How Few Remain

Chapter 8

General Thomas Jackson peered north across the Ohio River through a telescope. "The onslaught cannot now be long delayed," he said to Brigadier General Peter Turney, who stood by his side. "I thank our heavenly Father for having given us this much time in which to ready Louisville for the storm."

"The Yankees were slowcoaches in the last war," Turney answered, his Tennessee twang contrasting with Jackson 's softer Virginia accent. "Doesn't look like they've learned a whole hell of a lot since."

"For which we should also give thanks to God," Jackson said, and Turney nodded.

Negro labour gangs in tunics and trousers of coarse, undyed cotton-almost the same color as old-style Confederate uniforms-were still busily digging firing pits and building earthworks and abatis throughout Louisville, but especially down by the waterfront. Without the slaves, the defenses of the city would have been far weaker than they were.

Brigadier General Turney asked, "Sir, is it true what I hear, that President Longstreet's going to try and manumit the niggers after the war?" Under bushy gray eyebrows, his broad, earnest face was worried.

"It is true, General," Jackson said, and Turney grimaced. "He feels the effort to be necessary for reasons of state."

"Reasons of state be damned." Turney pointed toward a gang marching along with picks and shovels shouldered like rifles. "Without slaves like that bunch there, what in blazes are we supposed to do the next time the Yankees pick a fight with us?"

"I can hope that, even if free, the Negro shall not be equal to the white man, and shall be subject to some form of conscription in time of need."

"Turn 'em loose and they'll get uppity-you mark my words," Turney said. Then (rather to Jackson 's relief, for he agreed with the views the Tennessean expressed) he changed the subject: "Do you think we knocked out enough of their invasion boats to have held them up?"

"I wish I did, but I very much doubt it," Jackson answered. "Artillery is ideally suited for breaking up an attack once launched, but I fear the science has not advanced to the point where it can preempt one. That day may be coming, but has not yet arrived."

"We'll hurt 'em when they do come-whenever that is," Brigadier General Turney said.

"We shall do more than hurt them, General," Jackson said. "We shall smash them and wreck any further hopes for the invasion of our country they may have-we shall do that, or I will know the reason why and the men responsible."

He did not raise his voice or make any histrionic gesture. Nevertheless, before Turney quite realized what he was doing, he gave back a pace from Jackson. The brigadier general laughed nervously. "The men won't dare lose," he said. "They're more afraid of what you'd do to 'em than they are of the damnyankees."

Jackson considered. "That is as it should be," he said at last, and swung up onto his horse. Leaving Turney to stare after him, he rode back through Louisville to the headquarters he'd established south of the city, beyond U.S. artillery range.

Even in its present state, with most of the civilian population fled, Louisville struck him as the least distinctively Southern city in the Confederate States. That didn't spring only from its having been the last town to fall into Confederate hands. Many of the people hereabouts were Yankees by origin or descent, from New York and New England.

And Louisville, like Covington farther east, still looked across the border to the United States, in the same way that Cincinnati, on the other side of the Ohio, looked south to the Confederacy. All three were towns that had grown up trading what the North made for that the South did. That North and South were now two different countries made trade more complicated, but had neither stopped it nor even slowed it much.

Coins jingled in Jackson 's pocket. Some had been minted in the USA, some in the CSA. Both nations coined to the same standard; along the border, that was all that mattered. Yankee greenbacks circulated as readily as the brown banknotes issued in the Confederate States. A lot of people hereabouts not only didn't much care whether the Stars and Bars or the Stars and Stripes flew over them, they hardly noticed which flag did fly.

"They will, I expect, learn the difference in short order," Jackson said to himself.

A company of infantry, the soldiers in gray, the officers in the new butternut uniforms, was marching north as he rode south past them. The men grinned and whooped and tossed their hats. "Stonewall!" they shouted. Abstracted, Jackson was by them before he raised his own hat to acknowledge the cheers.

He rode past the University of Louisville, past the downs where, locals told him, people were talking about building a racetrack, and into a grove of oaks where he'd pitched his tent so he could rest under the shade of the trees. After giving his horse to an orderly, he hunted up his own chief artillerist, Major General E. Porter Alexander. "It won't be long," he said bluntly.

"Good," Alexander answered. "High time." He was more than ten years younger than Jackson, with a perpetually amused look on his long, handsome face and a pointed brown beard flecked with gray.

"Much will depend on your guns, General," Jackson said. "I shall want as much damage as possible done to the Yankees' boats while they are in the water, and to their installations on the northern bank of the river."

"I understand, sir," Alexander said. "We've been trying to hurt them before they launch, but we unmask ourselves when we bombard them, and they have a lot of guns over there trying to knock us out. Say what you will about the rest of the U.S. Army, their artillery has always been good."

He and Jackson smiled at each other. Jackson had begun his military service in the U.S. Artillery. Alexander himself had started out as an engineer, switching to big guns not long after choosing the Confederate side in the War of Secession.

"It is of the most crucial importance that they not gain such a lodgment on the southern shore of the Ohio that they drive us beyond rifle range of the river," Jackson said. "That would enable them more easily to erect bridges to facilitate the flow of men and equipage into our country, and their engineers are not to be despised, either." He didn't often think to return compliments, and was always pleased with himself when he did remember such niceties.

"As long as they don't drive us out of cannon range, we can still give them a rough time," Alexander said. "And our guns range a deal farther than they did in the last war."

Jackson noted the artillerist did not promise he could put the bridges out of action with his guns. One reason he appreciated Alexander was that the younger officer never made promises impossible to keep.

"1 shall rely on your men quite as much as on the infantry," Jackson said.

"Coming from you, sir, I'll take that," Alexander replied. "In fact, I'll let the men know you said it. If anything will make them fight harder, that'll do it."

They conferred a while longer. Jackson went back to his own tent, where he spent an hour in prayer. He had heard that General Willcox, the U.S. commander, was also a man of thoroughgoing piety. That worried him not in the least. "Lord, Thou shalt surely judge the right," he said.

After a frugal supper of stale bread and roasted beef with salt but no other seasoning, a regimen he had followed for many years, he checked with the telegraphers to see if President Longstreet had sent him any further instructions. Longstreet hadn't. Having ordered him to make a defensive fight, Longstreet seemed content to let his gen-eral-in-chief handle the details. Robert E. Lee, God rest his soul, had known how to write a discretionary order. Seeing that Longstreet had learned something from the man who had commanded them both was good.

On returning to his tent, Jackson reviewed his dispositions. He was, he decided, as ready as he could be. He doubted the same held true on the other side of the river. Taking that as a sign God favored the Confederate cause, he pulled off his boots, knelt beside his iron-framed cot for the day's last petition to the Lord, then lay down and fell asleep almost at once.

Whenever he was in the field, he had himself roused with the first twilight at latest. He'd just sat up in bed after the orderly woke him when a great thundering rose from the north. None of the artillery duels his forces and General Willcox's had fought were anything close to this. "It begins!" he exclaimed. As usual, all he needed to put on were his boots and his hat. That done, he rushed out of the tent.

