American Front

VI

A long with the rest of Captain Lincoln's command, Corporal Stephen Ramsay rode out of Jennings, Sequoyah, on horseback to repel U.S. raiders. "Wouldn't think the damnyankees'd get the idea so quick," he said mournfully. It had rained the night before, and the horses were kicking up a lot of mud. Everybody would be filthy by the time the company got back into Jennings — everybody who was alive.

Lincoln said, "They're money-grubbing bastards, the Yankees. A chance to grab the oil south of the Cimarron 'd look good to 'em. Then they can ship it over to the Huns, to burn Belgian babies with."

"Good luck to anybody shippin' anything on the Atlantic," Ramsay said. "Best I can tell, it's like a cavalry campaign a whole ocean wide."

Lincoln chuckled at that, though Ramsay had meant it seriously. Warships and liners and freighters and submarines from the CSA and the USA and England and France and Germany were scurrying all over the ocean, and shooting at one another whenever they knocked heads.

Ramsay added, "This here is better country for fightin' than the regular prairie or the ocean. If we can't hold the Yanks the far side of the river, we ain't gonna hold 'em anywheres."

"I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, Corporal," Captain Lincoln said. The territory between the Cimarron and the Arkansas, which came together about twenty miles east of Jennings, was rough and rugged: wooded hills and gullies took over for prairie. There were caves in the hills, if you knew where to find them. Outlaws and robbers had infested the area for years, because just about all the people who could find them after they'd fled from their crimes were either friends or relations.

"One other thing," Ramsay said. "They ain't gonna get one o' those armored automobiles through here. You try and run a motorcar in this kind of landscape and it'll fall to pieces before you've gone ten miles."

"Damn good thing, too," the company commander said, to which Ram say could only nod. A lot of the men with them in the company were new recruits. Confederate raids into Kansas hadn't lasted long; the damnyankees had the initiative now, pushing down into Sequoyah and threatening the oil fields that gave the Confederacy so much of its petroleum.

The U.S. troopers were not better soldiers than their Confederate counterparts; anyone who claimed they were would have got himself pounded by any cavalryman in butternut who happened to hear. But what Ramsay and Lincoln had feared from the time of their first encounter was a reality: the U.S. cavalry usually advanced with armored cars bolstering the horsemen. Confederate armored automobiles, by contrast, were often promised, seldom seen. In open country, protected, mobile machine guns were deadly all out of proportion to their numbers.

Ramsay chuckled reminiscently as an exception to that rule came to mind. "Remember when we had that battery of field artillery with us, up near the border with the Yankees? We made 'em pay that day, by Jesus."

"Sure did," Captain Lincoln agreed. "Sure do. Pretty damn fine to have guns to outrange those damn cars-and to blow one of 'em to hell and gone when you hit it."

"Yes, sir," Ramsay said enthusiastically. The quick-firing three-inch field guns had hit two armored cars, setting them ablaze and making their fellows scuttle on back toward Kansas. They'd also started a grass fire that had slowed up the advance of the U.S. horsemen, who weren't nearly so eager to go forward without their mechanical buddies, anyhow.

But there weren't enough batteries of field artillery to go around, and the Yankees kept coming. Even if they weren't very good at what they did, enough mediocre soldiers were eventually liable to wear down a smaller force of good ones. And now parts of Sequoyah lay in U.S. hands.

Ramsay's horse stumbled. What passed for roads here in these badlands were pretty miserable even when they were dry. When they were wet, puddles disguised potholes deep enough to break an animal's leg-sometimes, it seemed, deep enough to drown an animal.

He sharply jerked the horse's head up. The beast let out an indignant squeal of complaint, but it didn't fall. Ramsay knew everything there was to know about complaining-he was a soldier, after all. He'd heard better, from men and horses.

The damp, muddy road wound round the edge of some bare-branched scrub oaks and opened out into a valley wider than most. A couple of farms took up most of the horizontal land and some that wasn't: the sheep grazing on a hillside would have done better if their right legs had been shorter than their left. Smoke curled up from the chimneys of both wooden farmhouses: cabins might have been a better word for them.

A woman wearing a kerchief, a man's flannel shirt, and a long calico dress was tossing corn to some scrawny chickens between one farmhouse and the barn. As the cavalry company drew nearer, Ramsay saw she was a half-breed, or maybe a full-blooded Indian. Sequoyah held more Indians than the rest of the Confederacy put together, and had even elected a couple of Indian congressmen and a senator.

Seeing soldiers approaching, the woman grabbed a shotgun that was leaning up against a stump. It wouldn't have done her much good, not against a cavalry company, but Ramsay admired her spirit. After a moment, the woman lowered the barrel of the shotgun, though she didn't let go of it. "You're Confederates, ain't you?" she said, her words not just uneducated but also flavored with an odd accent: she was Indian, sure enough.

"Yes, we're Confederates," Captain Lincoln answered gravely, brushing the brim of his hat with a forefinger. He pointed to the flag the standard bearer carried. "See for yourself, ma'am."

The woman peered at it, peered at him, and then nodded. She turned the barrel of the shotgun away from the troopers, using it to point north and west. "Yankees in them woods. Leastways, they was there last night. Seen their fires. Don't know how many-less'n you, reckon. Go over there and kill 'em."

Her vehemence made little chills run up Ramsay's back. One thing you could rely on: the Indians in the state of Sequoyah were loyal to Richmond. The government of the United States had made them pack up and leave their original homelands back east for this country. Since the War of Secession, though, the Confederacy had treated them with forbearance, and that was paying off now.

"Whereabouts exactly were they?" Captain Lincoln asked, getting down off his horse and standing beside the woman. A chicken walked over and pecked at the brass buckle of his boot-maybe the stupid bird thought it was a grain of corn.

The woman pointed again. "Halfway up this here side of that hill-you see it? Ain't seen 'em move out since. Maybe they still there."

Ramsay doubted that, but you never could tell. Maybe they'd decided to wait out the bad weather-even though it wasn't raining now-or maybe they were waiting for reinforcements to come up before they started pushing south again. Any which way, the company would have to ride on up there and find out what was going on.

Captain Lincoln touched his hat again. "Thank you, ma'am. Don't want to ride into trouble blind, you know."

"You just keep them damnyankees from tramplin' our garden and stealin' our critters," the woman said, as if such petty thievery were the only reason U.S. soldiers were in Sequoyah now. She probably thought that; Ramsay wondered if she'd been off this farm since she was married.

As if the thought had gone straight from his head to Captain Lincoln's, the company commander's voice suddenly got hard and suspicious as he demanded, "Where's your husband at?"

The farm woman spat, right between his feet. "Where the hell you think he's at?" she snapped. "He got drug into the Army, and I jus' hope to Jesus he come home again."

