American Front

XX

Sylvia Enos collected the mail from the box in the front hall of her apartment building. She crumpled up a patent-medicine circular. The allotment check from the Navy she kept.

Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. She had the money, drawn from George's pay, as he'd said she would before he enlisted. The only trouble was, she didn't care about the money. She would sooner have had her husband back. When he'd stayed in Boston after joining the Navy, when he'd, in essence, gone back to being a fisherman, she'd been overjoyed. Her life had returned to one not far different from what she'd known before the war started, even if she had kept her job at the canning plant. Considering all the dislocations that had come since 1914, she'd counted herself lucky.

"So much for luck," she said as she started upstairs. Now George was gone, and gone farther and more irrevocably than when he'd languished in Confederate imprisonment. All she had by which to remember him were the monthly allotment checks and an occasional letter. There could have been more letters, she supposed, but George had never been much of a writer.

The hallway and the stairwell were not so warm as they had been a few weeks before: Boston 's summer, hot while it lasted, couldn't be counted on to last far into September. For the moment, cutting the heat only made days and nights more pleasant. Pretty soon, though, she wouldn't be wrangling with the Coal Board over fuel enough to cook her food. She'd be wrangling with its inflexible clerks and stubborn supervisors over fuel enough to keep her from freezing during the winter.

She left the stairwell and trudged wearily down the hall to Mrs. Coneval's apartment. She stood there in front of the doorway for a moment before she knocked. It sounded as if the children were fighting a battle of their own inside, a battle about the size of some of the big ones on the Kentucky front. She wondered how Brigid Coneval put up with the noise.

When she did knock, she needed to hammer on the door to get anyone within to notice she was there. After a while, Brigid Coneval opened the door. The racket, without wood between it and Sylvia, grew from alarming to ap palling. "A bit rowdy they are today," Mrs. Coneval said with a smile that could only be described as wan.

"So it would seem," Sylvia agreed. She knew she would have gone crazy, cooped up in there the day around with a horde of screaming children. Given the choice between that and the factory job she had, she would have chosen factory work a hundred times out of a hundred. Her own two children were plenty to try to keep under control.

"I'll get your wee ones," Brigid Coneval said, and disappeared back into chaos. A toddler smaller than Mary Jane started to howl. Sylvia thanked heaven she hadn't got pregnant again after George came back from the CSA. Trying to take care of a new baby by herself, along with two small children, was nothing to anticipate with glee.

Mrs. Coneval came back holding Mary Jane by one hand and George, Jr., by the other. George, Jr., twisted in her grasp and fired an imaginary rifle at one of the other children. "I got you, Joey, you dirty Reb!"

"No, you didn't — you missed me," Joey shouted back-the next small boy who admitted himself slain in imaginary conflict would be the first. "And I'm not the Reb-you are!"

"Liar, liar, pants on fire," George, Jr., yelled at him, which made Mary Jane giggle. George, Jr., said, "Hello, Mama. Joey cheats."

"I don't either!" Joey exclaimed.

"It doesn't matter now, one way or the other," Sylvia said. By the look on his face, her son was prepared to disagree with that as eloquently as he could. She didn't give him the chance. "See you tomorrow morning," she said to Mrs. Coneval, and took her children back to their apartment.

It seemed empty without her husband there. She was used to having him gone for days at a time; she'd even had to grow used to having him gone for much longer than that while he was a Confederate detainee. Now, though, with him in St. Louis, she had the strong sense she wouldn't see him again till the war ended, and it didn't look as if it was going to end any time soon.

She had some good scrod in the icebox. She hadn't lost the connections she'd made down on T Wharf; as a fisherman's wife (even if her husband wasn't actually fishing right now), she could find better fish than the ordinary shopper and pay less for it. She breaded the scrod, pan-fried it in lard on top of the stove, and served it up with mashed potatoes.

George, Jr., ate everything up and demanded more. He ate almost as much as a man, or so it seemed. She was probably wrong about that, she admitted to herself as she gave him more potatoes, but she wasn't wrong about his outgrowing all his clothes. She patted her purse. The allotment check would come in handy the next time she went shopping at Filene's.

Mary Jane, by contrast, had to be cajoled into eating much of anything. Sylvia produced a gumdrop from a bowl on a shelf too high for the children to reach. She set it on the table. "Do you want it?" she asked her daughter.

Eyes wide with longing, Mary Jane nodded. Having once made the dread ful error of saying no to candy, she wasn't about to repeat it.

"All right," Sylvia said. "Eat up your supper and you can have it." Sometimes that got results, sometimes a tantrum. Today it worked. Mary Jane cleaned her plate and stretched out a hand that needed washing. "Good girl," Sylvia told her, handing her the sweet.

After she'd scrubbed the dishes, she settled the children down on the couch, one on either side of her, and read to them from Queen Zixi of Ix. Mary Jane's attention sometimes wandered. When she got off the couch, went over to get a doll, and then came back to play with it, Sylvia didn't mind. The story held George, Jr., rapt for most of an hour. By then, it was time for Sylvia to get the children into bed. Morning came all too early.

Then she had the apartment to herself, before she also had to go to bed. When George was home, they'd sit and talk while he smoked a pipe or cigar. When he was out fishing, she'd look forward to his return. Now… now he was gone, and the place seemed large and empty and quiet as the tomb.

She walked around for a while with a feather duster, flicking specks from tables and gewgaws. What with the dirt and soot always in the air, things got dusty faster than they had any proper business doing. That would worsen in winter, when everyone burned more coal — always assuming the Coal Board didn't decide to let people turn to blocks of ice instead.

She realized she was dusting a china dog for the third time. Shaking her head, she put the feather duster away. Time hung heavy when she was alone, but not that heavy. She went into the bedroom, changed into a nainsook cotton nightgown with lace at the neck and sleeves, and set out the drawers and skirt and shirtwaist she'd wear the next morning. Then she went into the bathroom, where she cleaned her teeth and gave her hair a hundred strokes with the brush in front of the mirror over the sink. Evening ritual done, she went back into the bedroom, turned off the gas lamp, and lay down.

She sat up with a start. "Lord have mercy, I'd forget my head if it wasn't sewed on tight!" she exclaimed. Not wanting to get up and light the lamp again, she fumbled in the darkness with the alarm clock on the nightstand. Had she forgotten to set it, she would surely have been late to work, which would have got her docked at best and fired at worst. "Can't have that," she said, as if someone lying beside her was trying to talk her into sleeping as long as she wanted.

But no one was lying beside her. The bed felt large and empty. Some nights, she was so tired she hardly noticed George was gone and would be gone God only knew how long. Others, she missed him to the point where tears ran down her face. They did no good. She knew that. Knowing didn't help.

She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and trying without much luck to go to sleep. She closed her eyes, which didn't seem to make the room much darker. But with her eyes closed, as they usually were when she and George made love, it was easier to imagine him on top of her, imagine his familiar weight pressing her down on the mattress, imagine his breath warming the hollow of her shoulder in quick gasps.

