The Guns of the South

* XV *

No sooner had Robert E. Lee ventured outside the Powhatan House to enjoy the brisk fall air than reporters swooped down on him like stooping hawks. He nodded to them, unsurprised; they had become familiar over the past few months. By unspoken agreement, they let him alone as long as he was within the hotel, but he became fair game the moment his foot hit the sidewalk.

“Mr. Quincy, you were here half a step ahead of the rest, I believe,” Lee said to the man from the Richmond Whig.

“Thank you, General.” Virgil Quincy poised pencil over pad. “If I may ask, why have you chosen to remain here in Virginia while Bedford Forrest travels allover the country, speaking, it seems, at every town big enough to boast a railroad station?”

“General Forrest is, of course, free to conduct his campaign in any fashion that suits him.” Lee had learned to speak slowly enough to let the reporters take down his words. “I might add a point which sometimes seems in danger of being forgotten: that is to say, I also enjoy the same freedom. The entire Confederacy surely knows where I stand on the issues of the day; perhaps General Forrest still feels the need to make his ideas more widely accessible to the voters.”

Quincy twirled a waxed mustache between thumb and forefinger as he considered his next question. “How do you feel about Forrest’s questioning your initial loyalty to the Confederate cause?”

“I prefer to allow my contributions to that cause to speak for themselves. If they do not make it plain where my loyalty lay, nothing I can say will do so.” For public consumption, Lee kept his fury tightly bottled. He was used to newspapers sniping at him from time to time. But to have his loyalty impugned by a man he had admired until their differing views created a chasm between them, and for no better purpose than political advantage—that was hard to bear. He had not imagined Forrest would stoop so low, which, if anything, but served to illuminate his own political naïveté.

Virgil Quincy took a step back; Lee’s rule was to allow each reporter two questions. Edwin Helper of the Richmond Dispatch approached in Quincy’s place. “To change the subject, if I may, sir, what do you think of the war just begun by the United States against England over the Canadas?”

“I deprecate war in general,” Lee replied. “As to this war in particular, I would be less than truthful if I said I was sorry to see so many U.S. troops drawn hundreds of miles to the north of our frontier.” He smiled; several reporters chuckled. He added, “Even with the accession of Kentucky to the Confederacy, the United States are a larger, more populous nation than the C.S.A. The implications to be drawn from that should be clear to the observer.”

“They’re not quite clear to me,” Helper said. “What do you think our course ought to be?”

“To continue the scrupulous neutrality President Davis has proclaimed and is observing,” Lee answered at once. “Any other course involves us in risks which should not be run.” Senator Wigfall was shouting for a Southern invasion to seize the slave states remaining in the U.S.A. while that country was otherwise engaged. Some fire-eaters shouted right along with him. Others, though, remembering how England’s not-so-scrupulous neutrality had almost ruined the Confederacy during the war, were all for allying with the United States against her.

“Should we not at least demand concessions from the U.S.A. as the price of our neutrality?” asked Rex Van Lew of the Richmond Examiner.

Lee shook his head. “They are our brothers. Though we no longer live in the same house with them, having grown up to enjoy one of our own, putting demands upon brothers strikes me as a bad business, and one which cannot fail to bring resentment.”

“He’s right about that, by God,” Virgil Quincy said. “I’ve yet to hear the end of the time I asked my brother for fifty dollars, and it was back before the war.”

The reporters laughed. Lee walked down Broad” Street with the newpapermen trailing along behind him. Van Lew said, “What is your opinion of General Forrest’s actively campaigning for a whole year in his quest to defeat you?”

“I admire his energy without wishing to employ mine to similar purpose,” Lee said. “I also doubt the benefit, either to the nation or to the electorate, of repeating oneself so often. Now, gentlemen, if you will excuse me, I should like to get in something of a constitutional.” He increased his pace. The reporters were decades younger than he—he would be sixty-one come January—but several of them began puffing as they hurried to keep up.

Rex Van Lew had used up his allotted questions, but asked another one anyhow: “How will you feel when the election is over, sir?”

“Relieved,” Lee answered promptly.

“Win or lose?” three reporters asked at the same time.

“Win or lose,” he said. “Relieved at least of suspense if I win, relieved of responsibility if I lose. While I hope and expect to win, the prospect of quiet retirement is by no means altogether unattractive, I assure you.”

He walked on. Three years before, the Army of Northern Virginia had paraded in triumph down this very street. Now most of those soldiers were long since back at their peacetime trades. That, he thought, was as it should be. He blinked, then smiled—he even had a peacetime trade of his own, though he’d never expected to turn politician.

“What’s funny, General?” Edwin Helper asked.

“Life; or, if you’d like, the fortunes of war,” Lee said. In Capitol Square, George Washington in bronze pointed ahead, urging on invisible followers, or perhaps the country as a whole. Lee gravely tipped his hat to his wife’s adoptive ancestor, then went on with his constitutional.

Nate Caudell gauged the creeping shadows in the classroom. He put down his chalk. “That’s enough for now. We’ll pick it up again after dinner.” Several students let out barely suppressed cheers and grabbed for the bags and old newspapers in which they’d brought their noontime meals. For that matter, his stomach was growling, too.

He wolfed his ham and corn bread, gulped from a canteen full of cold coffee. Then he hurried over to the town square. Extra flags flew above the courthouse; a long line of men snaked in through the front door. Unfamiliar buggies and wagons, horses and mules, were hitched everywhere—farmers from half the county were in town to vote today.

A lot of them were men he’d known in the army but seldom saw these days. He waved to Dempsey Eure, who was just tying his horse in a narrow space between two buggies. They got into line together: “Patriot or Confederate?” Caudell asked. Since Eure had heckled Mayor Cockrell at the Forrest rally, he thought he knew what answer to expect.

Sure enough, the ex-sergeant said, “I’m voting Confederate. I followed Marse Robert into Washington City, so I don’t reckon I’ll run away from him now. How about you, Nate?”

“The same,” Caudell said. “He ought to have an easy time of it here and in Virginia, where so many served under him. Out farther west, though, they know about him but they don’t really know him, if you know what I mean. And they do know Forrest out there.”

“That’s why they vote—to see what happens,” Eure said.

“Yup.” Caudell looked his friend over, smiled as he saw something familiar. “You still wear a feather in your hat, do you? How are you getting along?”

“I get by,” Dempsey Eure said with a shrug. “Married Lemon Strickland’s sister Lucy not long after I got home, you know. We got ourselves a boy two years old, an’ she’s in the family way again. How times does get on—before too long, suppose I’ll be sendin’ Wiley to that school of yours. You fix him so he knows more’n his old man, you hear?”

“If he’s anything like his old man, he’ll do fine,” Caudell said. He noticed Eure hadn’t really said anything about his fortunes except I get by. He didn’t push for more; come to that, he couldn’t have said more himself.

The line advanced. Caudell blinked as he went from sunshine into the gloom inside the courthouse. Mayor Cockrell and Cornelius Joyner, the justice of the peace, sat behind a stout wooden table. “Here’s the roll, Nate,” Joyner said when Caudell came up to him. “Sign your name on the line.” He pointed to show where.

Caudell signed. Quite a lot of men had already voted. Most had signed their names, but for a depressingly large number of voters, only an X, witnessed by mayor and justice of the peace, appeared in the signature column of the register. Isaac Cockrell handed Caudell a ballot and a much-sharpened stub of pencil.

He voted for Lee and for Albert Gallatin Brown without hesitation, then went on through the rest of his choices. Sion Rogers, he saw, was running for Congress and billing himself a Confederate. Caudell voted for him. He might have done so even if Rogers ran as a Patriot, for he’d been the 47th North Carolina’s first colonel until he resigned his commission early in 1863 to become Attorney General of North Carolina.

When Caudell was done, he folded his ballot and returned it to Cornelius Joyner, who slid it through the slot of a wooden box with an impressively stout padlock.” Nathaniel N. Caudell has voted,” the justice of the peace intoned, his voice loud and deep enough to make Caudell proud of having done his civic duty.

“Wait a minute,” Mayor Cockrell exclaimed when Caudell started to walk out with the pencil. “You bring that back right now, you hear? We’re startin’ to run low on ‘em.” Red-faced, Caudell returned the little stub.