"Sorry, ma'am," Lincoln said, colour rising in his face. A couple of the troopers snickered. One of them was in Ramsay's squad. He'd rake Parker over the coals later on; couldn't let discipline go to pot. The captain was saying, "Hope he comes home, too. Hope we all do, when this war is over." He swung back up into the saddle and waved to the company. "Let's go find those damnyankees."

They rode in loose order, with plenty of scouts forward and more out on either flank. This whole country was made for bushwhacking. And then, up ahead, they heard a brisk crackle of gunfire. "Somebody else done found 'em for us," Ramsay yelled. "Now we go in there and clean 'em out."

As the Confederates rode toward the shooting, a machine gun started hammering away. "That's Yankees, all right," Lincoln said. "God knows the outlaws have plenty of rifles, but they don't have any of those."

A winding little track led through the scrub oaks toward the fighting. Lincoln dismounted his men and sent them through the woods on foot, using them like dragoons rather than true cavalry. Ramsay heartily approved- galloping up that path was asking to be massacred.

Before long, the dismounted troopers ran into Yankee pickets. Whoever was commanding the U.S. forces was doing the same thing with them as Lincoln was with the Confederates: they might have ridden to get to the fight, but they were making it on foot.

They also seemed to be outnumbered, and had to give ground again and again to keep from being outflanked and cut off. What with the thick undergrowth, you couldn't see much. If anything moved, you took a shot at it. And when you moved, people you couldn't spot shot at you. Getting a taste of what infantry did for a living, Ramsay discovered he didn't much care for it.

Eventually, the crew for the company machine gun managed to lug both it and its mount through the woods and started spraying the Yankee positions with damn near as many bullets as the rest of the company put out all together. Ramsay waited for the U.S. troopers to move their own Maxim gun away from wherever they'd had it before and try to neutralize the Confederate weapon, but they didn't. Instead, here and there among the oaks, white flags started going up.

"Ease off, you Rebs!" somebody yelled. "You got us."

Firing slowly died away. "All right, Yanks, come out," Captain Lincoln called. The U.S. troopers obeyed, hands high over their heads. Nobody shot them down. This wasn't like the skirmish up in Kansas, the one by the railroad track. This one had been fair all the way-no armored automobiles to mess up the odds.

There were, all told, maybe twenty-five U.S. soldiers. Their leader, a fellow with a Kaiser Bill mustache that had lost a good deal of its waxed perfection, wore the single silver bars of a first lieutenant. "We have some wounded back there," he said, pointing in the direction from which he'd come.

"We'll take care of them," Captain Lincoln promised, and told off a detachment to lead the Yankee prisoners back toward the road.

"A good haul," Stephen Ramsay said, standing up and emerging from cover. "We'll pick up that machine gun and as much ammunition as they have left for it, and then somebody'll shoot it back at 'em till all the cartridges are gone."

Captain Lincoln gathered him up by eye. "Come on, Corporal," he said. "Let's go see who we rescued there."

Ramsay followed him through what had been the U.S. position. He was curious about that himself; he hadn't known any other Confederate cavalry was operating in this neck of the woods. He didn't know everything there was to know, though; he would have been the first-well, maybe the second-to admit as much.

From out of some woods that looked impenetrable, a voice called a sharp warning: "Don't come no further! We got you covered six different ways."

Captain Lincoln stopped. So did Ramsay, right behind him. "Who are you?" Lincoln asked; it hadn't sounded like a Yankee holdout.

A hoarse laugh answered him. "Ain't none of your damn business who we are and who we ain't," the unseen man said. "You jus' go on home, Captain; we ain't got a quarrel with you now, even if mebbe we used to."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ramsay muttered.

He hadn't meant anyone, even Lincoln, to hear him, but his ears were ringing from the fire fight, and he spoke louder than he'd intended. "Means we wouldn't've mixed it up with them damnyankees if we hadn't thought they was you."

"Outlaws!" Captain Lincoln exclaimed.

"Yeah, and now we got a nice new Maxim gun to play with, too, you want to come in after us. You want to fight the USA, fine. Leave us the hell alone."

"What do we do, sir?" Ramsay asked.

"I think we leave them the hell alone, Corporal," Lincoln said loudly. "We're not the police and we're not the sheriffs. We owe these people one, too. They let us know where the Yankees were, and a machine gun's too heavy to lug around to robberies." He turned his back and started away. Nobody shot at him, or at Ramsay.

"Hell of a thing," Ramsay said when they were back among their comrades, and then, "We could take 'em."

"Oh, no doubt," Lincoln agreed. "But that's not our mission. We're having enough trouble with what is." Ramsay thought that over and decided the captain was right.

Sam Carsten wished he were someplace else. He'd had that feeling before, but never so bad. If he got noticed "This is what I get for volunteering," he muttered under his breath as the ugly freighter pulled away from Kapalama Basin, around Sand Island, and west over Keehi Lagoon toward the entrance to Pearl Harbor. "Cap'n" Kidde could have told him as much. Hell, Kidde had told him as much-after it was too late for him to do anything about it. But the gunner's mate hadn't been standing next to him when the captain of the Dakota asked for volunteers for a dangerous mission, and so his hand had shot up along with everybody else's. He hadn't particularly expected to be picked, but here he was.

Off to the west, the sound of big and medium-sized guns never let up. All of Oahu belonged to the United States Navy and Marines-all of it except one lump of rock and cement that made the U.S. hold on everything else a hell of a lot less secure than it should have been.

Smoke wreathed Fort William Rufus, the fort everybody, limey and Yank alike, called the Concrete Battleship. "Why the devil did the damned English have to go and build a fort right there?" Carsten said.

"Drive us crazy?" somebody next to him suggested.

It was as good an answer as any, and better than most. Anybody in his right mind would have thought batteries on the mainland were plenty to keep Pearl Harbor safe. The Royal Navy had to have been hearing voices when it built an artificial island to go with those mainland forts. But, since the mainland forts had fallen to the Marines and the Concrete Battleship was still very much a going concern, maybe the English hadn't been so stupid after all.

The twelve-inch guns in the fort's two turrets had sunk a cruiser and a couple of destroyers, and damaged two battleships to boot. Until it was reduced, the Pacific Fleet couldn't use Pearl Harbor for an anchorage. If the British sortied from Singapore, either alone or with the Japs from Manila, there was liable to be hell to pay.

But how were you supposed to take a fort you couldn't wreck? Pounding by naval guns had chipped and pitted the steel-reinforced concrete that made up so much of the superstructure, but no shells had been lucky enough to land right on top of a turret. Admiral Dewey had offered the fort's garrison full military honors if they surrendered; scuttlebutt was, he'd even offered them safe passage to anywhere they wanted to go in British or Confederate territory. Whatever he'd offered, they'd said no.

