The Guns of the South

* I *

Robert E. Lee paused to dip his pen once more in the inkwell. Despite flannel shirt, uniform coat, and heavy winter boots, he shivered a little. The headquarters tent was cold. The winter had been harsh, and showed no signs of growing any milder. New England weather, he thought, and wondered why God had chosen to visit it upon his Virginia.

With a small sigh, he bent over the folding table once more to detail for President Davis the arrangements he had made to send General Rote’s brigade down into North Carolina for the attack on New Berne. Re had but small hope the attack would succeed, but the President had ordered it, and his duty was to carry out his orders as best he could. Even without the boats, the plan he had devised was not actually a bad one, and president Davis reckoned the matter urgent…

He shook his head. Keeping the Army of Northern Virginia fed and clothed was a never-ending struggle. His men were making their own shoes now, when they could get the leather, which was not often. The ration was down to three-quarters of a pound of meat a day, along with a little salt, sugar, coffee—or rather, chicory and burnt grain—and lard. Bread, rice, corn…they trickled up the Virginia Central and the Orange and Alexandria Railroad every so often, but not nearly often enough. He would have to cut the daily allowance again, if more did not arrive soon.

President Davis, however, was as aware of all that as Lee could make him. To hash it over once more would only seem like carping. Lee resumed: Genl Early is still in the—

A gun cracked, quite close to the tent. Soldier’s instinct pulled Lee’s head up. Then he smiled and laughed at himself. One of his staff officers, most likely, shooting at a possum or a squirrel. He hoped the young man scored a hit.

But no sooner had the smile appeared than it vanished. The report of the gun sounded—odd. It had been an abrupt bark, not a pistol shot or the deeper boom of an Enfield rifle musket. Maybe it was a captured Federal weapon.

The gun cracked again and again and again. Each report came closer to the one before than two heartbeats were to each other. A Federal weapon indeed, Lee thought: one of those fancy repeaters their cavalry like so well. The fusillade went on and on. He frowned at the waste of precious cartridges—no Southern armory could easily duplicate them.

He frowned once more, this time in puzzlement, when silence fell. He had automatically kept count of the number of rounds fired. No Northern rifle he knew was a thirty-shooter.

He turned his mind back to the letter to President Davis. —Valley, he wrote. Then gunfire rang out again, an unbelievably rapid stutter of shots, altogether too quick to count and altogether unlike anything he had ever heard. He took off his glasses and set down the pen. Then he put on a hat and got up to see what was going on.

At the tent fly, Lee almost collided with one of his aides-decamp, who was hurrying in as he tried to leave. The younger man came to attention. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

“Quite all right, Major Taylor. Will this by any chance have something to do with the, ah, unusual gun I heard fired just now?”

“Yes, sir.” Walter Taylor seemed to beholding on to military discipline with both hands. He was, Lee reminded himself, only twenty-five or so, the youngest of all the staff officers. Now he drew out a sheet of paper, which he handed to Lee. “Sir, before you actually see the gun in action, as I just have, here is a communication from Colonel Gorgas in Richmond concerning it.”

“In matters concerning ordnance of any sort, no view could be more pertinent than that of Colonel Gorgas,” Lee agreed. He drew out his reading glasses once more, set them on the bridge of his nose.

Lee folded the letter, handed it back to Taylor. As he returned his glasses to their pocket, he said, “Very well, Major. I was curious before; now I find my curiosity doubled. Take me to Mr.—Rhoodie, was it?”

“Yes, sir. He’s around behind the tents here. If you will come with me—”

Breath smoking in the chilly air, Lee followed his aide-decamp. He was not surprised to see the flaps from the other three tents that made up his headquarters were open; anyone who had heard that gunfire would want to learn what had made it. Sure enough, the rest of his officers were gathered round a big man who did not wear Confederate gray.

The big man did not wear the yellow-brown that was the true color of most home-dyed uniforms, either, nor the black of the general run of civilian clothes. Lee had never seen an outfit like the one he had on. His coat and trousers were of mottled green and brown, so that he almost seemed to disappear against dirt and brush and bare-branched trees. A similarly mottled cap had flaps to keep his ears warm.

Seeing Lee approach, the staff officers saluted. He returned the courtesy. Major Taylor stepped ahead. “General Lee, gentlemen, this is Mr. Andries Rhoodie. Mr. Rhoodie, here is General Lee, whom you may well recognize, as well as my colleagues, Majors Venable and Marshall.”

“I am pleased to meet all you gentlemen, especially the famous General Lee,” Rhoodie said.

“You are much too kind, sir,” Lee murmured politely.

“By no means,” Rhoodie said. “I would be proud to shake your hand.” He held out his own.

As they shook, Lee tried to take the stranger’s measure. He spoke like an educated man, but not like a Carolinian. His accent sounded more nearly British, though it also held a faint guttural undertone.

His odd clothes aside, Rhoodie did not look like a Carolinian, either. His face was too square, his features too heavy. That heaviness made him seem almost indecently well fleshed to Lee, who was used to the lean, hungry men of the Army of Northern Virginia.

But Rhoodie’s bearing was erect and manly, his handclasp firm and strong. His gray eyes met Lee’s without wavering. Somewhere in his past, Lee was suddenly convinced, he had been a soldier: those were marksman’s eyes. By the wrinkles at their corners and by the white hairs that showed in his bushy reddish mustache, Rhoodie had to be nearing forty, but the years had only toughened him.

Lee said, “Colonel Gorgas gives you an excellent character, sir, you and your rifle both. Will you show it to me?”