Imagination, now, was all she had. She shifted restlessly on the bed. If George were there now, she'd be able to sleep pretty soon. She shifted again. The hem of her nightgown rode up past her knees. She reached down. Instead of straightening it, she hiked it up to her waist.

A few minutes later, she rolled over onto her side. She would sleep now. She knew it. She bit her lip, not caring to remember what she'd just done. But when your man was away for months, maybe for years, what were you sup posed to do? It wasn't as good as the real thing with George (actually, that wasn't quite true — it felt as good, or maybe even better, but it was lonely at the end), but it was better than nothing.

"Better than nothing," she muttered drowsily. With the war on, wasn't that as much as anybody had any business expecting? Her eyelids slid down over her eyes, of themselves this time. She started to say something else, but only a soft snore passed her lips.

"Masks and goggles!" Captain Orville Wyatt ordered as the bombardment of the Confederate positions east of the Roanoke began. Chester Martin quickly tied the hyposulfite-impregnated mask over his mouth and nose. He breathed in chemical dampness. That was unpleasant, but much less so than breathing in the poison gas that shells were spreading up and down the Rebel lines. He took off his newly issued helmet to strap the goggles over his eyes. He didn't know whether to curse the weight of the thing or bless it for making his brains less likely to be splattered over the landscape.

Beside Martin, Specs Peterson swore. "They've been usin' this damn gas more since they started loading it into shells than they did when they shot it out of those projector things, and I fucking hate it," he said. "I can leave my glasses on and have the chlorine eat my eyes up, or I can take 'em off and fall on my damn face half a dozen times before I get to where the Rebs are at. Hell of a deal, ain't it?"

"I'm in the same boat, Peterson," Captain Wyatt said, touching the ear-piece to his own spectacles. "I've been leaving my glasses on. My eyes get better after a couple of days, seems like."

"Yeah, but you want to be a hero," Peterson muttered under his breath. "Me, I just want to get out of this in one piece."

"Amen," Chester Martin said. "All I want to do is live through this damn war and go home and make steel. I used to complain about that job like no body's business. It was hot and it was dirty and it was hard and it was dangerous. And it's still every damn one of those things. And you know what else? Next to what we're doin' now, it's so fine, I'll never grouse again."

"Nothin' worse than farm work — I always used to say that," Corporal Paul Andersen put in. "Only goes to show I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. You do your two years as a conscript and that's not so bad. You figure real soldiering works out the same way. Ha!" His wave took in the trenches, the filth, the vermin, the fear, the foe.

Captain Wyatt said, "Once upon a time, Virginia used to belong to the USA. Now we're working to take it back. It's not the kind of job anybody wants to do, but it needs doing. If everything goes right, we keep their front trenches. No matter what happens, we bring some prisoners back for interro gation." He went up and down the trench line, checking to make sure his sol diers' masks and goggles were on securely. He was a long way from being the most good-natured of men, but he fussed over the soldiers in his company like a mother cat with a litter of kittens. As far as Martin was concerned, that made him a good officer.

The bombardment went on and on. Every so often, the Confederates would lob a few shells back at the U.S. lines, but they were taking it a lot harder than they were dishing it out. That suited Martin fine. He'd been on the receiving end of too many barrages to suit him. Giving was better-an un- Christian thought but a true one nonetheless.

Sharp as an axe coming down, the shelling ended. Up and down the trench line, whistles sounded. Martin scrambled up the steps made of sandbags, over the parapet, and toward the Rebel lines.

Pioneers had cut some paths through the barbed wire between the U.S. and Confederate lines, marking them with strips of cloth tied to the wire. Martin liked that and hated it at the same time. It gave him an easier way toward the enemy trenches, but also gave the Rebel machine gunners a notion of what the way was. If they'd zeroed their weapons on it… He tried not to think about that, as he tried not to think of any of the disasters that might befall him.

Here and there, the bombardment had knocked down the posts that sup ported the barbed wire, leaving it sprawled in snaky coils on the rubble-strewn ground of what had probably been a suburb of Big Lick, Virginia.

When Chester Martin saw relatively clear stretches of that sort, he used them to move forward. The Rebs wouldn't have so many guns pointed there as they would at the paths.

He blew out through the thick, wet gauze pad he wore over his mouth. The first couple of gas attacks had let U.S. forces gain and consolidate their positions east of the Roanoke River. Now, though, the Rebs had learned how to defend themselves against the new American weapon, and pushing them back had turned into another hard job.

He wasn't more than halfway toward their trenches, and already the Rebels were shooting back at him and his men, the muzzle flashes of their rifles seeming bright as the sun. Machine guns started up a moment later. Somewhere not far away, he heard the wet smack of a bullet striking flesh. Whoever was hurt there, he hoped it wasn't too bad and he hoped they'd be able to get the fellow to a doctor before he bled to death. That also made him hope nobody would get hurt picking up the wounded man. Nobody was supposed to shoot at people wearing Red Cross armbands, but bullets, as he'd learned too well, weren't fussy about whom they hit.

One of the machine guns, traversed by what their crews matter-of-factly called a two-inch tap, sent bullets kicking up dirt not far from his feet. He dove headlong into a shell hole in front of him. A horrid stench rose. Part of it came from the pool of noisome, stagnant water at the bottom of the hole. More was from the body, or rather fragments of body, entombed under dirt and shattered bricks. U.S. forces were advancing, so the dead man was presumably a Confederate. But he would have smelled just as bad had he been born in Michigan.

Martin wished the gauze mask he wore were as good at neutralizing stenches as it was at keeping chlorine from searing his lungs. That, though, wasn't why it had been designed. He tried to keep his unruly stomach under control. If he took off the mask to puke, who could guess how much poison gas he'd breathe in after every retch?

The hail of machine-gun bullets passed on beyond the shell hole. Crawling through muck of a sort he didn't care to contemplate, Martin peered out over the forward lip of the hole. Whatever else he did he couldn't stay there. Grunting under the weight of his pack, he heaved himself upright again and ran on.

Here came the trenches. He could see murky spots up and down their length, spots where chlorine gas still lingered. The Confederate defenders wore masks like his. A lot of them had goggles, too. They were either bareheaded or in caps, though: no one had yet issued them helmets.

One of the Rebs raised a rifle to shoot at Martin. He shot first, though, on the run and from the hip. As much by luck as anything else, the Confederate howled and dropped his weapon to clutch at his chest.

Yelling, Martin leaped down into the trench. He used his bayonet to make sure the Confederate wasn't going anywhere, then pulled a grenade improvised from nails and a half-pound block of explosive out of one of his equipment pouches and flung it into the next trench back. Somebody screamed a moment after it exploded, so he supposed he'd done that right.

He looked around, collected a couple of his soldiers by eye, and headed down the trench toward the next traverse. Like U.S. forces, the Confederates sensibly did not dig their trenches as long, straight gashes in the earth. Had they been so foolish, any foes who got into them could have delivered a deadly enfilading fire. Unfortunately, the game was harder than that.