Meanwhile, Judge Joyner announced to the world that Dempsey Eure had exercised his franchise. Eure’s eyes were twinkling as he left the courthouse with Caudell. “You should’ve told him to buy a substitute for his damn pencil, Nate,” he said. “That was you back this spring,” wasn’t it? Sure sounded like you if it wasn’t.”

“It was me, all right,” Caudell said. “Good thing his honor’s ears aren’t as good as yours.” The clock above the courthouse chimed one. “I’ve got to get back to the schoolhouse, Dempsey, before they burn it down. By God, it’s good to see you.”

“And you.” Dempsey Eure thumped him on the back. “I wondered if they’d have to get us back into butternut before we met up again.”

“It would take a good deal to get me back into uniform, and that’s a fact,” Caudell said. His friend laughed and nodded. He went on, “I really do have to get back.” He hurried on down Alston Street while Dempsey Eure went to reclaim his horse.

When he walked into the schoolroom again, one of the little boys there called, “Who won the election, teacher?”

Through the snorts and giggles of the older pupils, Caudell—who had to smile himself—gravely answered, “We won’t know for a few days yet, Willie. They have to count all the votes and send the count to Richmond, which takes a while. Now, class, who can tell me all twelve Confederate states and their capitals?” Hands shot into the air.

As he had in the Galt House in Louisville, so Lee now sat in the dining room of the Powhatan House in Richmond with telegrams piled so high on the table in front of him that he could hardly get to, let alone enjoy, his plate of smothered chicken. He knew now that he’d been foolish to order his favorite dish on a night when he couldn’t give it his full attention.

A boy brought in a new set of returns. Since Lee had knife in one hand and fork in the other—he did manage a distracted bite every now and then—Albert Gallatin Brown took the telegrams. As he read them, his face fen. “Forrest and Wigfall remain ahead of us in Louisiana.”

“That is unfortunate,” Lee said—blurrily, as his mouth was full. He chewed, swallowed, and resumed, sounding like himself again: “I had hoped to carry Louisiana, as its white voters have greater and longer familiarity with free Negroes, especially in and around New Orleans, than is the case elsewhere in the Confederacy.”

“The election is more closely contested than I thought it would be,” Brown agreed. He sounded gloomy, and with reason: he and Lee were also trailing in Mississippi, his home state.

Lee looked at the map tacked up on an easel beside the table. Having it there made him feel more as if this were a military campaign; it was, in fact, borrowed from the War Department, and would have to go back to Mechanic’s Hall once all the results were in. He was leading handily here in Virginia and in North Carolina, by rather less in Georgia and lightly settled Florida, and by a fair margin in Kentucky, which he had helped bring into the Confederacy and which was now voting for the first time for the President of the country it had freely chosen.

South Carolina had already come down against him: the Palmetto State, alone in the South, still chose its Electoral College representatives by vote of the legislature rather than of the people. Thus its choice had quickly, and painfully, become known.

He was losing Alabama; too, along with Louisiana and Mississippi. The cotton states; the ones whose livelihoods most depended on plantations and their slave labor, were unwilling to vote for anyone who questioned Negro servitude in any way.

That left Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee. Votes from the two western states were slow coming in. Those from Tennessee had arrived in large numbers, but every new telegram changed the leader there. At the moment, Forrest was ahead by nearly a thousand votes; an hour before, Lee had led by almost exactly as many.

Albert Gallatin Brown was studying the map, too. “We badly need Tennessee,” he said. The deliberate lack of emphasis in his voice highlighted his words as effectively as a shout.

“You have no confidence in the results from the other two?” Lee asked.

“Have you?”

“Possibly some hope for Arkansas,” Lee said. Only after he had spoken did he realize he had in effect written off Texas. It, too, was a cotton state, and also one that had boomed since the war, with Negroes in great demand and fetching high prices. Were Texans likely to vote against prosperity? It went against human nature.

Brown had been doing sums on the back of a telegram. “If Forrest takes Tennessee—and Arkansas,” he added in deference to Lee’s hope, which he did not seem to share, “that will give him sixty-four electoral votes.”

“And sixty are required for election,” Lee said heavily. Only once before had he felt as he did now: watching his men swarm up the slope toward the Union lines on the third day at Gettysburg. He had been confident they could carry everything before them, as he had been confident his own campaign would convince the people he offered the nation the wisest course. Was he to be proven as disastrously wrong now as he had been then?

A new messenger boy—the other had presumably gone home for the evening—arrived with more telegrams. Lee took them, unfolded the first few. He read them, set them down on the table. “Well?” Brown asked.

“Arkansas, or the first considerable returns therefrom.” Again Lee declined to continue. This time, his running mate did not press him: he could figure out what silence meant. Lee made himself get the words out: “The trend is against us.”

“So it all rides on Tennessee, does it?”

“It would appear that way, yes—or do you think results in any of the other states likely to change?”

Albert Gallatin Brown shook his head. He surprised Lee by starting to laugh. At Lee’s raised eyebrow, he explained, “Even if I fail of election, I remain in the Senate, and shall continue to serve my state as best I can.”

Again, Lee found himself envying Brown’s quick adaptability. If he was not elected, he would go back to Arlington, put in a crop on the sloping fields, and no doubt be more contented living the life of a semiretired gentleman farmer than as president of the Confederate States of America. Yet the idea of losing the election was intolerable to him; he would carry the weight of that rejection for the rest of his days.

The night dragged on. A colored waiter took away the dishes. Fresh stacks of telegrams replaced them. Before long, the whole big table was flooded. In Louisville, Lee had been getting returns from only two states. Now six times that many were voting.

“I have more election results here,” someone said. This was a man’s voice, not the treble of previous boys from the telegraph office. Lee looked up to find Jefferson Davis holding a handful of telegrams. The president said, “I waylaid the messenger at the dining room door.” He pulled out his watch. “It’s already past two. How long do you aim to stay up?”

“Until we know, or until we fall asleep in our chairs—whichever comes first,” Lee answered. The outgoing President smiled. Lee said, “From where are your telegrams, sir?”

“I beg your pardon, but I have yet to look at them.” Davis did so, then said, “These first several are from Tennessee: from Chattanooga and its environs, mostly.”

“Let me hear them,” Lee said, suddenly alert.

The President read off the returns. As he did, Brown scrawled figures and, lips moving, rapidly added them up. Finally he said, “That cuts Forrest’s lead there in half, more or less.” He glanced over at a pile of telegrams off to one side. “We gain when reports come in from the eastern part of the state, but fall behind when they’re out of the west.”

“The plantations in Tennessee are in the south and west. The planters there, I would infer, want their slaves back,” Davis. said. One eyebrow quirked as he turned toward Lee. “Whereas you, sir, are winning the votes of folk who, during the war, I feared would go over to the United States en masse, as did those of what must now be known as West Virginia. How can you call yourself a good Confederate, sir, if those who half wanted to be Yankees give you the election?”

But for that eyebrow, Lee would have thought the President in earnest. As it was, he hoped Davis was making one of his wintry jokes. He gave back another one: “If Forrest had seen the result there before the rest of the country voted, no doubt he would have taxed me with the same charge.”

“He did anyhow,” Brown pointed out.

“He succeeded all too well,” Lee said. “I don’t know whether you have kept track of how things stand, Mr. President, but—” He used a forefinger to point out on the map which states were going to whom.

Jefferson Davis gnawed on his lower lip as he pondered the shape of the election. “Sectionalism appears to remain alive and well among us,” he said, shaking his head. “That is dangerous; if we cannot cure it, it will cause us grief down the road: the United States, after all, tore asunder from a surfeit of sectionalism.”

“The Constitution of the Confederate States does not provide for secession,” Albert Gallatin Brown said.

“Neither did the Constitution of the United States,” Davis replied. “But if the western states have the gall to seek to abandon our confederacy as a result of this election, we shall—” He stopped; for once his façade cracked, leaving him quite humanly confused. “If they seek to abandon our confederacy, at the moment I have no idea what we shall do. In any event, the decision will be yours, not mine, General Lee.”