“In a moment, if I may,” Rhoodie answered, which surprised Lee. In his experience, most inventors were wildly eager to show off their brainchildren. Rhoodie went on, “First, sir, I would like to ask you a question, which I hope you will be kind enough to answer frankly.”

“Sir, you are presumptuous,” Charles Marshall said. The wan winter sun glinted from the lenses of his spectacles and turned his normally animated face into something stern and a little inhuman.

Lee held up a hand. “Let him ask what he would, Major. You need not forejudge his intentions.” He glanced toward Rhoodie, nodded for him to continue. He had to look up to meet the stranger’s eye, which was unusual, for he was nearly six feet tall himself. But Rhoodie overtopped him by three or four inches.

“I thank you for your patience with me,” he said now in that not-quite-British accent. “Tell me this, then: what do you make of the Confederacy’s chances for the coming year’s campaign and for the war as a whole?”

“To be or not to be, that is the question,” Marshall murmured.

“I hope our prospects are somewhat better than poor Hamlet’s, Major,” Lee said. His staff officers smiled. Rhoodie, though, simply waited. Lee paused to marshal his thoughts. “Sir, since I have but so briefly had the honor of your acquaintance, I hope you will forgive me for clinging to what may be plainly seen by any man with some knowledge and some wit: that is, our enemies are superior to us in numbers, resources, and the means and appliances for carrying on the war. If those people”—his common euphemism for the Federals—”use their advantages vigorously, we can but counterpoise to them the courage of our soldiers and our confidence in Heaven’s judgment of the justice of our cause. Those have sufficed thus far. God willing, they shall continue to do so.”

“Who said God is for the big battalions?” Rhoodie asked.

“Voltaire, wasn’t it?” Charles Venable said. He had been a professor of mathematics before the war, and was widely read.

“A freethinker if ever there was one,” Marshall added disapprovingly.

“Oh, indeed,” Rhoodie said, “but far from a fool. When you are weaker than your foes, should you not take the best advantage of what you do have?”

“That is but plain sense,” Lee said. “No one could disagree.”

Now Rhoodie smiled, or his mouth did; the expression stopped just short of his eyes. “Thank you, General Lee. You have just given much of my sales talk for me.”

“Have I?”

“Yes, sir, you have. You see, my rifle will let you conserve your most precious resource of all-your men.”

Walter Taylor, who had seen the gun in action, sucked in a long, deep breath. “It could be so,” he said quietly.

“I await the demonstration, Mr. Rhoodie,” Lee said. “You will have it.” Rhoodie unslung the weapon. Lee had already noted it was of carbine length, stubby next to an infantry musket. Because it was so short, its socket bayonet seemed the longer. Rhoodie reached over his shoulder into his haversack. That was made of mottled cloth like his trousers and coat, and looked to be of finer manufacture than even a Union man carried. Most of Lee’s soldiers made do with a rolled-up blanket.

The tall stranger produced a curved metal object, perhaps eight inches long and an inch and a half or two inches wide. He clicked it into place in front of the carbine’s trigger. “This is the magazine,” he said. “When it’s full, it holds thirty rounds.”

“In fine, the rifle now has bullets in it,” Taylor said.” As all of you will no doubt have noticed, it is a breechloader.” The other aides nodded. Lee kept his own counsel.

With a rasping sound followed by a sharp, metallic click, Rhoodie drew back a shiny steel lever on the right side of the rifle. “The first round from each magazine must be chambered manually,” he said.

“What about the others?” Venable whispered to Taylor.

“You’ll see,” Taylor whispered back.

Rhoodie reached into the haversack again. This time he drew out some folded papers. He unfolded one of them. It proved to be a target, a cutout roughly approximating the shape of a man’s head and body. He turned to Lee’s aides. “Will you gentlemen please put these up at different ranges out to, say, four or five hundred yards?”

“With pleasure,” Taylor said promptly. “I’ve seen how fast your rifle can shoot; I’d like to learn how accurate it is.” He took some of the targets; Rhoodie handed the rest to the other aides. They stuck low-hanging branches through some, leaned others against bushes, both in the upright position and sideways.

“Shall I have them straighten those, sir?” Lee asked, pointing. “They will make your shooting more difficult.”

“Never mind,” Rhoodie answered. “Soldiers don’t always stand up, either.” Lee nodded. The stranger did not lack for confidence.

When the aides were through, a ragged column of thirty targets straggled southeast toward Orange Court House a couple of miles off. The knot of tents that was Lee’s headquarters lay on a steep hillside, well away from encamped troops or any other human habitations. The young men laughed and joked as they came back to Rhoodie and Lee. “There’s General McClellan!” Charles Marshall said, stabbing a thumb in the direction of the nearest target. “Give him what he deserves!”

The others took up the cry: “There’s General Burnside!” “General Hooker!” “General Meade!” “Hancock!” “Warren!” “Stoneman!” “Howard!” “There’s Honest Abe! Give him his deserts, by God!”

Lee turned to Rhoodie. “At your convenience, sir.” The aides fell silent at once.

“One of your men might want to look at a watch,” Rhoodie said.

“I will, sir.” Charles Venable drew one from his waistcoat pocket. “Shall I give you a mark at which to begin?” Rhoodie nodded. Venable held the watch close to his face so he could see the second hand crawling around its tiny separate dial. “Now!”

The rifle leaped to the big stranger’s shoulder. He squeezed the trigger. Craack! A brass cartridge case flipped up into the air. It glittered in the sun as it fell. Craack! Another cartridge case. Craack! Another. This was the same sort of quick firing as that which had interrupted Lee’s letter to President Davis.

