How Few Remain

Chapter 12

General Thomas Jackson looked up from the map. "They are throwing everything they have into this," he observed. "Can we reduce our forces within the city of Louisville to add a core of battle-hardened men to the forces we are deploying against their flanking manoeuvre?"

"I believe so, sir," Major General E. Porter Alexander answered. "They have stepped up their attacks within the city, but their troops there have not the dash and spirit they did when the fighting was new. They know they are likely to gain little and to pay dearly for what they do get. Few men give their best under such circumstances."

"Any men who fail to give their best under any circumstances deserve the sternest treatment from their own superiors," Jackson said. "The old Roman custom of decimation has much to recommend it."

"I wouldn't go so far as that, sir," Alexander said, trying to turn it into a joke.

"I would," replied Jackson, who saw nothing funny in it. Raising one arm above his head, he went on, "But back to the nub of things. What can you do, General, about the Yankees' artillery? Their guns seriously hamper our efforts to move troops to face the attack from the east."

"They have more guns than we do," E. Porter Alexander said unhappily. "They've taken some off the Louisville front to do just as you say: to make shifting soldiers harder for us. It's a good thing you had the forethought to build so many trench lines around the city before the Yankees started moving against our flank. If we had to dig while we were fighting, we'd be in worse trouble than we are already."

"This demonstrates a point I have repeatedly stressed to President Long-street," Jackson said: "namely, that having a servile population upon which we can draw in time of need confers great military advantage on us." He sighed. "The president is of the opinion that other factors militate against our retaining this advantage. Perhaps he is even right. For the sake of the country, I pray he is right."

"Yes, sir." General Alexander hesitated, then said, "Sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?"

"By no means, General. Ask what you will."

Despite that generous permission, Alexander hemmed and hawed before he did put the question: "Sir, why do you stick your arm up in the air like that? I've seen you do it many times, and it's always puzzled me."

"Oh. That." Jackson lowered the arm; he'd all but forgotten he'd elevated it in the first place. "One of my legs, it seems to me, is bigger than the other, and one of my arms is likewise unduly heavy. By raising the arm, I let the blood run back into my body and so lighten the limb. It is a habit I have had for many years, and one, I believe, with nothing but beneficial results."

"All right, sir." Alexander grinned at him. "I expect I ought to be glad I'm the same size on both sides, then."

"Is that levity?" The general-in-chief of the C.S. Army knew he had trouble recognizing it. "Well, never mind. The key to this fight will lie in halting the new Yankee thrust before it can crash into the flank of the position we were previously maintaining. The foe has been generous enough to give us considerable room in which to manoeuvre."

"He's given himself considerable room to manoeuvre, too," Alexander pointed out.

"You have set your finger on an unfortunate truth." Jackson studied the map again. "We have to manoeuvre more effectually, then. We have no other choice. As best I can judge from the reports reaching this headquarters, the intended direction of the Yankee column is-"

"Straight at us, near enough," Porter Alexander broke in.

"I believe you are correct, yes." Jackson took another long look at the indicated U.S. line of attack. "Absent interference, they would be here in a couple of hours. I intend to see that such interference is not absent."

"Sir!" A telegrapher waved for Jackson 's attention. "I have an urgent wire here from Second Lieutenant Stuart, commanding the Third Virginia south and west of St. Matthews. His line to divisional headquarters is down, so he calls on you. He says the Yankees are there in great numbers. He's thrown an attack at them to delay and confuse them, but requests reinforcements. 'Whatever you have,' he says."

"He shall be reinforced." Jackson 's head came up. "A lieutenant, commanding a regiment?"

"I don't know anything about that, sir, past what the wire says," the telegrapher answered. "Shall I order him to report the circumstances?"

"Never mind," Jackson said. "If he has the command, he has it, and does not need his elbow jogged for explanations. Afterwards will be time enough to sort through the whys and wherefores."

