In the middle of the afternoon, with the musicians now silent prisoners under guard, General Jackson's column struck southeast on a wide road that passed through harvested fields and plundered orchards. The men could guess where they were going now, for ahead of them was a great moving plume of smoke that showed where the Orange and Alexandria Railroad carried the Northern army's supplies south to the Yankee troops. Every bullet, every cartridge, every slab of hardtack, every percussion cap, every shell, every pair of boots, every bayonet, every small and large thing that an army needed to fight was being carried down that single track, and Jackson's leading infantry was now within earshot of the wailing, whippoorwill cadence of the locomotives' whistles. They could even hear the distant and rhythmic clatter of car wheels crossing the rail joints.
The trains were running out from Manassas Junction, which lay only a few miles to the north. For a time Jackson had been tempted by the thought of marching directly on the Junction, but it seemed inconceivable that the largest Federal supply base in Virginia would not be guarded by earthworks and guns and regiments of prime infantry, so instead the General planned to cut the railroad at Bristoe Station, which lay just four miles south of the depot. Local people said that Bristoe Station was guarded by a mere handful of cavalry and only three companies of Northern infantry.
Dusk was falling as the leading rebel infantry breasted a slight rise and started down the long slope to Bristoe. Rebel cavalry had ridden ahead of the infantry, but those horsemen were nowhere in sight, and all the leading infantry could see were the twin rails gleaming empty in the day's dying light and a scatter of clapboard houses from which kitchen smoke trickled skyward. The small garrison had no idea that danger threatened. A Northern cavalryman, stripped to the waist and with his suspenders dangling, carried a canvas pail of water from a well to a horse trough. Another man played a fiddle, assiduously practicing the same phrase over and over again. Men smoked pipes in the small warm breeze or read hometown newspapers in the last light of the setting sun. A few men saw the infantry on the western road, but they assumed the approaching soldiers must be Federal troops. The infantry's flags were flying, but the sinking sun was huge and red behind the rebel column, and so the Yankees could make out no details of the approaching banners or uniforms.
The leading rebel regiment was from Louisiana. Its Colonel gave the order for his men to put percussion caps on the cones of their loaded rifles. Till now they had marched with their guns unprimed in case a stumbling man set off a cartridge and so alerted the enemy. "I guess we arrived here before the cavalry," the Colonel said to his adjutant as he scraped his sword clear of its scabbard.
The sound of the steel on its scabbard's throat seemed to release the village to hell. For just as the Colonel pulled his sword into the sun's scarlet light, so the hidden rebel horsemen launched their charge from a belt of trees north of the settlement. Bugles ripped the sky and hooves pounded the earth as a screaming line of rebel cavalry broke from cover and stormed down on the village.
The man with the pail of water stood frozen for a second. Then he dropped the pail and ran toward a house. Halfway there he changed his mind and ran back toward his tethered horse. More Northerners mounted up and, abandoning everything except their weapons, fled eastward. A few of the Yankee horsemen were too late and were trapped in the small village as the rebel cavalry thundered into the single street. A Northerner wheeled his horse and cut with his saber, but before his stroke was half completed, a Southern blade was in his belly. The Southerner rode on, dragging his saber free from the clinging flesh.
Rifles crashed and smoked from the houses where the Northern infantry had taken cover. A horse and man went down, their blood splashing together across the dusty road. The Southern cavalry fired back with revolvers until their Colonel shouted at them to forget the sheltering infantry and capture the rail depot instead.
Another volley splintered from the houses, and a horseman was snatched back from the saddle. His comrades spurred on to the depot, where scattered groups of Northern infantry gathered under the water tower and alongside the fuel bunkers where the pine logs were stacked. The largest group of Yankees rallied around the green-painted shed where a terrified telegrapher was sheltering under the table rather than sending a message. The man was still cowering with his head in his arms when the victorious Southern horsemen scattered the infantry and threw open the shed's door and ordered the telegrapher out. "I ain't done nothing!" the telegrapher called desperately. He had been too frightened to send any message, so that no Northerner yet knew that the army's vital rail line was severed.
"Come on, Billy!" The horseman pulled the telegrapher out into the dusk, where the victorious Southern horsemen were chasing the last of the Northern garrison out into the fields.
Behind them a cheer sounded as the Louisiana infantry swept into Bristoe's single street. A volley of shots crashed and splintered into a house where a group of Yankee infantry still tried to defy the attackers, but then the village's other defenders began to call out their surrender. The Louisiana men ran from house to house, yanking blue-coated soldiers out into the street. One last stubborn Yankee fired at the attackers from a shed behind a general store and received a full company volley for his pains, and then the firing in the village died away. A few shots still sounded in the field beyond the railroad, but otherwise the fighting had ended, and Stonewall Jackson had hooked clean behind John Pope and cut his eighty thousand men off from their supplies.
It was a feat that had been achieved by just twenty-four thousand men, who, on bloodied feet and with aching muscles and dry mouths and empty bellies, now marched into Bristoe. It was a summer's evening, and the light was fading into a warm soft darkness. They had marched more than fifty miles across country to sever the Yankees' supply line, and soon, Jackson knew, the stung Northerners would turn on him like fiends. Which was exactly what Lee wanted the Northerners to do. Lee wanted Pope's army to abandon its well-dug earthworks behind the Rappahannock's steep northern bank, and Jackson's job was to lure them out. Jackson's men were now the bait: twenty-four thousand vulnerable men isolated among a sea of Northern troops.
Which all added up, Jackson reckoned, to the probability of a pretty rare fight.
To the south of the depot a train whistle offered its mournful sound to the falling night. Smoke misted the sky; then a locomotive's lamp appeared around a bend to glimmer its shivering reflections on rails that had begun to quiver from the thunder of the approaching wheels. The train, unsuspecting, steamed north to where a rebel army and a Yankee nightmare waited.