The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 Read Online Free PDF Page B

request that your men are sent to my brigade."
    "What chance is there of that?"
    "I'm a Mason, remember," Swynyard said with a grin, "and I've still got a favor or two to call in. We'll get you back among friends."
    Maitland stood up as the two ragged officers walked back to the tent. He had drunk one of the two cups of coffee and started on the second. "You'll introduce me to the Legion's officers, Starbuck?" he said.
    "I'll do that for you, Colonel," Starbuck said. He might resent this man displacing him, but he would not put difficulties in Maitland's way because the Legion would have to fight the Yankees whoever commanded them and Starbuck did not want their morale hurt more than was necessary. "I'll talk you up to them," he promised grudgingly.
    "But I don't think you should stay after that," Maitland suggested confidently. "No man can serve two masters, isn't that what the good book says? So the sooner you're gone, Starbuck, the better for the men."
    "Better for you, you mean," Starbuck said.
    "That, too," Maitland agreed calmly.
    Starbuck was losing the Legion and been consigned to a battalion of the damned, which meant he was being destroyed and would somehow have to survive.
    lucifer was not happy . "Richmond," he told Star buck soon after they had arrived in the city, "is not to my taste."
    "Then go away," Starbuck retorted grumpily.
    "I am considering it," Lucifer said. He was liable to pompousness when he perceived that his dignity was under assault, and that dignity was very easily offended. He was only a boy, fifteen at the very most, and he would have been small for his age even if he were two years younger, but he had crammed a lot of living into those few years and was possessed of a self -assurance that fascinated Star buck quite as much as the mystery of the boy's past. Lucifer never spoke directly about that past, nor did Starbuck ask about it, for he had learned that every query merely prompted a different version. It was plain the boy was a contraband, an escaped slave, and Starbuck suspected Lucifer had been trying to reach the sanctuary of the North when he had been apprehended by Jackson's army at Manassas, but Lucifer's life before that moment, like his real name, remained all mystery, just as it was a mystery why he had elected to stay with Starbuck after his recapture.
    "He likes you, that's why," Sally Truslow told Starbuck. "He knows you'll give him plenty of rope and he's mischievous enough to want rope. Then one day he'll grow up and you won't ever see him again."
    Starbuck and Lucifer had walked from the rain-soaked battlefield to the railhead at Fredericksburg, then taken the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad to the capital. Starbuck's travel pass gave him admission to one of the passenger cars while Lucifer traveled in a boxcar with the other Negroes. The train had puffed and jerked and clanked and shuddered and thus crept south until, at dawn, Starbuck had been woken by the cry of a Richmond milkmaid. The Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac depot was in the heart of the city and the rails ran right down the center of Broad Street, and Starbuck found it a strange experience to see the familiar city through the soot-smutted window of a slow-moving railcar. Newspaper boys ran alongside the train offering copies of the Examiner or Sentinel, while on the sidewalk pedestrians edged past the carts and wagons that had been herded to the street's sides by the train's slow, clangorous passage. Starbuck stared bleary-eyed through the window, noticing gloomily how many doors were hung with black, how many women were in mourning, how many cripples begged on the sidewalk, and how many men had crepe armbands.
    Starbuck had convinced himself that he would not call on Sally. He told himself that she was no longer his woman. She had found a lover, Starbuck's good friend Patrick Lassan, a French cavalryman who was ostensibly observing the war on behalf of the French army but who really rode with