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too many casualties, the colonel’s base and the command post itself would be vulnerable to a counterattack. The rebels might already be moving squads across the Richelieu downstream of them to spring upon Gore from the rear. The colonel’s entire strategy had been poorly conceived and hastily carried out. Moreover, even as his troops pressed the defenders back towards the fortified house, marksmen from that quarter were now almost in range. Every ten minutes or so, a solid shot from the twenty-four-pounderover on the riverbank smashed into the stone façade of the house and bounced off with a pathetic clang. Not a single stone had been chipped away in several hours of shelling.
    â€œI don’t think the men have the stomach for a bayonet charge,” Hilliard said to Marc. “They’re asleep on their feet.”
    â€œWe’ll go in first, then,” Marc said.
    Rick Hilliard’s eyes lit up. “And this time they won’t be able to scuttle off; there’s only one door on that barn, and we’re going in through it.”
    Marc motioned to Sergeant Ogletree to provide some distracting fire, drew his pistol, raised his sabre, and ran stride for stride with Hilliard towards the door of the barn. Bullets whizzed by, though from which side was unclear. But they reached the door together, unmarked. Hilliard’s shoulder struck it a split second before Marc’s.
    At first they could see nothing. Bits of sombre November light were leaking through myriad cracks in the barn-board and irradiating ripples of hay-dust. Several bales of straw had been propped up along the walls where the rebels had squatted and buttressed their musket-barrels, but there were no musketeers now manning these posts. It was as quiet and eerie as the apse of an empty cathedral. The two men stood stock-still, perplexed.
    â€œWhere in hell did they all go?” Hilliard whispered.
    â€œThere!” Marc cried.
    In the far right corner, where a sort of manger had once been, they saw the legs of a dark figure wriggling frantically. The rebels had devised a quick-escape hatch, but one of them had not quite made it out. Hilliard was the first to move.In two bounds he was standing over the rebel with his sabre raised. Accompanied by a guttural cry of triumph or anger, its blade descended in a violent arc and sliced through the flesh of the man’s buttocks till it struck bone. His howl rattled the barn-boards and sent the dust-motes aflutter.
    Marc cringed, horrified. But some fury, too long pent up and whetted by fatigue and frustration, had taken hold of Hilliard. He reached down, grabbed the screaming rebel by the feet, and dragged his body back into the ghastly light of the little barn. Then he flipped it over, face up. The poor devil was choking on his own sobs and hyperventilating. The eyes were bulbous with shock and disbelief. But these grotesqueries were not what brought both Hilliard and Marc to a stunned halt: the rebel was a boy, no more than sixteen or seventeen. And he was gaunt, almost fleshless, his skin sagging on the bones of his cheeks.
    â€œChrist,” Marc breathed, “he’s damn near starved. I’ve seen beggars outside Bedlam with more flesh on them.”
    Hilliard raised his sabre and drove it through the boy’s ribs into his heart. He died with a long, accusing wheeze.
    Marc fell back against the wall, dizzy and trembling.
    â€œI’ve killed him,” Hilliard said, as if somehow surprised at the consequences of his own savage action.
    Just then a ragged sequence of shots came singing through the rotting walls and slammed into the nearby posts and studding around them. Marc and Rick dropped to their knees without ceremony.
    â€œNow they’ve got us trapped in here,” Marc said.
    â€œWe can wait for Ogletree and the men to move up.”
    â€œI’ve got to get back to the troop,” Marc said. “They should be covering the door if they’re