The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara Page A

took it in pained hands, drank, felt the heat soak down through him like hot liquid sunshine. The dizziness passed. There was fog flat and low in the treetops, like a soft roof. The rain was clean on his face. He walked slowly to the rail where the horses were tethered: gentle Traveler, skittish Lucy Long. Stuart had not come back in the night. If Stuart had come they would have wakened him. He said good morning to the beautiful gray horse, the great soft eyes, said a silent prayer. He thought: Tonight we’ll all be together.
    Troops were gathering along the rail fence, looking in at him. He heard a man cry a raucous greeting. Another man shushed him in anger. Lee turned, bowed slightly, waved a stiff arm. There was a cluster of sloppy salutes, broad wet grins under dripping hats. A bareheaded boy stood in reverent silence, black hat clutched to his breast. An officer moved down the fence, hustling the men away.
    Lee took a deep breath, testing his chest: a windblown vacancy, a breathless pain. He had a sense of enormous unnatural fragility, likehollow glass. He sat silently on a rail, letting the velvet nose nuzzle him. Not much pain this morning. Praise God. He had fallen from his horse on his hands and the hands still hurt him but the pain in the chest was not bad at all. But it was not the pain that troubled him; it was a sick gray emptiness he knew too well, that sense of a hole clear through him like the blasted vacancy in the air behind a shell burst, an enormous emptiness. The thing about the heart was that you could not coax it or force it, as you could any other disease. Willpower meant nothing. The great cold message had come in the spring, and Lee carried it inside him every moment of every day and all through the nights—that endless, breathless, inconsolable alarm:
there is not much time, beware, prepare
.
    “Sir?”
    Lee looked up. Young Walter Taylor. Lee came slowly awake, back to the misty world. Taylor stood in the rain with inky papers—a cool boy of twenty-four, already a major.
    “Good morning, sir. Trust you slept well?”
    The clear black eyes were concerned. Lee nodded. Taylor was a slim and cocky boy. Behind Lee’s back he called him “The Great Tycoon.” He did not know that Lee knew it. He had a delicate face, sensitive nostrils. He said cheerily, “Nothing from General Stuart, sir.”
    Lee nodded.
    “Not a thing, sir. We can’t even pick up any rumors. But we mustn’t fret now, sir.” A consoling tone. “They haven’t got anybody can catch General Stuart.”
    Lee turned to the beautiful horse. He had a sudden rushing sensation of human frailty, death like a blowing wind: Jackson was gone, Stuart would go, like leaves from autumn trees. Matter of time.
    Taylor said airily, “Sir, I would assume that if we haven’t heard from the general it is obviously because he has nothing to report.”
    “Perhaps,” Lee said.
    “After all, sir, Longstreet’s man is a paid spy. And an
actor
to boot.” Taylor pursed his lips primly, flicked water from a gray cuff.
    Lee said, “If I do not hear from General Stuart by this evening I will have to send for him.”

    “Yes, sir.”
    “We’ll send the Maryland people. They’ll be familiar with the ground.”
    “Very good, sir.” Taylor shifted wet papers. “Message here from General Hill, sir.”
    “Yes.”
    “The General wishes to inform you that he is going into Gettysburg this morning with his lead division.” Taylor squinted upward at a lightening sky. “I expect he’s already under way. He advises me that there is a shoe factory in the town and his men intend to, ah, requisition some footgear.” Taylor grinned.
    “General Ewell is moving down from the north?”
    “Yes, sir. The rain may slow things somewhat. But General Ewell expects to be in the Cashtown area by noon.”
    Lee nodded. Taylor peered distastefully at another paper.
    “Ah, there is a report here, sir, of Union cavalry in Gettysburg, but General Hill discounts