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like targets in a shooting gallery, pouring out rifle fire in sheets as the solitary horseman dashed past.
    They couldn’t hit him.
    Lieutenant Dunbar heard the firing die. The line of riflemen had run out. As he pulled up he felt something burning in his upper arm and discovered that he’d been nicked in the bicep. The prickle of heat brought him briefly back to his senses. He looked down the line he had just passed and saw that the Confederates were milling about behind the wall in a state of disbelief.
    His ears were suddenly working again and he could hear shouts of encouragement coming from his own line far across the field. Then he was aware once more of his foot, throbbing like some hideous pump deep in his boot.
    He wheeled Cisco into an about-face, and as the little buckskin surged against the bit, Lieutenant Dunbar heard a thunderous cheer. He looked across the field. His brothers in arms were rising en masse behind the wall.
    He laid his heels against Cisco’s side and they charged ahead, racing back the way they had come, this time to probe the other Confederate flank. The men he had already passed were caught with their pants down and he could see them frantically reloading as he sped by.
    But ahead of him, down along the unprobed flank, he could see riflemen coming to their feet, the guns settling in the crooks of their shoulders.
    Determined not to fail himself, the lieutenant suddenly and impulsively let the reins drop and lifted both his arms high into the air. He might have looked like a circus rider, but what he felt was final. He had raised his arms in a final gesture of farewell to this life. To someone watching, it might have been misconstrued. It might have looked like a gesture of triumph.
    Of course Lieutenant Dunbar had not meant it as a signal to anyone else. He had only wanted to die. But his Union comrades already had their hearts in their throats, and when they saw the lieutenant’s arms fly up, it was more than they could bear.
    They streamed over the wall, a spontaneous tide of fighting men, roaring with an abandon that curdled the blood of the Confederate troops.
    The men in the beechnut uniforms broke and ran as one, scrambling in a twisted mess toward the stand of trees behind them.
    By the time Lieutenant Dunbar pulled Cisco up, the blue-coated Union troops were already over the wall, chasing the terrified rebels into the woods.
    His head suddenly lightened.
    The world around him went into a spin.
    The colonel and his aides were converging from one direction, General Tipton and his people from another. They’d both seen him fall, toppling unconscious from the saddle, and each man quickened his pace as the lieutenant went down. Running to the spot in the empty field where Cisco stood quietly next to the shapeless form lying at his feet, the colonel and General Tipton shared the same feelings, feelings that were rare in high-ranking officers, particularly in wartime.
    They each shared a deep and genuine concern for a single individual.
    Of the two, General Tipton was the more overwhelmed. In twenty-seven years of soldiering he had witnessed many acts of bravery, but nothing came close to the display he had witnessed that afternoon.
    When Dunbar came to, the general was kneeling at his side with the fervency of a father at the side of a fallen son.
    And when he found that this brave lieutenant had ridden onto the field already wounded, the general lowered his head as if in prayer and did something he had not done since childhood. Tears tumbled into his graying beard.
    Lieutenant Dunbar was not in shape to talk much, but he did manage a single request. He said it several times.
    “Don’t take my foot off.”
    General Tipton heard and recorded that request as if it were a commandment from God. Lieutenant Dunbar was taken from the field in the general’s own ambulance, carried to the general’s regimental headquarters, and, once there, was placed under the direct supervision of the