And so, brute force and sweet reason having failed, the Navy was trying something new: sneakiness. Carsten didn't know which bright boy in glasses had come up with this scheme. What he did know was that, if it went wrong, nobody would ever find enough pieces of him to bury.

The freighter rounded the headland and sped toward the stern of the Concrete Battleship. The only gun it had ever had that could be brought to bear in that direction was a three-inch antiaircraft cannon, which wasn't turret mounted. The limeys weren't going to use that one now; the bombardment had long since wrecked it.

It was the only one in the plans, anyhow; what was hidden away in the depths of the fort was anybody's guess, and one that made Carsten want to run to the head. But to keep the garrison too busy even to worry about what was sneaking up on them, the Navy was plastering the place again. Shells burst on it, sending up smoke with a core of fire, and all around it, sending up great columns of water. Watching all that made Carsten want to pucker, too. If one of those shells was badly aimed Most of the Navy ships were at extreme long range, for good and cogent reasons. The Concrete Battleship could still return fire-and did, with a salvo from one of its big-gun turrets. The noise of those two twelve-inchers going off was like the end of the world.

Closer and closer the freighter came. Carsten moved up to the bow, with the rest of the Navy files and Marines carrying rifles. At the bow was a boarding tower that looked like something out of Sir Walter Scott or other tales of medieval adventure. But, considering that the roof of Fort William Rufus was forty feet above the waterline, the boarding party was going to need help getting up there.

All at once, the Navy guns fell silent. Carsten approved of that; a couple of shells had come closer to the freighter than to the Concrete Battleship. The ship slid up to the stern or rear or whatever you wanted to call it of the fort, making contact with a decided thump.

"Well, if those bastards didn't know we were here, they do now," somebody close to Carsten said. That was undoubtedly true, and did nothing to make him feel better about the world.

A couple of Marines at the top of the boarding tower secured it to the broken concrete atop the fort. They waved. Sailors and Marines swarmed up the ladder, fast as they could. Sam was somewhere near the middle of the rush. His feet seemed to touch only every third rung. Then he was up on top himself, running through rubble to make sure no limeys came out of their starboard sally port to interfere with what the Americans were doing.

He got down behind a broken chunk of concrete and pointed his Springfield in the direction from which the British would come if they were trying something. He hoped to Jesus they wouldn't-after all, what harm could a few American sailors with rifles do on top of a fortress that had defied every big gun the U.S. Navy owned?

"Here come the guys with the hoses!" a Marine corporal yelled.

And, sure enough, here they came, up over the boarding tower with hoses just like the ones the Vulcan had used to fuel the Dakota. The Concrete Battleship had no fueling ports, of course. But it did have air vents, and the combat engineers knew where they were. They weren't badly covered with broken concrete, either; the Englishmen would have made sure of that.

Somebody fired up through one of the vents. An engineer howled and reeled backwards, clutching his shoulder. Carsten, seeing that plenty of people were covering the sally port, ran over to the vent and shot down into it a couple of times. He didn't know how much good he did; he heard the bullets ricocheting off the metal of the air ducts.

"Hell with that, sailor," an uninjured combat engineer barked at him. "Take Clem's place on the hose and hang on tight."

"All right," Sam said agreeably.

At the rear edge of the Concrete Battleship, somebody yelled "Let 'er rip!" down to the freighter. The hose jerked in Carsten's arms like a live thing. He did have to hang on tight, to keep it from getting away. A stream of thick, black liquid gushed from the nozzle and poured down the vent. Twenty feet away, another hose crew sent more of the stuff into the opening to a second ventilator shaft. Petroleum odors filled the air.

"What the hell is this stuff?" Carsten asked, doing his best to breathe through his mouth.

"Two parts heavy diesel oil, one part gasoline," the combat engineer answered. He let out a wry chuckle. "You don't want to go lookin' for a match for a cigar right about now, do you, buddy?"

"Now that you mention it, no," Sam said.

The engineer laughed again. "Good thinking. Real good thinking. We got ten thousand gallons of this stinking shit on that freighter. Take us maybe ten minutes to pour it all down on the limeys' heads."

"Good pumps," Sam observed. "Damn good pumps."

"It's not like we've got time to waste up here," the combat engineer said. He and Carsten held onto the hose till it suddenly went limp. Then he took a surprisingly small square box out of his pack and set it by the vent. In spite of his warning to Sam, he did light a match and touch it to the fuse. He looked up and grinned. "Now we get the hell out of here, is what we do."

"Yes, sir\" Carsten grabbed his rifle and ran for the boarding tower. Most of the boarding party was already off the Concrete Battleship. A couple of engineers were still busy lighting more demolition charges here and there on the roof.

Sam went down the boarding tower even faster than he'd gone up it. He wanted to get away from Fort William Rufus, far away, as fast as he could. "Everybody off?" somebody yelled. When no one denied it, that same voice shouted, "All astern full!" The freighter backed away from the Concrete Battleship.

"How long a delay did you put on those fuses?" Carsten asked the combat engineer, who'd come down right behind him.

"Ten minutes," the fellow answered cheerfully.

"Jesus!" Carsten said, and wished the freighter would go faster.

When they'd backed a few hundred yards, shore batteries opened up on the Concrete Battleship to discourage the Englishmen from heading up onto the roof. "If one of their shells fouls up our charges, I'll kill those sons of bitches with my own hands," the engineer promised.

Sam wasn't worrying about that. He was still hoping the freighter could make something better than its current slow progress away from the Concrete Battleship. How long had he taken to run across the battered but unpierced concrete roof? How long had he needed to get down the boarding tower? How much time had gone by since then? And what would happen when-?

That last thought had just gone through his mind when it happened. Fort William Rufus went up in a titanic blast of fire and smoke that obscured the whole artificial island. The shock wave from the explosion slapped the freighter like a barmaid's hand across your face when you got fresh and she didn't like it. Heat hit Sam as if he'd stuck his head in front of an oven.

He hardly noticed. He was watching an enormous slab of reinforced concrete fly high, high, high into the air-hundreds of feet up there, flung like the lid of a pot by a playful kid. But this lid weighed tons uncounted.

Beside him, the combat engineer clapped his hands with glee. "We did know where the main powder magazine was," he said happily.

"I guess you did," Carsten agreed. The ruined roof fell into the Pacific with a splash bigger than a hundred twelve-inch shells all hitting the same place at the same time. "I guess you did," Sam repeated. Fresh explosions tore at the Concrete Battleship. "We aren't going to have any trouble getting in and out of Pearl Harbor, not any more we're not."

Lucien Galtier chased bits of rabbit-and-prune stew around his plate with knife and fork. He ate some potato, too, then reached for a little glass of applejack that sat nearby. "Hard times coming," he said in a mournful voice.

"It will be all right," his wife, Marie, said. "Would you like more?" When he nodded, she picked up his plate and handed it to Nicole, their oldest daughter. "Get your father some more stew, please."

