American Front

XIV

Lucien Galtier looked up in the sky with something like approval. Winters were long. Winters were hard. They wore at a man; it seemed he never saw the sun for weeks at a time. But spring, when it finally burgeoned, made up for that… at least until winter came again.

Fluffy white clouds drifted from west to east, their shadows sailing across the farmland like clipper ships across a smooth sea. The weather-he paused to thank God-had been very good this year. True, from time to time, there were Americans on the road, in trucks or on horseback or in long columns afoot, but God didn't take care of all the little details in your life. You had to do some of the work for yourself. If the farm survived the ravages of rabbits and rats and insects, it was likely to survive the ravages of Americans, too.

Here came Georges, running up the path that separated potatoes on the one side from rye on the other. "Papa!" he called, and waved when Lucien straightened up from weeding the potato plot. "Papa, Father Pascal is back at the house with an American officer, and they want to see you."

"Calisse," Galtier said; he'd been so engrossed in his hoeing, he'd paid no attention to traffic on the road for a while. Now he put the hoe up on his shoulder, as if it were a rifle. "Well, if they want to see me, then see me they shall. It is an invitation I cannot refuse, not so?"

His younger son's eyes twinkled. "They want to see you, but they did not bother to ask if you wanted to see them," Georges said with Gallic precision.

"They do not care. They have no reason to care. They are the authorities, and I? I am but a farmer of the humblest sort." Lucien sounded too humble to be quite convincing, but that was what happened when you took on an unfamiliar role. And, as he had said, whether he wanted to see them was an irrelevance. He tramped back toward the farmhouse, Georges running ahead to let the important visitors know he was coming.

Father Pascal and the American officer, whoever he was, had come in the priest's buggy; the horse bent its head down to crop grass by the rail to which it was tethered. Seeing the buggy relieved Galtier's mind. He would have thought senility closing in on him had he missed the noisy arrival of a motorcar.

Inside, Marie and Nicole had already presented the priest and the officer-he was, Lucien saw, the heavyset major with whom Father Pascal had been talking when Galtier first went into Riviere-du-Loup not long after the Americans arrived-with coffee and cakes. He would have been astonished had his wife and eldest daughter done anything less. Even if your guests' going would have been more welcome than their coming, you had duties as a host- or hostess.

"Here he is," Father Pascal said, rising from the sofa with a wide smile on his smooth, plump face. "Allow me to present to you the truly excellent husbandman, Lucien Galtier. Lucien, I have brought here Major Jedediah Quigley."

"Enchante, Monsieur Galtier," Quigley said in the elegant Parisian French Lucien had heard him using up in town. "Father Pascal has been loud in singing your praises."

"He honors me far beyond my poor worth," Galtier replied, wishing the priest had chosen to throw himself into the St. Lawrence rather than praising him to the occupying authorities. The less notice he attracted from them, the happier he was.

"You are a modest man," Father Pascal said. "This is the mark of a godly man, a Christian man of solid virtue. I have also taken the liberty of passing on to Major Quigley your generous willingness to inform me of anyone who misunderstood my role in the situation as it is."

Galtier spread his hands. They were hard and rough, with callused palms and dirt under his nails and ground into the folds of skin at each knuckle. "I am desolate, Father, that I have had nothing of which to inform you. Spring is a busy season for a farmer, and I have had little to do with anyone of late."

"Galtier, Lucien." Major Quigley took a piece of paper from one of the many pockets with which his uniform was adorned. From another pocket he drew a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, which he set on his nose. He unfolded the paper and studied it for a moment. "Ah, yes. I regret that the requisitions drawn from this farm were so heavy last winter. I should not be surprised if it turned out that the soldiers who carried out the program did so with an excess of zeal. As a result, you must think less than kind thoughts of the American military government for this district."

"Major, in a war, each side does what it can to win," Galtier answered with a shrug. "I am not a soldier now, but you must know I served my time. I know these things." He chose his words with great care. This American major who talked like a Parisian aristocrat was liable to be as dangerous as half a dozen of the likes of Father Pascal.

Quigley folded up the paper and put it in his pocket. He got out a pipe, a pouch of tobacco, and a match safe. After a glance toward Marie for permission, he lit the pipe. Once it was drawing well, he spoke in musing tones: "I am confident that, when requisition time comes round again, it will be easier to restrain the enthusiasm of the soldiers carrying out their duties."

Not, it may be easier to restrain them — if you cooperate. Most men, trying to establish such cooperation, would have spelled out the terms of the bargain to be struck. That was how Father Pascal operated, for instance. Not Major Quigley. He started at the point of assuming cooperation and went on from there. A man to reckon with, indeed.

And, of course, it would be impossible to keep the neighbors from learning he and Father Pascal had been here. Some of them would assume that alone meant Lucien was collaborating with the Americans: why else would the major and the priest have come? Keeping his good name was going to take Galtier some work.

He wanted to glance over at Marie, to see what she was thinking. A winter free of requisitions-or anything close to that-would all but guarantee a successful year. A full belly, peace of mind against what was in essence robbery at gunpoint-those were not small items on the balance sheet… provided he grew a beard so he did not have to look at himself in the mirror when he shaved every morning.

But looking at yourself in the mirror was not a small item, either. "As I say, Major, I am only a farmer, and spend most of my time here on my land. I am not a man who often hears things of any sort-certainly not scandal and slander spoken about the pious father here."

"No, eh? Father Pascal led me to believe it might be otherwise. What a pity," Major Quigley said. He didn't snarl and bluster at Lucien. He didn't turn and glower at Father Pascal, either. He just spread his hands. "Such is life." He got to his feet, which meant the priest also had to rise hastily. Major Quigley bowed to Marie. "Thank you, Madame Galtier, for your generous hospitality. We shall not take up any more of your time, or of your husband's-he is, as he says, a busy man."

He didn't even warn Galtier that the requisitions, instead of being extra gentle when harvest time came around, would be extra harsh. If Lucien couldn't figure that out for himself, he'd learn come fall.

But Lucien knew perfectly well what would happen come fall. He also knew he'd have to spend almost as much time working to make the farm seem poor as he would making sure it really wasn't. As the major with the strange Christian name had said, that was life.

Major Quigley climbed into the buggy. Father Pascal untied his horse, then joined the American soldier. The priest was expostulating violently and gesturing with such passion, he could hardly handle the reins. But the horse must have been used to his theatrics. It turned around and started back up the road toward Riviere-du-Loup.

Lucien Galtier sighed. Now he did turn to Marie, wondering if she was going to shout at him for guaranteeing the whole family a harder time when autumn rolled around. Instead, she ran to him and squeezed the breath out of him with the tightest embrace she'd given him outside the bedroom in years. A moment later, Nicole and Georges piled onto him, too, and after that his three younger daughters, who must have been listening somewhere out of sight. Only his son Charles, busy in the barn, didn't know to join and mob him, and Galtier knew perfectly well how Charles felt about the American occupiers.

