Chapter 2The night was quiet—too quiet. The chill, moist air surrounding the sparse Federal campsite seemed cloaked in an abnormal silence that unsettled Union Major Canaan Abbott Scarborough. It rattled him from the top of his hatted head down to the tips of his booted toes. In truth, it spooked the devil out of him, and that wasn’t an easy accomplishment, considering his former bravado in battle, his erstwhile nerves of steel, which had earned him the nickname Cannonball Canaan. Yet in all his twenty-nine years, especially in all these years of war, he couldn’t ever recall hearing such unadulterated noiselessness, and he didn’t quite know what to do about it. He opened his mouth to speak, then clamped it shut, oddly feeling as if a mere whisper might tear a hole in some undetected fabric