"Yes, Mama, certainly," Nicole said, rising from the table and heading back into the kitchen. Lucien smiled to watch her go. She reminded him of Marie when they'd been courting: small and dark and brisk and resolutely cheerful. No wonder half the young men in the neighbourhood would come around on errands that didn't really need doing.

But he would not let Nicole distract him from his worries. "Hard times coming," he said again, and then went on before Marie could answer: "Wives, now, wives, they look at things and they say, 'It will be all right,' no matter what it is, no matter how unlikely things are to be right ever again. We face starvation, nothing less-starvation, I tell you."

"Yes, Lucien, of course," Marie said, full of calm acceptance, as Nicole brought back his plate, piled high with steaming stew and potatoes. The plums that made the prunes had come from his own little orchard. The potatoes were from his farm, too. So were the rabbits, who had paid the penalty for being uninvited guests. He knew how to make applejack, but old Marcel, two farms away, had a still going and did not charge outrageous prices, so what was the point in cooking up his own? He finished the glass, savoring the warmth it put in his middle.

After he'd methodically plowed through the second helping, he said, with the air of a man granting a great concession, "Of course, here on the farm it could be that times are not so hard as they are in the town. I do not say it is, mind you, but it could be."

"This I think is so," Marie replied. "In Riviere-du-Loup, in St. Antonin, in St. Modeste, people cannot get along with what they are able to make so easily as can we, who raise our own food and who can even make our own clothes at need." She glanced from Nicole to her other, younger, daughters, Susanne, Denise, and Jeanne. "In the attic, stored away, are a spinning wheel and the parts for a loom. I have not brought them down and shown you what to do with them because, till now, there has been no need; we have sewn with cloth bought from the store. But my mother taught me, as her mother taught her, and I can teach you if we are able to get no more cloth, as may happen."

The girls, who ranged in age from Jeanne's seven to Nicole's twenty, all clamoured for Marie to bring down the old tools and teach them how to make cloth. Marie sent Lucien an amused glance. He returned it, saying, "See how bravely they take on new work. I remember my mother making cloth, too. I do not recall her being so eager to do it, though." He hid pride in his daughters behind gruffness.

"They want to find out something new, Lucien, or something so old, it seems new to them," Marie said. "That is not bad. When it is no longer new to them, it will no longer be exciting, either; no doubt you are right about that."

Lucien looked at his two sons: Charles, sixteen, compact like Marie, and Georges, a couple of years younger but already bigger than his brother. "Some people," he said pointedly, "have no interest in work even when it is of a new sort."

That was unfair, and he knew it; both boys worked on the farm like draft horses. Predictably, Charles got angry about it. Most times, Lucien would have been glad to see him turn eighteen, for the sake of the discipline with which he would have returned after two years' conscription. Most times, yes. With a war on Even more predictably, Georges turned it into a joke, asking, "Eh bien, Papa-this laziness, do you think we get it from you or from Mama?"

"You get it from the Devil, you little wretch," Lucien exclaimed, but then he had to cough a couple of times in lieu of laughing out loud. The next thing Georges took seriously-save, perhaps, a leather strap well applied to his backside, but he was getting too big for that-would be the first.

Outside, the dogs began to bark. A moment later came the sound of several men approaching the house, some of them mounted, others afoot. The Galtiers exchanged sudden glances of alarm. So many neighbors would never come together, not unannounced. That meant Americans, and Americans meant trouble.

Sure enough, in English rough as sandpaper, one of the men out there said, "Those hounds try and bite, you stick 'em or shoot 'em. The major, he ain't gonna give you no Purple Heart for a dog bite, boys."

Lucien realized he was the only one in the family who understood what the newcomers were saying. His sons would have learned their English in the Army when their time came; his wife and daughters would have had few occasions ever even to hear it.

"Shall we fight, Papa?" Charles demanded. He wanted to. At sixteen, you knew you could do the impossible.

At forty-three, you knew damn well you couldn't. "We have one rifle," Lucien said. "It is better for rabbits than for men. They have many guns out there, and can bring many soldiers here. No, we do not fight. We do as they tell us." When Charles and even Georges looked mutinous, he added, "Then we see what we can do afterwards." To his relief, that satisfied his sons. They were too young to be killed in a hopeless fight. It also had an element of truth that salved his own pride.

One of the Americans rapped on the door. The whole farmhouse shook. He had to be using his rifle butt, not a fist. Galtier opened the door. The American, a sergeant almost a head taller than he was, checked a piece of paper and said, "Galtier, Lucien." It was not a question, though the fellow mangled the pronunciation so badly that Lucien needed a moment to understand his own name.

"Yes, I am Lucien Galtier," he said when he did. He hated standing here with the door open; he could feel cold air sliding past him into the house. It wasn't as cold as it was going to be, but it was a lot colder than it had been, cold enough so you were glad of stove and fireplace.

"Good. You speak English," the U.S. sergeant said. Then his eyes, hard and pale, narrowed. "Round here, that means you been in the Army, ain't that right, Frenchy?"

"I have been in the Army, yes," Galtier said, shrugging. He paused to think of English words. "You find few men as old as I who are not in the Army, if they are not sick or-how do you say?" He mimed limping about.

"Crippled?" the American said. "Yeah, that's so, I guess. All right." He looked down at Lucien's stocking feet. "Get your shoes on, Frenchy. We're gonna have a look round your barn and your storehouses. You don't wanna waste time." He turned to a couple of his men and shouted, "Gosse, Hendrick, you go and start. Frenchy here'll be along."

"What is it you do here?" Galtier asked as he pulled on first one boot, then the other. He was glad they stood by the door, so he did not have to go away and let the sergeant-and maybe his followers-come in. To his family, he called in French, "Stay here. I am attending to this."

The sergeant nodded. "That's smart, pal. Don't want trouble." He under stood French, then, even if he didn't deign to speak it. He went on, in ugly English, "Requisition of supplies, by order of the brigadier general commanding."

"Requisition?" Lucien got on his other boot and stepped out into the night, closing the door after him. "This means what?" He meant the question seriously; he was trying to remember what the word meant. Before the sergeant could answer, he did remember, and stopped in his tracks. "This means-you take?"

"You got it in one, buddy," the U.S. soldier said.

"You do not pay," Galtier went on.

"Well, yes and no," the sergeant said. "You'll see how it goes."

A couple of soldiers-presumably Gosse and Hendrick-were pawing over what Lucien had spent a lifetime maintaining and adding to, the farm having been in his family for generations. One of them said, "Sarge, he's got enough here to keep the battalion in food all winter long."

"Yeah?" the sergeant said. He turned around and shouted toward one of the mounted men who'd come up to the farm. "Blocksage! Ride back and tell the QM to send a truck out here. No, better make it two trucks. Plenty of goodies, yes indeed." The horse went trotting away.