"Oh, Papa, you were so brave!" Nicole exclaimed.

"I was?" Lucien said: that had not occurred to him. "What was I sup posed to do, turn my coat? For a little more in the barn? It is not worth it."

"You were very brave, Lucien," Marie said; if she thought so, it was likely to be true. "We would have loved you whatever you told the American, but after what you did-we are proud of you."

"Well," Galtier said, "this is all very good, I am sure, and I am glad you are proud of me, but pride does nothing to weed the potato patch. I shall have to work harder today because of the Boche americain and the foolish priest. For that, I do not thank them. I work long enough as it is." He disentangled himself from the arms-the proud arms-of his family, went outside, picked up his hoe, shouldered it, and headed back toward the potatoes.

Not much was left of Slaughters, Kentucky, a few miles north of Madisonville. U.S. troops pushing east had managed to drive the Confederates out of it only a few days before, after fighting that fully lived up to the name of the place fought over. As far as Abner Dowling was concerned, the fight, like most of those General Custer planned, had been far more expensive than it was worth.

However much he wanted to, he couldn't say that to the war reporter walking through the ruined streets of Slaughters beside him. Custer's famous name was what had drawn Richard Harding Davis out to Kentucky to see the American troops in action.

Davis had seen a lot of wars, all around the world. His reports from Manila as the Japanese were entering the city were classics in their way. So were his reports on what they'd done to the Spanish prisoners they'd taken, though those hadn't been filed till he was safely out of the Philippines.

And now here he was with Custer's First Army- and with the chance, even if he hadn't known it when he got here, to write stories about something new in warfare on the North American continent.

"You're sure the general will let me go right up to the front?" the reporter asked Dowling for about the fourth time. Davis was fifty or so, ruggedly handsome (though his color wasn't all it could have been, and he panted a little as he walked along beside Dowling), and wore a green-gray jacket halfway between a military style and one a big-game hunter might have used. It had more pockets than you could shake a stick at. Dowling wished he owned one like it.

"Mr. Davis," he answered, "General Custer is going up to the front. He wants to see this for himself. He has already told me repeatedly, you are welcome to accompany him and me." Now that you're here, Mr. Davis, General Custer would strangle with his own liver-spotted hands anyone who had the gall to try to get between him and headlines, which is to say, between you and him.

Custer had billeted himself in one of the few houses in Slaughters only lightly damaged: a two-story Victorian structure whose windows had only jagged shards of glass in them but whose walls and roof remained intact. A couple of sentries stood outside the front door. They'd dug foxholes nearby, into which they could dive in case the Rebs started shelling the town again. They saluted Dowling and eyed Richard Harding Davis with respectful curiosity. He wasn't just a reporter, but had a name as a novelist and playwright as well.

"Go on in," one of them said, opening the door. "The general should be finishing up his breakfast about now, and I know he'll be glad to see you."

As the sentry had said, Custer sat at the kitchen table. The view through the bay window had probably been lovely, back before it turned into a prospect of charred rubble and shell holes. The general was attacking his plate with knife, fork, and great gusto.

He turned when Dowling and Davis came into the room. Pointing down at his breakfast, he exclaimed, "Raw onions!" Such was his delight that, had he been writing, he probably would have used capital letters and four exclamation points.

Dowling did not share that delight. He coughed and did his best not to inhale, but his eyes started watering to beat the band in spite of the improved ventilation the shattered bay window gave the kitchen. He'd known about Custer's love for onions- anyone who had anything to do with Custer found out about that- but why had the general chosen today of all days for them?

Richard Harding Davis did his best to take the potent vegetables in stride. "A warm-up for the rest of the day's show, eh?" he said, but could not help wiping his eyes with his sleeve.

"That's right, by jingo!" Custer said, shovelling another odorous forkful into his mouth. He went on till he was done. When he'd finished the whole plate, he spoke in meditative tones: "Those onions could have used some salt. Well, can't be helped. Shall we go disinfect some Rebels, gentlemen?"

Off they went. Custer's motorcar, despite having to veer off the road a couple of times to avoid craters, brought them past the artillery posts, where men without shirts stood waiting in the June sunshine for the order to rain death down on the Confederate lines. Custer talked gaily about Custer all the while. Davis scribbled an occasional note. Dowling wished the commanding general would shut up, not only because he'd heard all the stories before but also because, even with the wind streaming by in the open motorcar, Custer's breathe was still hideously vile.

Once they came to the rear of the trench system, the motorcar could advance no farther. Dowling wondered if Custer would make it to the front under his own power. The commanding general was a long way from being the spry, dashing soldier of thirty-odd years gone by, though obviously he was convinced that time's wrinkled hand hadn't touched him at all.

He was spry enough to reach the trenches without undue difficulty, though. Richard Harding Davis proved to be the one who had trouble there. "Wind isn't what it used to be," he said apologetically, letting a hand rest on his chest for a moment, as if his heart pained him. He lighted a cigarette and went gamely on.

Here and there along the way, pieces of crates stencilled BATTERY F and DISINFECTION were used as corduroying on the floor of the trench or as pieces of lean-tos and other shelters cut into the earth of the trench wall. Custer had just started talking about them when a Confederate aeroplane came buzzing overhead.

"Shoot him down!" the general shouted, his sagging features twisting in alarm. "If the Rebs see what we're up to, there'll be hell to pay!"

For once, Dowling agreed completely with his commander. Yelling in the middle of the trench line, though, didn't strike him as the best way to get the antiaircraft gunners to go to work. Fortunately, they didn't need Custer's encouragement. They opened up on the Confederate scout with everything they had. The air around his aeroplane filled with black puffs, as intense a barrage as Dowling had ever seen. The Reb must have felt the same way. He turned around and scooted for his own lines. The antiaircraft fire followed him till he was out of range.

Moving forward grew difficult then, because the trenches were packed with men in green-gray, their gauze masks making them all look alike, waiting to storm forward when the order was given. It wouldn't be long now. Dowling's bulk and the magic of Custer's name cleared the path enough that the general, his adjutant, and Davis were able to reach the very forward most trenches in good time.

Resting at the front of those trenches, spaced several yards apart, were metal cylinders about as long as a man, each one painted dark blue. Alongside each cylinder stood a masked man with a wrench, ready to open the fitting and let its contents spew forth into the air.

"What is the hour, Major?" Custer demanded.

He had a pocket watch of his own, but asking Dowling the question was easier than taking it out and looking at it. "Sir, it's 0625," Dowling said resignedly after checking his own watch.

"Splendid!" Custer said. "Capital! Couldn't be better. We're scheduled to begin at 0630, provided the wind holds." He licked a finger and stuck it up in the air. He stuck it up high enough, as a matter of fact, that he was lucky not to get shot in the hand. "Holding very nicely-straight out of the west, just as we want."