Firebays like the one he and his companions were in led to other firebays advanced or recessed from them by a short stretch of perpendicular trench, a traverse, so that the line, if viewed from an aeroplane, took on the look of a postage stamp perforated with insane regularity. Just because your side held a firebay didn't mean the enemy wasn't still lurking in the next traverse.

Finding out who was in the next traverse — or the next firebay, if you were in a traverse-was not a job for the faint of heart. Neither was getting rid of those people, if they happened to be wearing butternut while you were in green-gray. One way was to go up out of the trenches and crawl along the ground between them. Doing that, though, was a lot like a snail's jumping out of its shell to run faster: the poor creature was all too likely to get squashed.

Charging round a corner was not recommended, either. The other fellow had had too much time to prepare nasty surprises for you. Nearing a corner of the firebay, Martin called, "Give up, you Rebs!"

The only answer he got back was a grenade flying through the air. It was thrown too far, and detonated on the level ground beyond the firebay. His own men knew how to reply to it. Several grenades, tossed with better effect, rained down on the Confederates. Grenades, Martin reflected, were handy things: they gave an infantryman a little artillery of his own. And, like artillery, they didn't have to wound to be effective. Even a near miss could leave a soldier shaken and stunned.

Martin bet his life the grenades had stunned the Rebs in the traverse for a couple of vital seconds. He charged round the corner of the trench. One Reb had been stationed there to deal with any such unwelcome newcomers, but he was down and thrashing, blood pouring from his belly out between his fingers. Followed by the men he'd gathered, Martin ran past him and around the next bend. Another Confederate was down there, and still others on their feet. "Hands up, you Rebs!" he screamed.

Reggie Bartlett could barely hear the screamed order to surrender. One of the grenades the damnyankees had thrown had gone off only a few feet away from him. He looked down at his trouser leg. He was bleeding. Neither the pain nor the flow of blood was too bad, though, so he guessed whatever fragment or nail had hit him had drilled straight through muscle without getting stuck there or slamming into bone.

"Hands up!" the Yankee sergeant yelled again. Reggie let his rifle fall to the mud of the trench floor and raised his hands over his head. He knew he and his companions were lucky to get a chance to surrender after they'd tried to fight back. A lot of times, in situations like that, the side winning the fight in the trenches left only the losers' corpses.

The U.S. soldiers swarmed over him, Jasper Jenkins, and the other privates who hadn't been hurt-or not badly hurt, anyway, as a couple of them bore minor wounds not much different from Bartlett's. Corporal McCorkle lay on the ground, moaning. The U.S. soldier shook his head. "Poor bastard must have taken most of a grenade's worth, right in the gut," he said.

"He had a lot of gut to take it in," the sergeant answered, truthfully but unkindly. He frisked Reggie with thorough haste, depriving him of his pocket watch, his wallet, and whatever loose change he had in his pockets. Bartlett made no move to stop him, understanding it would be the last move he ever made if he did. Confederate troops plundered Yankee prisoners just as enthusiastically when they got the chance.

Off toward either side and back deeper in the Confederate position, the sound of fighting was picking up. The U.S. sergeant peered ever so cautiously over the parados at the rear of the trench, treating it as if it were the parapet at the front, which, from his point of view, it was.

He fired a couple of rounds at whatever he saw back there, then shook his head. The iron kettles he and his men wore gave them a look as if out of another time, old and fierce and sullen. What with helmet, goggles, and mask, hardly any of his face was actually visible. One of his men, who wore ordinary glasses instead of goggles and whose eyes were red and teary, said, "We ain't gonna be able to hold these trenches, Sarge."

"Yeah, I think you're right," the sergeant answered regretfully after gauging the noise again. "We're bringing back prisoners, so the brass can't grouse too bad." He turned to Bartlett and the other captured Confederates. "All right, you lugs, up over the top and back to the American lines. Don't try anything cute or you'll find out how cute dead is."

Reggie had gone over the top a good many times, but never before with out a rifle in his hands. He felt very naked, very much exposed as he awk wardly got up into no-man's-land and scrambled back through the barbed wire toward the forwardmost U.S. trenches. A few of the damnyankees in those trenches shot at him and his comrades. He was glad they quit when they saw the Yankee soldiers coming along behind the men in butternut.

He'd hoped he'd have a chance to jump in a shell hole and have the sergeant and the rest of the Yankees go on by so he could sneak back to his own lines. It didn't happen. One reason it didn't was that the Confederates whose positions hadn't been overrun were shooting at the damnyankees, who bunched up close to their prisoners to discourage that. How were you sup posed to escape a man who kept stepping on your bootheels?

The unhappy answer was, you couldn't. Bartlett had jumped down into U.S. trenches, too, but this time the Yankees had rifles and he didn't. "Well done, Sergeant," said one of them — an officer, by his demeanor.

"Thank you, Captain Wyatt," the sergeant answered. "Long as you're back here, I don't suppose I'm in trouble for not holding onto that stretch of Rebel entrenchment."

"No, nothing to worry about there, Martin," the officer-Wyatt-said. "Sometimes we manage to advance a few yards, sometimes we don't. They're more ready to face gas than they used to be." He pointed to the mask on Reggie's face.

"Yes, sir." Sergeant Martin shed his own mask and goggles. He rounded on Bartlett. "All right, Reb, let's have it."

"Reginald Bartlett, private, Confederate States Army," Reggie answered, and recited his pay number.

"What unit, Bartlett?" Sergeant Martin asked.

"I don't have to tell you that," Bartlett said.

The sergeant glanced over to his captain. Like one of Martin's soldiers, Captain Wyatt wore spectacles. Behind them, his eyes were not only reddened by chlorine but thoroughly grim. "I'm only going to tell you this once, Bartlett, so you'd better listen hard — the rest of you Rebs, too. Do you know how many thousand miles this godforsaken chunk of Virginia is from the Hague?"

It wasn't a geography question, although, from the way Jasper Jenkins frowned and scowled, he thought it was. Reggie knew better. What Wyatt had just given him was a warning: no matter what the formal laws of war said about forcing information out of prisoners, he was going to ask whatever he was going to ask, and he expected answers.

"Let's try again, Bartlett," Martin said, proving Reggie had been right. "What unit?"

If he didn't talk, he knew exactly what would happen to him. He didn't want to die in a Yankee trench, without even a chance to hit back at the enemy. He wished the U.S. sergeant had picked someone else on whom to start the questioning. He wouldn't have been so ashamed had he been the second or third man to open up rather than the first.

"Seventh Virginia Infantry," he said rapidly. There. It was done.

Captain Wyatt turned to the rest of the Confederates. "How about you boys?" The other men fairly fell over themselves agreeing. Reggie wondered if Wyatt had called them boys to stress that they were as much his inferiors as Negroes were whites' inferiors in the CSA. If so, the captain was one devious fellow. Bartlett covertly studied him. That seemed likely.

"Who's your battalion commander?" Wyatt demanded.

"Major Colleton." Jasper Jenkins got it out a split second ahead of Reg gie. As if to make up for that, Reggie added, "I don't think he was there when you all raided us-he was back at Division HQ."