“Very possibly not,” Lee replied. “If the returns from Tennessee continue to favor Forrest, the decision will be his. And in that event, the states which favor him, and which favor the indefinite continuation of Negro servitude, shall have no cause for complaint as a result of this election.”

Jefferson Davis let out an audible sniff. Though his background was more like Forrest’s than Lee’s, he had enjoyed the education denied to Forrest, and had come to identify himself completely with the old, landed aristocracy of the South. He said, “I cannot imagine that—that brawler at the head of our nation.”

“The voters, unfortunately, seem to have suffered no similar failure of imagination,” Lee said.

“That is not so,” Brown said stoutly. “The aggregate total of the popular vote continues to favor us, regardless of what the Electoral College may say.”

“By the Constitution, however, the Electoral College is the final arbiter of the election. I shall not dispute its results, whatever they prove to be,” Lee said. “If we set aside the Constitution for our convenience, what point in having it?” No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he realized others would apply them to his own views on slavery. It is not the same thing, he told himself, not quite comfortably.

The messenger boy whose function President Davis had usurped now returned with a fresh set of results, which he placed in front of Lee. Brown asked, “Where are these from?”

Lee unfolded the top one, read it. “Texas,” he answered. His tone of voice said all that needed saying about the way the votes there were going. He did his best to find a silver lining to the cloud. “We had no great hope for Texas in any event.” He opened another telegram.” Ah, now this one from North Carolina is more like it: we have carried Nash County by three to two.”

“Good,” Brown said. “What are the numbers?” Lee read them off. As Brown wrote them down, he grinned the grim grin of a fighter who has landed a telling blow. Jefferson Davis’s smile held something of the same quality. Lee’s own initial burst of enthusiasm quickly faded. The news from North Carolina was no more cause for jubilation than that from Texas was cause for despair; the two sets of returns merely confirmed and extended trends that were already there. Results that went against those trends would have been more interesting.

“Anothuh cup of coffee, suh?” the waiter asked.

“No, thank you,” Lee said. “I am sufficiently awash as is. My elder brother Sydney has always been the naval officer of the family, but at the moment I am certain I am shipping more water than he.”

As the waiter left, Lee put a hand to his mouth to cover a yawn. Altogether without intending to, he fell asleep in his chair. A few minutes later, more telegrams arrived. Jefferson Davis took them and read the results to Brown, who asked, “Shall we wake the general?”

“No,” Davis said. “They make no significant changes. When more word from Tennessee arrives, that will be time enough.”

“By the feel of things, the only definitive word from Tennessee will be the last word. It will be days before we have the final count.”

“Then we needs must compose ourselves to wait,” Davis answered. “And all the less point to waking him now, would you not agree?”

Nate Caudell stared at the empty space on the counter where newspapers should have lain. “Confound it, Mr. Liles, when are they going to come in?”

“They’ve been in,” the storekeeper said. “Went right back out again today, too—I done sold every copy I had. Wept faster’n I ever seen ‘em before, matter of fact.” Caudell stared at him in blank dismay. Grinning, he went on, “You ask me pretty enough, might could be I’» tell you who won Tennessee.”

“Why, you—” Caudell swore as he hadn’t sworn since his army days. Raeford Liles laughed at him. When he finally ran down, he said, “You’d better tell me, before I start tearing this place apart.” He sounded as menacing as he could.

It was, he knew, a poor best. Liles didn’t quiver in his shoes; in fact, he didn’t stop laughing. When he’d let Caudell hang long enough, though, he said, “Vote from Knoxville came in at last. That nails it down tight—Lee carried the state by twenty-five hundred votes.”

“That’s first rate,” Caudell said, letting out a long sigh of relief. The results had hung in the balance for more than a week. Usually, even if one or two states’ returns remained in doubt, the shape of a national election grew clear soon enough. This time, everything rode on the one closest state. Caudell asked, “How big an edge in the popular vote did Lee end up with?”

“Just under thirty thousand votes, out of almost a million, cast: sixty-nine to fifty in the Electoral College,” Liles said. “But if a couple thousand people in Tennessee had gone the other way, well, we’d be talkin’ about President Forrest now, no matter what the popular vote had to say.”

“I know.” For as long as Caudell could remember, people had complained about the Electoral College of the United States; the only reason they didn’t complain more was that it normally did a good job of reflecting what the people decided. For whatever their reasons, the Confederate founding fathers had included an Electoral College in the new nation’s Constitution; and in its first real test—Jefferson Davis having run unopposed—it had almost thrown the Confederacy into turmoil by its mere existence. He said, “What are they saying about the election in the west and southwest?”

“The states Forrest won, you mean?” Liles said. Caudell nodded. The storekeeper told him: “They’re still bawlin’ like pigs that burned their noses on hot swill. From what the papers say, Senator Wigfall’s makin’ noises like they ought to up and pull out of the Confederacy, set up a new one of their own to suit them.”

“What? That’s crazy,” Caudell said. After a moment, he wondered why. The South had left the United States after an election it could not stomach. “What does Forrest have to say about that?”

“Hasn’t said anything yet,” Liles answered, which struck Caudell as ominous.

He also noticed something else. “You don’t seem to be up on your hind legs on account of Forrest has lost.”

“I ain’t,” Liles admitted. “Oh, I voted for him, spite of the Rivington men and everything else. I ain’t easy about let tin” all the niggers loose. But I reckon we won’t go far wrong with Bobbie Lee in Richmond. God willin’, a few o’ them hotheads in South Carolina and Mississippi’ll see it the same way once they settle down a bit an’ stop listenin’ to nothin’ but their own speeches over and over.”

“I do hope you’re right,” Caudell said. “Fighting one civil war was plenty for me—I’ve seen the elephant now, and I don’t care to see it ever again, thank you very much.”

“I can’t believe they’d try anything so stupid—just can’t believe it,” Liles said. “Damnation, Nate, might could be they’d have to fight us an’ the United States at the same time.”

“Wouldn’t that be a fine mess?” Caudell said. The very idea of three-cornered civil strife made him want to pull his hat down over his eyes. But after he thought about it, he shook his head. “I reckon the United States have enough on their hands with England up in the Canadas. Did you read what the papers had to say about the war there?”

“Sure did. We—the Yankees, I mean,” Liles amended with a shamefaced chuckle, “whipped ‘em again on land, up near a place called Ottawa, I think it was. But their navy shelled Boston harbor, an’ New York, too—started a big fire there, the paper said. Hell of a thing, ain’t it?”

“It is indeed,” Caudell said. Like the storekeeper, he almost instinctively sided with the U.S.A. in a quarrel against Great Britain. His enmity with the North was new, and fading now that the Confederacy had gained its freedom. Britain, though—Britain had been the bogeyman since his Schoolboy days. “That’s a war I’m just as glad we’re no part of.”

“Amen,” Liles said. “Next time I’ll save you a paper no matter what, Nate, I promise.”

“You’d better,” Caudell said, mock-fiercely. As he left the general store, he found himself half-delighted Lee had won the election, half-worried because even that victory looked to be bringing trouble in its wake. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. The older he got, the more he wondered if there was such a thing as an unmixed blessing.

Robert E. Lee’s heels made a reassuringly solid sound as he walked down the stairs from the great columned porch of Arlington and onto the lawn. Even the boards of those stairs were new since the war; the old timber, uncared for while the Federals occupied the mansion, had grown dangerously rotten. The lawn, at the moment, was patchy and yellow, but spring would restore its lushness for him.

Someone rode up the path toward Arlington. At first Lee thought it might be one of his sons, but he soon saw it was not. After another few seconds, when he did recognize the rider, his brows contracted in a frown. It was Nathan Bedford Forrest.

He stood stiffly, waiting for the former cavalry general to approach. After their hot words in Richmond, after the bitter campaign, he wondered that Forrest had the nerve to visit him here. He would have liked nothing better than sending his adversary away unheard. Had he been merely Robert E. Lee rather than President-elect of the Confederate States of America, he would have done just that. The good of the country, though, demanded that he give Forrest a hearing.

He even made himself take a few steps toward Forrest, who reined in and dismounted. His horse began cropping the sere grass. Forrest began to raise his right hand, then stopped, as if unsure whether Lee would take it and unwilling to give him cause to refuse. He dipped his head instead, a sharp, abrupt gesture. “General Lee, sir,” he said, then added after a tiny pause, “Mr. President-elect.”

