American Front

XVI

Captain Elijah Franklin stuck out his hand. "We're going to miss you here, Moss," he said. The pilots and observers in Jonathan Moss' squadron all nodded. So did the mechanics. Moss knew why Lefty would miss him: no more easy pickings at the poker table.

"I'll miss you, too, sir, and everybody else here," he said. "But I've been sort of a fifth wheel ever since Percy got hurt, and when this chance to transfer came along, it looked too good to pass up."

"Fighting scouts? I should say so," Stanley McClintock said. He twiddled with one of the waxed spikes of his mustache. "You never did like the idea of company in your aeroplane, did you?"

"Why, darling, I didn't know you'd miss me that way," Moss said archly. The laugh he got let him slide over the fact that McClintock had a point. He'd been the one who'd complained longest and hardest about the introduction of the two-seater Wright 17s. In the old Super Hudsons, you had nobody but yourself to blame if you made a mistake up there. The new fighting scouts were like that, too. You did what you did and, if you did it right, you lived and you got to keep on doing it. If not, it was your own damn fault, no one else's.

People crowded round him, pressing chocolate and flasks of brandy and whiskey into his pockets. They slapped him on the back and wished him luck. McClintock wasn't the only one who looked jealous. If you did your job in a two-seater, your observer took his pictures and you came home and got them developed. If you did your job in a fighting scout, you shot down enemy aeroplanes, and soldiers in the trenches shouted their heads off for you. So did reporters. If you shot down enough enemy aeroplanes, people back home shouted their heads off for you.

"Come on, let's go," Lefty said. Moss shouldered his duffel bag and climbed into the Ford that did duty as squadron transport. Unlike models that came off the assembly line, this one had been modified to boast an electric starter button on the dashboard. Lefty mashed it with his thumb. The engine thundered to life. As they rolled away from the aerodrome, Lefty handed Moss a pair of dice. "You ever get in a hot crap game where you need some sevens in a hurry, these are the babies to have."

Moss stared down at the ivory cubes in the palm of his hand. Lefty doubt less meant them for a thoughtful going-away present. They made him thoughtful, all right. He thought about what a profitable time Lefty had had ever since the squadron went into Canada.

As if reading his mind, the mechanic said, "I never use 'em myself, and nobody'll ever be able to prove I do. Same goes for poker, Lieutenant, in case you're wondering. Know what you're doing and you'll never need to cheat."

By which, he was saying Moss didn't know what he was doing at cards or dice. He probably knew what he was talking about, too.

The Ford rattled along. The road was nothing to boast about, which made the motorcar's big wheels and high ground clearance all the more valuable. Nothing in American-held Ontario was anything to boast about, though. Every inch had been fought over, every inch wrecked. What had been little farms by the side of the road were now cratered ground and rubble, with hardly a house standing. Here and there, skinny people came out of ruins to glower at the automobile as it rolled past.

Lefty pulled off the road and onto a new track made by U.S. vehicles after the war had passed this stretch of Canada. The fighting scouts, having shorter range than the observation aeroplanes, were based closer to the front. The strip on which they took off and landed had so much fresh dirt on it, it had pretty obviously been shelled not long before, the land then releveled by trac tors or more likely by lots of men working hard.

Alongside the strip sat the Martin single-deckers. Next to the bulky Wilburs he'd been flying, they looked little and low and fast. Next to the Cur tiss Super Hudsons, pushers with more wires and struts than you could shake a stick at, they looked like something out of the 1930s, maybe the 1940s, not merely next year's model.

"You got to hand it to Kaiser Bill's boys," Lefty said, stamping on the none too effective brake to bring the Ford to a halt (when you needed to stop in a hurry, stamping on the reverse was a better idea). Puffy summer clouds drifted lazily across the sky. "They know how to make aeroplanes, no two ways about it."

"Yeah," Moss said with a small sigh. The Wright brothers might have flown the first aeroplane in 1904, but the machines had evolved faster in Europe than in the USA. The single-decker was a straight knockoff of the Fokker monoplanes now flying above France and Belgium. Also a knockoff was the machine gun mounted above the engine, almost the only bulge marring the smooth lines of the aeroplane. "Good to know somebody finally figured out how to build a decent interrupter gear. Even if it wasn't us, we get to borrow it."

"That's right, Lieutenant," Lefty said. "Chew the hell out of the Canucks and the limeys for me, you hear?" He stuck out his hand. Moss shook it, then grabbed his duffel bag and jumped down from the Ford. Lefty took his foot off the brake, gave the motorcar more throttle with the hand control, and putt-putted away.

Shouldering the bag, Moss made for the canvas tents that housed his new squadron. Such arrangements were all very well now, with the weather warm, but could you live in a tent in the middle of winter? Maybe the war would be over and he wouldn't have to find out. He clicked tongue between teeth. He'd believed nonsense like that the year before. He was a tougher sell now.

Somebody came out of the closest tent and spotted him. "Moss, isn't it?" the man called with a friendly wave. "Welcome to the monkey house."

"Thank you, Captain Pruitt," Moss said, letting the bag fall so he could salute. Shelby Pruitt lazily returned the gesture. Moss had already gathered he'd have to get used to a new style here; Captain Franklin, his CO since the start of the war, had been the sort who dotted every i and crossed every t. Pruitt didn't seem the sort to make much fuss over little things, as long as the big ones were all right.

Now he said, "Come along with me. We'll give you someplace or other where you can lay your weary head." He didn't particularly look like a flier — he was short and dark and on the dumpy side-and his south-western accent made him sound almost like a Reb. When you watched him move, though, you got the idea he always knew exactly where every part of him was at every moment, and that was something a pilot certainly needed.

He led Moss along the row of green-gray canvas shelters till he flipped up one flap. "Ah, thought so," he said. "We've got room at the inn here."

Peering in, Moss saw the tent held four cots, the space around one of them conspicuously bare and empty. One airman sat on the edge of his bed, writing a letter. He looked up at Moss and said, "You're the new fish, are you? I'm Daniel Dudley-they mostly call me Dud." He shrugged resignedly. He had a pale, bony face and a grin that was engaging even if a little cadaverous.

"Jonathan Moss," Moss said, and shook hands. He set his gear down on the empty cot. Pruitt nodded to him, then went off on whatever other business he had. Moss understood his offhandedness: he wouldn't really be part of the squadron till he'd flown his first mission.

Dudley made a small production out of sticking the cap back onto his fountain pen. That let him effectively do nothing till Captain Pruitt was out of earshot. Then he asked, "What do you think of Hardshell so far?"

Moss needed a moment to grasp the nickname. "The captain, you mean?" he asked, to make sure he had it right. When Dudley didn't say no, he went on, "He seems all right to me. Friendlier than the fellow I'm leaving, that's clear. What do you think of him?"

"He'll do, no doubt about it." Dudley took a panatela out of a teakwood cigar case. He offered the case to Moss, who shook his head. The pilot bit off the end of his cigar, lighted it, and sighed with pleasure.

"Who else sleeps here?" Moss asked, pointing to the other two cots.