Rhoodie paused once for a moment.” Adjusting the sights,” he explained. He was shooting again as soon as the last word left his mouth. Finally the rifle clicked harmlessly instead of blasting out another round.

Charles Venable looked up. “Thirty aimed shots. Thirty-two seconds. Most impressive.” He looked from the rifle to Rhoodie, back again. “Thirty shots,” he repeated, half to himself. “Where is the smoke from thirty shots?”

“By God!” Walter Taylor sounded astonished, both at the lack of smoke and at himself. “Why didn’t I notice that before?”

Lee had also failed to notice it. Thirty closely spaced shots should have left this Andries Rhoodie in the middle of a young fogbank. Instead, only a few hazy wisps of smoke floated from the breech and muzzle of his rifle. “How do you achieve this, sir?” he asked.

“The charge in my cartridges is not your ordinary black powder,” Rhoodie said, which told Lee nothing not already obvious. The big man went on, “If your officers will bring in the targets, we can see how I did.”

Taylor, Venable, and Marshall went out to retrieve the paper men. They laid them on the ground, walked along the row looking for bullet holes. Lee walked with them, quiet and thoughtful. When he had examined all the targets, he turned back to Rhoodie. “Twenty-eight out of thirty, I make it to be,” he said. “This appears to be a fine weapon, sir, and without a doubt very fine shooting.”

“Thirty-two seconds,” Venable said. He whistled softly.

“May I show you one thing more?” Rhoodie said. Without waiting for a reply, he loosened the catch that held the magazine in place below the rifle, stuck the curved metal container into a coat pocket. Then he pulled another one out of his haversack and clicked it into position. The operation took only a moment to complete.

“Another thirty shots?” Lee asked.

“Another thirty shots,” Rhoodie agreed. He drew back the shiny handle with the snick Lee had heard before. “Now I am ready to fire again. But what if the Americans—”

“We are Americans, sir,” Lee broke in.

“Sorry. The Yankees, I mean. What if the Yankees are too close for aimed fire?” Below the handle was a small metal lever. Rhoodie clicked it down so that, instead of being parallel to the handle’s track, its front end pointed more nearly toward the ground. He turned away from Lee and his staff officers. “This is what.”

The rifle roared. Flame spurted from its muzzle. Cartridges flew out of it in a glittering stream. The silence that followed the shooting came hard and abrupt as a blow. Into it, Lee asked, “Major Venable, did you time that?”

“Uh, no, sir,” Venable said, “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Never mind, It was quite rapid enough.”

Rhoodie said, “Except at close range or into big crowds, full automatic fire isn’t nearly as effective or accurate as single shots. The weapon pulls up and to the right.”

“Full automatic fire.” Lee tasted the words. “How does this repeater operate, if I may ask, sir? I have seen, for example, the Spencer repeating carbines the enemy cavalrymen employ, with a lever action to advance each successive bullet. But you worked no lever, save to chamber your first round. The rifle simply fired, again and again.”

“When the charge in a round explodes, it makes a gas that rapidly expands and pushes the bullet out of the muzzle. Do you follow me?”

“Certainly, sir. If I may remind you, I was an engineer.” Lee felt irked at being asked so elementary a question.

“That’s right. So you were.” Rhoodie spoke as if reminding himself. He went on, “My weapon taps some of the gas and uses it to move the bolt back so the magazine spring can lift another round into the chamber. Then the cycle repeats itself until the magazine has no more ammunition left in it.”

“Most ingenious.” Lee plucked at his beard, not wanting to go on. Southern inventors had come up with a great many clever ideas during the war, only to have them prove stillborn because of the Confederacy’s feeble manufacturing capacity. Nevertheless, the question had to be asked: “With how many of these repeaters could you supply me?”

Rhoodie smiled broadly. “How many would you like?”

“I would like as many as you can furnish,” Lee said. “The use to which I might put them, however, would depend on the number available. If you can provide me with, say, a hundred, I might furnish them to horse artillery batteries, so they might protect themselves against attacks by the enemy infantry. If, on the other hand, you are fortunate enough to possess five hundred or so—and the requisite ammunition—I would consider outfitting a cavalry regiment with them. It would be pleasant to have our horsemen able to match the firepower those people are able to bring to bear, rather than opposing them with pistols and shotguns.”

Andries Rhoodie’s smile grew wider still, yet it was not the smile of someone sharing something pleasant with friends. Lee was reminded instead of the professional grimace of a stage magician about to produce two doves from inside his hat. Rhoodie said,” And suppose, General Lee, suppose I am able to get you a hundred thousand of these rifles, with their ammunition? How would you—how would the Confederacy—use them?”

“A hundred thousand?” Lee kept his voice low and steady, but only with a distinct effort. Rather than pulling two doves out of his hat, the big stranger had turned loose a whole flock. “Sir, that is not a piker’s offer.”

“Nor a likely one, if you will forgive my saying so,” Charles Marshall said. “That is nearly as many weapons as we have been able to realize from all of Europe in three years of war. I suppose you will deliver the first shipment by the next northbound train?” Irony flavored every word.

Rhoodie took no notice of it. “Close enough,” he said coolly. “My comrades and I have spent some time getting ready for this day. General Lee, you will be sending General Hoke’s brigade down to North Carolina over the next couple of nights—am I right?”

“Yes, that is so,” Lee said without much thought. Then all at once he swung the full weight of his attention to Rhoodie. “But how do you know of it, sir? I wrote those orders just today, and was in the process of informing President Davis of them when interrupted by you and your repeater. So how can you have learned of my plans for General Hoke’s movements?”

