His aides hurried off to get their horses. Andries Rhoodie went with them. Perry brought up Traveller. Lee swung onto the gray. The staff officers and Rhoodie soon joined them. They rode down from the hills to Orange Court House together. Lee and his aides were all fine horsemen. He soon saw Rhoodie was not, though he managed well enough.

Old civilian men, walking or riding along the streets of Orange Court House, lifted their hats in tribute to Lee as he passed. He gravely returned their greetings. Few young male civilians were to be seen—in the town or anywhere else in the Confederacy. There were a fair number of soldiers, seeing what the shops had to offer: not much, probably. They saluted Lee and his staff officers. Some pointed at Andries Rhoodie: his size, his strange clothes, and the fact that he, a stranger, rode with Lee drew their notice to him.

The train station was not far from the courthouse that gave the hamlet half its name. For that matter, nothing in Orange Court House was far from anything else. The train had already arrived by the time Lee and his companions got to the station. Under the watchful eye of the crew, slaves loaded cut logs into the tender for the next trip south.

Other blacks were starting to unload the freight cars. Some of the men who supervised them wore the Confederate uniform; others were dressed like Andries Rhoodies, in caps and mottled jackets and trousers. Even their ankle boots were the same as his. Lee rubbed his chin thoughtfully. What one man wore was his own business. When a dozen men—a baker’s dozen, counting Rhoodie himself—wore similar outfits, that suggested the clothes were a uniform of sorts. Indeed, Rhoodie’s colleagues looked more uniform than the Southern soldiers with them, whose pants, coats, and hats were of several different colors and cut in a variety of ways.