E. Porter Alexander said, "One way or another, he won't be a second lieutenant by this time tomorrow. Either he'll be a captain or maybe a major, or else he'll wind up a private with no hope of seeing officer's rank ever again." He paused. "Or, of course, he may well end up more concerned about his heavenly reward than any he might gain upon this earth. A lot of good men must have fallen for a lieutenant to assume regimental command. If afterwards he ordered an attack, he would hardly be removing himself from danger."

"That's true, General." Jackson studied the telegram, trying to divine more from it than the operator's bald statement had given him. Then, suddenly, his tangled eyebrows rose. "Second Lieutenant Stuart-that's S-T-U-A-R-T, General Alexander. Is our colleague's son not of that rank, and in this army?"

"Jeb, Jr.?" Alexander's eyebrows went up, too. "I believe he is, sir. Of course, even with that spelling, it's far from the least common of names. Would you answer his request any differently if you knew he was, or, for that matter, if you knew he wasn't?"

"In the midst of battle? Don't be absurd." Jackson tossed his head. As he did so, he remembered Robert E. Lee's habitual gesture of annoyance-Lee would jerk his head up and to one side, as if trying to take a bite out of his own earlobe. It was, in Jackson 's view, ridiculous. Raising his arm over his head again, he concentrated on the map. "The Fourth Virginia, the Third Tennessee, and the Second Confederate States are ordered to support the attack of the Third Virginia, if their commanders shall not have already moved to do so of their own initiative."

"Yes, sir." The telegrapher's key clicked and clicked, almost as fast as the castanets of the Mexican senoritas whose sinuous grace and flashing eyes Jackson had admired during his long-ago service in the U.S. Artillery.

No sooner had he thought of artillery in one way than General Alexander did in another, saying, "We have three batteries by the village of West Buechel, sir, that could lend the infantry useful assistance."

"Let it be so," Jackson agreed, and the telegrapher's key clicked anew.

More and more wires began coming in to headquarters from that part of the field. Second Lieutenant Stuart, from whom nothing further was heard, had been right in reporting that U.S. troops were there in great force. They had been driving forward, too. They no longer seemed to be doing so; Stuart's attack had done what he'd hoped, rocking them back on their heels. They must have thought that, if the Confederates were numerous enough to assault them, they were also numerous enough to beat back an assault.

Jackson knew perfectly well that they had not been so at the time when Second Lieutenant Stuart ordered the attack. (Was it Jeb, Jr.? Hadn't Jeb, Jr., been born day before yesterday, or last week at the outside? Hadn't he just the other day graduated from a little boy's flowing dress into trousers? Intellectually, Jackson knew better. Every so often, though, the passing years up and ambushed him. They had more skill at it than any Yankees. One day, they would shoot him down from ambush, too.)

Even had it not been so then, it was rapidly becoming so now. He who hesitates is lost was nowhere more true than on the battlefield. The brief halt Stuart had imposed on the enemy let Jackson bring forces up to yet another of the lines he had had the conscripted Negro slaves of the vicinity build. (He had every intention of sending President Longstreet an exquisitely detailed memorandum relating everything the slaves' labours meant to his forces. Longstreet, no doubt, would consign it to oblivion. That was his affair. Jackson would not keep silent to appease him.)

By midafternoon, the line had stabilized. Jackson called off the counterattack, which, he knew, must have cost him dear in terms of men. Though his instinct was always to strike at the enemy, he had come to see a certain virtue in the defensive, in making U.S. forces rise from concealment to attack his men while the soldiers in butternut and gray waited in trenches and behind breastworks. (Unlike his thoughts on slave labour, he did not plan on confiding that one to James Longstreet.)

When the crisis was past, he told the telegrapher, "Order Second Lieutenant Stuart to report to his headquarters immediately." As the soldier tapped out the message, Jackson sent a silent prayer heavenward that the lieutenant would be able to obey the command.