“My comrades and I are well informed in any area we choose,” Rhoodie answered. He was easy, even amused; Lee abstractly admired that; he knew his own presence overawed most men. The stranger went on, “We do not aim to harm you or your army or the Confederacy in any way, General. Please believe me when I say that. No less than you, we aim to see the South free and independent.”

“That all sounds very fine, but you did not answer the general’s question,” Marshall said. He ran a hand through his slick, dark blond hair as he took a step toward Rhoodie. “How did you learn of General Hoke’s movements?”

“I knew. That’s enough.” The stranger did not back down. “If you order the northbound train’s engineer to stop at Rivington, General Lee, we’ll put aboard the first shipment of rifles and ammunition. That would be, hmm, about twenty-five-hundred weapons, with several magazines’ worth of rounds for each. We can supply as many again the night after that, until your army is fully equipped with new pieces.”

“A hundred thousand rifles would oversupply the Army of Northern Virginia,” Lee said.

“The Confederacy has more armies than yours. Don’t you think General Johnston will be able to use some when General Sherman brings the whole Military Division of the Mississippi down against him come spring?”

“General Grant commands the Military Division of the Mississippi,” Walter Taylor said: “all the Federal troops between the Alleghenies and the river.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right, so he does, for now. My mistake,” Rhoodie said. He turned back to Lee, this time with a hunter’s intent expression on his face. “And don’t you think, General, that Nathan Bedford Forrest’s troopers would enjoy being able to outshoot the Federals as well as outride and outfight them?”

“What I think, sir, is that you are building mighty castles in the air on the strength of a single rifle,” Lee answered. He did not care for the way Andries Rhoodie looked at him, did not care for the arrogant way the man spoke, did not care for anything about him…except for his rifle. If one Southern man could deliver the fire of five or ten Unionists, the odds against which Confederate armies had to fight in every engagement might all at once be set at naught.

Rhoodie still studied him. Lee felt his cheeks go hot, even on this icy winter’s day, for he knew the stranger could see he was tempted. The book of Matthew came into his mind: Again the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.

But Rhoodie did not ask for worship, and he was no devil, only a big, tough man, who was not too tough to wear a cap with flaps to keep his ears warm. For all that Lee had not taken to him, he spoke like a reasonable man, and now said, reasonably, “General, I will stay here and guarantee with my person that what I say is true. Give the order for the train to stop and pick up the rifles and ammunition. If they do not come as I say they will, why, you can do whatever you please with me. Where is your risk in that?”

Lee searched for one. Try as he would, he could not find it. To no one in particular, Charles Venable said, “The fellow doesn’t lack for brass, that’s certain.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Lee agreed. The major’s remark helped decide him. “Very well, Mr. Rhoodie, I will give that order, and we shall see what arrives on that northbound train. If you make good on your claims, the first rifles will go to General Stuart’s cavalry. After that, well, the divisions of General Anderson and Henry Heth are quartered closest to us here. Those men can have first call on the rifles among the infantry.”

“If he makes good,” Charles Marshall said heavily. “What if he fails?”

“What would you recommend, Major?” Lee asked, genuinely curious.

“A good horsewhipping, to teach him to brag no more.”

“How say you to that, Mr. Rhoodie?” Lee inquired.

“I’ll take the chance,” the stranger answered. Despite himself, Lee was impressed—whether the fellow could do as he said remained to be seen, but he thought he could. Rhoodie went on, “With your permission, General, some of my comrades will ride north with the rifles. You’ll need instructors to teach your men to use them properly.”

“They may come,” Lee said. Afterwards, he thought that moment was the one when he first truly began to believe Andries Rhoodie, began to believe a trainload of fancy repeaters and ammunition could arrive from North Carolina. Rhoodie was just too sure of himself to doubt.

Walter Taylor asked, “Mr. Rhoodie, what do you call this rifle of yours. Is it a Rhoodie, too? Most inventors name their products for themselves, do they not?”

“No, it’s not a Rhoodie.” The big stranger unslung the title, held it in both hands as gently as if it were a baby. “Give it its proper name, Major. It’s an AK-47.”

Lee returned to his tent to finish the delayed letter to President Davis, then went back outside to see how his staff officers were dealing with Andries Rhoodie. Rhoodie, for his part, seemed perfectly ready to wait to be proved right. Either from that commodious haversack of his or from the pack behind his horse’s saddle, he had taken out and erected a neat little one-man tent and was now building a fire in front of it.

Majors Taylor, Venable, and Marshall stood around watching him. Each of them kept a hand close to his side arm. It occurred to Lee, though, that with such a quick-firing repeater, Rhoodie might take advantage of a second’s inattention to take out all three men before they could shoot back…

The notion was unsettling. But the extraordinary repeater was inside the tent at the moment, and the big stranger showed not the slightest sign of hostility. He got his fire going on the first match, and proceeded to warm his hands over it. Lee smiled a little. Rhoodie did net have the air of a man about to attack everyone around him.

He ducked into the tent, but emerged with nothing more lethal than a pot and a folding metal stand. He dipped up some water from a little brook that ran eventually into the Rapidan, then returned to his fire and put the pot over it to boil.

Lee’s servant came up. “Supper be ready soon, Marse Robert.”

“Thank you, Perry. What do we have tonight?”

“Possum soup, all nice and thick with peanuts,” the black man answered.

“That sounds very fine.” Lee walked over to Rhoodie. “Would you care to share supper with me, sir? Perry has not much to work with here, but one would never know it by the meals he turns out.”