Galtier did not like the sound of any of that. "How is it you have the right to-?" he began.

Before he could finish, the sergeant pointed his rifle at him. "This gives me the right, pal," he said. "We're the ones who won the war, remember? Now, we're supposed to treat you Frenchies nice, so you'll get some compensation, don't you worry about that. But don't you go telling us what we can do and what we can't, either. You'll be real sorry real fast, if you understand what I'm saying. You understand?"

"Oh, yes, monsieur" Galtier said. "I understand."

Wherever the quartermaster had set up his headquarters, it wasn't far away. Within a few minutes, a couple of trucks came wheezing and rattling up the dirt road before turning and approaching the farmhouse. The looting began immediately thereafter.

They left Lucien his horse. They left him a cow and a few sheep and a pig. They left him a handful of hens and his rooster. They left him enough fodder to feed the animals he had left through the winter-if it wasn't too long or too hard and he didn't feed them too much. By the time they were done hauling away glass jars, they left his family in the same shape as the livestock: most of the food Marie had laboriously preserved was gone, along with lovingly smoked hams and flitches of bacon.

As food and fodder moved into the trucks, the sergeant kept meticulous notes on everything that was taken. When the sacking of the farm was complete, he handed Lucien a carbon copy of the list. "You want to take this in to Riviere-du-Loup"-from his mouth, it came out rivy-air-doo-loop — "to the commandant's office. They'll pay you off there."

"They will pay me off," Galtier echoed dully. He wished he had grabbed the little. 22 Charles had wanted to get. That way, he could have died defending what was his instead of having to watch as he went from a prosperous farmer to a poor one in a couple of hours' time. He nodded to the sergeant. "You are sure this generosity will not cause them difficulties?"

He'd intended that for irony. The sergeant took it literally, which would have been funny in an absurd kind of way if he hadn't answered, "Don't worry about that, Frenchy. You ain't gonna get more than twenty cents on the dollar, and you'll have to yell and scream and cuss to get that much."

Galtier didn't yell or scream or swear, no matter how much he wanted to. He stood silent, holding the copy of the list of supplies requisitioned from him, as the big American soldiers finished their job, started the trucks' engines, and left. The infantry and horsemen went on to the next farm down the road. They were noisily arguing about whether it would yield more or less than they'd got from him.

When they were all gone, he went back into the house. His family crowded round him. "Thank God you are well," Marie said, taking his hand in a public display of affection unlike any she'd given him since they were newlyweds. "What have the Boches americains done?"

He told her and the children what they'd done. "Hard times are here, as I told you before," he said. Even in dismay, he recognized that he hadn't intended to be taken seriously before, but now he did.

"Hard times," Marie echoed somberly. He might have been wrong before, he might have been joking before, but no longer.

A string of the curses he hadn't aimed at the U.S. soldiers burst from him: "C'est chrisse, maudit, calisse de tabernac." Like any Quebecois, he cursed by reviling the symbols of his church; English-speakers' ways of blowing off steam by talking about excrement and sex struck him as peculiar.

His family stared at him; he hardly ever said such things where even his sons, let alone his wife and daughters, could hear him. "It's all right," Marie said. "God will surely forgive you, so we must as well."

Lucien nodded gratefully to her. She always found a way to make things right. He said one thing more: "Je me souviens — I will remember."

Without hesitation, everyone nodded.

The train rolled westward toward New Orleans. As far as Anne Colleton could tell, she was the only unattached white female under the age of sixty on the whole train-certainly in her car. Not many women were traveling at all- soldiers in butternut and sailors in white took up most of the seats.

Not all her money, not all her influence, had been able to get her a Pullman berth for herself and her colored maidservant, Julia. When she boarded the train, she found out why: the Pullmans were full of military men, too, some of them with cots adding to their carrying capacity. When set against the needs of war, luxury was no longer practical.

Luxury no longer seemed fashionable, either. That distressed Anne: what point to living if you couldn't live graciously? With a cynicism older than her years but not older than her sex, she suspected the powers that be would soon grow bored with their egalitarian pose. These weren't the United States, after all: class mattered in the Confederacy, especially looking down from the top. Pretending that wasn't so struck at the heart of the nation's raison d'etre.

Not that she wasn't the center of attention all the same. She coolly took that for granted, as much as she did Julia's presence beside her. Had the train been almost all women and only a handful of men instead of the other way round, she would have been as confident of drawing those men to her. Looks told. Even President Wilson responded to her smile. So did breeding. And, she thought, smoothing a pleat on the skirt of the cranberry-red silk dress she was wearing, so did money. She toyed with the lace at her throat, affecting not to notice that she was being watched.

Ordinary soldiers and sailors eyed her without approaching; they knew she was beyond them. Yes, breeding and money told. A couple of soldiers who stank of cheap whiskey tried to approach Julia, looking for nothing more than female flesh with which to slake their lusts. Anne Colleton sent them on their way with a few low-voiced words that left their ears red and tingling.

Officers, though, officers were drawn to Anne as moths were drawn to fires. And, like moths, they drew back with their wings singed. Attracting men was great sport. But most of the officers, especially those from the Navy and the cavalry and artillery, were aristocrats with all the virtues of their class- they were brave and loyal and randy-and also its vices-they were crashing bores, or so Anne found them.

When the porter announced that supper was being served, she and Julia went back to the dining car together. A couple of tables at the rear were reserved for Negroes, commonly servants. Just as Anne had not been able to get a Pullman berth, so she was not able to get a table for herself, either: the train was too full for that. Something like a football scrim developed among the officers in white and butternut to see who would get the other two seats at the corner table where she was sitting.

When the elbowing died away, a couple of Navy officers not far from her own age smiled down at her. "Mind if we join you, ma'am?" one of them asked. He might have been an officer, but he was no aristocrat, not with that rough accent. Anne shrugged and nodded permission.

They sat down. The crowd behind them thinned regretfully. The one who'd asked her leave was a lieutenant, senior grade, with wreathed stars on his shoulder straps and a stripe and a half of gold on each sleeve. He was growing a sandy beard; at the moment, he looked as if he'd forgotten to shave.

His companion, a lieutenant, junior grade, with plain stars and single sleeve stripes, was so blond and perfect, he might have stepped off a recruiting poster. Anne dismissed him at once. The other one, though, backwoods accent or not, was… interesting.

The colored waiter, resplendent in tailcoat livery like that which Scipio usually wore, poised pencil above notepad. "What can I bring you tonight, ma'am, gentlemen?"

"How are the ham and yams?" Anne asked.

"Very fine, ma'am," the waiter assured her.

"I'll have that, then, and a glass of rose to go with it."

Pencil poised again, the waiter looked a question to the two officers. "Steak and potatoes here, and a bottle of bourbon for the two of us," the senior lieutenant said.

"Steak and potatoes for me, too," the junior lieutenant agreed.

