The men panted behind him, crashing through undergrowth and splintering dry fallen branches as they ran. Starbuck was leading the Legion to his left, going slantwise across the rebels' front line. He could see gunsmoke sifting through the leaves ahead; then he glimpsed flashes of blue where a handful of Northern soldiers ran through the woods. He ran toward those enemy, but the blue coats disappeared in the trees. Somewhere a rifle fired, and Starbuck heard the bullet ripping through the leaves overhead, but he could not see the gunsmoke or tell whether it was a friend or foe who had fired. He slowed down to catch his breath. The Legion had long lost its cohesion as the companies broke apart in the woodland, so that now they were streaming through the trees like packs of hunters on a quick scent. A volley crashed to Starbuck's left, but no bullets came his way. A riderless horse foaming with sweat and with white eyes flashing plunged through the brush and galloped unchecked between two of Starbuck's companies. The wood suddenly seemed empty of enemy. Starbuck could hear shouted orders and sporadic rifle fire, but he could see no one, and he feared he had led his men far astray; then a sudden warning shout turned him to his left.
And there, suddenly, was an enemy. A huddle of Yankees were kneeling and firing, loading and aiming, but their targets were not the men of the Legion but other Southerners way off to the Legion's left, which suggested that Starbuck had indeed discovered the North's open flank. "Legion, halt! Aim!" He was giving his men precious little time. They skidded to a halt and raised their guns.
'Tire!"
The small group of Yankees were swept cruelly away. Over two hundred bullets had been fired at a score of men, and only one of them was able to stand when the volley was done, and that man was staggering and bleeding. "Charge!" Starbuck shouted. "And let me hear you scream!"
The Legion began to sound the rebel yell. Starbuck remembered that he had not ordered the men to fix bayonets, but it was too late to remedy the lack now. The Legion had been unleashed, and nothing could stop the ragged charge that screamed through the wood to take the enemy's open flank. The trees ahead were filled with fleeing Yankees. More rebels were coming from the left, and Starbuck shouted at his men to wheel right. "This way! This way!" The breath was pounding in his lungs. Somewhere a man screamed again and again, the sound terrible and pathetic until it was blissfully cut short by a rifle shot.
Starbuck leaped a dead man, stumbled on a fallen log, pushed through a laurel screen, then saw he had blundered into an open field covered with running men. "Halt!" he shouted. "Stop here! Reload!"
The Legion made a rough line at the wood's edge and fired at the horde of retreating Yankees. The men were too breathless and too excited to shoot well, but their rifle fire did serve to hasten the Yankees' panicked retreat. Another rebel regiment appeared to the Legion's left and pursued the enemy into the open meadow, but when Company H began to follow, Captain Truslow pulled them back just a second before a Northern battery unmasked itself in a stand of trees on the meadow's far side. The first cannon whipped a barrelload of canister through the exposed rebel pursuers. A second gun fired, this gun aiming shell at Starbuck's men. The missile cracked overhead and exploded in the trees just as a ragged Northern volley whistled over the pasture.
"Back!" Colonel Swynyard had advanced with the Legion. "Back to the railbed, lads! Well done!"
"Lieutenant Howes?" Starbuck shouted. "A party to collect guns and ammunition!"
"We've got some prisoners here, sir," Howes called back.
Starbuck had not been aware of any prisoners being taken, but sure enough there was a disconsolate group of a dozen men under a corporal's guard who had to be escorted back to the Brigade headquarters. Howe's men found a score of usable rifles and several hundred cartridges that they carried back through the woods.
"A nice beginning," Colonel Swynyard said to Starbuck when the Legion was back in its cutting.
"Easy pickings." Starbuck was dismissive. He could not recall a single bullet coming near him. He knew the Legion had not needed to be involved in the fight, but he was glad that his regiment had been given such a swift and simple victory. It was, as Swynyard had told him, a good beginning.
"But your man Meddlesome didn't move." Lucifer waited till Swynyard was gone before talking to Starbuck. "I watched him. He took his men into the woods and stopped there. You went on, he stayed back."
Starbuck grunted, not wanting to encourage Lucifer's indiscretion. "How old are you?" he asked the runaway slave instead.
Lucifer blinked with surprise at the unexpected question. "Seventeen," he said after a while. "Why?"
Starbuck suspected Lucifer had added at least a year to his age. "Because you're too young to die, that's why, so take yourself back to the wagon park."
"I ain't going to die. I'm charmed!" Lucifer said.
"Charmed?" Starbuck asked. "How?" He was remembering the crushed bird bones.
"Just charmed," Lucifer said. "Like I never got caught as a thief. Till your men trapped me, and there you were!" He grinned. "See? Charmed."
"But you were a thief," Starbuck said, not with disapproval, but simply to pin down the first piece of information about his past that Lucifer had so far offered.
"You think I'd wear those pants with long pockets otherwise? Mick gave them to me."
"Mick?"
"Mr. Micklewhite," Lucifer said. "He owns the big tavern at Manassas Junction and I worked for him."
"You were his slave?"
"I was his thief," Lucifer said. "But he wanted me to do other things. Because he said I'm young and good-looking." He laughed in self-mockery, but Starbuck detected an anxiety behind the words.
"What sort of things?" Starbuck asked.
"You need to be told? You don't know about appetite?"
"Appetite?"
But before Lucifer could answer there was a loud snap of a breaking twig in the woods beyond the killing patch. The Legion went still, fingers poised on triggers, but nothing more sounded from the trees. Off to the right the firing began again, but that far-off battle belonged to someone else. Starbuck looked for his servant again, but Lucifer had vanished, taking his past with him. Ahead of Starbuck the green woods were silent. Somewhere beyond the silence eighty thousand Yankees gathered, but here, for the moment, there was peace.
Starbuck had chosen not to put skirmishers into the woods. The killing patch between the railbed's cutting and the tree line was too wide, so that by the time his own skirmishers would have returned to the Legion's lines the pursuing Yankees would already have been halfway across the open space. The North Carolinians on the Legion's right, however, were faced by an ever-narrowing strip of open land and had taken the precaution of putting a skirmish line among the trees, and it was those men who alerted Starbuck to the day's second Yankee attack, an assault much better organized than the North's first motley advance.
The battle between the skirmishers did not take long. The Yankees were advancing in too much force, and the woods were no place for scattered men to fight against a horde. Hudson's skirmishers fired a single round each, then ran for their lives, yet that scattered volley was sufficient to warn the Legion that the attack was coming.
Starbuck was in the cutting with Company C, which was now commanded by the excitable, quick-tempered William Patterson, who was a stonemason and thus the unwilling butt of too many jokes about gravestones. Patterson had pretensions of gentility and had greeted his unexpected promotion by adorning himself with a red waist sash, a plumed hat, and a sword. He had discarded the sword and plumed hat for this day's fight, but the sash still marked him as an officer. "Ready, boys, ready!" he shouted, and his men licked dry lips and watched the trees anxiously. "They're coming, boys, they're coming!" Patterson called, yet still the green woods were empty, the trees dappled by sunlight alone and the humid air unsullied by powder smoke.