"Tom Innis and Luther Carlsen," the other pilot answered. "Good eggs, both of 'em. Luther's a big blond handsome guy, and thinks he's a wolf. If the girls thought so, too, he'd do pretty well for himself."

"That's true about a lot of guys who think they're wolves," Moss said, to which Dudley nodded. Moss turned serious in a hurry, though. "What can you tell me about the Martin that I won't have picked up from training on it?"

"Good question," Dudley said. A wide smile only made him look more skull-like than ever, but he couldn't help that. "We've just been flying Martins a month or so ourselves. They don't have a lot of vices that we've found: good speed, good view, good acrobatics." He paused. "Oh. There is one thing."

"What's that?" Moss leaned forward.

"Every once in a while, the interrupter gear will get a little bit out of alignment."

"How do you find out about that?"

"You shoot your own prop off and you shoot yourself down," Daniel Dudley answered. His face clouded. "That's what happened to Smitty, the guy who used to have that cot. If it does happen to you, the beast is nose-heavy. You have to watch it in your glide."

"Thanks. I'll remember." Moss started unpacking his bag. "When do you suppose they'll let me up in one?"

"Tomorrow, unless I'm all wet," Dudley answered. "Hardshell doesn't be lieve in letting people sit around and get rusty."

He was right. Captain Pruitt sent Moss up as tail-end Charlie on a flight of four Martins-himself and his tentmates-the very next morning. His scout aeroplane was factory-new, still stinking of the dope that made the fabric of wings and fuselage impenetrable to air. But the mechanics here had modified it as they had the other three Martins of the flight: by mounting on the left side of the wooden cockpit frame a rear-view mirror like those on some of the newest model motorcars. Moss found that a very clever idea, one that would keep his neck from developing a swivel mount.

The rotary engine kicked over at once when a mechanic spun the prop. Castor-oil fumes from the exhaust blew in his face. The in-line engine in the Wright he had flown had been petroleum-lubricated, which had made his bowels happier than they were liable to be now.

One after another, the four single-deckers took off. Moss tried to get a handle on Innis and Carlsen by the way they flew their aeroplanes; he hadn't had much chance to talk with them the day before. Carlsen was always exactly where he was supposed to be in the flight, which Dud Dudley led. Cap tain Franklin would have approved of that precise, finicky approach. Innis, on the other hand, was all over the place. Whether that bespoke imagination or carelessness remained to be seen.

Up to the front they flew. Dudley swung the nose of his Martin so that he flew parallel to the front, on the American side of the line. The rest of the flight followed, Innis frisking a little, up and down, from side to side. They were under orders as strict as Captain Pruitt could make them not to cross over to enemy-held territory no matter what. Neither the Canadians nor the British yet had a working interrupter gear, and nobody in the USA wanted to hand them one on a platter.

Flying a combat patrol was nothing like being trained on a new aero plane. Moss had discovered that when he'd made the transition from the Su per Hudson to the Wright 17, and now found out all over again. When you were in training, you were concentrating on your aeroplane and learning its idiosyncrasies. When you were up here on patrol, all you cared about was the other fellow's aeroplane, with your own reduced in your thoughts to a tool you'd use to shoot him down.

He spotted the Avro in that newfangled rear-view mirror. It had probably been flying a reconnaissance mission on the American side of the line, and was now heading back toward Canadian territory with its pictures or sketches or whatever it had. Moss peeled off from the flight and gave his Martin single- decker all the power it had as he raced toward the Avro.

Its pilot spotted him and tried to bank away, which also gave the observer a better shot at him. He dove and then climbed rapidly. All he had to do was point his aeroplane's nose at the enemy and squeeze the firing button on his machine gun. He'd practiced shooting during training, but having the bullets miss the prop still seemed half like black magic to him.

The Avro was still trying to manoeuvre into a position from which it could effectively defend itself. He kept firing, playing the stream of bullets as if they were water from a hose. All at once, the Avro stopped dodging and nosed toward the ground. As he had with his first kill, back when the war was young, he must have put the pilot out of action. The observer kept shooting long after he had any hope of scoring a hit. Martin respected his courage and wondered what he was thinking about during the long dive toward death.

He looked around to see if he could spot any more British or Canadian aeroplanes. He saw none, but all his flightmates were close by. He hadn't noticed them coming to his aid; he'd been thinking about the Avro, nothing else.

Dudley, Innis, and Carlsen were waving and blowing him kisses. He waved back. He might not have fully belonged in his new squadron the day before, but he did now.

The U.S. Army sergeant doing paymaster duty shoved a dollar and a half across the table at Cincinnatus and checked off his name on the list. "You get the bonus again today," he said. "That's twice now this week, ain't it? Don't usually see Lieutenant Kennan actin' so free and easy with the government's money."

Don't usually see him give a Negro anything close to an even break, was what he meant. Cincinnatus had no doubt that was true. But — for a white man, for a U.S. soldier-the paymaster seemed decent enough. Figuring he owed him an answer, Cincinnatus said, "Whatever you do, you got to do it as good as you can."

"Yeah, that ain't a bad way to look at things," the sergeant agreed. "But you made Kennan notice how good you're doin' it — you got a black hide and you manage that, you got to be doin' awful damn fine."

"My wife's gonna have a baby," Cincinnatus said. "Extra half-dollar now and then, it means a lot." He cut it short after that; no point to getting the la bourers in line behind him angry.

He was about halfway home when it started to rain. Herodotus and a couple of the other Negroes with whom he was walking ducked under an awning for protection. The awning, conveniently for them, was in front of a saloon. They went on inside. Cincinnatus kept going. He took off his hat and turned his face up to the warm rain, letting it wash the sweat off him. That felt good. Sometimes, after a hot, muggy day, he felt as crusted in salt as a pretzel.

When he walked past Conroy's general store, he looked in through the window, as he often did. One lone white man was in there with the storekeeper. After a second glance, Cincinnatus stiffened. That white man was Tom Kennedy.

Kennedy saw him, too, and waved for him to come inside. He did, his heart full of foreboding. A U.S. Army patrol was walking down the other side of the street. One of the men paused to smear petroleum jelly on his bayonet to hold back the rain. All they had to do was look over and recognize Kennedy and everything went up in smoke. They didn't. They just kept walk ing, one of them making a lewd crack about what else you could do with a greasy hand.

"Hello, Cincinnatus," Kennedy said, about as cordially as if Cincinnatus had been white. He didn't know whether he liked that or not. It made him nervous; he did know that. He wished Kennedy had never come knocking at his door in the middle of the night.

But Kennedy had. "Evenin'," Cincinnatus answered reluctantly. "What kin I do for you today?"

"Glad you stopped in," Kennedy said, again sounding as if Cincinnatus were a favourite customer rather than a Negro labourer. "Would have had some body by to pay you a visit tonight if you hadn't."