“General Forrest,” Lee said, with the same wary politeness Forrest had used. He was not ready to shake hands with his recent rival, not yet. Seeking neutral ground on which to begin the conversation, he nodded toward Forrest’s horse. “That is’ a handsome animal, sir.”

“King Philip? Thank you, sir.” Forrest’s eyes lit up, partly, perhaps, in relief, partly with a horseman’s enthusiasm. “I rode him in a good many fights. He’s old now, as you’ll note, but he still carries me well.”

“So I saw.” Lee nodded again. Then, because he found no other polite but meaningless questions to ask, he said, “How may I serve you today, sir?”

“I came—” Forrest had to start twice before he could get it out: “I came to congratulate you for winning the election, General Lee.” Now he did hold out his hand, and Lee took it.

“Thank you, General Forrest—thank you,” Lee said with no small relief of his own.

“I’ll do anything I can to make things easy for you as you take over,” Forrest said.

“Will you?” Lee said, all at once suspicious as well as relieved.” After the—unpleasantness which marked the campaign, that is good to hear, but—” He let his voice trail away. Forrest was notoriously touchy; if he was in earnest, no point to stirring him.

But he would not be stirred, not today. He waved his hand. “All that was just business, just trying to put a scare”—he pronounced it skeer—”on you and on the people out there who did the voting, same as I would have on a Yankee general, to get him runnin’.” He waved again, this time encompassing the whole of the Confederacy. “I came close.”

“That you did, sir,” Lee said. “And having come so close, you are most generous to come here now with your support.”

“When it comes to niggers, General Lee, I don’t agree with you still, and I don’t reckon I ever shall,” Forrest said. “But I lost. The whys of it don’t matter. That I got beat is a self-evident fact, sir. If I carried on now, it would be nothin’ but folly and rashness. I wanted to meet you like a man and say that to you straight out.”

Lee saw he meant it. This time, he held out his hand to Forrest, who squeezed hard. Lee said, “The nation owes you a debt of gratitude for taking that view. I hope you will forgive me for saying that I wish more of those who followed you would do likewise. The talk of new secession out of the southwest is deeply troubling to me, and Senator Wigfall has produced more than his share of it.”

“He does go on, don’t he?” Forrest grinned, then sobered. “I tell you what, General Lee. If those damn fools try and leave the Confederacy, I’ll put my uniform back on and whip ‘em into line inside of six weeks. I mean it, sir. Tell it to the papers, or if you’d rather, I’ll tell it to ‘em my own self.”

“If you would do that, General Forrest, I think it would have a very happy effect on all concerned.”

“Then I will,” Forrest said.

“Would you care to come inside and take some coffee with me?” Lee asked. In Richmond, he had ordered Forrest out of his house; now he tacitly apologized.

But Forrest shook his head; he remembered the quarrel, too. “No, sir. I do this for the country’s sake, not yours. I will abide by the vote of the people, but they—and you—have not the power to make me like it. I aim to keep on working against you in every way I lawfully can.”

“That is your right, as it is the right of every citizen. Congress will have to ratify my proposals in order for them to take effect, of course; I anticipate considerable disputation before that comes to pass.” Lee and Albert Gallatin Brown had been going over the list of congressmen and senators returned to office, trying to work out the odds of their favoring the commencement of even gradual, compensated emancipation. He thought his program had a chance of passage; he knew it was far from assured.

Forrest bowed to Lee. “We have been rivals; I reckon we’ll stay rivals. But we’ve both fought for this country. We can work together to keep it whole. That’s what I came to say, General Lee, and now I’ve said it. A good morning to you, sir.” He bowed again, swung up onto King Philip, and rode away.

Lee plucked at his beard as he watched Forrest go. He felt as if a weight had come off his shoulders. Nathan Bedford Forrest was still a political foe, but seemed not to want to remain a personal enemy after all. That suited Lee; political foes, he was. learning, could be dealt with. The casual thought brought him up short—was he in fact turning into a politician in his old age? He stopped to consider the idea carefully. At last he shook his head. His inevitable slide into decay hadn’t yet progressed so far.

Dressed in his Sunday best—which, save for being the newest of his four shirts and three pairs of trousers, was no different from what he wore the other six days of the week—Nate Caudell hurried into the Nashville Baptist church. Once inside, he took off his hat and slid into a place on one of the hard wooden pews. Several people—including the preacher, Ben Drake—sent disapproving looks his way; the service was about to begin. He avoided Drake’s eye as he sat.

Yancey Glover strode importantly to the front of the hall, nodded to the preacher, and waited a few seconds to let everyone notice him standing there. Then the precentor launched into “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The congregation joined in. They had no hymnals; Glover’s big bass voice pulled them through the song. That voice was one of the reasons the church elder had the precentor’s job.

“Rock of Ages” came next, with several more hymns right behind. The congregation warmed up, both physically—a chilly, nasty rain was falling outside—and spiritually. Yancey Glover marched back to his seat. Ben Drake pounded a fist down on the pulpit, once, twice, three times. The preacher was an impressive-looking man of about forty-five, with a full head of wavy gray hair; he’d served a few months as a lieutenant in the Castalia Invincibles, till chronic dysentery forced him to resign his commission.

“‘I know thy works,’ “ says the Book of Revelation,” Drake began,” ‘that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’ That’s what God says, my friends—you cannot, you dare not, be lukewarm. Again, in the Book of Deuteronomy, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

“Not ‘with some of thy might,’ friends, not ‘with a little of thy might, when thou hast the time. “With all thy might,’ as hard as you can, all the time, while you’re eating or working or bathing or reading. You can’t be lukewarm, or the Lord will spew you out of His mouth, and you don’t want that, no indeed you don’t, for if the Lord spews you out of His mouth, who’s going to suck you right on in? You know who, my friends—Satan, that’s who. Paul says in his epistle to the Philippians, ‘Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.’ So what do you want to do? Do you want to fret yourselves about the things of this world, or about God, Who endures forever?”

“God!” the congregation shouted with a single voice. Nate was as loud as anyone. He’d been sorry when Drake had to leave the regiment; people listened to him. He might have become captain instead of George Lewis when John Harrison resigned in October 1862. If he’d led on the battlefield half as well as he did from the pulpit, the Castalia Invincibles would have been in good hands.

He went on glorifying God and casting scorn on Satan and the things of this world for the next couple of hours. By the time. he was done, he had his congregation up on their feet, urging him on. He made Caudell ashamed of the way he drank and swore and even of the way he smoked. As he had more than once before, he vowed to abandon his wicked habits. He’d never managed to keep any of those vows. That shamed him, too.

Another round of hymns closed the service. Some people went up to the pulpit to talk with the preacher about his sermon. Others hung around in small groups inside the church. Some of them talked about the sermon, too; for others, tobacco or horses were of more pressing interest, even on Sunday. Young men took the chance to eye young ladies, and even, if they were bold enough, to say hello. Church was a town social center, a place where everyone gathered.

Caudell, more social caterpillar than butterfly, was about to head out into the rain when a woman called, “Don’t go, Nate.” He turned around. The woman smiled at him. She was fairly tall, with gray eyes, black curls that fell past her shoulders, and a mouth that was too wide for perfect beauty—her smile emphasized that. He’d noticed her earlier, partly for her own sake but mostly because he hadn’t seen her in church before. She smiled again and repeated, “Don’t go.”

She still didn’t look familiar, but that voice—”Mollie!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?” No wonder he hadn’t recognized her—he’d never seen her dressed as a woman till this instant.

Raeford Liles, who was standing nearby, cackled like a laying hen, “So this here’s your sweetheart, eh, Nate? Let me meet her, why don’t you?”

Caudell introduced them. He didn’t bother contradicting the storekeeper, not anymore. Liles fussed over Mollie Bean as if he were a planter and she a fine lady, not least to embarrass Nate. He was embarrassed, but not on account of that. Several other Castalia Invincibles, men who knew Mollie was no lady, were among those who stood around chatting in the church. Most of them, though, were with their wives; whatever they thought, they had to be discreet.

