The plight of the men still on the battlefield was far worse. They drifted in and out of their painful sleep, sometimes waking to the voices of other men calling feebly for help or to the sound of wounded horses spending a long night dying. The night’s small wind blew north to where the frightened Yankees waited for another rebel attack. Every now and then a nervous artilleryman fired a shell from the Yankee lines, and the round would thump into the trampled corn and explode. Clods of earth would patter down, and a small thick cloud of bitter smoke would drift north as a chorus of frightened voices momentarily sounded loud before fading again. Here and there a lantern showed where men looked for friends or tried to rescue the wounded, but there were too many men lying in blood and not enough men to help, and so the abandoned men suffered and died in the small wicked hours.
Colonel Griffin Swynyard neither died nor called for help. Instead the Colonel lay sleeping, and in the dawn, when the sun’s first rays lanced over the crest of Cedar Mountain to gild the field where the dead lay rotting and the wounded lay whimpering, he opened his eyes to brightness.
Thirty miles north, where train after train steamed into Manassas Junction to fill the night with the clash of cars, the hiss of valves, and the stench of smoke, Adam Faulconer watched the horses purchased with the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s money come down from the boxcars. The beasts were frightened by the noises and the pungent smells of this strange place, and so they pricked their ears, rolled their eyes white, and whinnied pitifully as they were driven between two lines of men into a makeshift corral formed from empty army wagons. Captain Billy Blythe, who had purchased the horses and shipped them to Manassas, sat long-legged on a wagon driver’s high box and watched to see how Adam liked his animals. “Real special horses, Faulconer,” Blythe called. “Picked ’em myself. I know they don’t look much, but there ain’t nothing wrong that a few days in a feedlot won’t set straight.” Blythe lit a cigar and waited for Adam’s judgment.
Adam hardly dared say a word in case that word provoked a fight with Blythe. The horses were dreadful beasts. Adam had seen better animals penned at slaughter yards.
Tom Huxtable was Adam’s troop sergeant. He came from Louisiana but had chosen to fight for the North rather than strain the loyalty of his New York wife. Huxtable spat in derision of the newly arrived horses. “These ain’t horses, sir,” he said to Adam. “Hell, these ain’t no horses. Broken-down mules is all they is.” He spat again. “Swaybacked, spavined, and wormy. I reckon Blythe just pocketed half the money.”
“You say something, Tom Huxtable?” a grinning Billy Blythe called from his perch.
For answer Sergeant Huxtable just spat again. Adam curbed his own anger as he inspected the twenty frightened horses and tried to find some redeeming feature among them, but in the lanterns’ meager light the animals did indeed look a sorry bunch. They had capped hocks and sloping pasterns, swaybacks and, most troubling of all, too many running noses. A horse with bad lungs was a horse that needed to be butchered, yet these were the horses being given to the men under Adam’s command. Adam cursed himself for not buying the horses himself, but Major Galloway had insisted that Blythe’s experience in horse dealing was one of the regiment’s valuable assets.
“So what do you think, Faulconer?” Blythe asked mockingly.
“What did you pay for them?”
Blythe waved the cigar insouciantly. “I paid plenty, boy, just plenty.”
“Then you were cheated.” Adam could not hide his bitterness.
“There just ain’t that many horses available, boy,” Blythe deliberately taunted Adam with the word “boy” in hopes of provoking a show of temper. Blythe had been content to be Galloway’s second-in-command and saw no need for the Major to have fetched a third officer into the regiment. “The army’s already bought all the decent horses, so we latecomers have to make do with the leavings. Are you telling me you can’t manage with those there horses?”
“I reckon this gray has distemper,” Corporal Kemp said. Harlan Kemp, like Adam, was a Virginian who could not shake his loyalty to the United States. He and his whole family had abandoned their farm to come north.
“Better shoot the beast, then,” Blythe said happily.
“Not with one of your guns,” Adam snapped back. “Not if they’re as good as your horses.”
Blythe laughed, pleased at having goaded the display of temper out of Adam. “I got you some right proper guns, Faulconer. Colt repeaters, brand-new, still in their Connecticut packing cases.” The Colt repeater was little more than a revolver elongated into a long-arm, but its revolving cylinder gave a man the chance to fire six shots in the same time an enemy rifleman needed to fire just one. The weapon was not famed for its accuracy, but Major Galloway reckoned a small group of horsemen needed volume of fire rather than accuracy and claimed that forty horsemen firing six shots were worth over two hundred men with single-shot rifles.
“It ain’t a reliable gun,” Sergeant Huxtable murmured to Adam. “I’ve seen the whole cylinder explode and take off a man’s hand.”
“And it’s too long in the barrel,” Harlan Kemp added. “Real hard to carry on horseback.”
“You spoke, Harlan Kemp?” Blythe challenged.
“I’m saying the Colt ain’t a horse soldier’s weapon,” Kemp responded. “We should have carbines.”
Blythe chuckled. “You’re lucky to have any guns at all. So far as guns and horses go, we’re on the hindmost teat. So you’ll just have to clamp down and suck hard.”
Huxtable ignored Blythe’s crudity. “What do you reckon, sir?” he asked Adam. “These horses can’t be ridden. They ain’t nothing but worm meat.” Adam did not answer, and Tom Huxtable shook his head. “Major Galloway won’t let us ride on nags like these, sir.”
“I guess not,” Adam said. Tonight Major Galloway was fetching orders from General Pope, and those orders were supposed to initiate the first offensive patrols of Galloway’s Horse, but Adam knew he could do nothing on these broken-backed animals.
“So what will we do?” Harlan Kemp asked, and the other men of Adam’s troop gathered round to hear their Captain’s answer.
Adam looked at the sorry, shivering, diseased horses. Their ribs showed and their pelts were mangy. For a moment he felt a temptation to give way to despair, and he wondered why every human endeavor had to be soured by jealousy and spite, but then he glanced up into Billy Blythe’s grinning face, and Adam’s incipient despair was overtaken by a surge of resolution. “We’ll exchange the horses,” Adam told his anxious men. “We’ll take these nags south and we’ll exchange them for the best horses in Virginia. We’ll change them for horses swift as the wind and strong as the hills.” He laughed as he saw the incomprehension on Blythe’s face. Adam would not be beaten, for he knew just where to find those horses, the best horses, and once he had found his horses, he would sow havoc among his enemies. Billy Blythe or no, Adam Faulconer would fight.
SATURDAY MORNING, THE DAY AFTER BATTLE, AGAIN dawned hot and humid. Leaden clouds covered the sky and added to the air’s oppression, which was made even fouler by a miasmic smell that clung to the folds of the battlefield like the morning mist. At first light, when the troops were stirring reluctantly from their makeshift beds, Major Hinton sought out Starbuck. “I’m sorry about last night, Nate,” Hinton said.
Starbuck offered the Legion’s new commanding officer a curt and dismissive judgment of Washington Faulconer’s raid to snatch the captured flag. The Bostonian was stripped to the waist and