"Of course," the waiter said. "How would you care to have those done?"

"Medium," the lieutenant, junior grade, said.

The other officer laughed. "How many times have I got to tell you, Ralph, you want to be able to taste the meat?" He looked up at the waiter. "I want that slab of meat just barely-and I mean just barely-dead. You tell the cook that if it doesn't go 'Ouch!' when I stick a fork in it, I'm going to tell his grandpappy's ghost to haunt him till the end of time." He made a curious gesture with one hand. Had the waiter been white, he would have turned pale. His eyes got big. He nodded and beat a hasty retreat.

"What was that?" the handsome junior lieutenant-Ralph-asked.

Anne surprised herself by speaking: "That was a hex sign. It means-it's supposed to mean, anyhow-your friend really can do things with, or to, the cook's grandfather's ghost."

The lieutenant, senior grade, raised a gingery eyebrow. "You're right, ma'am. Not many white folks-especially not many white women-know that one."

"I make it a point to know what goes on with my Negroes," Anne said. Smugly, she used a different sign. She was surprised again, because both naval officers recognized it, and she'd never yet run across a white man who did. "How did you know what that meant?" she asked quietly.

"We use that one for luck, ma'am, when we fire a torpedo," the senior lieutenant answered. "I didn't know anybody-anybody white, anyhow- outside of submarines knew about it."

"Submarines!" Now Anne looked at both of them with respect. They might not be gentlemen, but they had courage and to spare. You had to have courage-or be a little touched in the head-to go down under the ocean in what was basically a metal cigar.

"Submarines," the senior lieutenant repeated. "I'm Roger Kimball, off the Whelk, and this lug here is Ralph Briggs, off the Scallop. Heading for New Orleans, both of us, for reassignment."

"I'm on my way to New Orleans, too," Anne said, and gave her name.

Neither of them knew who she was. Even so, Ralph Briggs started slavering as if he were a dog and she that steak he'd ordered, not cooked medium but raw. Kimball, on the other hand, just shrugged and nodded.

Their meals did arrive then. If Roger Kimball's steak had been over the flames at all, you could hardly tell by looking. The waiter hovered anxiously all the same. When Kimball cut the meat, he let out a long "Mooo!" without moving his lips, which made the Negro jump. Only after he nodded did the fellow smile in relief and go on about the rest of his business.

Since she'd broken the ice herself, Anne expected the submariners to try whatever approach they thought would work. Briggs started to, a couple of times. But Kimball wanted to talk shop and, being senior to Briggs, got his way. It was almost as if the two men had started speaking some foreign tongue, one where words sounded as if they were English but meant obscure, indecipherable things. Anne listened, fascinated, to grumbles about fish that wouldn't swim straight, twelve-pounder and three-inch bricks, and eggs that would blow you to kingdom come if you couldn't keep away from them.

"We've laid ours, the damnyankees have laid theirs, and by the time both sides are done, won't be any room for boats left in the whole ocean, and I mean our boats and theirs both-ships, too," Kimball said.

"Don't know what to do about it," Briggs said, pouring whiskey from the bottle into his glass. He drank, then laughed, and said, "If we were still in those gasoline-engine boats, I'd be drunker'n this, just off the fumes."

"Diesel's the way to go there," Kimball agreed. "Gas-jag hangover is worse than anything you get from rotgut."

"Amen," Briggs said with what sounded like the voice of experience, though Anne wasn't quite sure what sort of experience. The lieutenant, junior grade, went on, "They're building heads in the new boats, too, thank God."

"Thank God is right," Kimball said, "even if they aren't everything they ought to be. You can't discharge 'em down deeper than about thirty feet, and you don't want to do it where the enemy can spot you."

"And when you do do it, you want to do it right," Briggs said.

"That's a fact." Kimball laughed out loud, a laugh that invited everyone who could to share the joke. "Ensign on my boat opened the wrong valve at the wrong time and got his own back-right between the eyes." He laughed again, and so did Ralph Briggs. Kimball finished, "After that, the poor miserable devil wouldn't even try unless he was crouched down in front of the pan."

When Anne Colleton discussed modern art, she and her fellow cognoscenti used terms that shut the uninitiated out of the conversation. Now she found herself shut out the same way. She didn't care for it. "What are you talking about?" she asked with some asperity.

Briggs and Kimball looked at each other. Briggs turned almost as red as the juice from Kimball's rare steak. Roger Kimball, though, laughed yet again. "What are we talking about?" he said. "You can't just flush the toilet when you're under the water in a submarine. You have to use compressed air and a complicated set of valves and levers. You have to use them in the right order, too, or else what you're trying to get rid of doesn't leave the boat. Instead, it comes back up and hits you in the face."

If Briggs had been red before, he was incandescent now. Kimball leaned back in his chair and waited to see how she'd take his blunt answer. She nodded to him. "Thank you. This happened to someone in your crew?"

"That's right. We were laughing about it for days afterwards," Kimball answered.

"Everyone but him, of course," Anne said.

Kimball shook his head. "Jim, too, after he got hold of a washrag."

Briggs poured his glass of bourbon full and gulped it down, maybe in an effort to drown his own embarrassment. Perhaps not surprisingly, he fell asleep in his chair about ten minutes later.

Kimball leaned him against the wall of the dining car. "There," he said in satisfaction. "Now he won't fall down and hurt himself." He got to his feet. "Thanks for sharing the table with us, Miss Colleton."

Not even A pleasure to have met you or Hope to see you again sometime, Anne noted, more than a little annoyed. She glanced back toward the table where Julia was eating and laughing and joking with other servants and some of the colored train crew. Her maid would be there for a while: she might stay there all night if she got the chance. Anne rose from her seat. "I'm going up to my car, I think."

Kimball made no effort to take up the unspoken invitation to walk with her. He didn't move so fast, though, as to leave her behind. They went through a couple of cars not quite together, not quite apart. Then he stopped in the hallway to a Pullman and said, "This is my compartment. Ralph's, too, matter of fact, but he found himself that berth in the diner. Not the one I'd take, but what can you do?" His eyes twinkled.

When he slid open the compartment door, Anne stepped in after him. She was a modern woman, after all, and did as she pleased in such things.

"What…?" he said, both reddish eyebrows rising. Then she kissed him, and after that matters took their own course. The lower berth was cramped for one, let alone for two, or so Anne found it, but Kimball acted as if it had all the room in the world. Maybe, compared to arrangements aboard a submarine, it did. He didn't bang his head on the bottom of the upper berth or the front wall; he didn't bump his feet against the back wall. What he did do, with precision and dispatch, was satisfy both him and her. He even used his hand to help her along a little when her pace didn't quite match his.