"Was he?" Wyatt said in an interested voice. "What was he doing there?"

"Don't know, sir," Bartlett answered truthfully. He didn't like the expres sion on the Yankee captain's face. It spoke of bodies forgotten in shell holes. He touched his sleeve and said, "I'm just a private, sir. The only time officers tell me anything is when they tell me what to do." A chorus of agreement rose from his fellow prisoners.

"It could be." Wyatt's face went from grim to thoughtful. "It might even be true with us — and you Rebs, your officers are a pack of damned aristocrats, aren't they?" Somehow, he contrived to look languid and effete for a moment before turning to Sergeant Martin. "Next time we hit them, we have to catch some bigger fish than privates. These boys don't know anything."

"Raids like this, sir, you take what you can grab," Martin said, which matched Bartlett's experience in the trenches.

"Maybe." From the way Wyatt acted, that seemed to mean he was yielding the point. Sure enough, he jerked his head toward the opening to a communication trench. "All right, Sergeant, take 'em back. We'll let the chaps from Intelligence see if they have any — intelligence, I mean."

"Yes, sir," Martin said. He picked out a couple of his own men with quick hand gestures. "Specs, Joe, come on along with me. These desperate charac-ters'd probably knock me over the head and run off to assassinate TR in a red-hot minute if I was with 'em all by my lonesome." His grin said he was not to be taken seriously.

Reggie Bartlett felt like a desperate character, but not in the way the Yankee sergeant meant. If you were a prisoner of war, you were supposed to try to escape. That much he knew. How you were supposed to try was another question. He didn't have time to think about it. Martin gestured with his bayonet-tipped rifle. The Confederate prisoners got moving.

"Keep those hands high," warned the damnyankee with the glasses — Specs. Guys with glasses were supposed to be mild-mannered. He wasn't, not even close.

Confederate shells — a belated response to the gas barrage and trench raid- fell not far away as they went out of the front line. Reggie swore. He'd almost been killed a couple of times by short artillery rounds. What irony, though, to end his days on the receiving end of a perfectly aimed Confederate shell.

Martin and his comrades turned the Confederate prisoners over to other men farther back, then returned to their position. The grilling Reggie got from U.S. Intelligence seemed perfunctory — occupation before the war, name, rank, pay number, unit, a few questions about what they'd been doing and what they might do, and a few more questions, just as casual, about the state of morale of the Negro laborers attached to their units.

"Who pays attention to niggers?" Jasper Jenkins said. "You tell 'em what to do, they do it, and that's that." The man recording the answers, a wizened little fellow who looked like a born clerk, wrote down the words without comment.

When he was through with the interrogation, the wizened fellow said, "All right. You're going back to a holding camp now. Don't forget your pay number. We'll keep track of you with it. I expect you'll be bored. Can't help that." He nodded to a couple of guards in green-gray.

Almost, it was like going out of the line. Almost. The prisoners were marched back toward a railhead out of artillery range of Confederate guns. That felt familiar, even if nobody boasted about the havoc he aimed to wreak in saloons or brothels. Waiting for a train was familiar, too. Getting into a stinking boxcar that had once held horses was less so, although not unknown.

The train fought its way up over the Blue Ridge Mountains. That line hadn't existed before the war started. The Yankees had built it to haul supplies to the Roanoke front. It was a two-track line; several eastbound trains growled past the one on which Bartlett unhappily rode. "Damnyankees do a lot of haulin', don't they?" Jasper Jenkins said, his voice mournful.

Somewhere on the downhill grade — or rather, one of the downhill grades-they passed out of Virginia and into its breakaway cousin, West Virginia. When the train hissed to a stop, armed guards threw open the doors and shouted, "Everybody out! Move, move, move, you damn Rebs!"

Again, Bartlett might almost have been back in a rest camp. He went through the same surely useless delousing process he had then. He also had his hair clipped down to his scalp. The uniform he drew on completion of all that, though, was not his own. The tunic was tight, the trousers and boots too large. He complained about it. The fellow handing out clothes looked at him as if he were insane. "Shut up," he said flatly. Reggie shut up.

Prisoner barracks were of rough, unpainted wood, with spaces showing between boards. Reggie didn't look forward to that in winter. Bunks were similarly rough, and stacked on top of one another not double, not triple, but quadruple. He found a third-level one to call his own and climbed into it. "Home," he said sadly.

Evening was coming to Hampstead, Maryland. As far as Jake Featherston was concerned, it looked like a pretty good evening. The Yankees out in front of the Confederate lines had been quiet, and the battery had needed to fire only a few rounds at them. Some of those had been gas shells, too.

"About time," Featherston muttered to himself. The United States had been using gas against the Confederacy for months. Being able to respond in kind felt good. "Let those bastards worry about masks and goggles when we want 'em to, not the other way round."

He got his mess kit and went over to the stew pot Perseus had bubbling. Some damnyankee farmer was short a chicken. Jake found himself imperfectly sympathetic, especially when the Negro ladled a drumstick into his mess tin. He smacked his lips. Sure as hell, things were looking up.

He sat around shooting the breeze with his gun crew. It wasn't the same as it had been back in the old days, with the veterans who'd served beside him before the shooting started. But the new fish weren't virgins any more, either. "We've got us a pretty good gun here," Featherston said, looking back at the howitzer.

"The best," Michael Scott said. The loader was probably right, at least as far as the battery went. By their smug grins, the rest of the gun crew agreed with him. "We got us the best niggers in the battery, too," he added in the fond tones a man might use about a child of whom he is proud: the typical tones of a Confederate white talking about the achievements of a Confederate Negro. He patronized so automatically, he had no idea he was doing it.

"That they are," Jake Featherston said. His tone of voice was a little different: he'd used Nero and Perseus as men, however uncomfortable that had made both him and them. He shook his head. He neither particularly liked nor particularly trusted Negroes, and the principal reason for that was his certainty that they had more capacity than they showed. As an overseer's son, that worried him. The surprise you got if you kept thinking a man a boy was apt to be dreadful.

He didn't mention that the two Negroes had helped him fight the gun. The crew he had now knew it, but they seemed intent on pretending they didn't. He understood that; he tried to pretend it hadn't happened, too. Doing anything else tore a hole in the fabric of the Confederate way of life. He was glad Nero and Perseus hadn't turned uppity on account of their exploit. They would have been sorry for that, and some of the blame would have stuck to him, too.

He wandered over to see if anything was left in the stew pot, and came back with a couple of potatoes. The rest of the chicken seemed to have walked with the Lord, or more likely with the cooks. He shrugged. You had to expect that. Who ever heard of a cook's going hungry?

After he'd disposed of the potatoes, he washed his mess tin in a bucket of water and scrubbed it with a rag till the metal took on a dull gleam. He made sure the rest of the gun crew did the same. Nothing gave you food poisoning faster than eating out of a dirty mess tin.

Scott broke out a deck of cards. Jake declined to get into a poker game, saying, "My luck's been lousy lately." That was, if anything, an understatement; he'd lost most of a month's pay a week before, betting a full house against four artfully concealed nines.