He almost collided with E. Porter Alexander, who emerged from under canvas as fast as he did. Alexander had shed his tunic for the night and was wearing only shirt and trousers, which made him look more like a Yankee labourer on a hot afternoon than a Confederate general before sunup.

"Now we shall see what we shall see," Alexander said, for all the world like a chemistry professor about to drop a bit of sodium into water for the sake of the flame and smoke. "Artillery can do so much more than it could during the last war, but we knew much more about sheltering from it, too."

"A lesson learned from painful experience," Jackson said. Now, all at once, he wished he'd encamped in the open. The leafy canopy overhead kept him from having any better notion of what was going on than his ears could bring him, and all he could learn from them was that both U.S. and Confederate guns were in action, every one of them sounding as if it was pounding away as hard as it could.

An orderly led up Jackson 's horse. At the same time, another man dashed up to the general-in-chief with a telegram clutched in his fist. "This just in from General Turney, sir," he said. "It cuts off halfway- don't know if a shell broke the wire or his operator got hit."

"Give it to me." Jackson put on his glasses, then took the wire. It was hard to read in the still-dim light. A soldier brought over a candle. By the flickering light, Jackson read, U.S. FORCES ON THE RIVER IN LARGE NUMBERS: RESISTING: WITH: ARTILLERY: AND: RIFLE: FIRE:. NEED:

As the private from the signals office had said, it ended there.

Deducing what General Turney required, though, required no great generalship: a schoolchild could have done it. Jackson shouted for a messenger. When one appeared, he said, "The two brigades quartered near the Gait House are ordered to the waterfront to resist the invaders if their commanders have not sent them forward on their own initiative." The messenger saluted and dashed off, shouting for a horse. Jackson gave the identical order to the soldier who'd passed him the telegram. "With the U.S. bombardment, I do not know if a wire can get through, but make the effort."

Not far away, E. Porter Alexander was also giving orders, in a calm, unhurried voice: "Until we know different, we'll go on the notion that the Yankees are doing what we expect. That means Fire Plan One, with guns ranged in on the river and on the Indiana docks to stick to their assigned targets. Any changes from the plan are to be reported to me at once."

When he was done, he turned to Jackson with a smile on his face. "A pity, isn't it, General, that battles have grown too large to be commanded from the front? If messengers and telegrams don't constantly tell us what's happening across the field, how can we direct the fighting?"

"In a fight this size, we can't, and I hate that," Jackson said. "Leading a brigade against Winchester made me feel a young man again. I tell you this, though, General: I am going to see the fighting for myself, even if only from a distance." He mounted the horse the orderly had brought, and rode out from under the spreading branches of the oaks toward a nearby hilltop.

Sunrise was near. The eastern horizon glowed with pink and gold light, the spark that was Venus gleaming through it. Only the brightest stars still shone in the darker sky farther west. But the northern quadrant was ablaze with bursting shells; Jackson might have been watching a Fourth of July fireworks display from some distant house.

By where the smoke was thickest, he could tell that the U.S. gunners were giving the wharves of the waterfront a fearful pounding. Had he led the Yankees, he would have ordered the same, to make the Confederate infantrymen keep their heads down and prevent them from bringing too heavy a fire to bear against the invasion boats. The smoke kept him from discerning much more than that. And, with every passing minute, though the light got stronger, the smoke got worse: smoke from the Yankees' guns on the other side of the Ohio, smoke from bursting shells, and smoke from the C.S. cannon responding to the enemy's fire.

Jackson 's frown was venomous. He wanted nothing so much as to grab a Tredegar and go where the fighting was hottest. But Major General Alexander had the right of it: if he did that, he could not at the same time command. More men were capable of fighting the damnyankees than of leading the entire army against them. And, had he snatched up a rifle and run off to pretend he was a private soldier, he would have been able to see even less of the battlefield than he could from his present vantage point.

He'd already been too long away from his electric eyes and ears. And messengers would be getting back to headquarters from the fighting by now, too. Regretfully, he used feet and reins to start his horse back toward the tent among the trees.

No sooner had he dismounted than the first messenger arrived, dirty-faced, with a torn and filthy uniform, eyes wide and staring from what was surely his first taste of combat. He stared at Jackson, too. Was that because he was meeting a man legendary in the CSA or simply because he was too battered to recall the message he was supposed to deliver?

Then, very visibly, his wits began to turn, as if they were a steamboat's paddlewheel. "General Jackson, sir!" he exclaimed. "The damnyankees have men ashore on our side of the river." He gulped. "Lots of 'em, sir."

Even in the predawn stillness, southern Indiana remained sultry, sticky. Frederick Douglass stood in a field just outside the city limits of New Albany. Every couple of minutes, he would slap at himself as a mosquito bit him. "I'm an old man," he said sadly. "I remember being able to hear the mosquitoes buzzing around, so that sometimes 1 could get them before they got me. No more, not for years. Now they take me by surprise."

That amused the U.S. artillerymen standing by their pieces awaiting the word to commence. "It ain't no big loss, Pop," one of them said. "That goddamn buzzing drives me crazy, nothin' else but." A couple of his comrades spoke up in agreement.

"Better to know the enemy than to let him take you by surprise," Douglass insisted, which drew another chuckle from the Massachusetts volunteers. In the couple of days he'd been with them, they'd treated him well: General Willcox had made a good choice in assigning him to their battery when he'd asked to watch the bombardment of Louisville from among the guns.

A rider came trotting down the road. He halted when he saw the guns: big, dark shapes in what was otherwise an empty field. "Open fire at four A.M. sharp," he called, and rode on to give the next battery the word.

Someone struck a match, first stepping well away from the guns and limbers to do so. The brief flare of light showed the boyish features of Captain Joseph Little, the battery commander. "Fifteen minutes," he said after checking his pocket watch. "Men, we'll load our pieces now, so as to get the first shots off precisely on the mark."

In darkness just this side of perfect, the gun crews handled unscrewing the breech blocks, loading in shells and bags of powder after them, and sealing the guns once more as smoothly as they might have done at high noon. Douglass had already seen that the artillery volunteers, most of whom were militiamen of long standing, were trained to a standard close to that of their Regular Army counterparts, which could not have been said about the volunteer infantry.

Captain Little spoke up again: "Mr. Douglass, you'll want to make certain"-his Bay State accent made the word come out as suht'n, almost as if he were a Rebel-"you're not standing right behind a gun. When they go off, the recoil will send them rolling backwards at a pretty clip."

Douglass made sure he would be out of harm's way. The quarter of an hour seemed to take forever. Douglass was beginning to think it would never end when, off to the east toward Jeffersonville, several cannon roared all at once.