"When the Germans used chlorine gas against the French and the English at Ypres, they made gains, but not a breakthrough," Davis said. "How will you make sure we do better than our allies?"

That was a good question. Dowling wondered how Custer would answer it. Dowling wondered if Custer could answer it. The truth was that the USA, like everyone else in the war, seized eagerly on anything that might yield a small edge in the murderous struggle. Every U.S. army in Kentucky was trying chlorine gas today. Making gains without losing men by the tens of thousands looked very good, even to Custer, who normally used up soldiers as if they were so many pieces of blotting paper.

But instead of replying, Custer shouted, "Release the gas!" It was, by Dowling's watch, still a minute early, but Custer's watch might have run faster-not that he checked to find out.

The men at the closest chlorine cylinders gave counter clockwise twists with their wrenches. Puffs, as of pale green smoke, spurted from the cylinders. Custer had been right about one thing; the wind was out of the west. It blew the puffs of smoke into a single dirty green cloud and sent that cloud rolling and billowing toward the Confederate trenches.

"That'll shift them!" Custer said jubilantly. He got up on the firing step to watch the progress of the gas. Davis got up beside him. If he didn't watch the progress of the gas, he didn't have much of a story. And Dowling got up there, too. As long as he was Custer's adjutant, this was as close to real combat as he was likely to come.

Every now and then, little bits of high ground between the U.S. and C.S. lines would remain visible above the chlorine cloud, which, being heavier than air, stuck close to the ground except when the wind blew it up into little puffs and wisps. Despite that steady wind, the harsh, bleachlike odor of the gas made Dowling's throat raw, his nose sore, and his eyes even more watery than Custer's vicious onions had done.

As soon as the chlorine cloud rolled over and into the Confederate trenches, observers telephoned word back to the U.S. artillery emplacements. They opened up with a savage bombardment. Explosions sent dirt flying and made the gas jump and writhe like a plateful of gelatin.

Before long, the cylinders of chlorine gas were empty. The artillery stopped pounding the Confederates' forward most trenches and moved back to the support trenches to keep reinforcements from moving up. All along the U.S. line, officers' whistles blew. Cries of "Let's go!" and "Get moving!" rang out. One nearby officer added, "Come on, the closer we stay to the hind end of that gas cloud, the worse shape the Rebs'll be in when we hit 'em." Over the top the troops went.

That would have been plenty to inspire Abner Dowling to follow close behind the chlorine. Only in books by writers who'd never smelled powder (more to the point, who'd never smelled the shit from spilled guts) did soldiers want a fair fight. What soldiers wanted was a walkover, with none of them getting hurt. They didn't get what they wanted very often. Maybe today…

"Brave men," Richard Harding Davis said quietly, watching the soldiers in green-gray, their uniforms fading almost to invisibility when seen against the chlorine, swarming out of the U.S. trenches and toward those of the Confederates. "Very brave men."

Here and there, rifle and machine-gun fire greeted the Americans. Not all of the Rebels had been overcome by the poisonous gas. Men caught between the trench lines fell, sometimes one by one, sometimes in rows. But most of the U.S. soldiers moved forward. One after another, the weapons aimed at them fell silent.

"Do the Rebels know how to block the chlorine's effect?" Davis asked.

"I wouldn't be surprised," Dowling said, at the same time as General Custer was snapping, "I doubt it."

Custer glared at his adjutant. Dowling hung his head and muttered an apology. Reports from Europe, though, showed how chlorine could be countered. Even something as simple as pissing in a rag and holding it over your mouth and nose could keep most of the gas out of your lungs, though it would still burn your eyes. And the limeys and the frogs were supposed to be using the same sort of masks German and now U.S. troops had, too.

"I shan't give any details," Davis said, "though I doubt the Confederate States need to read my columns to garner military intelligence." That was sure to be true; where the USA had German reports on the effects of chlorine, the CSA would have got details from Paris and London.

Whatever the reports had said, though, the Rebs hadn't paid much attention to it. U.S. soldiers still flooded forward, and, now, Confederate prisoners, herded along by jubilant Americans-some wearing their masks, some with them hung around their necks-came stumbling back to the U.S. lines.

Some of the Rebs were ordinary captives, either men who'd surrendered in the fighting or were taken after being wounded. But others showed the effects of the poisonous gas. Some had blood running from their mouths or bubbling out of their noses. Others seemed to be doing their best not to breathe at all. From the tiny taste of chlorine Dowling had got, he tried to imagine what their throats and chests felt like. He was glad he failed. A couple of Confederates tried to scream at every breath they took, but emitted only little gasping sounds of agony.

"Not much glory here," Dowling observed, watching the wretched prisoners.

"Defeating the enemies of my country is glory aplenty for me," Custer declared. In his own way, he meant it, but his own way included seeing his name in the newspapers, preferably in letters several inches high.

And, by the way the attack was developing, he might get glory on his own terms. A big victory here, and Roosevelt would be hard pressed to keep from giving him the command in Canada he so desperately craved. A runner came up and said, in tones of high excitement, "Sir, we just captured a whole battery of those damn fast-firing three-inch guns the Rebs have. Not a man at 'em: most of the gunners ran, and the gas got the rest."

"That's first-rate," Custer said. "Positively first-rate. We have to keep throwing men at them till they crack. Pour it on, by God! Pour it on!"

"Have you got more chlorine ready, to make another breach in their lines after they manage to plug this gap?" Davis asked.

Dowling nodded. Again, the reporter had found the right question to ask. The right answer, unfortunately, was no. The USA didn't turn out-or hadn't turned out-chlorine in the quantity Germany, a chemical powerhouse, did. If the thought of not having more bothered Custer, he didn't let on. "We won't need more," he said grandly. "Now that we've got them on the run, we'll make sure they keep running. I'll send in the cavalry to complete their demoralization. The stalemate on this front, Mr. Davis, is over, and you can quote me."

Davis wrote the words down. He didn't ask any more questions. Maybe that meant Custer had convinced him. Maybe, on the other hand, it meant the reporter had seen enough war on his own to know the general commanding First Army was talking through his hat. Abner Dowling was glumly certain about which way he would have bet.

Retreat. It was an ugly word. Jake Featherston hated the sound of it. But he hated the sound of annihilation a lot more. If the First Richmond Howitzers hadn't pulled back from the Susquehanna when they did, they would have been in no position to do it later.

"I knew we were in trouble when we didn't make it to the Delaware," he muttered as he trudged along a dirt road that coated him, the horses, the guns, and everything else nearby with a red-brown haze of dust.

He hadn't expected to be overheard, not through the clopping of the horses' hooves and the rattle and squeak of the gun carriage. But the new loader for the piece, a youngster named Michael Scott, said, "Why's that, Sarge?"

