Ambrose and several others reacted to the sniping with grins. "Let's go catch that bunch," a private whooped.
You idiot, Charles thought as his midsection tightened. He glimpsed horses in the grove and heard the pop of other muskets, overlaid by the roar of his own voice bellowing the order to charge.
2
The charge from the road to the trees was ragged but effective. The sunlit blue flashes, bright as plumage, became the trouser legs of a half-dozen patrolling enemy horsemen. The Yanks galloped off when Charles's men cantered into the grove, assorted shoulder weapons ready.
Charles went in first, his double-barrel shotgun cocked. The Academy and Texas had taught him that successful officers led; they didn't prod. No one exemplified that more than the rich and physically powerful planter who'd raised the legion. Hampton was one of the rare ones who didn't need West Point to teach them to soldier.
Among the walnut trees, with shotguns booming, muskets snapping replies, smoke thickening, Charles's troop scattered. The men went skylarking off every which way, taunting the retreating enemy, now barely visible.
"Where you Yankee boys goin' so fast?"
"Come on, turn around and fight us!"
"They aren't worth our time, lads," Ambrose Pell cried. "Wish our niggers were here. They could chase 'em."
A single musket shot from a dark part of the grove punctuated the last of his sentence. Charles instinctively ducked down close to Dasher's neck. The bay seemed nervous, uncertain, even though, like all of the legion's horses, she'd been drilled to the sound of shotgun and artillery fire in camp in Columbia.
A ball whizzed past. Sergeant Peterkin Reynolds yelled. Charles fired both barrels into the trees. Immediately, he heard a cry of pain.
He yanked Dasher's head hard, turning back. "Reynolds—?" The sergeant, pale but grinning, held up his cadet gray sleeve to show a tear near the cuff and only a small spot of blood.
Friends of Reynolds treated the wounding less lightly. "Goddamn tailors and shoemakers on horseback," one man shouted as he galloped past Charles, who vainly ordered him back.
Through a gap in the trees Charles saw a laggard from the Union patrol, a plump blond fellow with no control of his horse, one of the heavy draft plugs typical of the hastily assembled Northern cavalry. The man kicked the animal and cursed. German.
The Dutchman was such a poor horseman, the trooper who'd shot past Charles had no trouble riding up to him and pulling him sideways. He fell out of his saddle and hit the ground, wailing till he freed his boot from the left stirrup.
The young man from South Carolina had drawn his forty-inch, six-pound, two-edged, straight-bladed sword, bigger than regulation and forged in Columbia to the colonel's specifications. Hampton had equipped his legion using his own money.
Ambrose rode up beside Charles. He pointed. "Look at that, will you, Charlie? Scared as a treed coon."
Ambrose didn't exaggerate. On his knees, the Yank trembled as the trooper climbed down, took a two-handed grip and raised the blade over his head. Charles yelled, "Manigault! No!"
Private Manigault turned and glared. Charles shoved his shotgun into his lieutenant's hand and dismounted in a leap. He dashed to the trooper, seizing the still-raised sword arm.
"I said no."
Defiant, the trooper struggled and strained against Charles's grip. "Let go of me, you damned puppy, you damned West Point son of a bitch, you damned —"
Charles let go, then smashed his right fist into Manigault's face. Bleeding from his nose, the young man crashed backward into a tree trunk. Charles wrenched the trooper's sword away from him and turned to confront the glowering men on horseback. He stared right back.
"We're soldiers, not butchers, and you'd better remember that. The next man who disobeys my order or curses me or calls me by my first name goes up for court-martial. After I deal with him personally."
He let his eyes drift past a few hostile faces, then threw the sword down and reclaimed his shotgun. "Form them up, Lieutenant Pell."
Ambrose avoided his eyes but got busy. Charles heard plenty of grumbling. The joy in the morning was gone; he'd been stupid to believe in it anyway.
Discouraged, he wondered how his men could survive in a real battle if they considered a skirmish somewhat less serious than a fox hunt. How could they win if they refused to learn to fight as a unit — which first of all meant learning to obey?
His long-time friend from his West Point days, Billy Hazard, of the federal engineers, knew the importance of taking war seriously. Cousin Orry Main and his closest friend, Billy's older brother George, knew it, too. All Academy men did. Maybe that explained the gulf between the professional officers of the old regular army and the amateur hotspurs. Even Wade Hampton sometimes mocked men from the Point —
"No worse than bees buzzing, was it?" Charles overheard a trooper say while Ambrose re-formed the troop by twos on the road.
Charles withheld comment and rode to the soiled, cringing prisoner. "You'll have to walk a long way back with us. But you won't be harmed. Understand?"
"Ja, versteh' — onderstand." The Dutchman pronounced the English word with difficulty.
The troopers considered all Yankees mere mudsills or mechanics; unworthy opponents. Studying the poor tun-bellied captive, Charles could understand the viewpoint. Trouble was, there were hundreds of thousands more mudsills and mechanics in the North than in the South. The Carolina boys never considered that.
The North reminded him of his friend Billy. Where was he? Would Charles ever lay eyes on him again? The Hazard and Main families had grown close in the years before the war; would they ever be close again, even with Cousin Brett now married to Billy?
Too many questions. Too many problems. And as the double column headed south again, the sun was all at once too cool for summertime. A half mile from the site of the skirmish, Charles heard and felt Dasher cough. Saw her nostrils excessively damp when she turned her head.
A discharge beginning? Yes. The coughing persisted. God, not the strangles, he thought. It was a winter disease.
But she was a young horse, more susceptible. He realized he had another problem, this one potentially disastrous.
3
Each of the young man's shoulder straps bore a single bar of silver embroidery. His coat collar displayed the turreted castle within a wreath of laurel, the whole embroidered in gold on a small black velvet oval. Very smart, that uniform of dark blue frock coat and stovepipe trousers.
The young man wiped his mouth with a napkin. He had eaten a delicious meal of beefsteak, browned onions, and fried oysters, which he was just topping off with a dish of blancmange — at ten after ten in the morning. You could order breakfast here until eleven. Washington was a bizarre town. A frightened town, too. Across the Potomac on the Arlington Heights, Brigadier General McDowell was drawing up war plans in the mansion the Lees had abandoned. While awaiting new orders, the young man had hired a horse and ridden over there day before yesterday. He had not been encouraged to find army headquarters a crowded, noisy place with a distinct air of confusion. Awareness that Confederate pickets stood guard not many miles away seemed very real there.
Federal troops had crossed the Potomac and occupied the Virginia side in late May. Regiments from New England crowded the city now. Their presence had partially lifted the burden of terror Washington had borne during the first week after Fort Sumter fell; then, telegraph and even rail connections to the North had been cut for a time. An attack had been expected any hour. The Capitol had been hastily fortified. Some of the relief troops were presently bivouacked there; a military bakery operated in the basement. Tensions had lessened a little, but he still felt the same confusion he'd detected at McDowell's headquarters. Too many new and alarming things were happening, too fast.