"Well! I like that," Captain Little said indignantly. "Still lacks two minutes of the hour by my watch." He must have been staring at it in the faintest early twilight. "Some people think they have to come to the party early. If we can't be the first, we shan't be the last, either." More guns were going off, some of them much closer than the earliest ones had been. Little raised his voice: "Battery B… Fire!"

All six guns bellowed at essentially the same instant. The noise was a cataclysmic blow against Douglass' ears. Great long tongues of yellow flame burst from the muzzles of the cannon, illuminating for half a heartbeat the men who served them. Dense smoke shot from the muzzles, too.

Douglass paid that scant heed for the moment. As Captain Little had warned, the cannon recoiled sharply. A couple of artillerymen had to step lively to keep from being run down by the creaking gun carriages.

"Come on, lads!" Little yelled. "Get 'em back in place and give the damn Rebs another dose of the same." Grunting and cursing, the crews man-handled the cannon up to the positions from which they'd first fired. The breeches were opened, swabbed out to make sure no burning fragments of powder bag remained. Then in went another shell, another charge, and the loaders screwed the breeches shut. The guns bellowed once more, not in a single salvo this time but one after another, each crew struggling to be faster than those to either side of it.

The smoke quickly filled the field. Coughing, Douglass moved to one side, seeking not only cleaner air to breathe but also an unimpeded view of the battlefield. As twilight brightened toward day, it was as if the curtain lifted on an enormous stage set out before him.

Seeing that panorama, he understood for the first time why men spoke of the terrible grandeur of war. Barges and boats packed with soldiers raced across the Ohio so the men they carried could close with the foe. Shells from the U.S. guns poured down like rain on the waterfront of Louisville. Each one burst with a flash of sullen red fire and a great uplifting cloud of black smoke. Douglass could not imagine how any Confederate soldiers compelled to endure such a cannonading could hope to survive.

But the enemy not only survived, he fought. Not only did shells burst along the waterfront. They also burst in the Ohio. Looking across the river, Douglass could see flashes from the muzzles of Confederate guns, cannon similar to those the Massachusetts volunteers served. Their thunder reached his ears, too, attenuated by distance but still very real.

Tall plumes of water flew up from the shells that splashed into the Ohio. When Douglass noticed those, the spectacle before him suddenly seemed less grand. His breathing came short. His palms got sweaty. Remembered terror was almost as vivid as the original. He did not need to wonder what the blue-clad men in the invasion boats were feeling. He'd felt it himself, when the Rebel battery shelled the Queen of the Ohio.

Those Confederates had been but a handful, with only a single battery of old-fashioned guns to bring to bear on their target. The Rebels here had modern cannon by the score and targets to match. Many of them, too, would be their Regular Army men, the best they had.

Not all their shells, then, burst in the river. Some struck the hurrying boats full of U.S. troops. Douglass groaned when one of those simply broke up and sank, throwing its heavily laden soldiers into the water. Another stricken vessel must have had either its helmsman hit or its rudder jammed, for it slewed sharply to one side and collided with its neighbor. Both boats capsized.

And, as the barges and boats neared the bank the Confederates held, tiny yellow flashes, like far-off fireflies, began appearing in the midst of the shell-bursts from the U.S. guns: Confederate riflemen got to work. Incredible as it seemed to Frederick Douglass, they had not only lived through the bombardment that still continued, but also retained enough spirit to fight back strongly. Loathe their cause though he most sincerely did, Douglass could not help respecting their courage.

The first boats began to reach the far bank of the river. Tiny as blue ants in the distance, U.S. soldiers swarmed off them, rushing forward to find cover from the galling fire of their foes-and also from the fire of their friends, which had not shifted its targets despite the landings. Artillery put Douglass in mind of some great ponderous stupid beast, liable to step on and crush anyone who came too near it.

He scrawled his impressions of the fight down in a notebook, intending to weave them into a coherent whole back at his tent when he had the leisure. He had, as yet, no idea whether the battle would be won or lost. All he could discern at the moment was that both sides were fighting not only with desperate courage but also with all the resources science and industry could give them.

And then, in the twinkling of an eye, the battle lost its abstract, panoramic quality and the face of war changed for him forever. The C.S. artillery had concentrated on the invasion boats on the Ohio and, to a lesser degree, on the quays where the barges and boats took on their cargo of soldiers. Every so often, though, the Rebs would lob a few shells at the U.S. guns bombarding them, no doubt aiming more to harass than to stop the cannonading.

By the time the sun came up, Frederick Douglass had grown intimately familiar with the astonishing cacophony emanating from an artillery battery working at full throttle. He did not, however, understand what shrill, rising screams in the air meant until three shells burst in swift succession among the Massachusetts volunteers whose deeds he'd intended chronicling.

The ground shook under his feet. Something hissed past his head. Had it flown a few inches to one side of its actual path, any hopes of his chronicling the artillerymen's adventures would have died in that instant.

More screams, these from the ground, not the air: the sounds of agony. Douglass forgot he was a reporter and remembered he was a man. Stuffing the notebook into a pocket, he ran across the field- even now, under the stink of gunpowder, the grass smclled sweet-to give what aid he could.

"Oh, dear God!" He stopped short with an involuntary exclamation of horror. There lay brave, clever Captain Joseph Little, who had never by word or deed shown he thought Douglass less than himself on account of the color of his skin. Captain Little would never think good or ill of Douglass again, not in this world. One of the Confederate shells had burst quite near him. Now he lay like a broken doll. Broken quite literally: his head had been torn from his body, and lay several feet away from the still-twitching corpse. Half the top of it had been blown off, too; red blood pooled on gray brains. More red soaked the green grass under him. The first flies were already landing.

Captain Little, of course, did not scream. The one virtue of his death was that he could have had no notion of what hit him. One second, he was directing his guns, the next… gone. The fellow down on the ground beside him-no, by some miracle or insanity, sitting up now-wasn't screaming, either. When the artilleryman sat, his intestines spilled out into his lap. A shell fragment had laid open his belly as neatly as the slave butcher gutted hogs back in Douglass' plantation days.

The Massachusetts volunteer looked down at himself. "Isn't that something?" he said, his voice eerily calm. Douglass had heard of men with dreadful injuries who seemed unaware of pain, in stories from railroad accidents and such. He hadn't believed them, but now he saw they were-or could be-true. The artilleryman's eyes rolled up in his head. He slumped back to the ground, dead or unconscious. If he was unconscious, Douglass hoped he'd never wake, for he had no hope of surviving, not with that dreadful wound.

By one of the hellish freaks of war, another soldier had had his guts torn out in almost identical fashion. He was not quiet. He was not calm. He rolled and thrashed and shrieked and wailed, spraying blood and fragmented bits of himself in every direction. Douglass heard one of his teeth break as he clenched his jaws against yet another scream. He was perfectly conscious, perfectly rational, and looked likely to stay that way for hours to come.

His eyes, wide and wild and staring, fixed on Douglass and held the Negro's in an unbreakable grip. "Kill me," the artilleryman growled, his voice rough and ragged and ready to dissolve into yet another howl of anguish. "For God's sake, kill me. Don't make me go through any more of this."