"Is that a fact?" Cincinnatus sounded dubious. The last thing he wanted was some white man coming around his house late at night. He'd been lucky none of the neighbours had said anything to the U.S. soldiers after Kennedy paid him a visit that first time. Lucky once didn't have anything to do with lucky twice, though. Half-probably more than half-the Negroes in Coving- ton preferred the USA to the CSA, although a plague on both their houses had wide popularity among them, too. "Who wants to visit me, and how come?"

Kennedy and Conroy looked at each other: Kennedy kept doing the talking, which was smart, because Cincinnatus trusted him further than the storekeeper. He said, "We've got a delivery we need you to make." He grinned. "Sort of like old times, isn't it?"

"Not so you'd notice," Cincinnatus answered. "What did you have in mind? Drive a truck up in front of my house? Don't think I'd much fancy that." He'd been trained to be cautious and polite around whites, so as not to let them know everything that was going on in his head. That was the only thing that kept him from shouting, Are you out of your skull, Mr. Kennedy, sir?

"Nothing like that," Kennedy said, raising a soothing hand. "We'll have somebody bring by a wagon with a mule pulling it — nothing that would look out of place in your part of town." The unspoken assumption that that was the way things ought to be in the Negro district of Covington grated on Cincinnatus. Oblivious, Kennedy went on, "We'll have a colored fellow drivin' it, too, so you don't need to worry about that, either."

"You already got a wagon and a driver, you don't need me, Mr. Kennedy," Cincinnatus said. He put his hat back on and touched a forefinger to the brim. "See you another time. Evenin', Mr. Conroy."

"Get back here," Conroy snapped as Cincinnatus turned to go. "We know where you live, boy, remember that."

Cincinnatus had had all the threats he could stomach. Blackmail cut both ways. "I know where you're at, too, Mr. Conroy. Ain't never had reason to talk to the Yankee soldiers, but I know."

Impasse. Conroy glanced at Cincinnatus. He didn't glare back; in the Confederacy, even the occupied parts of it, blacks showed whites respect whether they deserved it or not. "We'd really rather you did this, Cincinnatus," Kennedy said. "We've got this other fellow, yeah, but we don't know how reliable he is. We can trust you."

"You can trust me?" Cincinnatus said. Kennedy's reasonable tones, in their own way, irked him more than the storekeeper's bluster. Bitterly, he asked, "How do I know I can trust you? Why should I? Suppose the Confederate States do win this here war. What kind of place are they gonna be for colored folks afterwards? Everything stay the same, it ain't worth livin' for us, not hardly."

Conroy looked as if he'd just taken a big bite out of a Florida lemon. Tom Kennedy sighed. "Reckon it's going to be some different," he said. "All the niggers working in factories these days, the CSA could hardly fight the war without 'em. You think they can send 'em all packing, send 'em back to picking cotton and growing rice and tobacco when the war is over? They can try, but you can't unring a bell. I don't think it'll work."

What he said made the storekeeper look even more unhappy. "Never should have set the niggers free in the first place," Conroy muttered.

"A little too late to worry about that now, wouldn't you say?" Kennedy scraped a match on his shoe and lighted a stogie. "Hell, I hear there's talk about putting Negroes in butternut and giving 'em rifles. You get in a war like this, you've got to fight with everything you have."

"Damn foolishness," Conroy said. He looked Cincinnatus straight in the eye. "And if you want to tell the Yankees I said so, go right ahead." He was, at least, honest in his likes and dislikes.

Tom Kennedy blew a smoke ring, then held his cigar in a placatory hand. "We don't want to get in a quarrel here, Joe," he said, from which Cincinna tus learned Conroy's Christian name. "But if a nigger fights for the CSA, how are you going to take his gun away and tell him he's got to go back to being a nigger once the fighting's done? He'd spit in your eye, and would you blame him?"

"Shit," Conroy said, "even the damnyankees got better sense than to go giving niggers guns."

"Mr. Conroy," Cincinnatus said quietly, "I ain't carryin' no Tredegar rifle, but ain't I fightin' for the CSA? The Yankees catch me, they won't give me no medal. All they do is put me up against a wall and shoot me, same as they'd do with you."

"He's right, Joe," Kennedy said. "Go ahead, tell him he isn't."

"He doesn't want to take the packages over to the Kentucky Smoke House, he ain't right at all-just a damn lyin' nigger," Conroy said.

" Kentucky Smoke House? Hell, you don't need me to take anything there," Cincinnatus said. "Y'all could go your own selves, an' nobody'd notice anything different." That was only the slightest of exaggerations. The Kentucky Smoke House did up the best barbecue anywhere between North Carolina and Texas. That was what the proprietor, an enormous colored fel low named Apicius, claimed, and by the hordes of Negroes and steady stream of whites who came to the tumbledown shack out of which he operated, he might well have been right.

"Easier sending somebody colored — safer, too," Kennedy said, which was probably true. "If you're making the delivery, people will think you're bringing him tomatoes or spices or something like that. Joe or me, we'd stick out too much hauling crates."

That was also probably true. Cincinnatus sighed. Sensing his weakening, Conroy said, "Got the wagon and mule out back in the alley, waiting to be loaded."

Cincinnatus sighed again, and nodded. "Good fellow," Kennedy said, and tossed him something he caught automatically. "This is for taking the risk." Cincinnatus looked down at the five-dollar Stonewall in his hand. A moment later, the gold piece was in his pocket, along with the dollar and a half he'd made (bonus included) for eleven and a half hours of gruelling labour on the docks.

Without another word, Conroy led him into the back room and pointed to a couple of crates and a tarp. He opened the door out onto the alley. Cincinnatus picked up the crates, which felt very full and were heavy for their size, then heaved the canvas sheet over them. The rain had stopped, but no guessing whether it might start up again. The weight of the crates and the need for the tarpaulin made Cincinnatus guess they held pamphlets or papers of some sort.

He hadn't driven a mule for a while; Kennedy had bought motor trucks three years before. But, he discovered, he still knew how. And the mule, a tired beast with drooping ears, didn't give him any trouble.

Kennedy and Conroy had done one thing right: no one, black or white, paid any attention to a Negro on a battered wagon pulled by a lazy mule. If they'd wanted him to leave a bomb in front of U.S. Army headquarters, he could have done that, too, he thought, and slipped away with no one the wiser.

His nose guided him to the Kentucky Smoke House. A lot of buggies and wagons were tied up nearby, along with a couple of motorcars. Again, he re mained inconspicuous. The sweet smell of smoke and cooking meat made spit flood into his mouth when he went inside. There stood Apicius, splashing sauce on a spitted pig's carcass with a paintbrush.

"Got a couple boxes for you from Mistuh Conroy," Cincinnatus said, coming up close so nobody else could hear.

The fat cook nodded. "Felix!" he bawled. "Lucullus!" Two youths with his looks but without his bulk came hurrying up to him. He jerked a thumb at Cincinnatus. "He got the packages we been waitin' fo'."

His sons-for so Cincinnatus figured them to be-hurried outside and carried the boxes into a back room of the restaurant. One of them gave Cincinnatus a package wrapped in newspapers through which grease was starting to soak. "Best ribs in town," he said.