He said, “What brings you to Nashville, Mollie?”

Her smile blew out. “I got a problem, Nate.” Caudell gulped. Raeford Liles started to cackle again. Mollie fixed him with a gaze that would not have looked out of place over the sights of an AK-47. “I ain’t in a family way, mister, so you can just drag your mind out of the ditch,” she said quietly. Liles blushed all the way up to the top of his head, started coughing and couldn’t stop, and retired in disorder.

“What’s the matter?” Caudell asked. He was relieved for a couple of reasons: first that she wasn’t pregnant—even if he’d had, nothing to do with it—and second that she hadn’t noticed him” worrying that she was.

“It ain’t somethin’ I can explain in just words,” she said. “You got to see it, an’ even then it don’t make sense—or I ain’t beep able to make it make sense, anyways. You know a whole lot more’n me; it’s on account of you I’m able to read and write at all. So I reckoned if anybody I knew could cipher this out, it was you, an’ I brang it to you. I had to get out of Rivington anyhow.”

Those few sentences raised enough questions in Caudell’s mind for any six school quizzes, but he contented himself with one that might lead to answers for the rest: “Where are you staying?”

“In one of the rooms up above the Liberty Bell.” Mollie’s lip curled. “This town don’t have a proper hotel, let alone anything like the Notahilton. Come on over with me; I got the book you need to see there.”

“Let’s go,” Caudell said. Wren Tisdale, who ran the saloon, had fought in the Chicora Guards, not the Castalia Invincibles. Even if Mollie had given him her whole proper name, it probably meant nothing to him. Caudell put his hat back on. Mollie opened the small, long-handled umbrella she was carrying.

They splashed over to the Liberty Bell; Mollie used her free hand to hold her skirts out of the mud, Wren Tisdale nodded to them as they came in; he was a dark, dour man whose looks belied his name. This being Sunday, the bar was quiet and deserted. The saloonkeeper’s eyebrows rose slightly when they climbed the stairs together, but he kept his mouth shut. Caudell’s ears heated just the same.

Mollie’s room was small and none too clean. It held only a bed, a stool, a pitcher, and a chamber pot. On the bed lay a couple of carpet bags. Mollie dug in one. Caudell averted his eyes as lacy feminine undergarments flew this way and that; being easy with her came harder now that she was so unequivocally a woman. Finally she said, “Here, Nate, this here’s what you got to see.”

As she’d said, it was a book. The paper cover, somewhat crinkled from rough treatment, showed a U.S. flag crossed with a Confederate battle flag. “The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War,” Caudell read aloud.

“Open it up anywheres,” Mollie said. “Here, come on, sit down beside me.”

He sat, though at a greater distance than he’d used to back in the days when she wore uniform tunic and trousers. Then, as she’d suggested, he opened the big, heavy book at random. He found himself looking at a discussion of the Vicksburg Campaign, at a woodcut from Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and at photographs of Generals Grant and Van Dorn. “I’ve never seen photographs just put into a book like that before, instead of being made into engravings first,” he breathed.” And look at that painting above the picture of Grant there.”

“Once upon a time, you wrote me for a joke, asking if the Rivington men had books with colored pictures all through ‘em,” Mollie said. “Now you can see ‘em for yourself.”

Caudell only half heard her; he had just read the caption under that colored picture. “It says this here is a photograph, too. But there’s no such thing as colored photographs. Everybody knows that.” Without his willing it, his voice rose in protest. He flipped through several pages, found color on about every other one: on maps, on reproductions of paintings, and on what, by their clarity, seemed to be more photographs. Scratching his head in befuddlement, he turned to Mollie. “Where did you get this?”

“Rivington—I stole it from Benny Lang,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Sometimes, after we was done—well, hell, you know done with what—he’d go off an’ do other things, his own business, I mean, until he was ready for his second round. One of them times, I pulled this here book out of a case he kept by”‘“—by the bed. With that fine light he had in there, readin’ was easy. But this here book, it purely perplexed me. What year is it, Nate?”

“What year?” He stared at her. “It’s 1868, of course—January 18, if you want to get picky.”

She gestured impatiently. “I know that, I really do. But look in the front of the book.”

He did; The date of printing did not appear on the title page, as it did in most books he knew. He turned the page. Sure enough, there was the information he needed, next to the table of contents. “Copyright—1960?” he said slowly. “And this edition was printed in—1996?” His voice trailed away, then firmed again. “That’s impossible.”

“Is it? Look here.” She pointed to a section he hadn’t yet noticed, something called “Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data.” The author, someone named Bruce Catton, was listed as having been born in 1899. Richard M. Ketchum, who was called editor at the top of the page, seemed to have been born in 1922. And the book itself fell under “United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865.”

“But the war ended in 1864,” Caudell said, as much to the book as to Mollie. If he’d been bewildered before, now he was completely at sea.

Mollie went to the next page. “That ain’t what it says here, is it?”

Caudell’s eyes grew wide as he read the first two sentences of the introduction, which talked about the South surrendering.” Of themselves, his eyes kept reading. By the time he got through that two-page introduction, he was ready to question his own sanity. Every calm, rational word spoke of a long-ago war the United States had won. If this Richard Ketchum was either a maniac or a prankster, he didn’t let on once.”

Caudell started reading in earnest. Before long, he realized going through the whole book in detail would take too long. He skimmed over the astonishing pictures and maps, read their captions. After a while, he asked, “Does Benny Lang know this book is gone?”

“Don’t reckon so,” Mollie answered. “I moved a skinny book from the shelf on top so as to fill up part of the space this one took, and fiddled with both shelves so the holes didn’t show. Then I hid this one with the, ah, dainties I used to fetch over to Benny’s place sometimes, and got it back to my room without him bein’ the wiser. Read it there some more, times I was by myself, an’ the more I read, the more I got confused, till I figured I had to come to you.”

Till today, Caudell had seen Mollie only in ragged gray and butternut. Picturing her in “dainties” distracted him from the book for a little while. But soon the story of the war engrossed him again. The farther he got, the less he understood, and the more he came to wonder whether this Bruce Catton really was writing in some distant future time. He kept referring to what he called the Civil War as having happened well in the past.

And he kept assuming the United States had won and the Confederate States lost. That was clear very early on, when he talked about the overwhelming material advantages the North enjoyed, and about the trouble the South had in creating a navy out of nothing, and about the Confederacy’s two-pronged offensive into Kentucky and Maryland in 1862 as a chance to win the war which failed.

Catton also talked about slavery as something dead and long departed; the feeling underlying his words seemed to be revulsion that it had ever existed, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which the results of the war had rendered meaningless and which all the South heartily loathed in any case, was to Catton a harbinger of great things ahead. Not even the staunchest Yankee should have been able to consider it as having any great effect.

Gettysburg…Caudell studied the paintings of the third day’s fight, then turned to a calm photograph of the battlefield after the fight was done. The weathered granite and bronze monument there looked as if it had stood for decades if not centuries, yet the fight was only four and a half years in the past. He looked up lit Mollie. “Does your scar still pain you?”

“The one from Gettysburg, you mean? It twinges right smart sometimes.” She looked at the colored photograph, too; she understood what he was driving at. “Don’t reckon it’d trouble me a-tall if I waited till that was took.”

He raised an eyebrow. Somewhere down deep, she believed the impossible dates of 1960 and 1996. He shivered, and not just because the room was chilly; he was starting to believe them himself. When he looked down to the Picture History of the Civil War once more, he discovered it was almost too dark to see: Evening had snuck up on him like a dismounted Yankee cavalryman in the Wilderness.

He went downstairs, asked Wren Tisdale for some candles. Leering, the saloonkeeper supplied them. “You can go straight to hell, you and your filthy mind,” Caudell growled. “We’re up there reading a book, and if you don’t believe me, you come on up and watch us.” He lit one of the candles at the fireplace, hurried back to Mollie’s room.

A few minutes later, he heard someone coming partway upstairs and then hastily going back down. He laughed, said to Mollie, “Tisdale, checking up on us.” She giggled, too.