Afterwards, just as efficient, he helped her dress again, those clever hands doing up hooks and buttons with accurate, unhurried haste. He stuck his head out into the hallway to make sure she could leave the compartment unnoticed. Now he did say, with a knowing smile, "A pleasure to have met you." As soon as she was on her way, he shut the door behind her.

She was almost back to her own seat when, ignoring her body's happy glow, she stopped so suddenly that the old man behind her stepped on the heel of her shoe. She listened to his apologies without really hearing them.

"That sneaky devil!" she exclaimed. "He planned the whole thing." And Kimball had done it so smoothly, she hadn't even noticed till now. She didn't know whether to be furious or to salute him. She, who'd manipulated so many people so successfully over the past few years, had been manipulated herself tonight. Then she shook her head. No, she hadn't just been manipulated. She'd been, in the most literal sense of the word, had.

Sergeant Chester Martin looked down at the three stripes on the sleeve of his green-gray tunic. He didn't delude himself that he'd done anything particularly heroic to deserve the promotion. What he'd done, and what a lot of people-an awful lot of people-hadn't, was stay alive.

He looked back toward Catawba Mountain. Coming down it had been almost as bad as righting his way up it. The Rebs moved back from one line to another, and made you pay the butcher's bill every time you attacked.

"Dumb fool luck," he muttered. "That's the only reason I'm here, let alone a three-striper."

"You bet, Sarge," said Paul Andersen, who was using a wire-cutter to snip his way into a can of corned beef that let out an embalmed smell when he got it open. He wore a corporal's chevrons now himself, for the same reason that Chester was a sergeant. "A machine gun, it doesn't care how smart you are or how brave you are. You get in front of it, either you go down or you don't. All depends on how the dice roll."

"Yeah." Martin tore his eyes away from the scarred slopes of Catawba Mountain and looked east, toward the Roanoke River and Big Lick. He didn't stand up for a better look; you were asking for a sniper to blow your lamp out for good if you did anything that stupid. The lines were quiet right this minute, but what did that mean? Only that the Rebel snipers, who were used to shooting for the pot and reckoned men deliciously large targets, had plenty of time to get ready to take advantage of any chance you gave 'em.

He knew what he'd see, anyhow. Big Lick, or what was left of it after end less shelling, still lay in Confederate hands, though a lot of the iron mines nearby had the Stars and Stripes flying over them now. But the last big U.S. push had bogged down right on the outskirts of town, and after that the Rebs had counterattacked and regained a mile or two of ground. One of these days, he expected, the Army would try another push toward the river. He was willing to wait-forever, with luck.

He dug in his own mess kit and chose a hardtack biscuit. Hard was the word for it; it might have been baked during the War of Secession. And at that, troops were better supplied than they had been at the start of the campaign. Railroads were snaking out of West Virginia to the front, to bring in food and ammunition faster and in bigger lots than horses and mules and men could manage.

"Now if we could only put the Rebel trains out of action," he said. That was a big part of the reason the brass had attacked Big Lick in the first place. But the tracks remained in Confederate hands, though repeated bombardment meant the Rebs tried running trains through only at night.

"Good luck, Sarge," Andersen said. Now he pointed east. "'Stead of earthworks, they got their niggers runnin' up new lines out of range of our guns, anyhow. Don't seem fair."

Chester Martin nodded gloomily. Captain Wyatt had been grousing about those lines, too. But the captain's grousing wasn't what worried Martin about the Confederate tracklaying. Sure as hell, the brass would want to push guns up close enough to pound the new lines. And who'd have to do the dirty work to make that happen? Nobody he could see but the infantry.

As if thinking of him had been enough to make him appear, Captain Orville Wyatt stepped into the firing pit Martin and Andersen were sharing. He tossed each of them a chocolate bar. "Courtesy of the cooks," he said. "They had so many, they didn't know what to do with 'em, so 1 liberated as many as I could. They'll probably eat the rest themselves."

"Yeah, who ever saw a skinny cook?" Martin said, peeling silver paper off the bar before he crammed it into his mouth. "Mm-thank you, sir. Beats the hell out of biscuits and corned beef." Wyatt was a damned good officer- he looked out for his men. If your captain took care of things like that, odds were good he'd also be an effective combat leader, and Wyatt was. He was also up for promotion to major, for most of the same reasons Martin and Andersen had seen their ranks go up.

Wyatt dug a much-folded newspaper out of his pocket. "This came up to the front on the last train-only four days old," he said; he believed in keeping minds full along with bellies. He gave the sergeant and corporal the gist of what was in the news: "Big fight out in the Atlantic. We torpedoed a French armored cruiser, and it went down. We sank some Confederate and Argentine freighters heading for England, too."

"Good," Martin said. "Hope the limeys starve."

Wyatt read on: "The Rebs torpedoed one of our cruisers, too, the cowardly sons of bitches, but we rescued almost the whole crew. And TR made a bully speech in New York City."

That got Martin's attention, and Andersen's, too. Nobody could make a speech like Teddy Roosevelt. "What does he say?" Martin asked eagerly.

Captain Wyatt knew nobody could make a speech like TR, too. He skimmed and summarized, saying, "He wants the world to know we're at war to support our allies and to restore what's ours by rights, what the English and the French and the Rebs took away from our grandfathers… Wait. Here's the best bit." He stood very straight and drew back his lips so you could see all his teeth, a pretty good TR imitation. "'A great free people owes to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil. I ask that this people rise to the greatness of its opportunities. I do not ask that it seek the easiest path.' "

"That is good," Andersen said with a connoisseur's approval.

Chester Martin nodded, too. Roosevelt knew about the harder path. Along with Custer, though on a slightly smaller scale because he'd been just a colonel of volunteers, he'd come out of the Second Mexican War a hero, and his stock had been rising ever since. No nation could have hoped for a better leader in time of war.

All the same, sitting in a firing pit that had started life as a shell hole, surrounded by the stench of death, the rattle of machine guns, the occasional roar of U.S. and Rebel artillery, lice in his hair, Martin couldn't help wondering whether Teddy Roosevelt had ever walked a path as hard as this one.

Scipio bowed and said in tones of grave regret, "I am sorry to have to inform you, sir, that we have no more champagne."

"No more champagne? Merde!" Marcel Duchamp clapped a dramatic hand to his forehead. Everything the modern artist did, as far as Scipio could tell, was deliberately dramatic. Duchamp was tall and thin and pale and in the habit of dressing in black, which made him look like a preacher-until you saw his eyes. He didn't behave like a preacher, either, not if half-not if a quarter-of the stories Scipio heard from the maids and kitchen girls were true. Now he went on, "How shall I endure this rural desolation without champagne to console me?"

Whiskey was the first thought that came to Scipio's mind. If it worked for him, if it worked for the Negroes who picked Marshlands' cotton, it ought to do the job for a dandified Frenchman. But he'd been trained to give the best service he could, and so he said, "The war has made importing difficult, sir, as it has disturbed outbound travel. But perhaps my mistress, Miss Colleton, would be able to procure some champagne in New Orleans and order it sent here for you. If you like, I will send her a telegram with your request."

