screws were churning the Potomac white in their efforts to combine the enemy armies, and meanwhile the Confederate cavalry was not ready. Which meant Pope's army would be safe for one more day. The frustration rose in Lee, only to be instantly suppressed. There was no profit in displaying temperament, none at all, and so the General looked placidly back at the crude map scratched in the dirt. There was still time, he told himself, still time. It was one thing for the Northern generals to move an army by boat, but quite another to land the troops and reunite them with their wagons and guns and tents and ammunition. And McClellan was a cautious man, much too cautious, which would give the rebels even more time to teach John Pope a lesson in civilized warfare. Lee ruefully obliterated the map with the toe of a riding boot and gave orders that the army would not, after all, be marching that morning. He retrieved his coffee. "What exactly do they do to this coffee?" he asked. "Mix it with ground goober peas, sir," Captain Hudson answered.
"Mashed peanuts!" Lee sipped again. "Good Lord." "It makes the coffee go farther, sir." "It surely does, it surely does."
"Of course, sir, we can always get some real beans from Richmond," Hudson said. "If we say they're for you, I'm sure they'll find some."
"No, no. We must drink what the soldiers drink. At least when it comes to coffee we must." The General forced himself to swallow more of the sour liquid. "The horses will be ready tomorrow, you think?" he asked Stuart's messenger very courteously, almost as though he regretted pressing the cavalryman for a decision.
"General Stuart's confident of that, sir. Very confident." Lee forbore to remark that twenty-four hours earlier Stuart had been equally confident that the cavalry would be ready in this dawn, but nothing would be achieved by recrimination, and so Lee offered the discomfited aide a grave smile. "My respects to General Stuart," he said, "and I look forward to marching tomorrow instead."
Later that morning Lee returned to Clark's Mountain to examine the enemy on the river's far bank. As he climbed the wooded slope, he saw a pyre of dirty smoke smearing the western sky, but no one on his staff knew what the smoke meant. It came from Jackson's lines, and doubtless Jackson would deal with whatever had caused the fire. Lee was more concerned with what was happening across the river, and so, once at the summit, he dismounted and rested his telescope on Traveller's patient back.
And once again the Yankee presence in the Virginia hills was denoted by a myriad of smoking fires that hazed the green land like a winter mist, but then Lee saw that something was missing beneath that mist. There were fires aplenty, but no tents. He moved the glass. No wagons, no horses, and no guns. There was nothing but the remains of campfires that the Yankees had lit in the night, stacked high with wood, then left to burn as they crept away. "They've gone," Lee said.
"Sir?" One of his aides stepped forward to hear better.
"They've gone." Lee collapsed his telescope but still stared northward. "They've gone," he said again, almost as if he did not believe his own eyes.
Pope had taken his men out of the trap. He had retreated across the Rappahannock. He had seen his danger and abandoned the land between the rivers, which meant, Lee thought, that in a week's time Pope would have been reinforced by McClellan and then it would all be finished. Blue-coated Yankees would be rampaging all across Virginia, and John Pope, the wretched John Pope who so passionately hated Southerners, would be the tyrant of all he surveyed.
Unless, that is, the Confederacy risked everything on a daring and desperate chance. Not a maneuver from the rule book, but something from the devil's box of tricks instead. Lee sensed the idea like a temptation. He suddenly saw how he could tip John Pope off balance and then savage him, and the idea burgeoned in his mind even as the well-schooled and conventional part of his training attempted to reject the notion as too risky. But another part of Lee was tantalized by the beauty and symmetry of the outrageous idea. It was a maneuver that would humiliate John Pope and drive the Yankees clean out of Virginia, and as Lee considered the rewards and risks of his maneuver, he felt the excitement of a gambler staking everything on a single run of cards. The thing could be done! Yet his face betrayed no hint of that excitement as he climbed into his saddle and settled his boots into his stirrups. "My compliments to General Jackson," he said calmly, pushing his telescope back into its case and gathering Traveller's reins into his hands, "and I would be much obliged if he would call on me at his earliest convenience."