He wore a revolver on his belt. With what looked like a supreme effort of will, he jerked one dripping hand away from his belly long enough to get the pistol out and shove it along the ground toward Douglass.

Before Douglass knew what he'd done, he picked up the revolver. It was heavy in his hand. He knew how to use one. He'd carried one in the grim days just after the War of Secession, when whites were liable to blame any Negro they saw for the war and, perhaps, to go from blaming him to hanging him from the nearest lamp post.

He looked around. None of the other artillerymen was paying him the least attention. Some were tending to less dreadfully wounded comrades. Others, farther away, kept on serving their own guns, so as to make sure the Confederates on the other side of the river got their fair share of death and mutilation and horror and torment.

"Shoot me," the eviscerated soldier groaned. "Don't stand there with your thumb up your ass, damn you to fucking hell."

For the first twenty years of his life and more, Douglass had been caught up in the nightmare of slavery. Now he found another nightmare, one that turned men into beasts-into beasts straight from the abattoir-in different, more abrupt fashion. Caught in the toils of this new nightmare, he pointed the revolver at the artilleryman's forehead and, with a convulsive motion, squeezed the trigger.

The pistol bucked in his hand. A neat, blue-black hole appeared above the wounded soldier's left eye. The back of his head blew out, splashing hair and shattered bits of skull and brains and blood over the grass. With a cry of disgust and dismay, Douglass set down the pistol and rubbed his blood-smeared palm against a trouser leg again and again, as if by that means he could wipe off the mark of Cain.

Several artillerymen spun toward him at the sound of the shot. Most of them, seeing what he had done, simply went back to what they were doing. One, though, with a sergeant's three red stripes on his sleeve, walked over toward the distraught Negro. After looking at the dead gunner's ghastly wound for a few seconds, he put an arm around Douglass' shoulder. "I want to thank you for what you did, sir," he said. "Noah was my cousin, and you put him out of his pain. If you hadn't been there, I believe I'd have had to do the job myself, and that would have been mighty hard, mighty hard indeed."

"It was-the only thing I could do," Douglass said slowly. So often, words like that revealed themselves for the shallow self-justification they were. This once, he heard truth in them.

So did the sergeant, Noah's cousin. "That's right," he said. "That's just exactly right, and don't you let it trouble your mind again." He went back to his cannon, leaving Douglass, who was not a Roman Catholic, fully understanding for the first time in his life the power of absolution.

Alfred von Schlieffen paced along the northern bank of the Ohio, growing more frustrated by the moment. A great battle raged a mile away, and he could not get to it. He could not even do a proper job of observing, not from where he was. Too much smoke hung in the air to let him have more than the vaguest notion of how the fight was going.

And the U.S. authorities flatly refused to let him board a boat and cross over to the Kentucky side of the river.

"I'm sorry, sir." said Second Lieutenant Archibald Creel, who accompanied him today because General Willcox had more urgent things for Oliver Richardson to do. "The general doesn't want us to have to explain to Berlin how we let their military attache go and get himself killed."

A couple of Confederate shells smashed to earth within a hundred yards of Schlieffen. "I am on this side of the river to do that," he remarked with some asperity. As if to underscore his words, more shells screamed in.

Lieutenant Creel did not look as if he had been out of West Point more than a week. He stood firm, both against the shelling and against the foreign officer he was required to shepherd. "I have my orders, sir," he said. He might have been quoting Holy Writ. In a soldierly way, he was.

"To the devil with your orders," Schlieffen muttered, but in German, which the youngster did not speak. He tried again: "I am a military man. I am obliged to take risks for my fatherland."

"No, sir," Creel said, and stuck out his chin.

"Donnerwetter," Schlieffen said. No doubt about it: he was stuck.

Since he was stuck, he decided to make the most of it. He set off at a brisk walk toward the Jcffersonville wharves, which, as an accomplished map reader, he knew to be closer than those of Clarksville. Like a dog on a leash-and so he was, a watchdog-Second Lieutenant Creel tagged along.

Men in blue-some in the faded uniforms of the regulars, more wearing the dark and almost spotless clothes the volunteers had recently donned-waited in long, stolid lines to board the barges and steamboats that would ferry them over the river so they could fight. Schlieffen had watched boats get hit in midstream. No doubt the soldiers had, too. They kept moving toward the boats anyhow, exactly as Germans would have done. That took discipline and courage both, the combination being especially remarkable for volunteer troops.

Long trenches paralleled the lines that led down to the waterfront. When the Confederates started sending shells at the men near Schlieffen, they lost their stolidity in a hurry, diving into the trenches to shelter from blast and flying splinters.

Schlieffen stayed upright. So did Lieutenant Creel. It was surely the first time he'd been under fire. He handled himself well. As soon as the shells stopped falling, the U.S. soldiers scrambled out of the trenches and resumed their places in line as if nothing had happened. Stretcher-bearers carried away a couple of groaning wounded men, but only a couple.

"These ditches are a good idea," Schlieffen said. "They save casualties."

"That they do." Archibald Creel sounded as proud as if he'd thought of them himself.

So, Schlieffen thought, I have here one small worthwhile thing. Is this enough for sending me so far? Is this enough to have gathered from the greatest battle of the war? The answer, in both cases, was painfully obvious. With more temper than he usually showed, Schlieffen rounded on Second Lieutenant Creel: "You can tell me for a fact that U.S. troops arc at this time fighting in Louisville?"

"Yes, sir, I can tell you that," Lieutenant Creel said.

"Sehr gut. You cannot, however, tell me where in Louisville or how in Louisville or how well in Louisville they are fighting, nicht wahr?"

"I don't know those things for certain, no, sir," Creel said. "I wish I did." He laughed nervously. "The fog of war." His wave encompassed the very real layer of thick gray smoke that blanketed Louisville, that hung low and close to the Ohio, and that drifted and swirled in eddies on the U.S. side of the river.

"Where will they know-where will they have some idea-how goes the fighting in Louisville?" Schlieffen demanded.

"One place is over across the river, sir," Creel said.

"Where I cannot go."

"Where you can't go," the young lieutenant agreed. "The other place would be General Willcox's headquarters." He laughed again. "Well, Confederate headquarters, too, I suppose, but you can't go there, either."

"No," Schlieffen wondered if the German military attache to the Confederate States was over there. He hoped so. Having reports from both sides of the line would be useful back in Berlin — provided he learned enough here to give his report any value. "Be so good, then, as to conduct me back to General Willcox's tent. To go to the front is for me forbidden, and here in the middle I might as well be in the middle of the sea. Take me back."

"Yes, sir," Lieutenant Creel said. "I don't know how much the general will let you see with the battle still going hot and heavy, but we'll find out. You come along with me, sir, and I'll take you there."

Schlieffen would have got there faster by himself, but not much.