He walked out onto Hampstead's main street and peered north. The fall air was cool against his cheek. He couldn't see anything much in the deepening twilight, and told himself that was just as well. If he had seen something, it would have been Yankee artillery flashes lighting up the horizon, which would have meant Yankee shells paying the battery a visit. This past year, he'd had all the glory and drama and excitement of combat he'd needed to prove to him that the best thing to hope for in the middle of a war was a nice, quiet day-or two or three of them in a row.

Since he didn't feel like sleeping, he went back to check on the horses. Perseus and Nero had done their usual capable job of taking care of the animals. He patted the gray gelding on the nose, then headed out of the barn where the animals were resting.

A cricket chirped. Somewhere off in the middle distance, an owl let loose with a mournful hoot. From the front came the occasional crack of rifle fire. It was only occasional, though, not the continuous, almost surflike roar it became when the action heated up. He looked up to the rather cloudy heavens and thanked God he wasn't an infantryman.

Captain Stuart's tent was pitched not far from Jake's gun. A lot of officers, instead of living under canvas, would have commandeered a house and made themselves comfortable there. That would have been all right with Feather- ston; what point to being an officer if you couldn't take advantage of it? But Stuart, despite his fancy dinners and such, still affected a pose as just another artilleryman — except when he needed something from his father. The hypocrisy irked Jake.

He heard a low murmur of voices from beyond the battery commander's tent. He frowned. What was going on back there? The voices grew quiet as he approached. He found Nero and Perseus, along with the Negro laborers from the rest of the guns in the battery and even with Captain Stuart's servant Pom-pey, gathered in a circle around a tiny fire. Walls all around made it impossible for any Yankee to spot from the ground; they could smother it in an instant if aeroplanes came over.

Near the fire lay a pair of dice and some money. "Evenin", Sergeant," Pompey said in his mincing voice when he recognized Jake. "We is just spreadin' the wealth around, you might say." He grinned. His teeth were very white in his dark face.

"Yeah, well, I done spread my wealth around lately," Featherston said. Perseus and Nero laughed. They'd heard him grouse about losing his shirt with that full house. When Pompey reached for the dice, Jake shrugged and left.

His own gun crew had their poker game going strong. He watched for a while, then pulled out what money he had left and sat in with them. He won a couple of little hands, lost a couple, then lost with a flush to a full house. That cost him a big piece of the anemic bankroll he'd brought to the game. He quit in disgust and went off to wrap himself in his blanket.

Some time in the middle of the night, somebody gently shook him awake. He looked up to find Perseus squatting beside his bedroll. In a voice not much above a whisper, the laborer said, "We ain't actin' like niggers no more, Marse Jake. Figured I'd tell you, on account of you know we don't got to. You want to be careful fo' a while, is all I got to say." He slipped away.

Featherston looked around, not altogether sure he hadn't been dreaming. He didn't see Perseus. He didn't hear anything. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

A little before dawn, Captain Stuart's angry voice woke him: "Pompey? Where the hell are you, Pompey? I call you, you bring your black ass over here and find out what I want, do you hear me? Pompey!"

Stuart's shouts went on and on. Wherever Pompey was, he wasn't coming when called. And then Michael Scott hurried up to Jake, a worried look on his face. "Sarge, you seen Nero or Perseus? Don't know where they're at, but they sure as hell ain't where they're supposed to be."

"Jesus," Featherston said, bouncing to his feet. "It wasn't a dream. Sure as hell it wasn't." Scott stared at him, having no idea what he meant. He wasn't altogether sure himself. One thing seemed clear: trouble was brewing.

The policeman at the corner of Beaufain and Meeting Street-a pudgy, white-mustached fellow who might have fought in the War of Secession-threw up his right hand, halting north-south traffic on Meeting so trucks and wagons on Beaufain could continue making their way to and from the Charleston railroad lines and harbor.

Anne Colleton snarled something distinctly unladylike and stomped on the brakes of her Vauxhall Prince Henry. The motorcar groaned and squeaked to a stop, its radiator grill projecting slightly out onto Beaufain. She'd bought the Vauxhall because it could go fast, not for its ability to stop in a hurry. The brakes were a good deal weaker than the sixty-horsepower engine.

A man in a battered Ford was stopped alongside her. He gave her a look halfway between curious and rude. She'd long since grown used, if not resigned, to that look. Even in the USA, lady automobilists were a small mi nority. In the more conservative Confederacy, they were rare. She smiled back at the man. He might have thought it a sweet smile… if he were an imbecile.

Rather nervously, he tipped his straw hat. "Sure you know what you're doing in the car"-he proved himself a Charleston native by pronouncing it cyar — "little lady? Wouldn't you rather have a chauffeur drive you around?"

Anne smiled again, even more savagely than before. "I had to fire my last two chauffeurs," she answered. "They went too slow to suit me."

The policeman halted traffic on Beaufain and let the waiting vehicles on Meeting Street move. Anne put the potent Vauxhall — with three times the power of the Ford next to it-through its paces. She left the Ford's driver choking on her exhaust.

She was almost sorry the Charleston Hotel lay only a couple of blocks south of Beaufain. The sensation of speed in the Vauxhall exhilarated her far more than the same speed would have in a train. Here she was the engineer, her foot on the throttle. Freedom, she thought.

A pair of Negro servants came dashing out from under the columned portico of the hotel. One of them handed her down to the sidewalk. Then both of them grabbed her suitcases and followed her inside. The doorman, a fat col ored fellow in a getup that made him look like a Revolutionary soldier, threw wide the door to allow the procession to enter.

Electric fans mounted on the ceiling stirred the air without cooling it. Anne strode up to the desk clerk, gave her name, and said, "I believe you have the Presidential Suite reserved for me."

"Uh, Miss Colleton, I'm uh, very sorry, ma'am," the clerk said, plainly alarmed at having to give her bad news, "but we've, uh, had to move you to the Beauregard Suite on the third floor."

She froze him with a glance. "Oh? And why is that?" Her voice was low, calm, reasonable… dangerous.

"Because, ma'am, President Wilson's in the Presidential Suite," he blurted.

"Oh," she said again. Her laugh, much to the unhappy clerk's relief, held acquiescence. "Nothing you can do about that, I suppose. I didn't know he was going to be in Charleston."

"Yes, ma'am," the clerk said. "He's come down to launch the Fort Sumter — you know, the new cruiser that just got built. That's tomorrow. Tonight there's a reception and dance here. In fact…" He turned back to the rectangular array of message slots behind the registration desk and pulled out a cream-colored envelope. "You have an invitation here. When Mr. Wilson's private secretary learned who had been booked into the Presidential Suite before him, he made sure to give you one."

"I should hope so," Anne said, conscious of her position in South Carolina. Then she turned the warmth up on her smile. "That was thoughtful. The Beauregard Suite, you say. It will do."