Featherston scowled. He almost didn't answer. As far as he was concerned, Nero and Perseus had manned the gun better than the kind of replacements you got nowadays. What they'd learned when they were serving their time as conscripts, God only knew. Featherston wasn't convinced they'd learned anything. But he replied, as patiently as he could, "When we didn't finish the big wheel to the Delaware, that let the damnyankees keep shipping supplies into Baltimore. And that let the bastards break out of Baltimore, too. If they cut us off, we're still liable to be in a lot of trouble."

"Never happen," Scott declared. "Not in a million years. We'll whip 'em, same as we've done twice running."

"I figured the same thing when the fighting started," Featherston answered. "It's already gone on a hell of a lot longer than I figured it would. The Yankees this time, feels like they mean business, same as us."

They crossed Codorus Creek, the gun-carriage wheels rumbling over the planks of the bridge. On the south-western side of the creek, Negro labourers and Confederate infantry were digging in, aiming to hold back the advancing U.S. troops, at least for a while, and to hold on to the town of Hanover, a couple of miles to the west.

Featherston was glumly certain they wouldn't keep Hanover long. With the chunk of land they'd carved out of Yankee territory being nibbled away at the base, they'd have to keep moving back toward Washington, and smartly, or the U.S. soldiers would cut them off. But they couldn't just skedaddle, not unless they wanted endless grief from the damnyankees who'd halted them at the Susquehanna.

Scott Said, "If things had gone the way they were supposed to, we'd have been in Philadelphia a long time ago."

"Yeah, and if pigs had wings, we'd all carry umbrellas," Featherston replied with a snort. "When you've been through even a little more fighting, kid, you're going to see that things just don't go the way they're supposed to. The Yanks, they've got their own set of supposed-to's, and what we get is what's left over when ours bump up against theirs."

The loader nodded respectfully. Not only was Featherston a sergeant, he was that even more exalted creature, a veteran. The combination gave his views an authority few mortals could claim.

More hoof beats: here came Pompey, mounted on one of Captain Stuart's fine horses. "Captain's compliments, Sergeant," he said in his syrupy voice, "an' we gonna go into battery by that slate quarry over yonder." He pointed off to the west of the road.

"All right," Featherston said shortly. He still didn't care for the way Stuart used the Negro to relay orders, but however much authority he might seem to have to Michael Scott, to the battery commander he was just another non-com who did what he was told. Pompey rode on to give the rest of the guns in the battery the word.

Jake admitted to himself that Stuart had picked a good spot in which to deploy the howitzers. They were only a couple of miles back of Codorus Creek, in good position to pound the Yankees when they approached the line the Confederates were creating. Better yet, piles of spoil from the mine offered fine cover for the guns, and Negroes were already busy digging firing pits to protect them even better.

As Featherston supervised the emplacement of his own howitzer, Captain Stuart rode up himself. Featherston saluted. Stuart watched the black men in butternut tunics of simpler, baggier cut than soldiers wore. With a sly grin, he said, "Got yourself a whole ready-made gun crew this time, in case the one the government issued you goes down."

"Uh, yes, sir," Jake said, a little nervously. He still wasn't happy about having used Nero and Perseus as fighting men. Nobody else was happy about it, either, except possibly the two Negroes-and their opinion didn't count. What the reaction of the brass amounted to was that Featherston had done what he'd had to do, and it was too damn bad he'd had to do it. That was pretty much how he felt about it himself.

Stuart swung down off the horse and tied the reins to a sapling. "What really makes life difficult is that you put the niggers on the guns right after that Major Potter came sniffing around with all his crazy talk about every other nigger in the army being a damned Red. Would you believe it, he wanted to take Pompey away for questioning."

"Is that a fact, sir?" Featherston said, in tones he devoutly hoped were un- revealing. He, after all, had been the one who'd suggested Pompey could do with some investigating.

"It is indeed." Jeb Stuart III kicked at the ground to show his indignation. It wasn't aimed at Jake, from which he concluded Stuart didn't know who mistrusted his supercilious servant. "I had to get hold of my father back in the War Department, and he had to do some pretty plain talking to the Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence before they turned Pompey loose. When those people question somebody, he's lucky if he comes out of it in one piece, especially if he's a nigger."

Ever since the days of Robert E. Lee, Confederates had used those people, spoken in a particular tone of voice, as a euphemism for the enemy. Featherston had never heard it used that way to mean part of the Confederate Army, not till now. He hoped he didn't hear it used that way again for another fifty or sixty years.

So Jeb Stuart, Jr., had saved Pompey from the tender mercies of Army Intelligence, had he? If Pompey wasn't any more than an ordinary black servant stuck up beyond his station because of whom he served, that was fine. If Pompey was a snake in the grass, it was anything but fine. But how were you sup posed to know which if you didn't try to find out?

"Pompey's family has been with my family since my great-grandfather's day," the captain said. "He'd be loyal to the Stuarts before he'd join up with a pack of Red revolutionaries just because they have black skins."

Featherston didn't answer. Arguing with your superior had no future in it. Arguing with your superior when he was also in the third generation of a leading Confederate military family had less than no future.

And, in any case, he had enough other things to do. Making sure the gun was sited as well as it could be, making sure the wheel brakes were set and the spade on the end of the trail dug into the ground, making sure there was a good, thick earthen rampart between the ammunition and the crew so a lucky shell hit wouldn't-or might not-blow them all to Jesus… all that took time and work.

As he readied the position, he kept peering over the creek, looking for the caterpillar ripples on the distant ground that marked advancing Yankee infantry. Sure enough, here they came. Larger dots punctuating the ripples were horses. Cavalry, Featherston thought, with a mixture of respect for their courage and scorn for their uselessness.

Then the dots peeled off. They know better than to get their precious horses — and their precious selves — too close to the machine guns, Jake thought. Poor dears might get hurt. Cavalry would charge, though, when ordered. After staring a moment, he recognized the pattern the horses were forming.

"That's not cavalry!" he shouted. "That's field artillery."

Jeb Stuart III came trotting up beside him. He nodded as he stuck a brass telescope up to his eye. "Field artillery, sure as hell," he agreed. "I make the range about two and a half miles-say, four thousand yards for starters. Let's give them a hello, shall we?"

He started bawling for the whole battery. Featherston handled his gun. It was the second one of the battery to open up. The shell fell a couple of hundred yards short of the U.S. field gun. The next shell, a few seconds later, was long. After that, they started landing in the right general area. You put enough shells in the right general area, you did damage. The Yanks had probably figured they could get their battery into position and into action before the retreating Confederates were ready to reply. They'd made a mistake there, and they were going to pay for it.

The U.S. battery did get a few shots off, shells crashing down on the trench line behind Codorus Creek. But that kind of nuisance firing went on every day of the war. It was hardly worth noticing, even by the Negro labourers, who were more flighty than soldiers when it came to being on the receiving end of bullets. Since they couldn't shoot back, Jake found it hard to blame them for that.

He glanced over to Nero and Perseus. They stood by the horses, and were plainly ready to dive into the foxhole if the damnyankees started hurling shells at the battery. They'd shot back. Featherston hoped to high heaven they'd never have to do it again.