He caught E. Porter Alexander looking at him. His chief artillerist crossed his fingers. Jackson nodded. Alexander had been thinking along with him in more than matters strictly military, then.

When Lieutenant Stuart did not report as soon as Jackson thought he should, the Confederate general-in-chief began to fear the officer was now obeying the orders of a higher commander. But then, to his glad surprise, a sentry poked his head into the headquarters tent to announce that Stuart had arrived after all. "Let him come in; by all means let him come in," Jackson exclaimed.

He and E. Porter Alexander both exclaimed then, for it was Jeb Stuart's son. "How the devil old are you?" Alexander demanded.

"Sir, I'm seventeen," Jeb Stuart, Jr., answered. He looked like his father, though instead of that famous shaggy beard he had only a peach-fuzz mustache. But for that, though, he looked older than his years, as any man will coming straight out of battle. With his face dark from black-powder smoke, he had the aspect of a minstrel-show performer freshly escaped from hell.

"How did you become senior officer in your regiment, Lieutenant?" Jackson inquired. How young Stuart had become a lieutenant at his age was another question, but one with an obvious answer-his father must have pulled wires for him.

"Sir, I wasn't," Stuart answered. "Captain Sheckard sent me back to Colonel Tinker with word that the Yankees were pressing my company hard."

"I see." Jackson wasn't sure he did, not altogether, but he didn't press it. Had Sheckard decided to get his important subordinate out of harm's way, or had he chosen him because he was worth less on the fighting line than an ordinary private? No way to tell, not from here. "Go on."

"There I was, sir, and a Yankee shell came down, and, next thing I knew, Colonel Tinker was dead and Lieutenant-Colonel Steinfeldt had his head blown off and Major Overall"-Stuart gulped-"the surgeons took that leg off him, I heard later. And the Yankees were coming at us every which way, and everybody was yelling, 'What do we do? What do we do?' " He looked a little green around the gills, remembering. "Nobody else said anything, so I started giving orders. I don't know whether the captains knew they were coming from me, but they took 'em, and we threw the Yankees back."

Jackson glanced at Alexander. Alexander was already looking at him. They both nodded and turned back to Jeb Stuart, Jr. Alexander spoke first: "Congratulations, son. Like it or not, you're a hero."

That summed it up better than Jackson could have done. He did find one thing to add: "Your father will be very proud of you."

"Thank you, sir." Stuart was less in awe of Jackson than most young officers would have been, having known him all his life. But the wobble in his voice had only a little to do with his youth. More came from the question he asked: "Sir, what would have happened if it hadn't worked out?"

Jackson was not good at diplomatic responses. He managed to come up with one now: "You probably would not be here to wonder about that."

The young officer needed a moment to see what he meant. Jackson was unsurprised; at that age, he'd thought he was immortal, too. Stuart licked his lips. He understood what might have happened, once Jackson pointed it out. He said, "I meant, sir, if I'd failed but lived."

"Best to draw a merciful veil of silence over that," E. Porter Alexander said.

Beneath his coating of smoke and soot, Jeb Stuart, Jr., turned red. "Er, yes, sir," he said, and turned back to Jackson. "Sir, will we hold the Yankees from our flank?"

"That still hangs in the balance," Jackson replied. "I will say, however, that we have a better chance of doing so thanks to your action, Lieutenant Stuart." He inclined his head to his old comrade's son. "You will be changing the ornaments on your collar in short order."

Jeb Stuart, Jr., understood that right away. He raised a hand to brush one of the single collar bars marking him as a second lieutenant. His grin lit up the inside of the headquarters tent, brighter than all the kerosene lamps hung there.

Orion Clemens rolled a hard rubber ball through a couple of squads of gray-painted lead soldiers. "Take that, you dirty Rebs!" he shouted as several of them toppled. Sutro ran barking after the ball and through the soldiers, completing the Confederates' overthrow. With a cry of fierce glee, Orion sent blue-painted lead figures swarming forward. "They're on the run now!"