"I know that already," Cincinnatus said. "Obliged."

He drove Conroy's wagon back to the general store, then walked home.

The smell of the ribs tormented him all the way there. When he opened the door, Elizabeth started to yell at him for being late. That savoury package started the job of calming her down. The five-dollar gold piece finished it.

Because of the Yankee curfew, nights were usually quiet. The sound of banging — not gunfire, but something else-woke Cincinnatus a couple of times. When he headed for the docks the next morning, every other telegraph pole and fence post was adorned with a full-color poster of Teddy Roosevelt leading a detachment of U.S. soldiers, all of them wearing German-style spiked helmets, each one with a baby spitted on the bayonet of his rifle, peace, the poster said, freedom.

In his mind's eye, Cincinnatus saw lots of Negro boys with hammers and nails running here and there, putting up posters in the dead of night. With his real eyes, he saw U.S. soldiers tearing them down. He didn't know for certain he'd had anything to do with that. Doing his best to take no notice of the angry U.S. troops, he kept on walking toward the docks.

Once upon a time, Provo, Utah, had probably been a pretty town. Mountains towered to the east and northeast; to the west lay Utah Lake. The streets were wide, and shade trees had lined them. This July, as far as Paul Mantarakis was concerned, the place was nothing but a bottleneck, corking the advance of U.S. forces toward Salt Lake City. The trees had either been blasted to bits by artillery fire or cut down to form barricades across the broad streets. Thanks to the mountains and the lake, you couldn't go around Provo. You had to go through it.

Mantarakis scratched his left sleeve. He was probably lousy again. The only notice he took of the third stripe on that sleeve was that the double thickness of cloth made scratching harder.

Captain Norman Hinshaw — a captain because of casualties, the same rea son Mantarakis was a sergeant-squatted down in a foxhole beside him. He pointed ahead. "The big set of buildings-that big set of ruins, I should say- that's what's left of Brigham Young College. That's where the damned Mor mons have all their machine guns, too. That's what keeps us from taking the whole town."

"Yes, sir," Mantarakis said. He knew where the Mormons had their ma chine guns, all right. They'd killed enough Americans with them. Deadpan, he went on, "Of course, it's just a few goddamn fanatics doing all the fighting. The rest of the Mormons all love the USA."

Hinshaw's narrow, sour face looked even narrower and more sour than usual. "They're still feeding that tripe to the people back home," he said. "Some of them may even still believe it. Only soldiers who still believe it are the ones who got shot right off the train."

"That's about the size of it, sir," Mantarakis agreed. As he spoke, he checked right, left, and to the rear. As in Price, the Mormons in Provo had the nasty habit of letting U.S. soldiers overrun their positions, then turning around and shooting them in the back. Paul summed it up as best he could: "If you're a Mormon in Utah, you hate the USA."

"Isn't that the sad and sorry truth?" Hinshaw said. "Only people who give us any sort of assistance at all are the ones the Mormons call gentiles- and they assassinate them whenever they get the chance." He snorted. "Even the sheenies in Utah are gentiles, if you can believe it."

"I'd believe anything about this damn place," Paul said. "Anybody who's seen what we've seen getting this far would believe anything."

Back of the line, back behind the train station, U.S. artillery opened up on Brigham Young College again. Up above, an aeroplane buzzed, spotting for the guns. The Mormons shot at it, but it was too high for their machine guns to reach.

Hinshaw looked up at the aeroplane. "Good for him," he said. "He'll find out where the bastards are at, and we'll blow 'em up. I like that. The more of 'em we kill, the less there are left to kill."

"You said it, sir," Paul agreed. "They do fight harder than the Rebs, every damn one of 'em."

"Amen to that," the captain said. "The Rebs, they're sons of bitches, but they're soldiers. When the war comes through, the civilians get the hell out of the way like they're supposed to. Here, though, anybody over the age of eight, boy or girl, is an even-money bet to be a franctireur. I heard tell they planted an explosive under a baby, and when one of our soldiers picked up the kid — boom'."

Mantarakis wondered if that was true, or something somebody had made up for the sake of the story, or something somebody had made up to keep the troops on their toes. No way to tell, not for certain. That it was even within the realm of possibility said everything that needed saying about the kind of fight the Mormons were putting up.

As if to remind him what kind of fight that was, the Mormons in the front-line foxholes and shelters in the rubble opened up again on the U.S. positions south of Center Street. Rifle fire picked up all along the line as government soldiers started shooting back. Machine guns began to bark and chatter. Here and there, wounded men shrieked.

"Be alert out there!" Paul shouted to his men as he got to his feet. "They're liable to rush us." The Mormons had done that to another regiment in the brigade, down near the town of Spanish Fork. Farmers and merchants in overalls and sack suits, a couple even wearing neckties, had thrown the U.S. soldiers back several hundred yards, and captured four machine guns to boot.

That regiment had had its colors retired in disgrace; it was off doing prisoner-guard duty somewhere these days, being reckoned unfit for anything better. Mantarakis didn't want the same ignominy to fall on his unit.

But the religious fanatics — religious maniacs was what Mantarakis thought of them, even if that did make him seem unpleasantly like Gordon McSweeney to himself-didn't charge. They weren't eager about battling their way through barbed wire, not any more. A few gruesome maulings at the hands of troops more alert than that one luckless regiment had pounded that lesson into them. Even if they didn't have uniforms, they were beginning to be have more like regular troops than they had: the effect, no doubt, of fighting the U.S. regulars for some weeks.

They still had more originality left in them than most regulars, though. Something flew through the air and crashed into the foxholes and trenches behind Mantarakis. He shook his head in bemusement. It had looked like a bot tle. He wondered what was in it. Not whiskey, that was for sure-the poor stupid damn Mormons were even drier than the desert in which they lived.

Another bottle hurtled toward the U.S. lines. The Mormons had used some sort of outsized slingshot arrangement to fling makeshift grenades at the soldiers battling to crush their rebellion; Paul would have bet they were throwing their bottles the same way. But why?

A trail of smoke followed that second one. It smashed maybe twenty yards from Mantarakis, and splashed flame into the bottom of the trench. "Jesus!" he yelled, and crossed himself. "They've got kerosene in there, or something like it."

"That's a filthy way to fight," Captain Hinshaw said. Half walking, half waddling, he started down the trench line. "Let me get to a field telephone. We'll teach them to play with fire, God damn me to hell if we don't."

"Look out, Captain!" Paul shouted. The Mormons must have been saving up bottles, because they had a lot of them. Here came another one. Hinshaw ducked. That didn't help him. It hit him in the back and shattered, pouring burning kerosene up and down his body.

He screamed. He thrashed. He rolled on the ground, trying to put out that fire. It didn't want to go out. It wasn't just the kerosene burning any more, but also his uniform and his flesh. The harsh, acrid stink of scorched wool warred with a sweet odor a lot like that of roasting pork. Had Mantarakis smelled that odor under other circumstances, he might have been hungry. Now he just wanted to heave up his guts into the bottom of the trench.