Rhoodie’s eyes flicked toward Perry. “Your slave?”

“He’s free,” Lee answered.

Rhoodie shrugged. Lee could see he did not approve. The stranger started to say something, then evidently thought better of it, which was just as well. When he did speak, it was about supper: “Will you let me add to the meal? I know you’re on short rations here.”

“I wouldn’t want to deprive you. Times are hard everywhere.”

“It’s no trouble. I have plenty.” Rhoodie peered into the pot. “Ah, good; it’s boiling.” He set it on the ground. “Excuse me.” He went back into the tent. When he came out, he was holding a couple of packages whose sides and bottoms reflected the firelight metallically. He peeled a lid off each of them. The insides of the lids looked metallic, too. He set down the packages, poured hot water into each of them. Instantly, savory steam rose.

Lee watched—and sniffed—with interest. “Is that desiccated stew you have there? The Federals use desiccated vegetables, but I did not know anyone was preparing whole meals that way.”

“Desiccated stew it is, General.” The tall stranger’s voice was oddly constrained, as if he’d expected Lee to be more surprised. He passed him one of the packages and a spoon. “Before you eat, stir it about a little.”

Lee stirred, then tasted. His eyebrows rose. “This is excellent. Were they to taste it, the wits in the army wouldn’t joke so about’ desecrated’ vegetables.” He ate another couple of spoonfuls; “Very good indeed. Now I find myself embarrassed at. having nothing better than possum soup to offer in exchange.”

“Don’t fret about it, General,” Rhoodie said. He held out his metal packet as a bowl when Perry came by a couple of minutes later with the kettle. Perry ladled the container full. He smiled. “You have nothing to be embarrassed about. Your black is a fine cook.”

“He does seem to work miracles, doesn’t he? He has to, these days, I fear.” Lee finished the last of his stew. Even desiccated, it had more and finer ingredients than he was used to; he could still feel their rich savor in his mouth. He said, “Mr. Rhoodie, you’ve spoken glibly of all the rifles you can furnish us. Can you also supply desiccated rations of this sort, enough to hold hunger at bay in this army until spring?”

“Our, ah, firm, is chiefly concerned with weapons: As far as rations go, I will have to inquire before I tell you how many we can bring in.”

“I wish you would,” Lee said. “A soldier who cannot march and fight is as much a loss to his country as one without a rifle.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Rhoodie said. “I don’t know how much that will be. We’re ready to move with the rifles now. For food, we would have to begin to make special arrangements, and they might take some time.”

“You know your own affairs best, I’m sure. I merely say that, if practicable, rations would be of material benefit to us.” Lee got to his feet. So did the big stranger. He started over to the brook with his pot. Lee said, “Surely you aren’t still hungry, sir.”

“I was going to boil water for coffee. Would you like some?”

“Real coffee?” Lee asked. Rhoodie nodded. With a rueful smile, Lee said, “I almost think real coffee might be too potent for me, after so long drinking chicory and scorched grain masquerading under the name. Still, I will gladly hazard the experiment, provided you have enough for my staff as well. I would not see them deprived of what I enjoy.”

“They’re welcome,” Rhoodie said. “They need their own mugs, though.”

“By all means,” Lee called his aides, gave them the good news. They exclaimed in delight and hurried back to their tents. Lee went off to fetch his own mug.

By the time everyone converged, mug in hand, on Rhoodie’s shelter, he had his pot back over the fire. With his free hand, he passed each Confederate officer a small, flat packet. Rhoodie said, “Tear it open and pour it into the bottom of your cup.”

FOLGER’S INSTANT COFFEE, Lee read on the packet. Below that, in much smaller print, was something he could not make out. He put on his glasses. The words came clear: MADE IN U.S.A. He returned the glasses to his pocket, thinking he should have been able to guess that without reading it.

As Rhoodie had directed, he poured the contents of the packet into his cup. The stuff did not look like ground coffee. “Is this another of your desiccations?” he asked.

“You might say so, yes, General. Now if you’ll hold out your cup—” Rhoodie filled it to the brim with hot water. All at once, it smelled like coffee. “Stir it about to dissolve it all,” Rhoodie said as he filled the aides’ mugs in turn.

Lee raised the cup to his lips. It was not the best coffee he’d ever had. But coffee it unmistakably was. He took a long, slow sip, closed his eyes with pleasure. “That is most welcome,” he said. One after another, the staff officers echoed him.

“I’m glad you enjoy it,” Rhoodie said. Charles Venable had been examining his packet, too. “Instant coffee,” he said musingly.” An apt description, though not one I’ve heard before. Is this little envelope made of tinfoil, Mr. Rhoodie?”

“I think so,” the big stranger answered after a slight hesitation, which Lee believed he recognized; it sounded like the pause of a man who was not telling everything he knew. Andries Rhoodie seemed to know a fair number of things he wasn’t telling. The things he had already spoken of and shown were quite remarkable enough. Lee wondered what secrets he still kept.

Walter Taylor pointed to Rhoodie’s coffee mug. “What is that emblem your cup bears, sir, if I may ask? At first, seeing the red background and the white, I took it for a Confederate symbol, but now I see it is not.”

Rhoodie held the mug close to the fire to give Taylor a better view of it. Lee looked, too. Inside a white circle on the red background was a spiky, black emblem that reminded him of a caltrop:

Under the emblem stood three letters: AWB. Rhoodie said, “It is the sign of my organization.” He was good at appearing to answer while actually saying little.