After a few minutes, the U.S. field guns couldn't stand the heat from deploying out in the open. They started moving again, this time against the tide of the advancing U.S. infantry. "So long!" Featherston shouted at them. "Tell your mama what it's like when you really have to work for a living." His gun crew yelled and waved their hats. At Captain Stuart's orders, they started pouring shells into the foot soldiers approaching the creek.

They worked a formidable slaughter among them, too, but a couple of hours later they had to abandon their position and pull back another mile or two: somewhere farther west, the Yankees had forced a crossing of the creek.

"Doesn't seem right," Michael Scott grumbled as Nero and Perseus hitched the horses up to the guns. "We were massacring the bastards."

"Wasn't so much what they did in front of us that made us start this retreat," Featherston answered. "It was what happened off to the flank and the rear. You can win your own part of the battle and still have the whole army lose."

"I wish you hadn't said that," the loader told him. After Jake thought about it for a while, he wished he hadn't said that, too.

When Flora Hamburger went downstairs from the Socialist Party offices to walk across Centre Market Place and buy a sandwich in the market, Max Fleischmann was arguing with two goons outside his butcher's shop.

"No, I don't got no ham," he said to them. "Don't got no pig's knuckles. Don't got no head cheese. Don't got no bacon. Don't got no time for no silliness, neither. I'm a Jew. You maybe may have noticed."

"Yeah, pop, we noticed," one of the goons said. His nasty grin showed a couple of broken teeth. "Maybe you noticed this." He raised the billy club he carried in his right hand. The armband wrapped around his left sleeve read, peace and order. He and his equally unpleasant friend looked like a couple of Soldiers' Circle men, and were helping to hold down the staunchly Socialist neighborhood by main force.

"Leave that man alone," Flora said crisply. Her English was precise and almost unaccented. The two volunteer policemen gaped at her as she went on, "Not only has he done nothing to you, but if you beat him, you will be beating one of the few Democrats in this part of New York."

"Ain't no Democrats here," said the goon with the club ready to use. "Just Jews and Socialists." He leered at her. "Which are you, lady?"

"Both," Flora answered. The thugs undoubtedly knew that; they hung around the Socialist Party office to harass the Party regulars, and, Maria Tresca aside, few gentiles came here. Angelina Tresca wouldn't, ever again. Flora's party affiliation, though, was a sword that cut both ways. "And if you beat me today-or if you beat Mr. Fleischmann-every Socialist paper in the country will carry the story tomorrow."

That was true. By the unhappy look on the goons' faces, they knew it, too. The one with the club raised lowered it. "Come on, Paddy," he said in disgust. "We'll find games to play somewheres else." They mooched off, looking for people more willing to be intimidated.

"Thank you," the butcher said to Flora in English before dropping back into Yiddish. "When you go home, you stop in here. I'll have something for you to take back to the flat. Not something big, maybe, but something."

"You don't need to do that," she said, also in Yiddish.

"Hush," Fleischmann told her, his voice stern. "You have a sister who can use good food right now. Take it for her, if not for you." His stiff-backed pose declared he would allow no disagreement.

Flora gave up. "I'll stop," she promised, wondering how Fleischmann knew about Sophie. Gossip on the crowded Lower East Side was an amazing thing. No doubt Fleischmann also knew the baby would be illegitimate. Flora sighed. Even if you disapproved of bourgeois conventions, you couldn't escape them.

More goons patrolled the Centre Market. The Remembrance Day riots had given the authorities the excuse they needed to clamp down on Socialist strongholds throughout New York City, though no one had proved or could prove a Socialist had started the disturbances.

Flora bought a smoked-tongue sandwich from a little stall in the market, a couple of pickled tomatoes from a man who carried his great vat of spiced brine on a pushcart, and coffee from another fellow with a pushcart, this one mounting a samovar. She ate quickly, then went back upstairs, where she spent the afternoon writing one letter after another, all of them aimed at getting Roosevelt's repressive restrictions lifted from New York City.

"If the president keeps up with them," said Herman Bruck, who was also writing, "he'll provoke a working-class uprising a hundred times worse than anything we saw in the Nineties. That will play hob with carrying on his foolish war."

His bruises had faded. Roentgen-ray photographs had shown his left hand wasn't broken after all. He wore as a badge of honor the gap in his smile that he'd got when somebody wearing a heavy Soldiers' Circle ring had punched him in the face during the riots, and loudly proclaimed to whoever would listen that he preferred it to going to the dentist for bridgework. Flora found that absurd, but didn't say so; whenever she argued with Bruck about anything, he thought it meant she was interested in him. Maria Tresca, in mourning black, was very quiet.

Flora finished her letter-writing, said her good-byes, and went downstairs. Max Fleischmann stood waiting for her, as if in ambush. He thrust a paper-wrapped package into her hands. Her eyebrows flew up at the weight of it. "This is too much!" she exclaimed.

"I'm sorry, I'm not hearing very well today," the butcher said, and went back into his shop. That left her the choice of pursuing him when he plainly did not want to be pursued and going home. Shaking her head, she went home.

"What do you have there?" her mother asked when she walked into the crowded apartment.

"I kept Mr. Fleischmann the butcher from having some trouble with TR's hooligans, so he gave me this," she answered, and opened it on the kitchen counter. "Marrow bones and stewing beef: there must be three or four pounds of it."

"That's very nice," her mother said. "We can use that-barley soup with onions and carrots, maybe, the way your father likes."

"Yes, Mama," Flora said; to her mother, utility made anything, even Socialism, worthwhile. "I'll put it in the icebox."

Her brothers came in then, bantering with her and their younger sister Esther as they hung up their jackets and caps. David lighted a cigarette, a habit he was just acquiring and one Flora wished he'd lose. The harsh smoke made the flat stink; it wasn't flavourful like the pipe tobacco their father used- even the cheaper grades he was using nowadays smelled better than this nasty weed.

When Benjamin Hamburger came in, he got the pipe going right away, perhaps in self-defense. Sophie dragged in last of all. The war had created relentless demands on seamstresses in New York City, all over the USA, and, no doubt, all over the world. The bosses didn't care if you were going to have a baby. You had to show up and you had to work no matter how tired, no matter how sick you were. If you didn't, somebody else was waiting to do your job.

Over small helpings of pot roast and big ones of potato kugel, Benjamin Hamburger remarked on that: "With so many jobs needing doing now, wages may be going up. Alevai," he added, dragging superstition into a discussion of what should have been the most unsuperstitious study of economics.

Before Flora could turn the discussion into a more rational pattern, someone knocked on the door. Flora's mother bounced to her feet and strode to the door with a determined stride, saying, "A peddler who comes round at suppertime deserves a choleryeh he'll remember for a year, and I'll give him one, you see if I don't."