After she'd ridden upstairs in the lift and tipped the servants carrying her bags, she sat down on the bed and laughed till tears rolled down her cheeks. The Charleston Hotel was modern enough to boast telephones in its fancy suites, the Beauregard among them. She made a call. "Roger?" she said when the connection was established. "I'm afraid I won't be able to see you tonight after all… Yes, I'm seeing someone else… Who?… Why should I tell you?… Oh, all right, I will — it's President Wilson."

That produced a good fifteen-second silence on the other end of the line. Then Roger Kimball said, "I hope you're not going to see as much of him as you were going to see of me."

Though the submariner couldn't see her, she nodded approvingly. He had gall. She admired that. "How can I be sure?" she said. "He hasn't asked me." That made Kimball sputter, as she'd hoped. She went on, "I will see you tomorrow — unless the president sweeps me off my feet."

Kimball chuckled. "Or you sweep him off his. But he's a long ways from young. Two nights running'd probably be tough for him. Tomorrow, then."

"He does have gall," Anne murmured after she'd hung up. She pondered her luggage. She'd brought clothes for going out with a young, none-too-wealthy naval officer, as well as some frilly, silky things for more private moments with him. What did she have that was suitable for dinner with the President of the Confederate States of America?

She went through the dresses she had with her. When she came to the summer-weight rose floral voile, she smiled. The full, pleated skirt would flow nicely around her legs as she moved, and the laced bodice over the white voile chemisette might draw the eye even of a president no longer young. The dress was wrinkled from its time in the suitcase. She grabbed for the bell pull by the bed. A maid knocked at the door less than a minute later. She gave the colored woman the dress for pressing.

As she'd been sure it would, it came back in plenty of time for the dinner, which, the invitation said, was to begin at eight o'clock. She had expected to have dined earlier and to be engaged in other things by then, but what you ex pected and what you got weren't always the same.

Like the Presidential Suite, the Beauregard Suite had not only cold but also hot running water. Anne ran the bathtub full and washed away the dust and grime of the trip from Marshlands down to Charleston. She knew she would start perspiring again as soon as she stepped out of the tub, but no one could do anything about that, not in South Carolina. She was glad she wore her hair short and straight, so the bath did not badly disarrange it.

She went downstairs about half past seven. As she'd expected, a crowd of rich and prominent South Carolinians had already gathered outside the doors of the banquet hall; a couple of Negro attendants with almost the presence of Scipio made sure those doors did not open prematurely.

Being a rich and prominent South Carolinian herself, Anne Colleton knew a good many of the people there. Being younger, more attractive, and more fe male than most of them, she had as much company as she wanted, and per haps rather more. She saw a couple of wives whose husbands had abandoned them to talk to her sending imperfectly friendly looks in her direction. She sent back the same sort of carnivorous smiles she'd given the fool in the Ford.

They pride themselves on being useless, she thought. They don't know anything, and they don't want to know anything. If you asked one of them to drive a motorcar, she'd tell you how unladylike it was, and how she had a chauffeur to take her everywhere she wanted to go. Old-fashioned, boring frumps. She wondered what they would have made of the exhibition of modern art she'd organized. Her lips pulled back in even more contempt. As if any of them could have brought off a show like that!

The women's stares turned even more poisonous when, after opening the doors, the attendants began escorting people to their seats. Not only was she placed at the president's table, but right across from him. "We were told to put you here, ma'am," her Negro guide said, "to make amends for Mr. Wilson taking your room away from you." He pulled out her chair so she could sit down.

Woodrow Wilson strode in, long and lean, at exactly eight o'clock. Everyone stood to honor him. He had something less than the almost demoniac energy of Theodore Roosevelt; you could not imagine him leading a charge across no-man's-land, as you would with the Yankee Kaiser. His appeal was more to the intellect, and he gave the impression of having that and to spare.

Which was not to say he could not be charming in his own way. Smiling across the table at Anne, he said, "I do hope you will forgive me for so rudely dispossessing you this afternoon, Miss Colleton."

"Quite all right. I feel I'm doing my patriotic duty by moving, Your Excellency," Anne answered. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw she was getting more looks from people who didn't know exactly who she was. Down deep where it didn't show, she grinned. President Wilson had known who she was long before he'd taken the suite away from her. He'd visited Marshlands, after all. And Anne would have been astonished if more than half a dozen men in the banquet hall had contributed more money to Wilson's election campaign back in 1909 than she had. Her brothers had laughed at her then, but she thought the investment had paid off well.

No sooner had the thought of Tom and Jacob crossed her mind than Wilson said, "I understand one of your gallant brothers was wounded this summer in a U.S. attack."

"He was gassed, yes," Anne said shortly. Having Jacob back at Marshlands in such a state would have been hard enough. Having him back at Marshlands in such a state and drugged on morphia and drunk when he wasn't drugged (and sometimes when he was) and fornicating his way through the colored wenches was ten times worse. That Cherry was getting so stuck up, it was as if she thought herself the rightful mistress of Marshlands.

At her anger, Wilson's narrow, deeply lined face hardened. "It is because the United States, like the Huns across the sea with whom they are allied, employ such vile and unrestrained means of waging war that they and their arrogant pretensions must be checked."

Down the table, a plump man with a red face that had grown redder with each glass of wine he'd poured down said loudly, "The damnyankees need whipping on account of they're damnyankees. Once you've gone and said that, what more needs saying?"

Anne nodded emphatic agreement. But Woodrow Wilson shook his head. "I would share this continent with them if I could," he said. "If tomorrow they would agree to a peace based on the status quo ante helium with us and our brave Canadian comrades, I would accept on the instant. Then this half of the world would be at peace, and we could work toward peace as well be tween our allies on the one hand and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other."

"They won't agree to any such thing, though," Anne said. "They tried to keep us from becoming a nation in the first place and they still think we be long to them by rights. If they can snuff us out, they will. We can't let them."

"Unfortunately, Miss Colleton, I fear you are correct," the president said sadly. "And so we have no choice but to continue the struggle, confident that God and justice are on our side. I came down to South Carolina to celebrate our production of another tool toward our ultimate triumph." He still seemed unhappy about such duty, and paused, shifting from the political to the per sonal: "But you undoubtedly know why I am here. What brings you to Charleston? Business or pleasure?"

He did not say that slightingly, as many a man might have: he knew she was a businesswoman in her own right. "Pleasure," she answered. It was, at the moment, pleasure she was forgoing for the sake of the dinner, but Presi dent Wilson did not need to know about that.

Colored waiters cleared away dishes. Wilson got up and made a brief speech, one line of which stuck in Anne's memory: "There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our nation and our people to be ignored or violated." It got, she thought, less applause than it deserved.

Colored musicians began playing a sprightly waltz. Couples drifted out onto the dance floor. Anne succeeded in dismaying the old frumps once more, for President Wilson asked her for the first dance. He had been a widower for more than twenty years, but must have had a good deal of practice at affairs like this, for he was strong and sure; Anne enjoyed dancing with him. She thought he took pleasure in it, too, and wondered if he was interested in something more than dancing.