The young U.S. officer had some notion of where he was and a pretty good idea of how to reach headquarters. Schlieffen, who laid a map in his head over the territory it represented as automatically as he breathed, had to do some unobtrusive guiding only once or twice to keep Creel headed in the right direction.

Creel's presence was enough to get Schlieffen past the sentries outside General Willcox's tent. Given the stream of messengers rushing in and out, Schlieffen suspected he could have got past them without the young lieutenant. Some of those messengers clutched telegrams in their fists. Schlieffen noted that, though he didn't remark on it for fear the Americans would notice him noticing. So they'd managed to get an insulated wire across the Ohio, had they? That would help them. General Willcox would have far more intimate knowledge of what his troops were doing and would be able to send them orders far quicker than if he'd had to rely on boat traffic alone.

Getting to see him actually directing the battle, though, took a bit of doing. A staff officer senior to Second Lieutenant Creel halted Schlieffen, saying, "This isn't anything we want any foreigners watching."

"I am not an enemy," Schlieffen said indignantly. "I am a neutral. When General Rosecrans let me come here, he gave me leave to observe the actions of the Army of the Ohio. You are preventing me from doing my duty to my country when you keep me from observing."

"I'm doing my duty to my own country," the staff officer retorted.

"I protest," Schlieffen said loudly. He was half the size and twice the age of the soldier barring his path. If the idiot in blue didn't get out of his way, though, he was going to do his best to break him in half.

Lieutenant Creel saw as much, and put a restraining hand on his arm. "Wait a second, Colonel," he said. "Let me get Captain Richardson. He'll straighten this out." He hurried past the other staff officer, who suffered him to enter General Willcox's sanctum sanctorum.

"What's all this about?" Richardson said when he came out. "I haven't got time for any nonsense right now." Schlieffen and the other U.S. staff officer both started talking at once, glaring at each other while they did. Richardson listened for a little while, then threw up his hands. "Yes, Colonel Schlieffen, you may observe. Hickenlooper, keep out the Rebs and the Englishmen. Germany 's friendly, and she's likelier to stay that way if you let the attache here do his job."

"Danke, Captain Richardson," Schlieffen said. He gave the dejected Hickenlooper a severe look as he strode past him.

As he might have expected, the command center of the Army of the Ohio was more chaotic than that which he'd known while serving in the Franco-Prussian War. Messengers and officers rushed in and out and stood around arguing with one another in a fashion no German general would have tolerated for an instant.

Orlando Willcox looked up from the enormous map held flat on a table by a couple of stones, a government-issue tin cup, and one bayonet stabbed through the paper and into the wood. "Ah, Colonel Schlieffen," he said. "Glad to see you. We have our landings on the other side of the river, you see."

Schlieffen bent over the map. Sure enough, pins with blue glass heads showed U.S. forces scattered along the Kentucky shore of the Ohio and controlling the sandy islands in the middle of the river. Even as the attache watched, an aide stuck in another blue-headed pin, this one a little farther from the riverbank.

"We have to push them back," Willcox said. "We can't bridge the river with snipers picking off our engineers as fast as they get into range. Artillery is bad enough, but Confederates, say what you will about them, produce first-rate sharpshooters. And they'll have every stretch of the Ohio ranged to the inch, too, so they'll know precisely how to sight their rifles."

"The need for accurate sighting is the major drawback of the modern military rifle," Schlieffen agreed. To reach longer ranges, rifle bullets needed considerable elevation, which meant the angle at which they descended was far from insignificant. It also meant a minor error in estimating range was almost sure to result in a miss out past a couple of hundred yards.

Willcox pointed to the red pins measling the map of Louisville. "It would appear that the C.S. commander, rather than withdrawing from the city here to engage us on open ground, intends to make his fight within Louisville itself, thereby subjecting it to all the rigors of war. Such callousness as to its fate and the fate of those civilians remaining there cannot win him favor either with his own people or in the eyes of the Lord."

"This may well be so," Schlieffen said, "but fighting in a built-up area is a good way to cause the foe many casualties. Remember the battle the French had to wage to put down the Paris Commune." He granted the Communards a good deal of thoughtful respect. Their ferocity, along with some of the fighting Napoleon Ill's army had waged even after its cause was lost, in his view gave the lie to those Germans who reckoned France too weak and decadent ever to be a menace again.

"Fighting like that is uncivilized," Willcox declared.

There, he had a point. European practice had long been for armies to engage away from centers of population, both to avoid endangering civilians and to give both sides the greatest possible opportunity to manoeuvre. The Americans had generally followed the same rules during the War of Secession. If the Confederates were changing those rules now… "Have you learned for certain who the C.S. commander is?"

Willcox looked unhappy. "Rebel prisoners are confirming the rumors we had heard. We do face General Jackson."

"Ach, so? Sehr interessant," Schlieffen murmured. In the War of Secession, Jackson 's reputation had come from manoeuvre so relentless, his infantry got the name of "foot cavalry." A man who could change his entire strategic concept was one who demanded to be taken seriously.

A messenger burst in and said, "General Willcox, sir, Colonel Sully says the First Minnesota is melting like St. Paul ice in May. They're pinned down on the waterfront, down to a couple of hundred men now. The Rebs in front of 'em arc too strong for 'em to go forward, and if they retreat they swim."

"What in heaven's name does Sully want me to do?" Willcox demanded.

"Sir, he asks if you could put some artillery on the Rebs in his front," the messenger answered. "They're either behind barricades or fighting from houses and shops and all. Makes the goddamn sons of bitches twice as hard to kill, sir, hopin' you'll pardon my French."

"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain," Willcox said, which gave Alfred von Schlieffen at least a partial understanding of what the idiom meant. Schlieffen knew French, and knew the man had not been speaking it. Willcox consulted the map, then went on, "The First Minnesota is close by Second Street?"

"No, sir-more like Sixth Street," the messenger told him. "Somebody's boats next to ours took a-a goldanged pounding, sir, and we had to slide downstream a ways to keep from gettin' rammed."

" Sixth Street," Willcox snarled, as if it were an obscenity. "I'll do what I can, soldier. I make no promises. Has Colonel Sully no other way to escape his predicament?"

"Sir, yes, sir," the messenger said. "He told me to tell you if he didn't get some kind of help some kind of way pretty… danged quick, he was going to have to surrender."

Willcox jerked as if wounded. "I'll do what I can," he repeated. The messenger saluted and hurried away. When the fellow was gone, Willcox turned to a runner from the signals office. "A wire across the river: Colonel Sully is to attempt to regain his position as indicated in the plan for the attack. That failing, he is at minimum to hold his present position at all hazards. He is to be informed that I am endeavoring to obtain artillery support for him."

The runner departed with a scrawled order. Schlieffen noted that Willcox made no effort to give the First Minnesota the artillery support he'd said he was trying to arrange. Sometimes, when all resources were committed elsewhere, that kind of deception was necessary to keep a unit fighting a while longer. Sometimes it meant only that the commanding officer wasn't doing as much as he should to solve a problem.