But when she threw open the door, it was not a peddler hawking knives or pens or stereoscope slides through the block of flats. Instead, it was an unfamiliar-looking man in a green-gray uniform. "Yossel!" Sophie exclaimed, recognizing him without his beard where Flora had not.

"May I come in?" Yossel Reisen asked when Sarah Hamburger showed no signs of getting out of his way.

"You may come in," Benjamin called over his wife's shoulder. When she whirled around to protest, he waved for her to calm down, continuing, "How long you stay depends on what you have to say for yourself once you are in here."

Thus appeased, Sarah grudgingly stepped out of the way. Yossel came past her and into the flat. Esther quickly got up. "Here, find a chair and eat something," she said, hurrying into the kitchen and returning with a plate piled high with potato kugel.

"Thank you." Reisen did sit down, and looked around nervously. The grimace with which he greeted Sophie was no doubt intended for a smile, but failed of its purpose. "Hello," he said, cautiously, as if she were an armed Rebel behind a wall. "How are you?"

"As well as I could be-considering," she answered. "You know how I am-the rest of it, though. You must have got my letters, even if I haven't heard from you." She stared at him as defiantly as a Confederate soldier in arms.

He had a mouth full of kugel, and used that respite to good advantage. "Yes, I know," he said, and then, "I'm sorry, Sophie. I didn't intend that to happen."

Didn't intend which to happen? Flora wondered. Didn't intend to sleep with Sophie or didn't intend to get her with child? But she held her tongue, to see what her older sister would do.

"People don't intend that to happen," Sophie said, taking him to mean he hadn't planned to impregnate her. "But it does, and then they have to decide what to do next."

"That's why I came here," Yossel answered. "I managed to get four days' leave. I spent most of one day coming up from Maryland, and I'll need most of another to get back. Between times"-he licked his lips-"we can get married."

Bourgeois respectability, Flora thought as Sophie clapped her hands together once and nodded. The idea should have carried more scorn than it did. Somehow, the feeling of contempt for bourgeois values was harder to come by when those values benefited her sister.

Benjamin Hamburger also nodded, as if he'd expected nothing less from Yossel. Maybe he had expected nothing less. But he raised an objection: "Even with the war, you'll have trouble finding a rabbi to perform the ceremony on such short notice."

Yossel Reisen shrugged. "Then we'll find a judge, and find a rabbi when I get a longer leave, or else after the war is over."

"You say that?" Flora exclaimed. "You, who wanted to do nothing but sit on your tokhus and study Talmud all day?"

"Flora!" Sophie said indignantly. Flora realized everyone else must have heard what she said as an insult. She hadn't meant it that way; what she'd been expressing was astonishment.

For a wonder, Yossel understood that. He held up a hand, which, after a moment, quieted the angry outcry from the rest of Flora's family. "Yes, I say that," he answered. "When you have been where I have been, when you have seen what I have seen, when you have done what I have done…" His voice trailed away. He was sitting across the table from Flora, and looking in her direction, but he wasn't looking at her. He looked through her, to some place he alone saw, some place maybe more real to him than the crowded apartment in which he sat. He needed a little while to realize he had stopped talking, and coughed a couple of times before he resumed: "When all that is true, you know, right down to the soles of your boots you know, how little time there is. And when you have a little of that little time, you do what you can with it, and what you cannot do now, you will do later, if God lets you."

No one spoke for a minute or so after that. Then, quietly, Benjamin Hamburger asked, "Sophie, is this all right with you?"

"Yes," Sophie answered, also quietly. Perhaps of its own accord, her left hand settled on her belly, which was beginning to bulge. "As Yossel said, we have only a little time. We'll do as much as we can with it."

Flora's father looked to her mother. Sarah Hamburger didn't say yes, but she didn't say no, either. "It is not a perfect arrangement," Benjamin said, "but what in life is perfect except God? If Sophie agrees, it will do."

Flora was temperamentally opposed to compromise of any kind: she was the one who'd wanted to fight to the end against voting to pay for Roosevelt 's war. Here, though… when it was her own family, things didn't look the same. It wasn't her choice, anyhow; it was Sophie's.

"You'll sleep here on the divan tonight," her father told Yossel, "as if you were a boarder again." Everybody smiled at that. Benjamin Hamburger got up and went into the kitchen. He rummaged in the pantry and in a cabinet, and came back with a bottle of whiskey and enough glasses for everyone; Flora's brothers told how the old men at the shul had given each of them his first shot just before his bar mitzvah.

Amid toasts of "L'chaym!" everybody knocked back the drinks. Isaac might have been emboldened by the whiskey, for he asked Yossel Reisen, "What- is it like at the front?" Emboldened or not, he sounded hesitant.

Yossel looked into the depths of his glass as he had looked through Flora. At last, he answered, "Think of all the worst things you know in the world. Think of them all in one place. Think of them as ten times as bad as they really are. Then think of them ten times worse than that. What you are thinking about when you do that is one ten-thousandth of what the front is like."

Nobody asked him any more questions.

Somewhere in the Yankee lines in the ruins of Big Lick, Virginia, a rifle cracked. About fifty feet away from Reggie Bartlett, an incautious Confederate soldier toppled back into the trench, shot through the face. He wasn't dead, not yet; a scream bubbled through the blood flooding from his nose, his mouth, and the wound between them.

"God damn that fucking sniper to hell," somebody snarled as a couple of men hauled their wounded comrade back toward the doctors to see if they could do anything for him. "That's the fourth one of us he's got on this sector this week. We ever catch him, I'll gut-shoot him and watch him die."

Bartlett hardly looked up, either for the gunshot or for the screams and curses following it. He was hunting lice, a matter that could have taken up most of his waking day if duties demanded by his officers hadn't intervened. Every one of the little bastards you crunched between your thumbnails was one more that wouldn't bite you, one more that wouldn't leave sores and scabs in your hair, one more that wouldn't leave itchy welts on your body.

He tried to remember his leave in Richmond. He knew he'd been there, seen old friends, made new ones, got drunk, got laid at a soldiers' brothel full of bored-looking colored girls. It was a matter of a few weeks, not months or years, but seemed far more distant than that. When you were at the front, everything else was distant.

If you singed the seams of your tunic and trousers, you killed nits and drove lice out to where you could grab them and squash them. Reggie lighted a candle, shed his tunic, and ran the flame along one sleeve, pausing every so often to slaughter the vermin he'd flushed out.

A fat rat came strolling down the middle of the trench. It was light enough not to get stuck in the mud from the recent rains; Bartlett wished he could have said the same. The rat paused and stared at him with its beady black eyes. I'll steal your rations, see if I don't, it seemed to say. And if I don't, one day soon a Yankee shell will turn you into rations — for me.

Shells never seemed to kill rats-or maybe it was just that there were so many of them, every piece of artillery in the world couldn't have slaughtered them all. Well, if wholesale didn't work, there was always retail. Reggie snatched up the entrenching tool beside him and threw it at the rat. The rat was quick and alert, but he'd guessed right about which way it would jump, and it couldn't outrun the sharpened shovel blade, which cut it almost in two. Bartlett retrieved the tool and used it to smash in the twitching rat's head. The twitching ceased. He looked around to see if any more rats were close by. Spying none, he went back to delousing his tunic.

