Battle Flag

  Murphy ran to a side window, but a second before he reached his objective a bullet slapped the gauze curtain aside, then a second bullet ripped clean through the wall to strike a splinter out of the tavern's counter. The slaves were wailing in the kitchen, while McComb's bedridden wife was calling pathetically for her husband. The other women upstairs were screaming in terror. Murphy cupped his hands. "There are women in here! Stop your firing! Stop firing!"

  Another voice took up the cry from the porch. "Cease fire! Cease fire! There are women here!"

  "Keep firing!" a man shouted from the fire-rent dark. "Bastards are lying! Keep firing!"

  Murphy ducked as more bullets riddled the wall. The heaviness of the rifle fire suggested there had to be scores of enemy outside. John Torrance, C Company's Captain, was lying in the porch doorway, apparently dead. One of the Legion's lieutenants was crawling across the floor, his beard dripping with blood; then he collapsed onto a full spittoon and spilt its rancid contents across the floor. A fire had started in the kitchen, and its flames roared hungrily as they fed on the old building's dry wood. Two of McComb's cus­tomers ran upstairs to try and take the women to safety as Murphy hurried into the back room, where the remains of the celebratory supper lay on the table. He snatched his coat from the nail, grabbed his cartridge pouch, and leaped straight through a gauze curtain into the night. The curtain wrapped itself round him, tripping him so that he rolled helplessly in the mud for a few seconds. He had an idea he might be able to drive the horsemen away from the front of the tavern if he could just fire at them from the darkness at the building's rear, but as he struggled to extricate himself from the muslin curtain, he heard the click of a gun being cocked and looked up to see the dark shape of a horseman. Murphy tried to raise his revolver, but the horseman fired first, then fired again. Murphy felt something hit him with a blow like the kick of a horse; then a terrible pain whipped up from his thigh. He heard himself scream, then lost consciousness as the rider fired again.

  The fire spread from the kitchen. Mrs. McComb screamed as the flames licked up the stairs and the bedrooms filled with a thick smoke. The two men who had tried to rescue the women abandoned their attempt, instead step­ping out of a bedroom window onto the porch roof in an effort to save themselves from the flames. "Shoot them down!" Billy Blythe ordered excitedly. "Shoot the bastards down!" A half-dozen bullets struck the two men, who col­lapsed, rolled twitching down the shingled roof, then dropped to the ground. Blythe whooped with victory while his men kept pouring their withering fire into the burning building.

  A bugle called to the north, summoning the raiders to their retreat, but Blythe had his enemy trapped like rats in a burning barrel, and like rats, he decided, they would die. He fired again and again while the flames spread through the tavern, leaping up the gauze curtains, devouring the ancient wooden floors, exploding barrels of liquor, and hissing where it met the blood that was spilt so thick across the planks.

  A man with burning clothes crawled across the porch, then fell shuddering as bullets ripped at him. A roof beam collapsed, showering sparks into the night, and Billy Blythe, his mouth open and eyes bright, watched enthralled.

  Major Galloway arrived at the head of his raiders. "Come on, Billy! Didn't you hear the bugle?"

  "Too busy," Blythe said, his eyes wide and fixed on the glorious destruction. Flames writhed out of collapsing liquor barrels and flared fierce and brief when they caught a dead man's hair. Ammunition crackled in the flames, each cartridge flashing white like a miniature firecracker.

  "What happened?" Galloway stared in awe at the burning house.

  "Sons of bitches fired on us," Blythe said, still gazing enraptured at the horror he had engendered, "so we taught the sons of bitches a lesson."

  "Let's go, Billy," Galloway said, then seized Blythe's bridle and dragged his second-in-command away from the fire. "Come on, Billy!"

  A figure stirred under the porch, and two horsemen emptied their rifles' revolving cylinders into the man. A woman screamed at the tavern's rear; then the kitchen roof collapsed and the scream was cut sharply off. "It was a horse," Blythe assured Galloway, who had frowned when he heard the woman's distress, "just a dying horse, Joe, and dying horses can sound uncommon like women."

  "Let's go," Galloway said. There was a smell of roasting meat from the tavern, and horrid things twitching in the furnace heat, and Galloway turned away, not wanting to know what horrors he abandoned.

  The horsemen rode west, leaving the sparks whirling cloudward and a whole brigade whipped.

  Starbuck had wanted to challenge the raiders, but Swynyard stopped him from leaving the tent. "They'll slash you down like a dog. Ever been chased by a cavalryman?"

  "No."

  "You'll end up saber-cut to ribbons. Keep quiet."

  "We must do something!"

  "Sometimes it's best to do nothing. They won't stay long."

  Yet the wait seemed forever to Starbuck as he crouched in the tent; then at last he heard a bugle call and voices shouting orders to retreat. Hooves thumped close by the tent, which suddenly twitched and half collapsed as its guy ropes were cut. Starbuck squirmed out of the sagging wet canvas and saw Adam on horseback not five paces away.

  "Adam!" Starbuck shouted, not really believing his own eyes.