He lacked the luxury of time in which to be sick. He jumped on top of Captain Hinshaw, smothering the flames with his body, beating at them with his hands, and then shovelling dirt onto them.

Hinshaw kept on screaming like a damned soul. Mantarakis remembered he'd asked God to damn him. Even as the Greek battled the fire burning his captain, he shivered. When you said something like that, you were asking for trouble.

A couple of other soldiers came running up and helped Mantarakis extin guish Hinshaw. More kerosene-filled bottles kept dropping all around. More men screamed those horrid screams, too.

Captain Hinshaw was still smoking, but he didn't seem to be burning anywhere, not any more. He sat up. That gave Mantarakis and the other two men the first look at his face they'd had since the bottle hit him. Mantarakis wanted to look away. "Jesus," one of the other soldiers said softly. It wasn't a live man's face any more, but a skull covered here and there with bits of charred meat.

In a voice eerily calm, Hinshaw said, "Will one of you please take your weapon and kill me? Believe me, you'd be doing me a favour."

"We can't do that, sir," Mantarakis answered through numb lips. He raised his voice to shout for stretcher-bearers. Trying to sound soothing, he went on, "They'll have morphia for you, sir."

"Morphia?" Hinshaw's laugh made Paul's hair stand on end. The officer groped for his own pistol, and got it out of the holster. Mantarakis knew he ought to stop him, but crouched, frozen. Neither of the other two soldiers moved. Hinshaw's hand was burned, too, but not too burned to pull the trig ger. He fell over, mercifully dead.

A few minutes later, artillery stopped pounding Brigham Young College and started hammering the Mormons in the front-line positions. A couple of shells fell short, too, ploughing up the ground too close to Paul for comfort.

Whistles shrilled. For once, Mantarakis was glad to go over the top, glad to struggle through paths in the wire that weren't paths enough-anything to get away from the roast-meat horror Captain Hinshaw had become. Beside that, the bullets cracking past him were nuisances, distractions, nothing more. By the way his men were shouting as they rushed the Mormon lines, they felt the same as he did.

He sprang down into a length of trench. The Mormons fought hard. They always fought hard. Hardly any of them threw down their rifles, even in the face of death. That didn't matter, not today it didn't. He hadn't planned on taking prisoners, anyhow.

From an upstairs bedroom came the insistent clanging of a bell. "I'll speak further to you later, Griselda," Scipio said. The servant, who'd given Anne Colleton rancid butter, looked suitably downcast, but he hadn't quite turned away before she stuck out her tongue at him.

She would have to go, he realized as he hurried up the staircase. Whether that meant another situation indoors somewhere else or work out in the fields, he didn't know, but such insubordination could not be tolerated. And then, around three steps higher, he remembered he was part of a revolutionary movement that, if it succeeded, would sweep away Negro servitude forever. Until it succeeded, though, the most he could do to help it was to make everything seem as normal as he could. Yes, Griselda would have to go.

"Coming, Captain Colleton," he called, for the bell went on and on and on. He had been too well-trained ever to look like someone in a hurry, but he was walking very fast by the time he got to Jacob Colleton's bedroom.

"Took you long enough," Colleton said in a slurring rasp. That didn't spring from the effects of the gas alone; he was drunk, as he was most of the time: a cut-glass whiskey decanter, nearly all the whiskey it had once held now decanted, sat on a table by the chair in which he perched.

"I am sorry to have inconvenienced you, sir," Scipio said. He had to fight to keep his air of servile detachment around Jacob Colleton. You knew people came back from war wounded, even maimed. You didn't think they could come back ruined this particular way, though, condemned to maybe a full life's worth of hell.

Chlorine gas… that was stuff more appalling than anyone had imagined back before the war. If the Confederates had thought of it, they wouldn't have used it against the USA, not at first they wouldn't. They'd have used it to keep their own blacks in line. He had a sudden, horrid vision of black men and women lined up and made to breathe the stuff. A lot more efficient than just shooting them…

In that choking wreck of a whisper, Jacob Colleton said, "I want to see Cherry. Bring her here to me. She can tell me a story, one of those Congaree yarns you niggers spin, take my mind off how wonderful the world is for me these days." He coughed. His face, already the color of parchment, went paler yet, to the shade milk had once you'd skimmed off the cream.

"You understand, sir, that she is in the fields at present," Scipio said. Colleton nodded impatiently. Face not showing any of what he was thinking, Sci pio said, "I shall fetch her here directly."

Muggy heat smote him when he went outside. He felt himself starting to sweat. It was, for once, honest sweat, sweat having nothing — well, only a little- to do with fear. The kinds of stories Cherry told Jacob Colleton had nothing to do with words. Colleton, of course, had no notion Cherry was anything but one more Negro wench to distract him and keep his mind off his pain.

What she thought about him was harder for Scipio to unravel. She gave Colleton what he wanted from her; the butler was sure of that much. He wouldn't have kept asking for her if she didn't. Understanding why she did was harder. Come the revolution, Jacob Colleton, like every other white aristocrat in the CSA, was fair game.

Maybe he told her things, when they were in there together with the doors closed. Cassius might know about that; Scipio didn't. He didn't have the nerve to ask the hunter, either. Maybe Cherry revelled in making herself feel worse now so revenge would be all the sweeter when it came. And maybe, too, revo lutionary sentiments or not, she also felt something akin to pity for Jacob Col leton. People weren't all of a piece, not whites, not blacks, not anybody. Scipio was sure of that.

He sent a little boy who wore nothing but a grin and a shirt that came halfway down to his knees out to find Cherry. That meant he'd have to give the little rascal a couple of pennies when he came back, but going out into the fields after a particular woman was beneath a butler's dignity.

While he waited for the boy to return with Cherry, he looked back at the Marshlands mansion. Halftone photographs in the newspapers showed what towns looked like after the rake of war dragged through them. He tried to imagine Marshlands as a burnt-out shell. Horror ran through him when he did. He loved and hated the place at the same time himself.

Here came Cherry, a plain cotton blouse over an equally plain cotton skirt, but a fiery red bandanna tied over her hair. Scipio gave the boy three pennies, which was plenty to send him capering off with glee. "Why fo' you wants me?" Cherry asked.

"Ain't me." Scipio shook his head in denial. "Marse Jacob, he want you. Say he want you to tell a story to he."

"He say dat?" Cherry asked. Scipio nodded. Now he was sweating from nerves. If Cherry told Jacob Colleton the wrong story, he himself was a dead man. He hoped she didn't truly care for Miss Anne's brother. If she did, she was liable to talk more than she should. That was the last thing Scipio wanted. She said, "Well, he gwine like de story he get."

Scipio wouldn't have doubted that. She was a fine-looking woman, with high cheekbones that said she had some Indian in her. You'd have never a dull moment between the sheets with her; of that much Scipio was sure. All the same, knowing what he knew, he would sooner have taken a cougar to bed.