Whether he was or not, she wasn't, despite the way she'd teased Roger Kimball. If you slept with a man of such power, he might want to go to bed with you again. Anne flattered herself that, if she slept with Woodrow Wilson, he would want to go to bed with her again. But if she slept with him, he would never take her seriously again. To her, that was more important.

When the music ended, she said, "Win the war, Your Excellency. Whatever it takes, win it."

"I have done my utmost, Miss Colleton, and shall go on doing my utmost till next March," he answered. "After that, God willing, it will be in the capable hands of Vice President Semmes."

"God willing," Anne agreed. She suspected Gabriel Semmes might prosecute the war with more vigor than Wilson had done. For that matter, Semmes' principal opponent in the November elections, Doroteo Arango, would probably prosecute the war with more vigor than Wilson had done: Arango was a young fire-eater if ever there was one. But Arango, she thought, had al most no chance of winning; the Radical Liberals, who had nominated him, would sweep Sonora, Chihuahua, and Cuba, and might take Texas, too, but she doubted they'd have much luck farther north and east.

Wilson said, "Will you be at the launching tomorrow, Miss Colleton? If you would like to come, see my secretary for an invitation in the morning."

"I may do that. Thank you, Your Excellency," Anne said. Going down to the harbor would make meeting Roger Kimball all the more convenient.

The music started up again. Three gray-haired men with the look of financiers almost got into a football scrimmage with one another, inviting her to dance. They'd dutifully waltzed the first round with their gray-haired wives, and now, obviously, had decided they were entitled to some fun.

Anne danced with each of them in turn. She stayed on the floor till a little past eleven, then went to bed. When she checked with the front desk the next morning, she discovered Wilson 's secretary had given her an invitation to the launching ceremony even without her asking for it. She put it into her hand bag, then went back to her room, telephoned Roger Kimball, and arranged to meet him at the Firemark on State Street, not far from the harbor.

The launch of the Fort Sumter disappointed her for a couple of reasons. For one, even with the pass, she couldn't get close enough for a good view of President Wilson smashing a bottle of champagne against the cruiser's bow. And, for another, Wilson, a staunch temperance man, made it plain in his speech that the champagne hadn't really been champagne, but soda water instead. Anne heartily approved of overturning some traditions, but that wasn't one of them.

Roger Kimball was waiting under the Firemark — a seal dating back to the seventeenth century showing that the building on which it was affixed carried fire insurance — when Anne drove up in her Vauxhall. The submariner looked avidly at her, and even more so at her motorcar. "May I drive it?" he asked.

She judged he would sulk and pout unless she indulged him, so she said yes and slid over into the passenger seat. Kimball bounded into the automobile and roared up and down the streets of Charleston with a panache that sometimes bordered on the suicidal. Anne prided herself as a bold driver, but after a few hairsbreadth escapes realized she had to yield the palm to her companion.

"Try not to put both of us through the windscreen," she said with some asperity as Kimball screeched to a stop bare inches from a Negro fisherman selling shrimp out of a basket. The Negro jumped back from the Vauxhall, but spilled no seafood.

After a moment, he realized he wouldn't be crushed after all. Smiling at the Navy man in his dashing whites and at his pretty companion, the fisher man held out the basket and gave forth with his sales call:

"Ro-ro swimp!

Ro-ro swimp!

Roro-ro-ro-ro swimp!

Coma and git yo' ro-ro swimp!"

Kimball took him at his word, jumping out of the automobile and buying a couple of pounds of them. The motorcar rested on a slight downgrade; Anne had to reach out a leg and stamp on the none-too-potent brake to keep the Vauxhall from getting the fisherman after all, and Kimball with him.

"What are you doing?" she demanded when the submariner, his hands full of crustaceans, got back into the motorcar.

Nothing fazed him. He dropped the shrimp, a couple of them still feebly flailing little legs, on the seat between them. "I know a little place where they'll cook the shrimp or the fish if you bring it in. Can't be beat." He smacked his lips, then added, "And it's only a couple of blocks from a hotel that never heard of house detectives."

"And how do you know that?" she asked.

"How many girls have I brought there before you, do you mean?" he returned. "Does it matter? If we aren't doing this for fun, why are we doing it?"

To that, she had no answer. Kimball had never claimed to offer more than amusement, or to want more than that from her. Under those circumstances, wondering about others before her was foolish. She hadn't been a virgin there in the Pullman car on the way to New Orleans, either. She nodded and said, "Let's go."

The restaurant was in the far northwest of Charleston, well away from the fancy part of the city. It was, in fact, much closer to one of the Negro districts, which began only a few blocks away. The proprietor, who looked as if he might have been a quadroon passing for white, greeted Roger Kim ball as an old friend. If he was used to seeing the submariner in variegated company, he gave no sign of it.

What he did with those little shrimp made the visit worthwhile. Cooked with rice and okra and chopped bacon and some spices he coyly refused to name, they made a better meal than Anne had had with President Wilson the night before. She didn't tell him that, assuming he wouldn't have believed her. She did give him as much praise as she thought he could accept. He bowed low when she left on Kimball's arm. The Navy man looked bemused, remarking, "He's never done that before."

He handed Anne into the Vauxhall, then drove to the hotel, which was even closer to the Negro section of town than the restaurant had been. As if to impress on her that it was a tough district, he took the key out of the ignition and gave it to her, a precaution with which she seldom bothered.

As he'd predicted, the desk clerk placidly nodded when Kimball signed the registry, Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson Davis. A night's rent was a night's rent. The second-story room was small but surprisingly clean. Kimball locked the door behind him, lighted the kerosene lamp, and then turned to Anne with a grin. "What are we waiting for?"

"Not a thing." She smiled back. From a lot of men — from most mensuch brashness would have put her off, but it was what drew her to Roger Kimball. She stepped forward into his arms. He squeezed her to him, tilted her chin up, and delivered an authoritative kiss.

For him to get out of his uniform, a little later, was the work of a few moments. Once naked, he saluted her without using his hands. He took his time about undressing her, pausing to kiss and caress each new bit of flesh revealed. She sighed with relief when, after detaching her stockings from their garters and sliding them down her legs, he finally peeled her out of her steel-stiffened corset.

"You men are so lucky not to have to wear those things," she said, "especially in weather like this."

He set his hand on her sweaty belly, then let it stray lower. Suddenly impatient, she caught his shoulders and pulled him onto her. He rode her hard, which was just what she wanted. When they were through, he rubbed at his back. "You clawed me good there," he said, sitting up.

"I hope it was good," Anne answered, sated and greedy at the same time. The room had no sink, but did have a pitcher and a bowl. She used some water to wash him off, then took him in her mouth. She wanted him hard again. As soon as he was, she straddled him and rode him as ferociously as he'd taken her, until she quivered again and again and he groaned beneath her as if in pain rather than ecstasy.

Afterwards, they lay side by side on the bed, too spent to move, neither of them much wanting to get back into stifling clothes when being naked felt so much better. Roger Kimball fell asleep first. Anne was going to tease him about it, but discovered she was yawning, too. She dozed off a few minutes later.