Which was it here? Schlieffen didn't know enough to be certain. The Army of the Ohio had a foothold on the far side of its eponymous river. Schlieffen would not have given good odds on that before the battle began. The next question was what Willcox would do with his bridgehead-and what Stonewall Jackson would do to it.

Edgar Leary dumped three telegrams on Sam Clemens' desk. "Here you go," the young reporter said: "More wires on the Louisville fighting."

"These are-what? The sixth, seventh, and eighth today?" Clemens asked. Leary nodded. The editor of the San Francisco Morning Call puffed out smoke like a steamboat. "Almost makes me wish the lines in Utah were still down."

He skimmed through the wires. Except for some new casualty figures, higher than the ones he'd seen a couple of days before, he didn't see anything he hadn't known already. He threw two of the telegrams into the trash, keeping the one with the numbers. He'd been about to start a new editorial; they would come in handy.

War, he wrote, is a good deal like a meat grinder, in that you feed in fresh chunks of whole meat at one end, and what comes out the other is fit only for stuffing into frankfurters. By all reports, General Willcox is working the crank for all he is worth in the Louisville campaign. Military meat is different from the ordinary kind, because some of the fragments that come out the business end of the grinder are still able to tell you what they were like before they went into the hopper.

If the figures we have are accurate-and God save the soul of the poor devil charged with aggregating the total-the United States have in the past several days gained anywhere from a quarter of a mile to a mile of land formerly having suffered the great misfortune of flying the Confederate flag, and have purchased this real estate at a cost of, to date, 17,409 young soldiers mutilated and killed. That we have here a great bargain can hardly be denied, for "Excuse me, Mr. Clemens," Edgar Leary said. "A couple of gentlemen are here to see you."

"If they're gentlemen," Clemens replied without looking up, "they'll wait till I'm ready to see them. Christ, Edgar, you know better than to jog my elbow when I'm trying to get words down on paper."

"It's not a social call, Clemens," a rough, unfamiliar voice said.

Angrily, Sam spun his chair around. He discovered he was looking down the barrels of two Colt revolvers, each held by a burly individual who did not look as if he would have much compunction about pulling the trigger. Ignoring the guns, he said, "People who use my surname commonly have the courtesy to put Mister in front of it, as my friend there did."

The larger of the two men-the one who had spoken before- said, "Next Rebel spy I hear tell of who deserves to get called Mister'W be the first."

"Rebel spy?" That sent Clemens bouncing to his feet in fury. "Who the devil says I am, and how in hell has he got the nerve to say it?"

Quick as a striking rattler, the smaller ruffian snatched from his desk the editorial on which Sam had been working. After reading the couple of paragraphs there, he said, "Sure as hell sounds like treason to me."

"God damn you!" Clemens shouted. "Give me that back before I punch you in your stupid nose." He kept on ignoring the Colts leveled at him. So did the men holding them. "If Adolph Imbecile Sutro tries to throw a newspaperman in jail for what he writes, he'll have every newspaperman in San Francisco by this time tomorrow, and that includes the heathen Chinese. There still is such a thing as the First Amendment to the Constitution, which has a thing or two to say on the subject of a free press. Has either of you blockheads ever heard of it?"

Reporters, typesetters, and printers had been edging through the Morning Call offices toward the altercation. A savage grin stretched across Sam's face. If these hooligans tried hauling him away by force, they'd have a battle on their hands. Newspapermen looked after their own.

But then the bigger intruder said, "We ain't here on account of what you write, Mister Clemens." Unexpectedly, he had the wit to load that with irony, and to add, "Hell, nobody reads it, anyways. We're here on account of it's done been reported that you are a veteran of the Confederate States of America. Is it so or ain't it that you were in the Confederate Army during the War of Secession?"

Clemens started to laugh. Then he got a look at the faces of the men who worked with him at the Morning Call. None of them had ever heard the story of his brief, absurd stint as a Rebel private in Missouri. None of them looked interested in hearing it, either. Even before he could answer, they started slipping back toward the places where they worked.

"Is it or ain't it?" the ruffian repeated.

"Not to speak of," Sam said at last. "The company I was in never did more than mooch around a bit to impress the girls."

"But you were in, were you?" the big man with the revolver said. "You come along with us, then, pal. You can do your explaining to the soldiers. If they reckon you're on the up and up, then they do, is all. But if they don't, they'll put you away where you can't get into any mischief."

"This is an outrage!" Clemens thundered. Nobody else in the offices said anything at all. The smaller ruffian seemed to remember he had a gun. He jerked the muzzle in the direction of the doorway. With a sigh, Clemens walked to the door. He grabbed his hat off the tree as he went by. "Let's get this over with. The sooner we do, the sooner I can come back here and let the world know what a pack of damned fools we've got running around loose these days."

The men with revolvers didn't seem inclined to argue with him. As long as he did what they said, they didn't care what else he did: stacked against a Colt, what did an insult or two matter? They had a buggy tied up outside the building. The silence behind Sam as he shut the door hurt him worse than his sallies hurt the spy-hunters.

"The both of you are plumb loco," Clemens said as the smaller fellow took up the reins and began to drive. "If I've been such a grand and dreadful terror to the United States lo these many years, what in sweet Jesus' name was I doing as assistant to the governor's secretary in Nevada Territory even before the blamed war was over?" That the secretary had been his brother Orion, after whom his son was named, he did not bother mentioning.

"Don't know," replied the bigger gunman, the one with some trace of wit. "What were you doing there?" By his tone, Sam might have been sending a daily telegram to Richmond from Carson City.

Clemens replied only with dignified silence. He also did not ask where they were going, as he had intended. He judged that would become obvious in short order, a judgment vindicated when the little ruffian headed north and west, away from the heart of the city. The only thing of any consequence in that direction was the Presidio, the Army base charged with defending San Francisco.

No matter how long Sam had lived in these parts, he never ceased to marvel at the beauty of the view across the Golden Gate, looking north toward Sausalito: blue sky, green-blue sea, the wooded headland rising swiftly above it. A ferry boat, thin black plume of smoke rising from its stack, gave a touch of human scale to nature's grandeur.

So did the stone walls of Fort Point. When a sentry came forward to demand the business of the new arrivals, the bigger of Sam's captors said, "We got a feller here might be a spy."

"Like hell I am!" Sam shouted. As far as the sentry was concerned, he was invisible and inaudible. The bluecoat waved the wagon into the fort.

Having reached the garrison commander's waiting room in jig time, Clemens proceeded to put it to the purpose for which it was named: he waited, and waited, and waited. The bravos who'd shanghaied him didn't wait with him: they had better things to do. When he poked his head out of the door to the parade ground through which he'd come in, a soldier pointed a bayoneted Springfield at him and growled, "You get back in there. The colonel'll see you in his time, not yours." Fuming, Sam retreated.

