"What?" I asked.

"Come on," he said, touching my shoulder.

I followed Wally away from the meeting between the Selznicks and Leigh. He ran down a gully on his spindly legs and hurried into a stand of bushes. I went after him into the darkness. Now I could hear something ahead of us.

Wally plowed ahead until we cleared the trees, went up a little hill, and found ourselves panting and looking at a group of Confederate soldiers who were about thirty yards ahead of us around an open fire.

"He's dead," one of the soldiers shouted. "I've seen dead. He's dead."

Wally pushed ahead and we made our way through the group that included the guy named Varney who had talked to us a few minutes earlier.

When we broke through we saw the dead man, in a gray uniform. He was lying at the bottom of what looked like a drainage ditch. A sword was plunged into his stomach. The sword swayed as if someone had set it in motion.

"Anybody see what happened?" Wally said.

"Just fell on it, I guess," an extra in a gray private's uniform said.

"I saw him fall on it," said Varney, as Wally and I scurried down the side of the ditch toward the dead man.

Wally got down first and kneeled next to the corpse, careful not to touch anything.

"Dead for sure," he said. "First, probably not the last, on a picture this big."

I stood next to him, my trouser cuffs getting wet with mud. I'd see them dead before. Wally got up.

"Picture like this," he went on, reaching for his pipe and tobacco, "no surprise. Bound to be some accidents. Think we had four or five killed on Ben-Hur back in the old days. My guess is they'll want to keep this quiet a while. Low key."

I'd seen cover-ups at Warners when I worked security there, had even helped with one or two that would have been the end of rising and falling stars, writers, and directors.