  But Adam was already spurring south, his horse's hooves throwing up great gobs of mud and water as he went. Starbuck saw the headquarters house burning and more fires flaring skyward among the supply wagons. The sentry guarding Swynyard's tent had vanished.

  "So how did they cross the river?" Colonel Swynyard asked as he crawled out from the tent's wreckage.

  "The same way they'll go back," Starbuck said. The horsemen might have withdrawn southward, but he had no doubt they would be riding a half-circle to get back to the unguarded ford, which meant a man on foot might just be able to cut them off. General Faulconer was shouting for water, but Starbuck ignored the orders. He leaped over the ditch that separated the headquarters from the bivouac lines and shouted for Sergeant Truslow. "Turn out! Fast now!"

  H Company fell into ranks. "Load!" Starbuck ordered.

  Truslow had rescued Starbuck's rifle and now threw it to him with an ammunition pouch. "The General says we're not to take orders from you," the Sergeant said.

  "The General can go to hell." Starbuck bit a cartridge and poured powder down the barrel.

  "That's what I reckoned too," Truslow said.

  Swynyard arrived, panting. "Where are you going?"

  Starbuck spat the bullet into the muzzle. "We're going to Dead Mary's Ford," he said, then rammed the bullet hard down, slotted the ramrod back into place, and slung the rifle from his shoulder.

  "Why Dead Mary's Ford?" Swynyard asked, puzzled.

  "Because, damn it, we saw one of the bastards there last night. Ain't that right, Mallory?"

  "Saw him plain as daylight," Sergeant Mallory confirmed.

  "Besides," Starbuck went on, "where else would they cross the river? Every other ford's guarded. Follow me!" Starbuck shouted, and the men ran through a darkness made livid by the great fires that burned uncontrollably in the Brigade lines. The farmhouse roof collapsed to spew a gout of flames skyward, but that inflagration was dwarfed by the huge fires in the ammunition park. Every few seconds another powder cask would explode to send a ball of fire soaring up into the low clouds. Shells cracked apart, rifle ammunition stuttered, and dogs howled in terror. The inferno lit Starbuck's path across the waterlogged meadow and into the trees, but the deeper he ran into the woods the darker it became and the harder it was to find the path. He had to slow down and feel his way forward.

  Sergeant Truslow wanted to know just what had hap­pened at headquarters. Colonel Swynyard told him about the Northern raiders, and Starbuck added that he had seen Adam Faulconer among the enemy horsemen. "Are you sure?" Colonel Swynyard asked.

  "Pretty damn sure, yes."

  Truslow spat into the dark. "I said we should have shot the bastard when he cr
ossed the lines. This way."

  They stumbled on through the woods; then, when they were still a quarter-mile short of the river, Starbuck heard hoofbeats and saw a glimmer of flamelight showing through the black tangled silhouette of the trees. "Run!" he shouted. He feared his company would arrive too late and that the Northern horsemen would escape before he could reach the line of rifle pits at the wood's edge.

  Then he saw the riders milling at the river's nearer bank. Someone had made a torch by strapping dead twigs to a length of timber, and the torch lit the horsemen's passage through a ford made dangerously deep by storm water. Starbuck guessed most of the riders had long crossed the river, but a dozen cavalrymen were still waiting on the southern bank as he slipped and skidded into a flooded rifle pit. He held his weapon up high to keep it dry and saw the nearest horsemen turn in alarm as they heard the splash of his fall. "Spread out!" Starbuck shouted to his men, "and open fire!" Three horses were in the middle of the ford with the river up past their bellies. One of the cavalrymen cut with a whip to urge his horse on. "Fire!" Starbuck shouted again, then aimed his own rifle at the nearest enemy. He pulled the trigger and felt a surge of relief that at last they were fighting back.

  Someone fired from Starbuck's right. The woods were full of trampling feet, and the edge of the meadow was suddenly black with rebel infantry. The ruined house where Mad Silas lived was a dark shadow in the meadow's center, beyond which the Yankee carried his flaming torch high; then the man suddenly realized that he was illuminating the target, and so he hurled the brand into the river to plunge the night into instant and utter blackness. A horse was screaming in the dark. More rifles cracked, their flames stabbing the sudden dark.

  The Yankees returned the fire. Rifles flared on the far bank. Men were shouting in panic, calling on each other to get the hell across the water. Northern bullets whipped through the leaves over Starbuck's head. He was up to his thighs in the flooded rifle pit. He rammed a new bullet down the rifle's barrel, then fired again. He could not see his targets because the muzzle flashes were dazzling him. The night was a chaos of gun flames, screams, and splashes. Something or someone floundered in the water, and Starbuck could hear desperate shouts as the horsemen tried to rescue their comrade. "Cease fire!" he shouted, not because he wanted to help the rescuers, but because it was time to take prisoners. "Cease fire!" he shouted again and heard Sergeant Truslow take up the call. "H Company!" Starbuck called when the rifles had fallen silent. "Forward!"

  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."

  Chapter 8

  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.