A young private in the bold experiment of the Confederacy took a musket ball between the eyes at the first battle of Bull Run. By all laws of mercy and physiology he should have fallen dead at the picket line. But he’d simply dropped his musket, stood up and wandered southeast until he came to the huge woods that bordered the dusty town of Manassas. There he lived for six months, growing dark as a slave, sucking eggs and robbing cradles (the human victuals were legend only, the Judge appended in a verbal footnote). The Dead Reb was personally responsible for the cessation of all foot traffic after dusk through the Centreville woods that fall-until he was found, stark naked and dead indeed, sitting upright in what was the middle of Jackson’s Corner, now a prime part of Tate Collier’s farm.

Well, no ghosts here now, Tate reflected, only a hundred feet of pipe to be replaced..

Straightening up now, he wiped his watch crystal.

Twenty minutes till they were due.

Look, he told himself, relax.

Through the misty rain Tate could see, a mile away, the house he’d built eighteen years ago. It was a miniature Tara, complete with Done columns, and was white as a cloud. This was Tate’s only real indulgence in life, paid for with some inheritance and the hope of money that a young prosecutor knows will be showered upon him for his brilliance and flair, despite the fact that a commonwealth’s attorney’s meager salary is a matter of public record. The six-bedroom house still groaned beneath a hearty mortgage.

When the Judge deeded over the fertile Piedmont land to Tate twenty years ago-skipping Tate’s father for reasons never articulated though known to one and all of the Collier clan-the young man decided impulsively he wanted a family home (the Judge’s residence wasn’t on the farmland itself but was eight miles away in Fairfax). Tate kept a two-acre parcel fallow for one season and built on it the next. The house sat between the two barns-one new, one the original-in the middle of a rough, grassy field punctuated with patches of black-eyed Susans, hop clover and bluestem, a stand of bitternut hickory trees, a beautiful American beech and eastern white pines.