Lee asked, “What do the initials signify?”

“Our motto,” Rhoodie replied with a smile: “America Will Break.”

Taylor raised his mug in salute. “I’ll drink to that, by God!” The other aides followed suit. So did Lee. He had stayed in the Federal army as long as he could, but when Virginia left the Union, he went with his state. It counted for more with him than did the idea of the United States.

“Another cup, gentlemen?” Rhoodie asked. “I have more coffee.”

The staff officers said yes in a chorus. Coffee won them over where even Rhoodie’s repeater had left suspicion in its wake. Lee declined: “After so long without, a second cup would surely leave me wakeful. At my age, I find I must be careful of my sleep, for I need it more but have more trouble winning it.”

Nodding to Rhoodie, he turned to go. His aides saluted. He returned the courtesy and walked slowly back to his tent. He took off his boots and jacket, lay down on the cot, and pulled several blankets over himself. Even with them, the night would be cold. Most of his men had but a single cover, many had none. The surgeons would see frostbite and catarrh come morning sick call. That happened every day.

The coffee did not keep him from falling asleep. It woke him a couple of hours later, though. He stood up to use the chamber pot. The ground chilled his toes through his socks.

Before he went back to bed, he glanced out through the tent flap. Andries Rhoodie had kept his fire large and bright. He was sitting in front of it in a folding chair of gaudy canvas webbing and wood. He did not notice Lee, being intent on the book in his lap.

“What are you reading, sir, at this late hour?” Lee called softly.

Rhoodie looked up and peered into the night. With his eyes full of firelight, he needed a few seconds to catch sight of Lee. When he did, he stuck a thumb in the book to keep his place, then shut it and held it up. A golden cross gleamed on the black cover.

“Ah,” Lee said, all at once feeling easier about Rhoodie than he had since the moment he’d met him. “You could find no better companion, by day or night. May I ask which verses you have chosen?”

“The story of Gideon,” the big ‘stranger answered. “I read it often. It seems to fit.”

“It does indeed,” Lee said. “It does indeed. Good night, sir. I hope you sleep well when you do seek your bedroll.”

“Thank you, General. A good night to you, too.”

Lee went back to bed. As he’d told Rhoodie, he often had trouble sleeping. Not tonight, though—he dropped off as smoothly and easily as a child. Just before he stopped thinking altogether, he wondered why. Maybe it was hope, something that had been in short supply since Gettysburg. He slept.

The next couple of days went by in something close to a state of anticlimax. General Samuel Jones of the Department of Western Virginia sent a letter promising cattle and beef for the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee wrote effusive thanks, but the promised animals were slower arriving than Jones‘s letter had been. As he’d feared, he had to reduce the army’s rations.

Just after he’d finished drafting the general order for the melancholy necessity, Charles Venable poked his head into the tent. “Telegram for you, sir.” He paused for dramatic effect. “It’s from Rivington.”

“Read it to me at once, Major,” Lee said.

“Yes, sir.” Venable unfolded the flimsy sheet of paper. “Stopped at Rivington northbound per your orders of January 20. Many crates of two different shapes taken on board. Townsfolk helpful and well organized. After departing, opened two crates at random, one of each type. Contents, metal cartridges and carbines of curious manufacture. A dozen men also boarded. Asbury Finch, First Lieutenant, C.S.A.”

“Well, well,” Lee said, and then again, “Well, well. Our mysterious Mr. Rhoodie does indeed have the rifles he promised, or some of them, at any rate. Despite his certainty, I wondered, I truly did.”

“I did more than wonder, sir,” Venable answered. “I doubted, and doubted strongly. But as you say, he seems to have kept the first part of his promise.”

“So he does. When General Stuart sees what these carbines can do, he will want no others. The repeaters, which ever more of the Federal cavalry employ, have hurt his troopers badly. Now he will be able to reply on equal—or better than equal—terms. And if Mr. Rhoodie was not “spinning a tale all out of moonshine, there will be rifles for our infantry as well.”

“I wonder how much the Bureau of Ordnance is paying for these—what did he call them?”

“AK-47s,” Lee supplied. “Whatever the price, it may well mark the difference between our liberty and suppression. It would be difficult to set that price too high.”

“Yes, sir.” Venable hesitated, then went on, “May I ask, sir, what you think of Mr. Rhoodie?”

“Well, I certainly think a good deal better of him now that I know for a fact he is not a solitary charlatan with a solitary, if marvelous, carbine,” Lee said at once. Then he too paused. “But that wasn’t the whole of what you asked, was it, Major?”

“No, sir.” Normally a fluent speaker, Venable seemed to be struggling to put what he thought into words: “I do believe he is the most peculiar man I’ve ever met. His carbine, his gear, even the food he eats and the coffee he drinks…I’ve not seen nor heard of their like anywhere.”

“Nor have I, and with their uniform excellence and convenience, I should hope I would have, the better to wage this war,” Lee said. “There is also more to it than that. The man knows more than he lets on. How could he have learned of my orders sending General Hoke south? That still perplexes me, and worries me no small amount as well. Had he been exposed ‘as a fraud, I would have had some hard questions to ask him about it, and asked them in as hard way as need. As is—” Lee shrugged. “He is manifestly a good Southern man. How long do you suppose we could have lasted, Major, had he chosen to go north and sell his rifles to the enemy?”

Venable made a sour face, as if disliking the taste of that idea. “Not long, sir.”

“I quite agree. They outweigh us enough as is. But he chose our cause instead, so for the time being the hard questions can wait. And he is a pious man. No one who was not would read his Testament late at night where nobody could be expected to see him.”

