"Certain. Absolutely certain."

The Colonel scratched at his beard, found a louse, and squashed it between his thumbnails. "What about the twenty thousand Johnnies in the west?" the Colonel asked.

"I sent my second-in-command that way, but he hasn't reported yet."

The Colonel yawned, then stretched his arms. "No news is good news, eh? If your fellow had found anything he'd have doubtless sent word. And no one else is squealing about twenty thousand rebels, so it's probably all moonshine, pure moonshine. Which reminds me." He turned in his chair and reached for two glasses and a whiskey bottle.

"You'll join me? Good." He poured the whiskey. "But even if there are twenty thousand Johnnies loose, what damage can they do?" He paused, thinking about his question, then laughed at the very thought of the whole United States Army being frightened of such a tiny force. "Twenty thousand men," he said disparagingly, "what harm can they do?"

Captain Davies woke Starbuck. "Reveille, sir."

Starbuck thought he had to be dreaming. No, worse, he thought he was not dreaming. His muscles were strips of pain, his bones were set solid.

"Starbuck! Up!" Davies said.

Starbuck groaned. "It's dark."

"They want us marching in twenty minutes."

"Oh, no, Jesus no," Starbuck muttered. He groaned again, then turned onto one side. The mere effort of rolling over hurt. Everything hurt. He could not bear to think of trying to stand on his blistered feet.

"Water." Davies, who had taken over picket duty from Medlicott, offered Starbuck a canteen. Starbuck drank, then felt for a cigar. He had two left, both preserved from harm by being wrapped in his hat. He borrowed Davies's cigar to light one of his own, then coughed some life into his lungs.

"Jesus," he said again, then remembered he had to set an example, and so he struggled to his feet. He blasphemed again.

"Stiff?" Davies asked.

"Why didn't I join the cavalry?" Starbuck asked, then tottered a few steps. It was night-dark still, without even a hint of dawn in the eastern sky. Stars were bright overhead, while the moon hung low above the Blue Ridge to mark its forested draws deep black and starkest white. He sat to pull on his boots. It hurt just to tug them over his raw feet. "Awake?" Colonel Swynyard's voice asked.

"I think I died and went to hell," Starbuck said as he forced himself to stand again. "Maybe that's it, Colonel. Maybe none of this is real. We're all in hell."

"Nonsense! We're heavenbound, praise Him."

"Then I wish He'd hurry," Starbuck complained. Around him the field heaved and groaned as waking men realized the ordeal that waited for them. Starbuck scratched at a louse, transferred the one remaining cigar to his pocket, pulled the hat onto his head, slung his rolled blanket over his left shoulder and the rifle on his right, and thus was ready to start.

Breakfast was taken on the march. For Starbuck it was a slate-hard slab of hardtack that gnawed at his aching tooth. He tried to remember when he had last had a decent meal. His uniform trousers were belted with rope that gathered in at least five inches of material that had been well stretched before the war's first battle. Then the blisters on his feet began hurting again and the sore spot on his right shoulder began to chafe, and he forgot about food and just concentrated on walking through the pain.

The column still marched north. Once, when the road rose to offer a view of the moonlit western hills, Starbuck saw the notch that marked where the Manassas Gap carried the railroad through the Blue Ridge and into the fertile Shenandoah Valley. In the moonlight the gap looked a far way off, and Starbuck's spirits fell at the thought of marching all that long way. His muscles were slowly unknotting, but only to hurt even more. The Legion passed between two rows of houses, their windows dimly lit with candlelight. A tethered dog barked at the passing soldiers, and an unseen woman called from a window to offer the soldiers her blessings.

Then, abruptly, the road climbed a steep few feet, and Starbuck almost tripped on a steel rail. He recovered his footing and stepped safely over the metal to realize that the Legion had at last reached the Manassas Gap Railroad. The road divided here, one branch climbing west toward the Blue Ridge and the other going east toward the Yankees. A mounted staff officer dominated the junction, and he was pointing the troops east. So they were not going to the Shenandoah Valley after all but were instead to march toward the rising sun that climbed through the vast smear of smoke marking where a waking army's cooking fires burned. They were to march east toward battle.

The sun rose like hellfire in their eyes. It dazzled them and cast their shambling shadows long on the dusty road behind. Every now and then Starbuck would see the rails of the Manassas Gap Railroad lying alongside the road like twin streaks of reflected fire, but no trains ran on those strips of molten steel. All the locomotives and stock had been taken south or else commandeered by the Yankees to shuttle their supplies from Alexandria through Manassas Junction to their forces on the Rappahannock.

And now, Starbuck realized, Stonewall Jackson was behind those forces. And maybe, Starbuck thought, the Yankees knew he was coming, for how could twenty-four thousand men hope to avoid a hostile army's scouts? Ahead of the marching column lay a low range of hills, so low that in peacetime the hills would scarcely have been noticeable, but Starbuck could see that the apparently innocuous slopes were more than steep enough to check an infantry attack. And if the Federals had put guns in the dark trees at the crest of those hills, then Jackson's long march must end in bloody defeat.

The road and the empty railroad arrowed side by side toward a pass through the low hills. Jackson's cavalry advanced either side of the rail embankment, their carbines cocked as they nervously watched every fence and wood and house. The passage through the unregarded hills was called Thoroughfare Gap, and if the Yankees had been shadowing Jackson's march, then Thoroughfare Gap was the place to put their ambush, and as the steep walls of the pass narrowed, the horsemen advanced ever more slowly and cautiously. They tried not to think of hidden gunners waiting with taut lanyards or of lines of concealed infantry poised with loaded rifles. Every creak of a saddle or rustle of wind or clatter of a horseshoe on stone startled the scouting horsemen's nerves; then suddenly they reached the pass's summit and the whole eastern countryside lay open before them, and it was empty. There were no limbers, no guns, no caissons, no Federals at all. There was nothing but low hills and thick woods stretching into the long blue distance. Stonewall Jackson had hooked his small army clean and undetected into the Yankees' unprotected belly.

Now all he had to do was twist the hook and start the killing.

"Close up!" the officers shouted. "Close up!" The men marched in silence, too tired to talk or sing. From time to time a man would break ranks to snatch a green apple or an ear of unripe corn from the farmlands on either side of the road, while other men broke ranks to be ill behind a hedge, but always they hurried on after their comrades and pushed themselves back into line. The horses pulling the guns labored under the whips, and their guns' wheels ripped the road's surface into broken ruts that turned men's ankles, but still they marched at the same cracking pace behind a cavalry vanguard that, late in the morning, rode into a small town where a Federal band was practicing in the main street. The band belonged to a regiment that had gone on a daylong route march, leaving their musicians to entertain the sullen Virginian townspeople. Those sullen people cheered up as the band fell slowly silent. The music ended with one last astonished and froglike grunt of a saxhorn tuba as the musicians realized that the horsemen in the street were pointing guns straight at their heads. The bandsmen had been assured that they were at least twenty miles from any enemy forces, yet now they were faced by a gray-coated pack of grinning men on dusty, sweat-foamed horses. "Let's hear you play Dixie, boys," the cavalry leader ordered. Some of the bandsmen began to edge backward, but the cavalry officer cocked his rifle one-handed and the bandmaster hastily turned around, raised his hands to ready the musicians, and then led them in a ragged rendition of the rebel anthem.