"Patron?"
"We're paid for by a New York furniture manufacturer. He paid for everything you see here, Starbuck; paid for it lock, stock, and barrel. You're seeing the profits of mahogany and turned legs at war."
The Reverend Starbuck eyed his old friend's uniform and wished that he was able to wear such finery. He was about to inquire what arrangements Winslow had made to fill his pulpit while he served with the army but was distracted by a burst of gunfire in the woods. "Our skirmishers, I guess," Winslow said when the sound had faded. "They were probably attacking a regiment of wild turkey. We ate a couple last night, and very good eating they were, too." The resting regiment had stirred at the sudden fusillade, and some men retrieved their rifles from the stacks, but most just cursed for being half woken up, pulled the turbans over their eyes again, and tried to go back to sleep.
"Your son said there's been no sign of the enemy here?" the Reverend Starbuck inquired, wondering why the hairs on the back of his neck were suddenly prickling.
"None at all!" the chaplain said, staring toward the woods. "I think you might say we've drawn the short straw. Our part in the great victory is to be spectators. Or maybe not."
His last three words were prompted by the appearance of a group of Zouaves at the tree line on the regiment's left flank. They were evidently skirmishers returning to their parent regiment, and they were agitated. "Rebels!" one of the men shouted. "Rebels!"
"They're panicking!" the chaplain said scornfully.
More of the Zouaves snatched up their rifles. A captain mounted on a nervous black horse cantered past the two pastors and touched his hat respectfully. "I think they're imagining things, chaplain!" the Captain called good-naturedly to Winslow, then put his hand to his throat and started making a mewing sound as he struggled to breathe. Blood began to seep through his fingers, and while the Reverend Starbuck tried to make sense of this strange apparition, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the sound of firing that had somehow taken a second or two to register on his stunned senses. Stunned because the hilltop was being swept by a typhoon of fire, a whistling whipping terror of bullets that crashed from the tree line where, appallingly, regiment after regiment of rebels now appeared. One moment there had been a summer's peace prevailing on the warm hilltop, where bees had sucked at clover blossoms, then there was death and screaming and blood, and the transition had been too abrupt for the preacher's mind to comprehend.
The dying captain was jerked back from the saddle to be dragged along the ground by a foot trapped in a stirrup. He cried pathetically; then a great rush of blood silenced him forever. The chaplain began shouting encouragement to the dazed Zouaves, who seemed to shrink back from the weltering rifle fire. The Reverend Starbucks horse bolted from the unending splintering crack of rifles that outflanked the two New York regiments. The horse ran north, fleeing the attack, and it was not till he reached the edge of the hill that the preacher was able to curb the scared animal and turn it just in time to see a line of rebel regiments appear from the far trees. These were Lee's men, who had marched one day after Stonewall Jackson and who were now being unleashed from the valleys and woods where they had hidden overnight. They all made their devilish, ululating scream as they attacked, and the preacher's blood ran chill as the terrible sound washed across the hilltop.
The Reverend Starbuck dragged his revolver out of its saddle holster but made no effort to fire it. He was faced by a nightmare. He was watching the death of two regiments.
The New Yorkers tried to fight. They stood in line and returned the rebel fire, but the gray lines overlapped and decimated the Zouave ranks with an overwhelming volume of rifle fire. Brightly uniformed men were plucked back from the New York ranks, and though the sergeants and corporals tried to close the gaps, the gaps kept coming faster than they could be filled. Men slipped away, running north and east. The Reverend Starbuck shouted at the fugitives to hold their ground, but they ignored his ravings and ran downhill toward the stream. The furniture maker's regiment was reduced to three groups of men who tried to hold off the overpowering assault, but three times their number could not have stopped this rebel surge.
The New Yorkers died. There was a spatter of final shots, a scream of defiance, then the flags toppled as the last stubborn defenders were overrun. The hill was suddenly swarming with rebel rat gray coats, and the preacher, startled from his shocked immobility, kicked his horse and let it run downhill among the scattered fugitives. The first rebels were already firing after the running men, and the Reverend Starbuck heard the bullets whiplash about him, but the preacher's horse kept running. It splashed through the stream and so up into the safety of the trees on the far side. The scream of the obscene rebel yell soured the preacher's ears as he slowed the sweating horse. All around him now he could hear that terrible scream, the noise of the devil on the march, and he sensed, even if he did not understand, that another Northern army was being ignominiously beaten. Tears ran down his cheeks as he tried to understand the unfathomable ways of God.
He crossed the turnpike, going back to where he had spent so long waiting to begin the pursuit of the beaten rebels, but there was no sign of Galloway's men there, nor, thank God, any rebels either. The preacher cuffed the tears from his cheeks as he rested his horse. To his right, where the smoke from the burning depot still made a brown smear in the sky, there was only a tangle of woods and steep valleys, and it was through that broken ground, he suspected, that the rebel advance was being made. To his left, across the wider fields, lay the woods where one Northern attack after another had been launched toward the railbed, but none of those attacks had succeeded, which surely meant that the rebels still lurked among those woods, while behind him the devil's troops had just made carrion out of Winslow's Zouaves on a Virginia hilltop, which left the preacher just one place to go.
He rode northeast, his grief turning into a rage fit to fill all heaven. What dolts led the armies of the North! What strutting turkey-cock fools! The preacher felt a duty being laid upon him, the duty to awaken the North to the poltroons who were leading its sons into one defeat after another. He would go to Galloway's house, fetch his luggage, then have one of the Major's servants show him an escape route north across the Bull Run. It was time to return to the sanity of Boston, where he would begin his campaign that would wake a nation to its sins.
Cannons fired in the hills, their sound echoing confusedly around the sky. Rifles cracked, the gunsmoke showing in rills above trees and streams. Robert Lee had brought twenty-five thousand men and placed them at right angles to Jackson's beleaguered line, and not one Yankee had known the rebels were there until the starry banners came forward above the gray lines. Now the rebels' flank attack advanced like a door swinging shut on John Pope's glory. And the Reverend Elial Starbuck carried his righteous anger back toward home.
The sun sank slow toward the western hills. Nothing stirred in the woods to the east. The noise of battle rolled like distant thunder, but what the noise meant or where the Yankees were no one knew. A patrol from Truslow's Company H was the first to cross the shell-scorched strip of land into the trees, but they found no Yankees there. The sharpshooters had gone, and the woods were empty except for the litter of the abandoned Northern bivouacs.
Ammunition arrived and was handed out among the weary men. Some troops slept, indistinguishable in their exhaustion from the dead around them. Starbuck tried to compile a list of the dead and the wounded, but the work was slow.