“Every word you say is true, sir,” Venable said. “And yet—I don’t know—everything Rhoodie has seems too good to be true somehow.”

“The Union has had the advantage in material goods all through the war, Major. Are you saying we are not entitled to our share, or that, if fortune should for once choose to favor us, we ought not to take advantage of it?”

“Put that way, no, of course not, General Lee.”

“Good,” Lee said. “For I intend to wring every drop of advantage from it that I may.”

A plume of woodsmoke announced a train heading up the Orange and Alexandria Railroad to the little town of Orange Court House. Lee pointed to it with the eagerness of a boy who spies his Christmas present being fetched in. “If I have calculated rightly, gentlemen, that will be the train from Rivington. Shall we ride to meet it, and see this first consignment of Mr. Rhoodie’s rifles?”

His aides hurried off to get their horses. Andries Rhoodie went with them. Perry brought up Traveller. Lee swung onto the gray. The staff officers and Rhoodie soon joined them. They rode down from the hills to Orange Court House together. Lee and his aides were all fine horsemen. He soon saw Rhoodie was not, though he managed well enough.

Old civilian men, walking or riding along the streets of Orange Court House, lifted their hats in tribute to Lee as he passed. He gravely returned their greetings. Few young male civilians were to be seen—in the town or anywhere else in the Confederacy. There were a fair number of soldiers, seeing what the shops had to offer: not much, probably. They saluted Lee and his staff officers. Some pointed at Andries Rhoodie: his size, his strange clothes, and the fact that he, a stranger, rode with Lee drew their notice to him.

The train station was not far from the courthouse that gave the hamlet half its name. For that matter, nothing in Orange Court House was far from anything else. The train had already arrived by the time Lee and his companions got to the station. Under the watchful eye of the crew, slaves loaded cut logs into the tender for the next trip south.

Other blacks were starting to unload the freight cars. Some of the men who supervised them wore the Confederate uniform; others were dressed like Andries Rhoodies, in caps and mottled jackets and trousers. Even their ankle boots were the same as his. Lee rubbed his chin thoughtfully. What one man wore was his own business. When a dozen men—a baker’s dozen, counting Rhoodie himself—wore similar outfits, that suggested the clothes were a uniform of sorts. Indeed, Rhoodie’s colleagues looked more uniform than the Southern soldiers with them, whose pants, coats, and hats were of several different colors and cut in a variety of ways.

Behind Lee, Walter Taylor turned to Rhoodie and remarked, “Your friends are all good-sized men, sir.” He was right. The smallest of the men m spotted clothes had to be five feet ten. Most of them were six-footers; two or three were as big as Rhoodie. They all looked well fed, too, in spite of the war and the hard winter. The Confederate soldiers came to attention when Lee and his aides rode up. The men from Rivington did not. A few of them greeted Rhoodie with a nod or a wave. Most just kept calling orders to the slaves, who were taking crates off the train.

“Your fellows here have the same interesting accent as you yourself,” Charles Venable observed.

“We are countrymen,” Rhoodie said blandly. Lee smiled at the major’s polite probe and at Rhoodie’s equally polite but uninformative reply. Rhoodie had given a lot of polite but uninformative replies, the last few days. Lee told himself that a trainload—maybe a great many trainloads—of repeaters and cartridges gave him the right to hold his tongue.

Lee dismounted. His aides and Rhoodie followed him to the ground; Venable hitched Traveller to the rail. A soldier with two bars on either side of his collar walked up to them. His face, Lee thought, was too thin for the whiskers he’d chosen, which were like those of the Federal general Burnside. He saluted. “Asbury Finch, sir, 21st Georgia.”

“Yes, Lieutenant. I received your telegram.”

“Yes, sir.” Finch sent a glance to Andries Rhoodie, who had gone over to greet his comrades. “So you’ve already met one of these all-over-spots fellows, have you, sir? They’ve purely done wonders for Rivington, that they have.”

“I commanded in North Carolina a couple of years ago, Lieutenant, but I must confess I do not remember the town,” Lee said.

“A couple years ago, General Lee, sir, wasn’t nothin’ worth remembering, just a town barely big enough for the train to bother stoppin’ at it. But it’s growin’ to beat the band now, thanks to these folks. A big bunch of ‘em done settled there, bought a raft o’ niggers, and run up new houses and warehouses and I don’t know what all. And all in the last three, four months, too; I heard that from one of the folks who’s lived there all his life while we were takin’ on these crates. They pay gold for everything, too, he says.”

“No wonder they’re welcome, then,” Lee said. Confederate paper money had weakened to the point where a pair of shoes cost a private soldier three or four months’ wages. That was one reason so many men in the Army of Northern Virginia went barefoot even in winter. Another was that there were not enough shoes to be had at any price.

“Pity they couldn’t have come a year ago,” Walter Taylor said. “Think what we might have done with those rifles at Chancellorsville, or up in Pennsylvania.”

“I have had that thought myself a fair number of times the last few days, Major,” Lee said. “What’s past is past, though, and cannot be changed.”

“The guns, they’re as fine as all that, sir?” Finch asked. “They are indeed, Lieutenant,” Taylor said. “With them, I feel we truly may hold in our hands the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

“Or it holds us,” Charles Marshall said, his voice sour.

Lee looked at him sharply. Marshall had not taken to Andries Rhoodie, not at all. But after a moment’s thought, Lee decided he had a point; Trainloads of repeating carbines might save the Confederacy. But if Rhoodie and his friends were the only source for them, they held a hand to the throat of the South. They were not squeezing now—far from it. If, however, they chose to…

“Major Marshall,” Lee said.