Cherry walked on toward Marshlands. Scipio followed her with his eyes. Any man would have, the roll she put to her hips. She opened the door, closing it after her as she went inside. Something else occurred to Scipio, something he hadn't thought through before. Cherry was going up to that bedroom to do what Jacob Colleton wanted. Colleton probably didn't care much about whether it was what she wanted. If the uprising of which she dreamt ever came off, Scipio wouldn't have cared to be in the shoes Miss Anne's brother was — or, at the moment, most likely wasn't-wearing.

Well, that was Jacob Colleton's lookout, not Scipio's. The butler had enough to worry about, keeping Marshlands going with servants constantly leaving for better-paying jobs, and with the threat of revolt from the field hands growing worse every day.

And, he remembered, with insolence from the servants he did have. Deal ing with Griselda came within the normal purview of his duties. That it was normal made it all the more attractive to him now. Straightening up until he looked as stiff and stern as the Confederate sergeant on the recruiting poster pasted to every other telegraph pole, he marched back to the mansion.

Griselda, predictably, screamed abuse at him when he told her she had to go. "That will be enough of that," he said, using his educated voice: he was speaking as Anne Colleton's agent now, not as himself. "If you comport yourself with dignity, I will prevail upon the mistress to write you a letter that will enable you to find a good situation elsewhere. Otherwise-"

But that was not so effective as it would have been a year earlier. "Fuck yo' letter, an' fuck you, too," Griselda shouted. "Don' need no letter, not these days I don't. Take myself to Columbia, git me work at one o' the factories they got there. Don' have to lissen to no nigger talkin' like white folks what needs to go take a shit, neither." She stormed out of Marshlands, slamming the door behind her.

Scipio stared out the window as she flounced down the path that led to the road. She hadn't even bothered going to her room and getting her belong ings. Maybe she'd be back for them later, or maybe she'd have somebody send them on to her when she found a place in town. Wherever the truth lay there, she never would have behaved that way before the war made it possible for her to find a job without worrying about her passbook or a letter of recommendation or anything past a strong back and a pair of hands.

"The war," he muttered. It had dislocated everything, including, God only knew, his own life.

Anne Colleton came out of her office and looked down at him from the second floor. "What was that all about?" she asked. "Or don't I want to know?"

"One of the house staff has seen fit to resign her position, ma'am," Scipio answered tonelessly.

Miss Anne raised an eyebrow. "I didn't know an artillery accompaniment was required with resignations these days," she remarked, but didn't seem inclined to take it any further, for which Scipio was duly grateful.

The mistress of Marshlands was turning away from the railing when an other door opened upstairs. Cherry walked by Anne Colleton, nodding to her almost, although not quite, as an equal. Miss Anne looked at her, looked back to the door from which she had emerged, and went back into her office, shak ing her head as she went.

Cherry paused by Scipio. "I hear one of the house niggers up an' leave?" she asked. When the butler nodded, she said, "How about you give de job she was doin' to me? I kin do it better dan she could, I bet you."

Scipio licked his lips. She might well have been right, but — "I gwine ask Cassius, see what he say." Using that dialect inside the mansion, even speaking quietly as he was now, made him nervous. Cassius would probably be glad to have an extra set of eyes and ears inside Marshlands, but if for some reason he wanted his followers to stay as inconspicuous as possible, Scipio didn't want to cross him. Scipio didn't want to cross Cassius for any reason. The hunter was altogether too good with a gun or a knife or any other piece of lethality that came into his hands.

Cherry tossed her head. "Cain't ask Cassius. He ain't here."

"What do you mean, he isn't here?" Scipio asked, returning to the form of English that seemed more natural-or at least safer-to him inside Marshlands. "Has he gone hunting in the swamps for a few days?"

"He gone, but not in de swamp," Cherry agreed. She too dropped her voice, to a throaty whisper. "Who know what kind o' good things he bring back wid he when he come home?"

What the devil was that supposed to mean? Scipio couldn't come right out and ask: too many ears around in a place like Marshlands, and not all of them — none of the white and too few of the black-to be trusted. He focused on what lay right before him. "Very well, Cherry," he said starchily. "We shall try you indoors for a time, and see how you shape in your new position. Have you anything more suitable for wear inside Marshlands?"

"Sho' do." Her eyes flashed deviltry. "Jus' axe Marse Jacob." She slipped outside, laughing, while Scipio was still in the middle of a coughing fit.

Chester Martin scratched his head. The gesture, for once, had nothing to do with the lice that were endemic in the front lines near the Roanoke — and everywhere else. "Sir, these are the craziest orders I ever heard," he said.

Captain Orville Wyatt said, "They're the craziest orders I ever heard, too, Sergeant. That hasn't got anything to do with the price of beer, though. We got 'em, so we're gonna obey 'em." But behind the wire-rimmed spectacles, his eyes were as puzzled as Martin's.

"Oh, yes, sir," Martin said. "But how are we supposed to pick out this one particular nigger? Those bastards do a lot of deserting." He scratched his head again. You had to want in the worst way to get out of your country if you were willing to crawl through barbed wire, willing to risk getting shot, to escape. And it wasn't as if the USA were any paradise for colored people, not even close. What did that say about the CSA? Nothing good, Martin figured.

Captain Wyatt said, "He'll let us know who he is. And when he does, we're supposed to treat him like he's whiter than the president." He spat down into the mud of the trench. That stuck in his craw, the same as it did for Martin.

The sergeant sighed. "Son of a bitch would have to pick our sector for whatever he's up to. I'll pass the word on to the men."

Specs Peterson, who was cleaning his eyeglasses on a rag that looked likelier to get them dirty, looked up, his gray eyes watery and unfocused. His voice was very clear, though: "What a lot of fuss over one damn nigger." The rest of the soldiers in the squad nodded.

So did Chester Martin, for that matter. But he answered, "When the order comes down from Philadelphia, you don't argue with it, not if you know what's good for you. Anybody who shoots that fellow when he's coming through the wire is gonna wish he'd shot himself instead."

"But, Sarge, what if this is all some kind of scheme the Rebs cooked up and they sneak a raiding party through? We won't shoot at them, neither, not till too late," Joe Hammerschmitt protested.

"You ought to be writing for Scribner's instead of what's-his-name, that Davis," Martin said. "Maybe you can make a gas attack sound exciting instead of nasty, too. But if the Rebels are that smart, they're probably going to overrun us. You ask me, though, they ain't that smart, or if they are, they sure haven't shown it."

With that the men-and Martin himself-had to be content. It turned out to be enough, too, for two nights later Hammerschmitt shook Martin awake. As he always did when he woke up, he grabbed for his Springfield, which lay beside him. "Don't need to do that, Sarge," the private said. "I think I got that nigger with me you were talking about the other day."

"Yeah?" Martin sat up, rubbing his eyes. It was dark in the trench; the Confederates had snipers watching for any light and anything it showed, same as the USA did. The man beside Hammerschmitt wasn't much more than a shadow. Martin peered toward him. "How you going to prove you're the one we've been waiting for?"