Sometime in the middle of the night — the lamp had burned out, leaving the hotel room very dark-she woke up, needing to use the chamber pot. Her motion woke Kimball, and they made love again, lazily this time, she on her side facing away from him, barely touching save at one sweet place in the warm, muggy night.

When Anne woke again, dawn was beginning to leak through the Venetian blinds over the window. But the light was not what roused her. From out in the street came a terrific racket of shouts and crashes and, after a moment, gunshots.

Roger Kimball sat bolt upright. Unclothed though he remained, he was suddenly and obviously a military man, not a lover. "What the devil…?" he said, his voice sharp as a cracking whip.

Right under the window, a black man, without intending to, gave him his answer: "To de barricades!" the fellow yelled. "De revolution comin'!"

Anne and Kimball stared at each other. "Oh, Lord," they said together.

Below them, the cry grew louder and came from more and more throats, till it seemed to fill the whole world: "De revolution! De revolution comin'!"

Scipio was talking with one of the cooks in the Marshlands kitchen when the woman's scream came from upstairs. "Good God in heaven, what can that be?" the butler exclaimed. Since he was talking as an extension of the estate rather than in his own person, he used the elegant formal English he would have employed when addressing Anne Colleton or some white guest at the mansion.

"Dunno, but I gwine find out," the cook said, and, ignoring the fine points of the pecan-and-sweet-potato pie about which Scipio had been trying to instruct him, ran up toward the front of the house.

Scipio followed. He had no sooner reached the foot of the stairs than another scream rang out, this one louder than before. "No! Godalmighty, no!" the woman up there wailed.

"Who dat?" the cook demanded.

"I believe that is Cherry," Scipio replied. Had it not been undignified to do so in front of the cook, he would have scratched his head. The second scream and the wail had both come from Jacob Colleton's room — so, presumably, had the first. But that made no sense. Cherry had gone up to Jacob's room a great many times. Scipio didn't know exactly what she and the mistress' gassed brother did behind that closed door, but he did know she'd always kept quiet about it till now.

The closed door opened, then slammed shut. Cherry came running out. Now the cook said "Godalmighty!" in a tone half shock, half admiration: she was naked and, though she clutched her dress to her, quite a lot of her remained on display.

She dashed down the stairs, moaning, "Dat debbil! Dat horrible debbil! What he try an' make me do!" She ran past Scipio and the cook, both of whom stared even more, for she was not covered at all from behind. She opened the front door and ran outside, out toward the fields if the direction from which her cries came was any indication.

"Damn white folks," the cook muttered, glaring up toward the closed door from which Cherry had emerged.

A moment later, the door opened again. Jacob Colleton wheeled himself out to the banister. "Come up here, Scipio," he croaked.

Scipio obeyed, as he had obeyed white men and women^every day of his life. "How may I help you, sir?" he asked, his voice the polite, attentive, meaningless counterpart to the mask of service stretched across his face.

Instead of answering at once, Jacob Colleton wheeled back into his room, motioning for Scipio to follow him. Once they were inside, Colleton demanded, "What's the matter with that wench? Has she gone mad?"

"Sir, I would not have the faintest idea," Scipio answered stiffly.

"Oh, don't act stupid with me," Colleton said, anger bubbling in his hoarse whisper. "You know we don't play caroms up here. We were about to screw, not to put too fine a point on it, the same way we've screwed two dozen times before this, when all of a sudden she went tearing out of here as if — I don't know as if what. I haven't found anything she doesn't do-and like doing, too, by God."

He panted, trying to catch his breath after such a long speech. To Scipio's own surprise, he believed Colleton. He knew bewilderment when he saw and heard it. What was wrong with Cherry, then? Had she gone round the bend?

Scipio glanced out the window toward the fields. Sure enough, there stood Cherry, still holding the dress in front of her, haranguing a swelling group of field hands. Scipio couldn't hear what she was saying, but he recognized the pose from meetings of the. Reds in Cassius' cottage.

And — Scipio stiffened. Here came a good many Negroes with rifles in their hands. All at once, everything came clear. This was the moment Cassius and Island and Cherry and the rest had been talking about for so long. Jacob Colleton hadn't done anything out of the ordinary with or to Cherry… but she was saying he had, to bring doubters over to the cause.

Whatever Colleton had or hadn't done with Cherry, he had seen Scipio's attention focus on what was happening outside. Coughing and swearing in rasping gasps, he had a look for himself. And then, most abruptly, he reminded Scipio he had been a soldier, and a good one: he had the Tredegar down off the wall and a clip in it before the butler could blink. He pointed it straight at Scipio's head.

Scipio stared down the barrel. It was black as midnight in there, and looked about a foot wide to his frightened gaze. He could smell gun oil. "Get out of here, boy," Colleton said, his bubbling whisper making the words all the more deadly cold. "You niggers want to play games, I'll show you how it's done up at the front." He was smiling. Scipio hadn't seen him so happy since he'd been gassed. The rifle barrel twitched toward the doorway. "Git!"

Scipio fled, not just out the door but down the stairs. Jacob Colleton slammed the door behind him, and locked it. The first shot from upstairs rang out when Scipio got to the front door, which Cherry hadn't closed after her.

He reached the doorway just in time to watch Island 's head explode into red mist. The revolutionary took half a step, then fell on what was left of his face. The rifle he'd been carrying bounced on the ground beside him.

"Git down]" Cassius yelled as another rifle shot barked and another Red went down, probably for good. Some of the armed Negroes listened to the hunter. Some just started banging away at Jacob Colleton's window. The racket was like the end of the world. Then Colleton fired again, and another black man sprawled twitching in the grass. By then, Cassius had taken cover behind a buggy. A bang! from upstairs and yet another Red went down. Scipio remembered what Colleton had said about the game of war. He was getting another chance to play, sure enough, and he still remembered how.

"Rush de house!" Cassius shouted. "I cover you." His men — and there could be no possible doubt they were his men-did as he ordered. Colleton knocked down another of them, but Cassius was shooting at him, and Cassius was no mean shot, either. Three barefoot Negroes in gray homespun dashed past Scipio up the stairs.

They pounded on the door to Jacob Colleton's room with their rifle butts. One fell back with a groan, shot from inside the room. But the door flew open. More shots rang out, and then a black man's whoop of triumph: "Dat white debbil, he done fo'!"

Cassius came walking up to Marshlands, rifle in his hand. He shouted for everyone to get out, waited half a minute, shouted again, and then went inside. "Wish dat damn Frenchman still have he ugly paintings here," he remarked to Scipio. "I do dis wid dey." He struck a match and touched it to a gauzy curtain. Flames raced up it, reached the wall above the window, and caught there. Grinning, Cassius hurried back outside, catching Scipio by the arm and hustling him along.

Scipio stared in through the window at the growing fire, feeling a pang for beauty destroyed no matter upon how much suffering it rested. The bourgeois in you, Cassius would have said. "You got to do dat, Cass?" he asked.

"Got to," Cassius said firmly. "Gwine burn it all, Kip. De revolution here."