His awareness of the world around him diminished once more as he bent close to read by candlelight. After a while, he raised his head in complete mystification. “Everything from the Wilderness on is wrong,” he said. “Grant didn’t go south—we went north. And Johnston stopped Sherman.” A picture of one of the fierce, jaunty “bummers” who, the book claimed, had looted their way across Georgia, stared mutely up at him.

“It don’t talk none about our repeaters, neither,” Mollie said.

“By God, you’re right. It doesn’t.” Caudell flipped to the back of the book; he already discovered it had an excellent index. Nothing was listed about repeaters, nothing about AK-47s. “But they won the war for us. Without them—”

“We’d maybe have lost,” Mollie put in. She pointed to the Picture History of the Civil War. “Like in there.”

Caudell kept going through the book. He found a picture of the Tredegar Iron Works, said to have been taken after Richmond fell. He found the story of Lincoln’s reelection over George McClellan, who, he knew, had actually run fourth in the election of 1864, and no mention whatever of U.S. President Seymour’s participation in the race. He found photographs of Richmond in ruins, and a painting of Lincoln going through the city in a carriage.

His eyes filled with foolish tears (foolish, for why should he be moved at what had never happened?) as he found word of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to overwhelming Federal forces and a final photograph of a grim-faced Robert E. Lee, said to have been made just after that surrender. At the very end of the book, he found a painting from 1890—a year that, to him, still felt far in the future—of Union veterans parading in Boston. Seeing the white beards of the officers marching in the first rank made gooseflesh prickle up on his arms.

He found himself altogether confused. Either Bruce Cat ton had never heard of the world in which he lived, or the man was the most inspired hoaxer of all time—even 1960. After some hard thought, Caudell found he could not believe the Picture History of the Civil War a hoax. For one thing, it was too perfect, too detailed. For another, even if an obsessed man somehow spent a lifetime assembling everything that went into this book—a lifetime when? Caudell wondered; no printer in 1868 could have produced anything like it—why would anyone else have cared to view the product of his obsession?

“What do you think, Nate?” Mollie asked when he finally closed the covers.

“I think—” Caudell stopped, as if saying what he thought somehow made it more real. But no help for it: “I think this may truly be a book from—from the twentieth century.”

She threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, sweet Jesus, thank you! I was thinkin’ the same thing, and thinkin’ I had to be out of my head.”

“Believe me, I feel the same way.” But when he looked down at the volume that should have been impossible, his resolve firmed.” All the other choices seem even crazier, though.”

“Seems like that to me, too. But if it’s real, Nate, it’s important. What are we going to do about it?”

That brought him up short. “You’ve had more time to think about this than I have.” Not wanting to sound as if he was accusing her, he quickly added, “But you’re dead right. If this comes out of Rivington, it ought to shed some kind of light on all the other peculiar things the Rivington men have.” Not just AK-47s went through his mind, but also desiccated meals, Benny Lang’s helmet and bullet-stopping flapjack (he still wondered if he’d heard that straight), and the marvelous lights and artificial coolness about which Mollie had written. He’d never before thought of all those things together. Now that he had, he saw what a mountain of strangeness they made, a mountain beside which the Picture History of the Civil War was by itself but a foothill.

He knew he was not a man cut out to handle mountains. He thought of bringing the book to George Lewis, shook his head the moment the idea occurred to him. Taken as a whole, the mystery of Rivington was far too big for Lewis, too. With that realization came an answer to Mollie’s question: “Robert E. Lee needs to see this book.”

Mollie stared at him. “Robert E. Lee? Marse Robert?” Her voice rose to a squeak. “The President?”

“He’s not the king,” Caudell said. “He’s not even President yet; and won’t be for more than a month. Remember how it was in Richmond? Jeff Davis had his house open every other week, just so he could meet people. Captain Lewis went there once, to shake his hand.”

“I ain’t no captain.” Mollie vehemently shook her head. “I’m just a—hell and damnation, Nate, you know what I am.” She set a hand on the book in his lap. “You go; Nate. You can tell Marse Robert what it’s all about, better’n I ever could.”

“Me?” Caudell was tempted—anyone who brought something this important to Richmond would become important himself, if only by association. But then, regretfully, he said, “No, it wouldn’t be right. For one thing, you got the book, so you should be the one who takes it. For another, you’ve lived at Rivington, so you can tell Marse Robert all about it. He’ll want to know that; the Rivington men were strong for Forrest in the election.”

“Oh, were they ever,” Mollie said. “You never heard such cussin’ and fussin’ and carryin’ oil as when Tennessee went for Lee.”

“There, you see? And besides, Mollie, you’re already traveling. Me, I have to teach school tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, or else throwaway a job I like and that I’m good at.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll do it if I have to, I guess, but you’re a better choice.”

“But I’m nothin’ but a no-’count whore,” Mollie wailed. “Marse Robert, he won’t want nothin’ to do with the likes of me.”

“I don’t know. He has an eye for pretty ladies, they say,”

Caudell said. But that made matters worse, not better. He tugged at his beard, then suddenly grinned and asked, “Do you still have your old uniform?”

“Yeah, I do,” she replied, sounding puzzled at the change of subject. “What about it?”

“If you won’t go as Mollie, go as Melvin,” he said. “You know Marse Robert would do whatever needed doing for one of his old soldiers—and you soldiered as hard as anybody.”

She had to nod. Slowly, she said, “Might could be that’d work.” Her laugh came shaky, but it was a laugh.” Always kept it in case I had to get out of somewhere quiet and sneakylike. Never reckoned I’d want to get into someplace that way.” A hand flew up to her hair. “Hate to chop this short again after it’s been growin’ since the war. But if it needs doin’, it needs doin’. I got me a little scissors right here.” She rummaged in one of the carpetbags, found what she was looking for, handed Caudell the scissors. “You cut it, Nate. You can see what you’re doin’.”

Caudell hadn’t cut hair since the war ended. A Negro barber would have laughed scornfully at the job he did, but when he was through, Mollie looked more like a man, or at least a beardless youth, than a woman. But the dress she still wore, and the feel of her thick, curly hair running through his fingers as he worked, the occasional moments when his hands brushed against the smooth, warm skin of her cheek, her ear, her neck, reminded him she was no man, even if she could put on the outer seeming of one.

Her hands checked what he had accomplished. She smiled. With her hair short, all at once it was the saucy smile of the Mollie beside whom he’d marched and fought—and lain. “That’s good, Nate. Thank you. You want to shut the door there, so as I can change?” He did as she asked; after a moment’s hesitation, he stood outside in the hallway. Through the thin wood panel, he heard her chuckle, and felt himself blush. She opened the door a couple of minutes later. “How do I look?”

Shabby was the first word that came to mind. No one could look anything but shabby in trousers, tunic, and forage cap that had gone through the war, even if those clothes were cleaned and mended, as Mollie’s were. But seeing her in uniform somehow excited him in a way her hoop skirt and petticoats had not—this was the way she’d looked when he went to her cabin.

She was used to reading men’s eyes. “You want to come back inside, Nate?” she asked softly. “Handy thing about this outfit is, it goes off a sight easier than the one I had on before.” Not trusting himself to speak, he nodded, stepped in, and closed the door again.

They lay side by side afterwards on the narrow, clothes-strewn bed. The next to last candle Nate had got from Wren Tisdale still. burned. Had the saloonkeeper known, he could have leered with impunity. Mollie stroked Caudell’s cheek, just above the line where his beard started. She said, “I always remembered you were sweet about it. You treat me like I’m somebody, not just—a place to stick it in.”

“Funny,” he said, sitting up. “I always thought the same about you—that you weren’t just going through the motions, I mean.”

“Not with you. Other times—oh, the hell with other times. I wish—” Grimacing, she broke off without saying what she wished. Caudell thought he could make a fair guess. He rather wished she had no other times to come between them, too.

Mollie got off the bed and started to dress. So did Caudell; the room was cold. As he pulled up his trousers, he said, “I have some money saved up that I can give you for train fare, if you need it.” He did not have much, but for this he was ready to use it.

“Don’t fret yourself.” Mollie finished buttoning her private’s tunic, then slid over her head a small velvet bag on a thong. She tucked it under the tunic; it clinked slightly as it settled between her breasts. “I hear tell gold’s still right scarce most places, but not in Rivington. You seen that for yourself. I got plenty.”