"You hammered that fat, ugly bastard," Corporal Robert E. McCorkle said.

"Sure did," Bartlett agreed. McCorkle was a fat, ugly bastard himself, but saying so struck Reggie as impolitic. "They're getting awfully bold these days, parading through the trenches like they've got stars in wreaths on their collars."

McCorkle laughed at that. Reggie relighted the candle, which had gone out, and went back to killing lice. He had just started on the other sleeve when first one man and then several began banging with entrenching tools on shell casings that had been hung like temple bells from tripods made of boards. With the unmusical banging, a warning cry raced up and down the trench line: "Gas! The Yanks are using gas!"

Being shot at, having artillery shells land all around, even going out between the trench lines to lay wire or to raid-Reggie was used to all that, almost to the same degree he'd been used to waiting at a Richmond corner for the streetcar to pick him up on his way between his apartment and the pharmacy where he'd worked. It wasn't that he was fearless; it was much more that anything, even the worst of horrors, becomes routine, and what is routine no longer terrifies.

But gas, gas was new. The U.S. soldiers hadn't used it on the Roanoke front, not till now. The masks-which looked like plump versions of the ones surgeons wore over their mouths and noses-and the hyposulfite solution in which to soak them had arrived days before. He snatched his mask out of the breast pocket in his tunic where he'd stowed it and sprinted, bare-chested, for the hyposulfite tin.

There, he discovered arrangements could have been better. Everybody else was as frightened of the poisonous stuff the damnyankees were spewing as he was, and the big tin stood at the center of a struggling knot of men.

"Form a line!" Corporal McCorkle shouted from behind him. "God damn you, form a line, and on the double!"

Discipline held; when a voice with command told the men what to do, they did it. Bartlett dipped his mask into the big, wide-mouthed tin and tied it over his face as the first yellow-green tendrils of chlorine gas came down into the trench like so many poisonous snakes slithering in the late spring sun.

His eyes burned. He passed the palm of his hand over the dripping mask and then over his eyes. That helped, a little. He had no idea whether the hyposulfite solution would hurt his eyes. He knew damn well the chlorine would, though.

His lungs burned, too. He could smell the harsh chlorine in his nose, taste it in his mouth. The mask he wore like a cold, clammy veil was anything but perfect. But men who hadn't donned masks, or who hadn't tied them tight, were coughing and choking, clutching at their throats and turning blue. Not perfect, no, but a hell of a lot better than nothing.

"If you can't get to the chemical, piss on your mask!" That was Captain Wilcox, his voice muffled by the mask he was wearing. "It's disgusting, but it may keep you alive."

As the chlorine spread from the front-line trenches toward those farther to the rear, U.S. artillery opened up, pounding the Confederates with a harsh bombardment. Reggie Bartlett huddled in the mud near the rat he had killed. Any one of those shells could lay him open the way his entrenching tool had gutted the rat. He held his hands over his face, both to protect it from splinters and to keep his mask on tight.

The bombardment was sharp, but it was also short: no more than fifteen minutes. "Up, dammit, up!" Captain Wilcox shouted. Farther along the trench, the battalion commander, Major Colleton, echoed the command: "Get up and fight like Americans! Here come the damnyankees!"

Bartlett 's eyes burned worse than ever; tears streamed down his face. But he hadn't been killed, he hadn't been maimed. Thank you, Jesus. He scrambled to his feet and ran to the firing step. Sure enough, the Yankees were cutting their way through the wire. Most of them wore masks like his. The white cloth squares made good targets. He fired again and again and again. U.S. soldiers fell. More kept coming, though, their uniforms almost the color of chlorine.

Confederate machine guns opened up. The damnyankees started falling faster. But still they came, urgent shouts blurred under the hyposulfite-soaked gauze pads on their mouths. Some of them got close enough to throw grenades. One burst near Bartlett, leaving him stunned and half deafened. After a moment, he realized his left leg hurt. Fragment or a nail or whatever must have kissed me, he thought. When he put weight on the leg, it held. He could worry about the wound later, then.

A few Yankees leaped down into the Confederate trench, but none near him: those men were dead or wounded or running or crawling back to their own lines. A pistol barked, its sharp report like a terrier yapping amid retrievers. Probably Major Colleton, doing some of his own fighting. You couldn't fault him for guts.

"God damn," a man in butternut beside Reggie said reverently as the firing slowed. "We beat the sons of bitches back."

Bartlett needed a moment to recognize Jasper Jenkins with a mask on his face, even though the two of them had shared cornbread and jam and coffee for breakfast that morning. "Sure as hell did, Jasper," he answered, using his friend's name to cover his own embarrassment. "These masks do help. Nice to know we got something at least partway right."

Negro stretcher-bearers, Red Cross armbands on their left sleeves and masks on their faces, came forward to take the men who had been gassed and the other casualties back to where the doctors could work on them. Staring at the yellowish foam on the lips of one poor fellow who moaned with every breath he took, Reggie wondered what the quacks could do for him, and if they could do anything at all. He brought his hand up to his mask. If he'd been at the tail end of that line instead of near the front…

"I'd have pissed on my mask," he said. "Anything is better than nothing." He unbuttoned his fly and faced the wall of the trench. He noticed he was pissing on a dead rat. Nobody had smacked it with an entrenching tool: like the gassed soldier he'd seen, it had yellow foam on its whiskers.

As he walked along the trench, he saw more rats, either frozen in death or thrashing like soldiers who'd inhaled what wasn't an immediately fatal dose of chlorine. He kicked a couple of the corpses, and stamped the life out of a couple that were still breathing.

"Gas must bring the sons of bitches up out of their holes," Jasper Jenkins said.

"Reckon so," Reggie agreed. "They come up for fresh air, but there isn't any fresh air. Maybe we'll have a few days without them thieving and chewing on dead bodies." He picked up the tunic he'd thrown down when the gas attack started. "I wonder if that chlorine stuff kills lice, too. If it does, there may be something to it after all." He squatted down to examine the tunic and find out.

Nellie Semphroch went from table to table with a tray for empty plates and coffee cups and a damp rag to wipe the tables clean of spilled coffee and bits of bread from sandwiches. Thanks to Mr. Jacobs, she hadn't had any trouble getting good bread and meats, despite what her ration books said. No snoopy Confederate inspectors had walked in and started asking questions; Mr. Jacobs evidently knew a way to keep that from happening, too.

She looked around the coffeehouse. Business was good. Business, in fact, was booming. If she wasn't careful, she'd get rich. Confederate inspectors might not come into the coffeehouse, but Confederate officers did, and they told their friends, and- She stiffened. There sat Nicholas H. Kincaid, moodily sipping at a cup of coffee. He hadn't come in for food or drink. He'd come in to try to seduce Edna, having come so close once before.