"'Cause I de one gwine bring de uprisin' o' de proletariat to de white folks o' de CSA," the Negro answered. "Gwine end de feudal 'pression, gwine end de capitalis' 'pression, gwine end all 'pression. De dictatorship o' de prole tariat gwine come, down in de CSA." His eyes glittered as he peered toward Martin. "An' de revolution gwine come in de USA, too, you wait an' see." His accent was thick as molasses, but if anything it added to the grim intensity of what he was saying.

"Jesus Christ, Sarge," Hammerschmitt burst out, "he's a fuckin' Red."

"He sure is," Martin answered. Plainly, the Negro wasn't just a Socialist. Martin voted Socialist as often as not, though he'd favoured TR in the last elec tion. The Negro was an out-and-out bomb-throwing Red, Red as a Russian Bolshevik, probably Redder than an IWW lead miner or fruit picker out West.

Martin scrambled to his feet. "I'll take you to the captain, uh — What's your name? They didn't tell us about that."

"I is Cassius," the Negro answered. "You sho' you got to waste time wid de captain? I got 'portant things to do up here in Yankeeland."

"Think a good bit of yourself, don't you, Cassius?" Martin said dryly. "Yes, you have to go see Captain Wyatt. You satisfy him, he'll pass you on up the line. And if you don't — " He didn't go on. Cassius sounded like a man with a head on his shoulders. He could work that out for himself.

Cassius picked his way over and around sleeping men and avoided holes in the bottom of the trench with an ease a cat would have had trouble matching and Martin couldn't approach. The Negro couldn't have acquired that sense of grace and balance chopping cotton all day. Martin wondered what he had done.

Captain Wyatt, as it happened, was awake, studying a map under the tiny light from a candle shielded by a tin can. He looked up when Martin and Cassius drew near. "This the man we're looking for, Sergeant?" he asked.

"I think so, sir," Martin answered. "His name's Cassius, and he's a Red." He wondered how the Negro would react to that. He just nodded, matter-of-factly, as if he'd been called tall or skinny. He was a Red.

Wyatt frowned. Martin knew he was a Democrat, and a conservative Democrat at that. But after a moment his face cleared. "If the Rebs have them selves a nice Red revolt in their own backyards, that won't make it any easier for them to fight us at the same time." He swung his eyes toward the black man. "Isn't that right, Mr. Cassius?" Martin had never heard anybody call a Negro Mister before.

Cassius nodded. "It's right, but we make dis revolution fo' our ownselves, not fo' you Yankees. Like I tol' you' sergeant here, one fine day you gits yo' own revolution."

"Yes, when pigs have wings," Wyatt said crisply. The two men glared at each other in the gloom, neither yielding in the least. Then the captain said, "But it's the CSA we're both worried about now, eh?" and Cassius nodded. Wyatt went on, "I still don't know if it was them or the Canucks who set Utah on its ear, but your people will do worse to them than Utah ever did to us." He pointed to Martin. "Take him back to the support trenches and tell them to pass him on to divisional headquarters. They'll see he gets what he needs."

"Yes, sir," Martin said. He headed for the closest communications trench, Cassius following. As they made their way back through the zigzag trench connecting the first line to the second, Martin remarked, "I sure as hell hope you give those Rebs a hard time."

"Oh, we do dat," Cassius said. With a dark skin, wearing a muddy Con federate laborer's uniform, he might almost have been an invisible voice in the night. "We do dat. We been waitin' fo' dis day a long rime, pay they back fo' what dey do to we all dese years."

Chester Martin tried to think of it as an officer would, weighing everything he knew about the situation. "Even with the Rebs' having to fight us, too, you, uh, Negroes are going to have the devil's own time making the revo lution stick. A lot more whites with a lot more guns than you've got."

"You Yankees gwine help wid de guns — I here fo' dat," Cassius said. "An' dis ain't no uprisin' o' jus de niggers o' de CSA. Dis an uprisin' o' de proletariat, like I done say befo'. De po' buckra-"

"The what?" Martin asked.

"White folks," Cassius said impatiently. "Like I say, de po' buckra, he 'pressed, too, workin' in de factory an' de mill fo' de boss wid de motorcar an' de diamond on he pinky an' de fancy seegar in he mouf. Come de revolution, all de proletariat rise up togedder." He walked on a couple of steps. "What you do 'fo' you go in de Army?"

"Worked in a steel mill back in Toledo," Martin answered. "That's where I'm from."

"You in de proletariat, too, den," Cassius said. "The boss you got, he throw you out in de street whenever he take a mind to do it. An' what kin you do about it? Cain't do nothin', on account of he kin hire ten men what kin do jus' de same job you was doin'. You call dat fair? You call dat right? Ought to point you' gun at dey fat-bellied parasites suckin' de blood from yo' labour."

"Telling a soldier to rise up against his own country is treason," Martin said. "Don't do that again."

Cassius laughed softly. "Tellin' de proletariat to rise up fo' dey class ain't no treason, Sergeant. De day come soon, you see dat fo' your own self."

A sergeant in the secondary trenches called a challenge that was more than half a yawn. Had Martin and Cassius been Confederate raiders, the fel low probably would have died before he finished. As things were, he woke up in a hurry when Martin identified his companion. "Oh, yes, Sergeant," he said. "We've been told to expect him."

Martin surrendered the Negro with more than a little relief and hurried back up toward the front line. Some of the things Cassius had said worried him more than a little, too. So did the Red's calm assumption that revolution would break out, come what may, not only in the Confederate States but in the United States as well.

Could it? Would it? Maybe it had tried to start in New York City on Remembrance Day, but it had been beaten down then. Would it stay beaten down? Capital and labour hadn't gotten on well in the years before the war. Plenty of strikes had turned bloody. If a wave of them came, all across the country…

After the war, something new would go into the mix, too. A lot of men who'd seen fighting far worse than strikers against goons would be coming back to the factories. If the bosses tried to ignore their demands — what then? The night was fine and mild, but Martin shivered.

Captain Stephen Ramsay remained convinced that his Creek Army rank badges were stupid and, with their gaudiness, were more likely to make him a sniper's target. He also remained convinced that entrenching in — or, more accurately, in front of-a town was a hell of a thing for a cavalryman to be doing.

Not that Nuyaka, Sequoyah, was much of a town-a sleepy hamlet a few miles west of Okmulgee. But, with the damnyankees shifting forces in this direction, it had to be defended to keep them from getting around behind Okmulgee and forcing the Confederates out of the Creek capital.

Where the blacks had run off, everybody had to do nigger work. Ramsay used an entrenching tool just as if he still was the sergeant he'd been not so long before. Alongside him, Moty Tiger also made the dirt fly. Pausing for a moment, the Creek non-com grinned at Ramsay and said, "Welcome to New York."

"Huh?" Ramsay answered. He paused, too; he was glad for a blow. The heat and humidity made it feel like Mobile. "What are you talking about?"

" New York," Moty Tiger repeated, pronouncing the name with exaggerated care, almost as if he came from the USA. Then he said it again, pronouncing it as a Creek normally would have. Sure as hell, it sounded a lot like Nuyaka.