“All right,” Caudell said, not altogether unhappily. He thought of something else. “When you go to Richmond, don’t go back through Rivington, in case Benny Lang has noticed his book is missing after all. The Rivington men might be watching the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad. Go south to Goldsboro from Rocky Mount, then over to Raleigh or Greensboro, so you can head north on the Raleigh and Gaston or the North Carolina Railroad up to the Richmond and Danville.”

“That’s right smart, Nate. I’ll do it,” Mollie promised. “I’ll hire me a wagon first thing tomorrow to take me to the Rocky Mount train station.” She grinned a grin that took him back to their days round campfires together. “Won’t Mr. Wren Tisdale be confused when I go downstairs in the mornin’?”

“Not unless you go barefoot,” he said, noticing a gap in her disguise. He kicked one of his shoes over to her. “Here—take these. I have another pair in my room. My feet won’t freeze on the way back. Reckon my shoes’ll fit you like socks on a chicken, but if you have to, you can get yourself some proper ones on your way north.”

“Oh, Nate, not your shoes!” But she saw the need for what he’d said as clearly as he did. She stooped, started to put them on, then stopped and stuffed the toes with wadded-up clothes from a carpet bag. “Just like I’d’ve done in the war, taking big ones off a dead Yankee.” She got up and hugged him. “Thanks for not thinkin’ I’m crazy on account of all this. Thanks for—” She hugged him again, hard. “For bein’ a friend, and more than a friend.”

He hugged her, too, felt the womanly shape of her through the uniform that masked it from the eye. More than a friend indeed, he thought. “Come back here when you can, if you care to,” he said. It was not any sort of promise, but it was as close to one as he could make himself come. Had she pressed for more, he might well have fought shy of the little he’d said. But she only nodded; maybe she’d not expected even so much.

Freezing mud squelched between his toes as he walked out of the Liberty Bell. His head, though, his head was in the clouds, and not just because he’d broken a long spell of abstinence. Not only had he held a willing woman in his arms, he’d somehow held a bit of the future in his hands.

Lee walked out of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. The shadow cast by George Washington’s equestrian statue, across Ninth Street in Capitol Square, shielded his eyes from the low, wan winter sun. Beside him, Jefferson Davis said,” A fine sermon, do you not agree?”

“Yes, as usual,” Lee said. “Mr. President, let me tell you again how grateful I am that you have agreed to. serve as my Secretary of War. I hesitated to ask it of you, lest you should feel it beneath your dignity to assume a Cabinet position after having held the Presidency.”

Davis snorted. “Nonsense, sir. I am ineligible under the constitution to continue as President; if I am to remain in public life, it must necessarily be at some lower level. The post you offered suits me well, and I am glad to have it.”

Lee was about to reply when a light, hesitant voice said, “Beggin’ your pardon, General Lee, sir—”

Frowning, he turned to deal with whoever had presumed to interrupt his conversation with President Davis. He saw a smooth-faced private in a worn uniform, clutching a parcel wrapped in coarse brown paper and twine to his chest. “Yes, Private—?” he asked, voice polite but frosty.

The soldier, who at second glance looked not quite young enough to be so free of beard, came to attention but held on to the parcel. “M-Melvin Bean, sir, 47th North Carolina. I got here a book you ought to see, sir.”

“Never mind that now, young man,” Jefferson Davis said impatiently. He walked on, looking back to see if Lee was following.

Lee was about to, when the private said something that made him stop in his tracks: “It’s a book from Rivington, sir.”

“Is it?” Lee said. Davis had gone too far to hear the half-dozen soft, nervous words, but, seeing that the ordinary soldier had somehow gained Lee’s attention, he shrugged and headed off toward the Presidential mansion.

“Yes, sir, it surely is,” Melvin Bean said. The private gulped, licked his lips, and then went on in a ragged whisper, “Other thing you ought to know, sir, is that inside this here book, it says it was printed in nineteen hundred and sixty, sir.”

“By God,” Lee said softly. Private Bean looked ready to bolt and run. Lee did not blame him in the least. He himself knew the secret of the Rivington men. But if this common soldier had somehow stumbled across it, not only would he have trouble believing it, he would have even more trouble believing anyone else would believe it. Quickly, Lee set out to ease his mind: “Private, you had better come back to the Powhatan House with me. This is most assuredly something I must see. Have you a horse?”

“No, sir—came up by train.” Melvin Bean gaped at him, blurted, “You—you mean you believe me, sir? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Lee agreed gravely. “Wait here a moment, if you please.” He ducked back inside the church, spoke with a vestryman, then returned to Private Bean. “There—now Traveller will be seen to. Walk up Capitol Square and then to the hotel with me, if you would be so kind, and tell me how this book—”

“It’s called the Picture History of the Civil War, sir,” Bean said.

“The Picture History of the Civil War? From—1960, you said?” A shiver of wonder ran up Lee’s spine. How would the Second American Revolution look, from a distance of a hundred years? He and Melvin Bean turned right from Ninth onto Broad Street. “Tell me at once how it came into your possession.”

The story was less than clear, and left him imperfectly edified. He gathered a woman friend of Bean’s had actually gotten the book away from the stronghold of America Will Break, but a couple of times the private said “I” when he meant “she.” Lee did not press him. For the sake of a volume from Rivington—and from 1960!—he was willing to overlook a discrepancy or three.

Private Bean, by his accent, was a country boy. Lee expected him to gape at the red velvet and gold-leaf splendor of the Powhatan House’s lobby, but he took it in stride, merely muttering something Lee did not quite catch: to him, it sounded like “It’s not a not a hilton.” Lee led him to his own suite and closed the door after them. He turned on the gaslight, sat by it, and pulled up another chair for Melvin Bean. “Now, if I may, the Picture History of the Civil War.” In anticipation, he slipped on his spectacles.

Bean handed him the parcel. He cut the twine with a pen knife, undid the paper wrapper, and stared at the book for a long moment before he opened it. The unusual quality of the printing struck him at once. His lips shaped a silent whistle when he saw the copyright and publication dates. He turned the page, came to the introduction. For a moment, he was confused and jolted when he read of the war’s ending with the South’s surrender. Then he understood, and said quietly, “So this is how it would have been, had the Rivington men not come back to us.”

“Sir’?” Melvin Bean said. He was at the very edge of his seat, and still looked ready to flee at any moment. He also looked hungry: Lee had seen that expression too many times in the war ever to mistake it.

He stood up. Melvin Bean bounced to his feet, too. Lee took some bills out of a trouser pocket, handed twenty dollars to the private soldier. “Why don’t you buy yourself some dinner, young man? The cooks here are quite fine. Ask for my usual table in the dining room, and tell them to send a boy back here to me if they doubt your right to sit there. Later, perhaps, I shall have questions for you, but first I want to read awhile.”

Bean stared at the money without reaching for it. “I couldn’t take that from you, General Lee, sir.”

Lee pressed it into the private’s hand. “You can, and you shall.”

“I got money o’ my own,” Melvin Bean said, drawing himself up with prickly pride.

“As may be. Use this anyhow, please, if for no other reason than as a token of my thanks for having brought this volume to my notice,.” He took Bean by the elbow, steered the private to the door, and pointed in the direction of the dining room. “Go ahead, please, as a favor to me.” Still shaking his head, Melvin Bean walked slowly down the hall.

Lee went back to his chair, picked up the Picture History of the Civil War, and plunged in. He was not normally an enthusiastic reader; when he’d come back to Richmond from Augusta, Georgia, he’d had half a dozen chapters to go in Quentin Durward, and those six chapters remained unread to this day. But he held in his hands a volume he had never imagined he would be able to examine. He eagerly seized the chance.

This Bruce Catton’s style was less Latinate, less ornate, more down-to-earth than Lee would have expected from a serious work of history. He soon ceased to notice; he was after information, and the smooth, flowing text and astonishing pictures made it easy to acquire. He had to remind himself that Cat ton was writing long after the war ended and that, to the historian, it had not gone as he himself remembered.