At last, after what had to be closer to two hours than one, the door to Colonel William T. Sherman's office opened. "Come in, Mr. Clemens," Sherman said. Lean and erect, he wore a close-trimmed beard that had once been red and was now mostly white. His mouth was a thin slash; his pale eyes did their best to stare through Sam. Harsh lines ran down his pinched cheeks, losing themselves in his beard near the corners of that narrow mouth. The word that sprang to Clemens' mind for him was bitter.

His office presented a stark contrast to the genial clutter that made finding things on Sam's desk an adventure. Everything here was obviously just where it belonged. Sam was sure anything that had the gall to go where it didn't belong, even to sidle an inch out of place, would end up in the guardhouse to teach it never to get gay again.

Sherman sat; he did not invite Clemens to sit. Glancing down at the beginning of the editorial the smaller gunman had purloined, and also at a large, neatly written sheet of paper on which Sam could make out his name, he said, "Why don't you tell me why you're here, sir?"

Clemens normally wisecracked without thinking, much as he breathed. Facing this man, he restrained himself. "I am here, Colonel, because I served something less than a month in the Marion Rangers, a Confederate unit of sorts in Missouri, during the War of Secession. Because of that, someone has decided I must be a spy."

Sherman said, "When Louisiana seceded, I was teaching at a military academy there. I resigned at once, and came north to serve my country as best I could. How is it that you fought under the Stars and Bars?"

"I never fought under them," Sam replied. "I marched a bit and rode a horse a bit, but I never once fought. Governor Jackson called for soldiers to repel the U.S. invaders-so he named them-which is how the Marion Rangers came to be. It was a grand and glorious unit, Colonel-there were fifteen of us, all told. The one time we got near a farmhouse that some U.S. troops were guarding, our captain-Tom Lyman, his name was-told us to attack it. We told him no; to a man, we said no. The rest of my so-called military career was cut from the same stuff. I never fired a shot at a soldier of the United States. None of us did, before the Marion Rangers became as one with Nineveh and Tyre."

Sherman 's jaw worked. "You put this down to youthful indiscretion, then? — for you would have been a young man in 1861."

"That's just what I put it down to, Colonel," Sam said with an emphatic nod.

"And you did serve the U.S. government in Nevada," Sherman said, checking that paper again. Sam wondered how much of his life's story was contained thereon. In musing tones, Sherman continued, "Yet these days, you speak out strongly in the papers against the war, as you have here." He let a finger rest on the editorial fragment for a moment. "What connection, if any, has the one to the other?"

"Colonel, you've seen real war at first hand, which is far more than 1 ever did," Clemens said. "What is your opinion of it?"

"My opinion?" He'd startled Sherman. But the officer did not hesitate long; Sam got the idea he seldom hesitated long about anything. "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. Its glory is all moon-shine. Only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded cry aloud for blood, vengeance, and desolation. War is as close to hell as a merciful God allows upon this earth."

That was more than Sam had bargained for. "If you can speak so strongly and still defend our country, how does questioning the wisdom and conduct of this war make me a Confederate agent?"

Sherman stroked his chin. "You might be an agent, using such a pretext as concealment." His mouth thinned further; Clemens had not thought it could. "But I have no evidence to say you arc, not a particle. What you say of the Marion Rangers squares with what I have on this sheet here-the men who brought you in were overzcalous. We were all quite mad twenty years ago. It should never have happened." That thin mouth twisted. "I shall write you a good character, Mr. Clemens, which you must show to be released from this fortress, and may show to anyone seeking to trouble you hereafter." He inked a pen and began to write.

"Thank you, Colonel," Clemens said fervently. "One thing more?" Sherman looked up from his work. Sam went on, "May I beg the use of a horse or buggy? The gentlemen who brought me here did not wait upon the outcome of your hearing." He said not a word about how long he'd waited himself.

"I'll see to it," Sherman said. The pen scratched over the paper. Sam did not mind waiting now, not a bit.

Bountiful, Utah lay about ten miles north of Salt Lake City, on the railroad line. George Custer had come south past it on the army's triumphal march toward and then into the capital of Utah Territory. He'd paid it no special mind then: just one more no-account town among so many. Now, though, he wasn't going to pass it by; along with the two troops of cavalry at his back, he was going to go through it like a man searching his pockets for a five-cent piece with which to buy his sweetheart a sarsaparilla. His own sweetheart, worse luck, was back at Fort Dodge.

"Blast John Taylor anyhow," he grumbled. "Dash and double-dash him. Why couldn't the old fraud have stayed in Salt Lake City, so we could snatch him up and stretch his neck and have done?"

"Don't be such a sourpuss, Autie," his brother Tom said. "If it weren't for Taylor and the rest of the scoops who ran away, we'd be stuck with garrison duty instead of doing something halfway useful out here."

"Halfway useful is right. We ought to be fighting the Rebs, not sitting on these confounded Mormons." Custer paused and sent Tom a quizzical look. " 'Scoops'? What's a scoop?"

"A Mormon. Heard it the other day," his brother answered. After removing his hat, Tom mimed removing the top of his skull in the same way and scooping out a large portion of its contents. "Have to have most of your brain missing to buy what they're selling, don't you think?"

"Mm, you're likely right." Custer weighed the word. "Scoops. I like that." He laughed, then pointed ahead. "We've got a whole scoop-ful of scoops coming up."

Much the biggest building in Bountiful was the Mormon chapel, a wood-and-adobe structure with five spires that looked as if it might have grown from the ground instead of being built. The lands around the chapel were bountiful enough; no matter how foolish the Mormons' religion was in Custer's eyes, he couldn't deny they made skillful, diligent farmers.

People came out into the street from the chapel, from the houses, and from the barbershop and dry-goods store to stare at the soldiers. Their dogs came out with them. The troopers had shot several dogs on the way up from Salt Lake City. They'd probably shoot more here. Mormons' dogs ran from mean to meaner.

Nobody said anything as the troopers rode up. Custer knew he wasn't loved here. He didn't care. Whatever the Mormons loved, as far as he was concerned, had to have something wrong with it.

He held up his hand. Behind him, the cavalrymen reined in. Every one of them carried a loaded carbine across his knees. That wasn't just for dogs. So far, the Mormons hadn't given any trouble. The best way to make sure they didn't give any trouble was to be ready to smash it down ruthlessly if it arose.

Tom Custer said, "I hate all these staring faces. Back in Salt Lake, at least the Gentiles were on our side. Out here, there aren't any Gentiles to speak of, and nobody's on our side."

"We arc in the right. We must never forget it," Custer declared. He raised his voice and called out to the people of Bountiful: "We are searching for John Taylor. Anyone who knows where this fugitive from justice is lurking will be handsomely rewarded." He waited. No one said a word. The wind, full of the salty tang of the Great Salt Lake, blew up little dust devils in front of his horse.

