His superiors didn’t know what to make of him. Most of them were Regulars, men who’d stayed in butternut all through the lean times before Jake Featherston started building up the C.S. Army again. A colonel named Travis W.W. Oliphant-he got very offended if you left the W.W. out of any correspondence addressed to him, no matter how trivial-said, “You know, Major, you’ll just kill yourself if you try to run through every brick wall you see instead of going around some of them.”

“Yes, sir.” Dover ground a cigarette out under the heel of his left boot (Boot, Marching, Officer’s Field, size 9?C). He lit another one and sucked in smoke. Without a cloud of smoke around him, he hardly felt real. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, those damned idiots south of the Ohio finally got us about half as many of the 105 shells we’ve been screaming for as we really need. Gotta move ’em up to the people who shoot ’em out the guns.”

Travis W.W. Oliphant scratched his head. He looked like a British cavalry colonel, or what Jerry Dover imagined a British cavalry colonel would look like. “See here, Dover, are you trying to mock me?” he said.

“Mock you? No, sir.” Dover scratched his head, too. “Why would you say that? I’m just trying to do my job.”

“You’re not a Regular,” the senior officer said.

“No, sir,” Dover agreed. “So what? I can still see what needs doing. I can still get people to do it, or else do it myself.”

“There are people in this unit who think you’re trying to show them up,” Colonel Oliphant said.

Dover scratched his head again. He blew out another stream of smoke. “Sir, don’t the Yankees give us enough trouble so we haven’t got time to play stupid games with ourselves? I work hard. I want everybody else to work hard, too.”

“We won’t get the job done if we wonder about each other-that’s for sure,” Oliphant said. “We’ve all got to pull together.”