But the odd tone ran deeper than that. Cat ton plainly saw chattel slavery as an outmoded institution which deserved to perish; to him, the Emancipation Proclamation gave the United States the moral high ground for the rest of the war. Lee had trouble squaring that with what Andries Rhoodie had said about the hatred between black and white which was to come.

The sun sank; the only light left in Lee’s room was the yellow pool beneath the gas lamp. He never noticed—he had reached 1864, and all at once the world he knew turned sideways. He studied Grant’s campaign against him, and Sherman’s against Joseph Johnston, and nodded most soberly. That relentless hammering used Northern resources simply to club the Confederacy into submission. It was the sort of attack he had feared most, and one which only the Rivington men’s AK-47s could have disrupted.

He winced when he read of John Bell Hood taking Johnston’s command in front of Atlanta. Hood had the fierce visage of a lion and boldness to match. At the head of a division, he was a nonpareil. But for boldness, though, he lacked all qualification for army command. He would attack whether attack was called for or not…Over the next few pages, Lee read what had come—what would have come, he made himself remember—of that.

He also took far more careful note of the political maneuvering in this other version of the war than he would have before his own not-altogether-voluntary entry into politics. He was unsurprised to discover Lincoln reelected; Andries Rhoodie had told him of that. But Rhoodie had also spoken of Lincoln treating the Confederate States as conquered provinces after their defeat, and that proved nothing but a lie: even with the war all but won, Lincoln had tried to get the Federal Congress to compensate Southern slaveholders for the animate property they were losing. Past reunion and emancipation, Lincoln had intended to impose no harsh terms upon the states which had lost their war for independence.

Absurdly, rage filled Lee at Rhoodie’s untruth. A man who knew the future might at least have the courtesy to report it correctly, he thought. That Rhoodie had lied argued he and America Will Break had their own political agenda, one which they aimed to impose on the Confederacy. Given their support for Nathan Bedford Forrest and all their efforts against the Negro, the nature of that agenda was easy enough to deduce: the permanent dominance of the white man. But by the tone of the Picture History of the Civil War, white supremacy was an outmoded idea in their own day, just as the course of history would have led Lee to believe. Did that make them maverick heroes, or simply mavericks?

The question being unanswerable for the time being, Lee put it aside and kept reading. He pursed his lips and tightly clenched his jaw when he came upon a picture of a wrecked locomotive in the burned-out ruins of the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad depot. A few pages farther on, he encountered himself, old, grim, and defeated, standing on the back porch of the rented house in which he and his wife had lived in Richmond. It was uncanny, seeing himself in a photograph for which he’d never posed. As eerie was the photograph on the facing page of his farewell order to the’ Army of Northern Virginia, unmistakably in the handwriting of Charles Marshall, and as unmistakably nothing Marshall had been compelled by fate to write.

He read of Lincoln’s second inaugural address and of the broad peace Lincoln hoped to gain, and, a page later, he read of the bullet that had slain Lincoln on Good Friday evening in 1865. He clicked his tongue between his teeth at the thought of a President dying at an assassin’s hands. Then, all at once, he shivered as if suddenly seized by an ague. He had seen Lincoln in Louisville that Good Friday, had listened to him plead without avail for Kentucky to stay in the Union, had even spoken with him. He shivered again. In defeat in the world he knew, Lincoln had wanted to martyr himself for the United States. In the other world, where there was no need for it, he had been made a martyr in the hour of his greatest triumph.

At last, Lee closed the Picture History of the Civil War. His joints creaked and protested when he got up from his chair: how long had he been sitting, rapt? He took out his watch. He blinked—it was after midnight.

“Dear God, I’ve entirely forgotten Melvin Bean!” he exclaimed. He hoped the young soldier had bought supper as well as dinner with his money, hoped even more that he was still here—perhaps stretched out asleep on a couch in the hotel lobby—to be questioned. Lee opened the door, hurried down the hall to find out.

To his dismay, he found no gray-clad soldier taking his ease in the lobby, or at the bar. No waiter recalled serving supper to any such person. Scowling, Lee headed for the front desk. Bean had said he had money; maybe, just maybe, he’d taken a room here.

The desk clerk regretfully spread his hands. “No, sir, nobody by that name has checked in today.” He spun the registration book on its revolving stand so Lee could see for himself. Then he turned to the bank of pigeonholes behind him. “This came in for you this afternoon, though, sir.”

Sure enough, the envelope he held out bore Lee’s name in a sprawling scrawl. Lee accepted it with a word of thanks, slit it open. When he saw what was inside, his breath went out in a surprised hiss.

“Something wrong, sir?” the clerk asked anxiously.

After a moment, Lee said, “No, nothing wrong.” He took the twenty dollars out of the envelope, returned the bills to his pocket, and slowly walked back to his room.

“What can I do for you today, General Lee?” Andries Rhoodie asked, more than ordinary curiosity in his deep, rough voice. “I tell you straight out, I’d not expected you to ask me for a meeting.”

“Nor had I expected the need for my doing so to arise,” Lee answered. “I find, however, that you and your colleagues have been less than completely candid with me and with others in the Confederacy concerning the course events would have taken had America Will Break not intervened on our behalf—or perhaps on your own behalf would phrase it more accurately.”

“Haw!” Rhoodie fleered laughter. “You find that, do you? I tell you now, what I have said before is the truth. And even if it weren’t, how the devil would you know?”

Lee sat beside a small marble-topped table, covered at the moment with an antimacassar borrowed from the couch. He pulled the cloth aside to reveal the Picture History of the Civil War. “By this means, sir.”

Rhoodie’s air of disdainful arrogance crashed in ruins; for the first time since he’d known the Rivington man, Lee saw him altogether at a loss. Rhoodie lost color, gave back a pace, sank heavily into a chair. His mouth opened, but no sound came forth. After a few seconds of gathering himself, he tried again: “How did you come by that book?”

“That is none of your affair,” Lee said.

Though he had no intention of revealing it to Rhoodie, the question still bothered him. As far as he could tell, Melvin Bean had disappeared from Richmond, nor had discreet questions at the railway depots revealed anyone who had seen a person of his description boarding a southbound train, whether in uniform or other men’s clothing. Lee had also had the military records examined: sure enough, a Melvin Bean had been mustered out along with the rest of the 47th North Carolina in 1864, but there the trail ended. It was a puzzle, but one that was not relevant here and now.

He went on, “In any event, no matter how I obtained the volume, it speaks for itself.”

“So it does,” Rhoodie said, rallying. He was neither weakling nor fool, and not a man to be cast down long. “It tells you how the United States would have crushed your country and your dreams to dust without us. You’ve not been any too bloody grateful for our help, either.”

“I freely acknowledge it,” Lee said. “As for gratitude, I should feel more were I surer your aid was disinterested, intended to further our ends rather than your own.”

“Some of us died in the taking of Washington,” Rhoodie growled.

“I know, but for what cause?” Lee reached out to lay a hand on the Picture History of the Civil War.” As you can imagine, I have read this work repeatedly, and with the closest attention. Yes, our struggle for freedom would have failed without you; in so much you told the truth. But in other regards—you spoke of Lincoln’s tyranny over us, of ceaseless strife between black and white, of other evils whereof your book here makes no mention. What it does mention is a continuing search for justice and equality between the races, one incomplete even in that distant future day, but nonetheless of vital import to both North and South. This seems to me to be in accord with a continuation of the trends that have grown here in my own century, and dead against your account of what lies ahead.”

“Nonsense.” A wave of Rhoodie’s hand brushed aside Lee’s words. “Or would you care for one of your daughters to marry a kaffir and submit to his loving embrace?”

Lee did not particularly care for the idea of his daughters marrying at all. He answered, “No, to be frank, I should not care for that. But it is neither here nor there. The discrepancy between your words and the tone of this history makes me wonder whether you and American Will” Break are in accord with the spirit of the future, as you claim, or whether you are in fact as misplaced and out of step with your own time as John Brown was with his.”

Andries Rhoodie had gone white before. Now he turned red. One big fist clenched. His guttural accent came thicker than Lee had ever heard it as he ground out, “Since you aim on taking the’ Confederacy to the devil, General Lee, we will show you what we are. That I vow.”

“Do not think to threaten me, sir.”

“I do not threaten,” Rhoodie said, “I promise,”