He'd expected nothing different, but the effort had to be made. His orders said so. The silence from the Mormons persisting, he moved on to the next step in the program: "We are going to search the houses and buildings of this town for the person of John Taylor, and for the persons of other fugitives from justice in this Territory. You are required to assist and cooperate with the brave soldiers of the United States engaged in this task. Any resistance will leave the guilty party subject to summary trial and the full rigors of military justice."

That drew a response from the crowd: somebody called, "Where's your search warrants at?"

Custer's smile was anything but pleasant. "We have none. We need none. Utah Territory, having been declared a region in rebellion against the lawful authority of the government of the United States of America, has forfeited the protections enshrined in the Constitution. You people should have thought more about what would follow from your actions before you attempted to coerce the national government into approving of your hideous practices. Having willfully flouted the government, you will have to earn its good graces once more by showing you are deserving of them."

He waved to his men, who swung down off their horses. Custer told a squad to follow him to the Mormon chapel. They searched the grounds, finding nothing out of the ordinary, and then went inside. Other than being ornamented with a large portrait in oils of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, the interior might have belonged to any church.

One of the men of Bountiful came inside. "Gentlemen, Mr. Taylor is not here," he said. "He has not been here."

"Who are you, and how do you know?" Custer growled.

"I'm O. Clifton Haight, and I have for many years been a lay preacher at this chapel," the man replied, "and I know Mr. Taylor has not been in Bountiful because I should have heard of it if he were."

"Not if he's lying low-and not if you're just plain lying, either," Custer said. Haight assumed an indignant expression. Custer, feeling briefly charitable, ignored it. He waved. "This church looks nice and fresh and clean, as if people had been in it just the other day, say, or last Sunday. Public worship in Mormon churches is forbidden by order of General Pope, you will recall."

"Oh, yes, of course," O. Clifton Haight said.

"You haven't by any chance forgotten that order?" Custer said.

"Why, no, of course not." Haight's eyes were wide and candid. He was lying. Custer knew he was lying. He undoubtedly knew Custer knew he was lying. But he also knew Custer couldn't do anything about it. Until Pope had enough men to put a permanent garrison into every one of these miserable little towns, the Mormons would ignore every order they could. No one was likely to betray them, not when they all conspired together to set at nought the commands of the military governor.

Shaking his head in angry frustration, Custer stalked out of the chapel. His soldiers followed. His eyes lighted on a house across the square. It was built in a pattern with which he'd become all too intimately acquainted in Salt Lake City: a central structure that had undoubtedly been erected first, with several whitewashed wings spreading out from it. Pointing toward the house, he asked, "Who lives there?"

"That's the Sessions place," Clifton Haight answered. "Peregrine Sessions was the first settler here, better than thirty years ago now. That house there, that belongs to his brother, Zedekiah."

"General Pope forbade more than public worship to you Mormons," Custer said, a certain hard anticipation gleaming in his eyes. "He also forbade the practice of polygamy, which has made you people a stench in the nostrils of decent Americans everywhere. Looking at that house, Mr. Haight, how many wives would you say, uh, Zedekiah Sessions is likely to have?"

"I only know of one," Haight said. "Irma Sessions is a pillar of our little community here."

"I'll bet she is," Custer sneered. "And how many other community pillars carry the name of Sessions?"

"1 know of no others," Haight said. Custer had heard that in Salt Lake City, too. The Mormons habitually dissembled about their plural marriages.

He gathered up his troopers by eye. "We are going to search that house for John Taylor. We are also going to search it for any evidence the abhorrent vice of polygamy is being practiced within. If by some chances we find such evidence, despite the statements of Mr. Haight here, we shall take whatever action I deem at the time to be appropriate. Come along."

Grinning, the soldiers followed him. As they tramped toward the large, rambling house, they told lewd jokes. Custer pretended not to hear them, except when a good one made him laugh out loud.

He walked up to the front door and rapped smartly upon it. When it opened, standing before him was one of the formidable middle-aged women of the sort Brigham Young had apparently married in battalions: broad through the shoulders, broader through the hips, graying hair pulled straight back from a face that had not approved of anything since the War of Secession. Custer thought how good her head would look stuffed and mounted on the wall back at Fort Dodge next to a pronghorn or a coyote. "You are Mrs. Irma Sessions?" he asked.

"I am. And you are a United States soldier." By her tone, that put Custer somewhere between a Comanche and a polecat.

"My men and I are going to search these premises for the possible presence of the fugitive John Taylor," Custer announced. "All persons inhabiting this residence must first come forth."

"And if we do not?" Irma Sessions inquired.

Custer folded his arms across his broad chest. "Then we shall remove you with whatever force proves needful and bind you over for trial for defying the authority of the United States Army." He pulled out his pocket watch. "You have five minutes."

He watched Mrs. Sessions contemplate calling his bluff. He watched her decide, with obvious reluctance, that he wasn't bluffing. He watched her start to slam the door in his face and then, with even more obvious reluctance, think better of it.

Within the appointed deadline, half a dozen women emerged, the other five as like Irma Sessions as peas in a pod. Along with them came something like two dozen children, ranging from babes in arms up to youths old enough to carry a gun and girls well on their way to becoming stolid copies of their mothers. "Where is Mr. Sessions?" Custer asked when the patriarch of the family proved not to be in evidence.

"In Salt Lake City, on business," Irma Sessions replied. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't.

"And all six of you are his wives?" Custer persisted.

"Oh, no," one of the other women said. "I am his widowed cousin." Another claimed to be his sister, still another said she was Irma's sister, and the last two didn't explain how or why they were living there, save to assert that they were not affiliated with Zcdekiah Sessions in any illegal or immoral manner. They were so shrill, so insistent, Custer would not have believed them even had he previously been inclined to do so, which he was not.

In the midst of the women's denials, a leering trooper brought Custer a photograph in a fancy gilt frame. It was a family group: a stout, bearded man, presumably Mr. Sessions, surrounded by the six women and their multifarious offspring. He displayed it to them. They went quiet. Rudely, he wondered if Sessions could get the same effect with it. For the sake of the man's peace of mind, he hoped so.

"I say that this photograph shows me you have been imperfectly truthful here," he told them, having been too well brought up to call a woman a liar to her face. "As you must know, General Pope has commanded that polygamy shall be suppressed in this Territory by all available means." He turned to the cavalryman. "Any sign of Taylor, Corporal?"

"No, sir," the soldier answered. "Nobody in there now."

"Very well. Put this place to the torch, that sin may have no dwelling place to call its own. If we needs must cleanse Utah with fire and sword, that is what we shall do."

The six wives of Zedekiah Sessions screamed and wailed, as did their female children. The boys, the older ones, cursed Custer and his men as vilely as they knew how. He'd heard worse. Despite screams and wails and curses, the house burned. Going through the town, he and his men found three more homes obviously belonging to polygamists. Those went up in flames, too. He wondered if the Mormons would shoot at his men for that. He almost hoped they would. They didn't.

"It's not so Bountiful any more," he said to his brother as they led the two cavalry troops north to the next little town. Both Custers laughed.