Why, Nellie thought resentfully, hasn't he gone and gotten himself killed? She wished she could walk up to him and throw him out on his ear. Since he was an occupier and she one of the occupied, she couldn't do that. What she could do, and did, was thank heaven she had Edna in the back washing dishes and not here out front waiting tables. With a final scowl at Kincaid, she carried the tray back to her daughter.

"Hello, Ma," Edna said, looking up from the sink. "You got more presents for me? Why don't you bring me a diamond ring and a motorcar, instead of all these miserable, stinking, goddamn dishes?"

"You've got the soap right there." Nellie pointed to it. "Why don't you wash your mouth out with it?"

Mother and daughter glared at each other. Mother and daughter had been doing a lot of that lately. The more Nellie tried to keep an eye on Edna, the more Edna took to sneaking around. Nellie didn't know what to do about it. She had to sleep, she had to eat, she had to mind the customers-and Edna was so wild for life these days-that was what the young people called it, anyway; to Nellie, it was just another word for loose — that fifteen or twenty minutes unwatched might well have been all she needed.

"Why don't you let me be?" Edna said.

"Oh, no," Nellie answered. "I know you too well." You're too much the way I was, more than half a lifetime ago. Easing back never occurred to her, nor did the notion that part of Edna's wildness might have sprung from being watched too closely too often for too long.

With a martyred sigh, Edna took the cups and saucers and plates from the tray and set them in the soapy water in the sink. Nellie nodded-that was what her daughter was supposed to be doing. Leaving Edna to the scrubbing, Nellie went back out to see what her customers needed.

A couple of Rebels held up empty cups and asked for refills. One of them asked for another ham sandwich, too. It was a good thing she was getting those extra rations, thanks to Mr. Jacobs; if the Rebs fought half as well as they ate, the United States were in more trouble than they knew.

She had just served the sandwich when a civilian came into the coffeehouse. That did happen now and again; some Washingtonians came in arm- in-arm with Confederate officers, and a lot of those who didn't still had the slick, prosperous look of men who were getting along well by getting along well with the enemy. She'd passed a name or two to Mr. Jacobs, in the hope of helping a collaborator to an untimely demise.

This fellow didn't have that look. He was a middle-aged man with gray muttonchop whiskers, and hadn't shaved the rest of his face any time in the past couple of days. He wore a suit and tie, but he'd been wearing his collar for a while, and his jacket had shiny elbows and a couple of spots on the front.

Nellie prominently posted her prices. One look at them was plenty to send most customers not armed with either Confederate scrip or good connections fleeing out into the street. The stranger studied the list, sighed, shrugged, and sat down at a corner table. Nellie went over to him. "May I help you, sir?"

He looked up at her, sharply, almost disconcertingly. His eyes were tracked with red. He might have had a drink or two, but he didn't stink too badly of booze. "A turkey sandwich and a cup of coffee," he said.

"Yes, sir," Nellie answered. When a customer didn't say what kind of coffee he wanted, he got the cheapest she had. "That'll be a dollar even," she went on, in a tone of voice suggesting she wanted to see the dollar before she served him.

Getting the unspoken message, the fellow dug in his trouser pocket. A big silver cartwheel chimed sweetly on the tabletop. "There you are," he said, still studying her.

She ignored that. She was good at ignoring men when they looked at her more closely than they should have. She didn't ignore the dollar. That she scooped up. Maybe this fellow thought he could leave it sitting there till she gave him his order, then scoop it up and slide out the door. Washington had always been full of grifters, and all the more so since the Rebs occupied it.

Money in hand, she went back behind the counter, poured the coffee, and made the man his sandwich. Because he looked down on his luck, she piled the smoked turkey higher than she would have for a damned Reb, and stuck a couple of sweet pickles alongside even though she usually tacked on an extra nickel apiece for them.

She carried the turkey sandwich and the steaming coffee cup over to him. He smiled, which stretched his mouth out almost to the tips of his mutton-chops. "That looks mighty good," he said, tucking the napkin into his collar to protect his shirtfront. "Thank you, Little Nell."

Nellie froze. No one had called her that since a couple of years before Edna was born. She'd hoped-she'd thought-no one would ever call her that again, as long as she lived. "Eat your sandwich, whoever you are," she said tonelessly. "Eat your sandwich, drink your coffee, get out, and never come back here again."

"Time was when you gave me something better for my dollar than meat and bread," the man said with a reminiscent leer. Yes, there was whiskey on his breath.

"Get out now," Nellie said, perhaps more quietly than she'd intended, because she felt a scream boiling up inside her that would shake the place down if she let it loose. "Get out now, or I'll have the Rebs here throw you out."

He assumed an injured expression. "Don't take it like that, Little Nell. Don't you remember Bill Reach of the Evening Star}"

And, for a wonder, she did. He'd been panting after stories in those days. He'd been panting after anything else he could get his hands on, too, and he'd got his hands on her once a week or so for months at a time. He'd been better than some, but that wasn't saying much, not with what she'd seen there for a couple of years. Men were brutes, men were beasts, no doubt about it.

"Your voice hasn't changed at all," he said, which explained how he'd recognized her. "You're not as blond as you used to be, though."

Her golden curls had come out of a bottle. They drew customers, so she'd kept them that color till she managed to escape the life she'd been leading. Bill Reach's looks weren't what they had been, not by a long shot. He looked to be about two steps up from a bum, too. Serves him right, she thought.

But, because he'd been better than some-only out for his own pleasure, not actively cruel-she said, "All right, eat before you go. But don't come back. Don't you ever come back here."

"Is that any way to talk to an old friend?" he demanded indignantly. Maybe that was how he thought of himself. As if she'd made friends with the men who set money on the nightstand! The idea made her want to laugh in his stubbly face. The only thing they'd ever done to make her happy was to get up, get dressed, and leave.

A large shape loomed up beside her: a Confederate officer. "Is this man bothering you, ma'am?" Nicholas H. Kincaid asked. The clear implication was that, if she said yes, Bill Reach would regret it for a long time.

She would have been happier with anyone but Kincaid coming to her aid. He wasn't helping her because he felt like helping her; he was helping because, if she approved of him, he'd have a better chance at laying Edna. She knew how men's minds worked, oh yes she did, all too well.

"It's all right," she said, surprising Reach and disappointing Kincaid. "He didn't mean any harm." She looked that eat-and-get-out warning at the ex-reporter. (What was he doing now? Nothing too well, by the look of him.) Reluctantly, Kincaid went back to his table and sat down again.

Nellie stayed out front till Reach had eaten and left. Then she gathered up his dirty dishes and those from several other tables and carried them in to Edna.

"What's the matter, Ma?" her daughter asked. "You look like you seen a ghost or something."

"Maybe I have," Nellie answered. Her daughter scratched her head.