“Sir?”

“Please draft a letter to Colonel Gorgas in Richmond. I would like his opinion on the practicability of our manufacturing copies of these weapons, as we do now with the Springfield and Mississippi rifles. When the first shipment of rifles reaches our headquarters, you might also send one and a stock of cartridges to Colonel G.W. Rains in Georgia, who is, I think, the man most expert in the Bureau of Ordnance on matters pertaining to powder. Perhaps he can enlighten us on how these rounds produce so little smoke.”

“I will attend to it, sir,” Marshall said. His spectacles’ wire frames could not hide a raised eyebrow. “Your trust in Mr. Rhoodie is not perfect, then?”

“The only perfect trust is in God,” Lee answered. Marshall smiled and nodded. A relative of the great chief justice, he had been a lawyer till the war began, which gave him another reason besides religion to place perfect trust in no human institution.

Just then, Rhoodie came back to Lee, his staff officers, and Lieutenant Finch. Several of his friends were right behind him. He said, “General, let me introduce some of my comrades. Here are Konrad de Buys, Wilhelm Gebhard, Benny Lang, and Ernie Graaf.”

“Gentlemen,” Lee said, extending his hand.

They came up one by one to shake it.” An honor to meet the great General Lee,” Ernie Graff said. He was about Lee’s height, and wore a neat, sandy chin-beard, which only partially hid a scar that ran up to the angle of his jaw. As Major Venable had noted, he and the rest of the men in mottled clothes spoke with the same not-quite-British accent as Rhoodie, and the same harsh undertone—if anything, that was stronger in his voice than in Rhoodie’s.

“You needn’t say my name as if you’d found it in some history book, sir,” Lee protested mildly. All of Rhoodie’s comrades smiled or laughed at that, rather more than the small joke deserved. Even so, Lee was pleased to put them at their ease.

“General Stuart is the man I want to meet,” said the one who had been introduced as Konrad de Buys. Most of the strangers had a businesslike look to them, but de Buys’s tawny eyes held a gleam that reminded Lee of a cougar. This man fought for the joy of it.

Then Lee remembered how Rhoodie rode. De Buys would have to do better than that to satisfy Jeb Stuart. “You are a horseman, sir?” Lee asked. De Buys nodded in a way that left no doubt. Lee said, “Then I am certain General Stuart will be pleased to make your acquaintance as well. Colonel Mosby also, perhaps, with his partisan command.” By the way de Buys grinned, Lee knew he had judged his man aright.

“General Stuart is by—Fredericksburg?” Wilhelm Gebhard asked.

He turned the soft g of general hard, as a German might have. Behind Lee, one of his aides whispered “Dutchmen” to another. Lee guessed it was Marshall; he seemed most dubious of Rhoodie, and the bulk of Germans in America—including a good many who lived in the Confederacy—were Unionists.

But these men were far too open—and far too strange—to be spies, and in any case, General Meade knew where the Army of Northern Virginia’s cavalry was passing the winter. “Yes, around Fredericksburg,” Lee answered. He would sooner have had Stuart’s troopers closer to hand, but getting horses through the winter was harder and required more land than men did.

Gebhard turned to Rhoodie, asked him something in a language that sounded close to English but was not. Rhoodie replied in the same tongue. Dutchmen they are, Lee thought, In English, Rhoodie said, “He wants to know whether he and de Buys should arrange to go to Fredericksburg to show off our guns, or whether you will call General Stuart here.”

Lee thought about that. At last he said, “With the cavalry spread out on the countryside as it is, the more efficient course would appear to be convening General Stuart and his divisional and brigade commanders here at Orange Court House so they can judge your repeaters for themselves.”

“Fine,” Rhoodie said. “When we shoot, though, better we go back up to your headquarters, to keep word of what these guns can do from reaching the enemy.”

“A sensible plan,” Lee agreed.

Talking to himself as much as to Lee, Rhoodie went on, “Since this will be the center from which we give out guns to your army, we ought to rent quarters here, and warehouse space, too. We have a lot of work to do before spring, getting your men ready.”

“The officers of the Army of Northern Virginia should prove of some assistance to you,” Lee said drily.

Irony bounced from Andries Rhoodie like solid shot off an ironclad’s armored hull. He looked Lee full in the face and said, “Some will help us, General; I don’t doubt it. But if I were on the other side of the Rapidan and dealing with the Federals, say with General Burnside or General Sigel, they might not even have given me a hearing. They have their Springfields, after all, and once a routineer settles in with something, it’s hard to boot him loose from it.”

“You will be treating with better men in this army than the two you named,” Lee said. “I should certainly hope so, at any rate.”

“You vouch for every brigadier, every colonel?” Rhoodie persisted. “My comrades and I haven’t enough manpower to do more than show the basics of how to shoot and clean the AK-47, regiment by regiment. Getting your soldiers to use it afterwards will be up to those commanders. Some of them will mistrust anything new and different.”

“I see what you are saying, sir,” Lee admitted. There was some truth to it, too. The Confederate States themselves had banded together in the hope of preserving their old way of life against the growing numbers and growing factories of the North. But here—”You get my men these repeaters, Mr. Rhoodie, and I shall undertake to see they are used,”

“That’s what I wanted to hear, General Lee.”

“You have heard it.”

Singing as they worked, slaves carried long crates with rifles in them and square crates of ammunition out of the freight cars and stacked them beside the railroad tracks. The stacks grew higher and higher and higher.