"This… little town"-Ramsay picked his words with care, not wanting to offend the Creek sergeant-"is named after New York City?" Moty Tiger nodded. Ramsay asked, "How come?"

"Back in Washington 's time, when the Creeks still lived in Alabama and Georgia, he invited our chiefs to New York to make a treaty with him," the sergeant told him. "They were impressed at how big and fine it was, and took the name home with them. We took it here, too, when the government of the USA made us leave our rightful homes and travel the Trail of Tears." His face clouded. " Richmond has been honest with us. The USA never was. Being at war with the USA feels right."

"Sure does," Ramsay said. But the Creeks had been fighting the USA back when his ancestors were U.S. citizens. That made him feel strange whenever he thought about it. The Confederate States had been part of the United States longer than they'd been free. If they'd lost the War of Secession the damnyankees had forced on them, they'd still be part of the USA. He scowled, thinking, Christ, what an awful idea.

Perhaps luckily, he didn't have time to do much in the way of pondering.

When you were digging like a gopher trying to get underground before a hawk swooped down and carried you away, worries about what might have been didn't clog your mind.

Colonel Lincoln, whose two-jewel insigne was twice as absurd as Ramsay's, came up to look over the progress the Creek regiment had made. He nodded his approval. "Good job," he told Ramsay. "You've got foxholes back toward town dug, so you can fall back if you need to, you've got the machine guns well sited, you've done everything I can think of that you should have."

"Thank you, sir," Ramsay said. "And this isn't any ordinary town, either." He told Lincoln the story of how Nuyaka had got its name.

"Is that a fact?" Lincoln said.

"Yes, sir," Moty Tiger answered when Ramsay glanced his way. Colonel Lincoln shook his head in bemusement. Like Ramsay, he was careful to do or say nothing that might offend the Indians he commanded. But Nuyaka, any way you looked at it, was pretty damn funny.

Lincoln peered back toward Okmulgee. Smoke and dust were rising up above the hills rimming the valley in which the town sat. The rumble of artillery carried across the miles. "They're pounding each other again," he said.

"Sure sounds that way, sir," Ramsay agreed. "I'm glad to be out of there, you want to know the truth. This here"-he waved at the Creeks preparing the position in front of Nuyaka-"it ain't cavalry fighting, but it's better than what it was back there. For now it's better, anyways."

"For now," Colonel Lincoln echoed. "The fight around Okmulgee has got itself all bogged down, the way things are in Kentucky and Virginia and Pennsylvania: a whole lot of men battling it out for a little patch of ground. But Sequoyah's got too much land and not enough men for most of it to be like that. And where men are thinner on the ground, you can get some movement."

"Not cavalry sweeps," Ramsay said mournfully. "Hell of a thing, training for years to be able to fight one kind of way, and then when the war comes, you find you can't do it."

"Machine guns," Lincoln said. By the way he said it, he couldn't have come up with a nastier curse if he'd tried for a week. He pointed to the ones the Creeks were setting up. "They'll mow down the Yankees if they try to come in this direction, but they mow down horses even better than they do men."

"Yes, sir, that's a fact," Ramsay said. He thought back to the days when the Confederates had been raiding up into Kansas rather than U.S. troops pressing down into Sequoyah. "If this war ever really gets moving again, it'll have to be with armored motorcars, not horses."

"Armored motorcars?" Moty Tiger said. "I read about those in the newspapers. Bad to run up against, are they?"

"You shoot a horse, it goes down," Ramsay said dryly. "You shoot one of those motorcars, the bullets mostly bounce off. It's got machine guns, too, and it keeps right on shooting at you. I'm just glad the damnyankees don't have a whole lot of them."

"More than we do." Captain Lincoln sounded grim. "Back before the war started, they were building a lot more automobiles than we were."

"They come this way, we'll deal with 'em, sir," the Creek sergeant said. Ramsay didn't want to discourage pluck like that. The Creeks had turned out to make far better, far steadier soldiers than he'd ever figured they would. One of the reasons was, they thought they could do anything. When you thought like that, you were halfway-maybe more than halfway-to being right.

They got the rest of that day, that night, and the first hour or so of daylight the next morning to dig in before the first U.S. patrols started probing their positions. Pickets in rifle pits well in front of the main Creek position traded gunfire with the Yankees.

Things had changed over the past year. When the war was new, infantry running up against opposition would mass and then hurl itself forward, aiming to overwhelm the foe by sheer weight of numbers. Sometimes they did overwhelm the foe, too, but at a gruesome cost in killed and wounded.

No more. The damnyankees coming down toward Nuyaka from the north must have been veteran troops. When they started taking fire, they went to earth themselves and fired back. Instead of swarming forward, they advanced in rushes, one group dashing up from one piece of cover to another while more soldiers supported them with rifle fire that made the Creeks keep their heads down, then reversing the roles.

In danger of being cut off from their comrades, the pickets retreated to the main line. When the U.S. troops drew a little closer, the machine guns opened up on them, spraying death all along the front. Again, the U.S. soldiers halted their advance where a year before they would have charged. It was as if they were pausing to think things over.

Not far from Ramsay, Moty Tiger peered out over the forward wall of the trench. "Uh-oh," he said. "I don't like it when they stop that way. Next thing that happens is, they start shooting cannon at us."

"You're learning," Ramsay told him. He looked back over his own shoulder. The Confederates had promised a battery of three-inch field pieces to help the Creek Nation Army hold Nuyaka. Ramsay hadn't seen any sign of those guns. Getting shelled when you couldn't shell back was one of the joys of the infantryman's life with which he'd become more intimately acquainted than he'd ever wanted.

Instead of rolling out the artillery, though, the damnyankees, as if to give Moty Tiger what he'd said he wanted, rolled out a couple of armored motorcars. The vehicles didn't come right up to the trench line. They cruised back and forth a couple of furlongs away, plastering the Creek position with machine-gun fire.

Ramsay threw himself flat as bullets stitched near. Dirt spattered close by, kicked up by the gunfire. Cautiously, he got to his feet again. "Shoot out their tires, if you can," he shouted to the Creek machine-gun crews. The tires weren't armored, although these motorcars, unlike the first ones Ramsay had encountered, carried metal shields covering part of the circumference of the wheels.

One of the armored motorcars slowed to a stop. The Creeks cheered. It was less of a victory than they thought, though, as they soon discovered. The motorcar, though stopped, kept right on shooting. "Where are those damn guns?" Ramsay growled. "A target you'd dream about-"

Sometimes dreams did come true. He'd just sent a runner back toward Okmulgee to demand artillery support when earth started fountaining up around the automobile. Its hatches flew open. The two-man crew fled for the nearest Yankee foxhole moments before the machine was hit and burst into flames. The other armored motorcar skedaddled, shells bursting around it. It hid itself behind bushes and trees before it got knocked out. The Creeks yelled themselves hoarse.

"The damnyankees already have one New York," Ramsay said to Moty Tiger, trying to pronounce the name as the Indian did. "What the hell do they need with two?" His sergeant grinned at him by way of reply.