"Disturbed outbound travel: yes, I should say so," Duchamp replied. "No one will put out to sea from Charleston, it seems, for fear of being torpedoed or cannonaded or otherwise discommoded." He rolled those disconcerting eyes. "Would you not agree, the risk of going to the bottom of the sea is only slightly less than the risk of staying here?"

By now, Scipio knew better than to try to match wits with Duchamp. The artist's conversation was as confusing as his paintings; he used words to reflect back on one another till common sense vanished from them. Stolidly, the butler repeated, "Would you like me to wire my mistress about the champagne, sir?"

"I give you the advice of Rabelais: do as you please," Duchamp said, which helped not at all. The Frenchman cocked his head to one side. "Your mistress, you say. In what sense is she yours?"

"I'm afraid I don't follow you, sir," Scipio said.

Marcel Duchamp stabbed out a long, pale forefinger. "You are her servant. You were, at one time, her slave, is it not so?" He waved a hand to encompass not just the dining room of the Marshlands mansion but the entire estate.

"I was a slave of the Colleton family, yes, sir, although I was manumitted not long before Miss Anne was born," Scipio said, nothing at all in his voice now. He didn't like being reminded of his former status, even if his present one represented no great advance upon it.

Duchamp sensed that. He didn't let it deter him; if anything, it spurred him on. "Very well. You are her servant. She may dismiss you, punish you, give you onerous duties, do as she likes with you. Is it not so?"

"It may be so in theory," Scipio said warily, "but Miss Colleton would never-"

Duchamp waggled that forefinger to interrupt him. "Never mind. It is in this sense of the word that you are her servant. Now, you say she is your mistress. How may you, in your turn, punish her if she fails of the requirements of a mistress?"

"What?" Even Scipio's politeness to a guest at Marshlands, and to a white man at that (not that the Marshlands estate was likely to entertain a colored guest), proved to have limits. "You ought to know I can't do that, sir."

"Oh, I do know it. I know it full well. Many have accused me of being mad, but few of being stupid." The artist winked, as if to say even here he did not expect to be taken altogether seriously. But he was, or at least he sounded, serious as he went on, "So how is the charming and wealthy Miss Colleton yours, eh, Scipio? You cannot punish her, you cannot control her, you cannot possess her, either in economic terms or in the perfumed privacy of her boudoir, you-"

Scipio abruptly turned on his heel and walked out of the dining room, out of the mansion altogether. That Frenchman was crazy, and the people who'd told him so knew what they were talking about. In the Confederate States of America, you had to be crazy if you talked about a Negro servant possessing a white woman in her bedroom-even if you called it a boudoir. Oh, such things happened now and again. Scipio knew that. They always ended badly, too, when they were discovered. He knew that, too. But whether they happened or not, you didn't go around talking about them. You sure as the devil didn't go around suggesting them to a Negro.

"Words," Scipio said in his educated voice. Then he repeated it in the slurred dialect of the Congaree: "Words." Marcel Duchamp played games with them nobody had any business playing.

The hell of it was, this time he did make a corrosive kind of sense. Anne Colleton wasn't his mistress in the same way he was her butler. The two sides of the relationship weren't heads and tails of the same coin, the way they looked to be if you didn't think about them. Few Negroes did think about them, instead taking them for granted… which was precisely what the white aristocracy of the Confederate States wanted them to do.

Scipio looked out toward the cotton fields from which Marshlands drew its wealth-from which Anne Colleton drew her wealth. The Negroes out in those fields were her workers, almost as they had been before manumission. But was she theirs? Hardly. In his own way, Duchamp was an influence as corrupting as The Communist Manifesto.

And Anne Colleton hadn't a clue that was so. There were a lot of things the mistress- his mistress? — he'd have to think about that) didn't have a clue about when it came to what really went on at Marshlands. Scipio hadn't had a clue about them, either, not until he discovered the forbidden book in Cassius' cottage.

He still wished he'd never seen it. But, to protect his own hide, he'd been reading a lot of Marx and Engels and Lincoln, and then talking things over with Cassius. The more you looked at things from an angle that wasn't the one white folks wanted you to use, the uglier the whole structure of the Confederacy looked.

And, as if deliberately sent by a malicious God to make his misgivings worse, here came Cassius, a shotgun over one shoulder, a stick with four possums tied by the tail to it on the other. The possums, presumably, were for his own larder: Scipio tried to imagine what Marcel Duchamp would say if presented with baked possum and greens. He'd learned a little about swearing in French. He figured that would teach him a good deal more.

Cassius couldn't wave, but did nod. "How you is?" he asked.

"I been better," Scipio answered, as usual in the dialect in which he was addressed.

Nobody else was in earshot, and it was normal for the hunter and the butler to stand around talking. With a sly grin on his face, Cassius said, "Come de revolution, all of we be better."

"You gwine get youself killed, is all, you talk like that," Scipio said. "The white folks, they shoot we, they hang we. The poor buckra, they look fo' the chance every day. You want to give it to they?"

"The poor buckra in the Army, fight the rich white folks' war," Cassius said. "Not enough leff to stop we, come de day."

They'd gone round and round on that one, pummeling each other like a couple of prizefighters. Scipio tried a new argument: "Awright. Suppose we beat the white folks, Cass. What happen then? Ain't just we the white folks is fightin', like you say. We rise up, we give the USA the fight. The USA, they don' love niggers hardly no better'n our own white folks."

He'd hoped he would at least rock Cassius back on his mental heels, but the hunter-the revolutionary, the Red-only shook his head and smiled, al most pityingly. "Kip, the revolution ain't jus' here. The USA, they gwine have they own revolution, right along with we."

Scipio stared at Cassius. Whatever else you could say about him, he didn't think small. At last, cautiously, Scipio said, "They ain't got enough niggers in the USA to rise up against they gov'ment."

"They got plenty white folks up no'th what's 'pressed," Cassius answered. "You get worked sunup to sundown, don't matter you is black or you is white. You 'pressed the same, either which way. You rise up the same, either which way. The damnyankees, they shoot they strikers same as they shoot niggers here. When the broom of revolution come out, it gwine sweep away the 'pressors in the USA the same as here."

He sounded like a preacher stirring up the congregation. That was what he was, though he would have been furious had Scipio said so. But a lot of workers on the plantation took The Communist Manifesto as Gospel. Gloomily, Scipio said, "You gwine get a lot o' niggers killed. They rise up in the USA, lots o' they poor buckra get killed. We don' rise up together. They white, we black. Things is like that, an' that's how things is."

"Come the revolution, black an' white be all the same," Cassius said.

For once, Scipio got the last word: "Yeah. All be dead the same."