His father looked up from Les Miserables. "If only it were that easy, for our side or theirs," Sam Clemens remarked to his wife. "The war would be over in a fortnight, one way or the other, and we could slide back to our comfortable daily business of killing one another by ones and twos-retail, you might say-instead of in great wholesale lots."

Alexandra set Louisa May Alcott's After the War Was Lost on her lap. "I think too many telegrams from the front have curdled your understanding of human nature."

"No." He shook his head in vigorous denial. "It's not the wires from the front that make your belly think you've swallowed melted lead. It's the ones from the politicians, who keep on claiming the boys die to some better purpose than their own stubborn greed and the generals' stupidity."

Even Orion's triumphal advance was interrupted. Ophelia got the ball away from Sutro and threw it at the toy soldiers who wore blue paint. The missile struck with deadly effect. One of the many casualties flew into the air and bounced off Sam's shin.

"Artillery!" Ophelia cried. "Knock 'em all down!"

Sam studied his daughter with the mixture of admiration and something close to fear she often raised in his mind. She couldn't possibly have read the latest despatches out of Louisville… could she? He shook his head. She was, after all, only four years old. She knew her ABCs, she could print her name in a sprawling scrawl, and that was about it. How, then, had she been so uncannily accurate about what the Confederate guns were doing to U.S. attackers?

She was Ophelia. That was how.

"Pa!" Orion shouted angrily. "Look, Pa! See what she did? She broke two of 'em, Pa! This one got his head knocked off, and this other one here, this sergeant, his arm is broke."

"Casualties of war," Clemens said. "See? You can't even fight with toy soldiers without having them get hurt. I wish President Blaine were here, I do. It would learn him a good one, if you don't mind my speaking Missouri."

"Sam." Alexandra Clemens somehow stuffed a world of warning into one syllable, three letters' worth of sound.

"Well, maybe I could find a better time to talk about politics," her husband admitted. With a sigh, Sam raised his voice. "Ophelia!"

"Yes, Pa?" Suddenly, she sounded like an ordinary four-year-old again.

"Come here, young lady."

"Yes, Pa. " No, not an ordinary four-year-old after all: as she walked toward him, a halo of rectitude sprang into glowing life above her head. Sam blinked, and it was gone. A trick of the gaslights, or perhaps of the imagination, though what a newspaperman needed with such useless stuff as an imagination was beyond him.

"You broke two of your brother's lead soldiers," he said, doing his best to sound stern and not break out laughing at the sight of the oh so precious, oh so innocent countenance before him. "What have you got to say for yourself?"

"I'm sorry, Pa. " The voice was small and sweet and pure, like the chiming of a silver bell.

Probably sorry you didn't wipe out the whole blasted regiment, Clemens thought. He turned her over his knee and gave her a swat on the bottom that was as much ritual as punishment. That opened the floodgates for a storm of tears. Ophelia always howled like a banshee when she got smacked. Part of that, Sam judged, was anger that she should be subjected to such indignities. And part of it probably stemmed from a calculation that, if she made every spanking as unpleasant as possible, she wouldn't get so many of them.

Orion seemed properly gratified at the racket his sister made. When she stalked off to sulk in her tent, he held out the broken lead soldiers and asked, "Can you fix 'em, Pa?"

"I'll take 'em to the paper tomorrow," Clemens answered. "The printers can melt 'em down for type metal."

"Sam!" Three letters and an exclamation point from Alexandra this time. Too late. Orion started crying louder than Ophelia had.

Over those theatrical groans, Sam said, "I was only joking. They'll be able to solder the soldiers back together." He had to say it twice more, once to get his son to hear him through the caterwauling he was putting out and again to get the boy to believe him.

"Can't you remember to save all that for the editorial page and not to bring it home to your family?" Alexandra asked after relative calm-and calm among the relatives-returned.

"I'm all of a piece, my dear," Clemens answered. "You can't very well expect me to flow like a Pennsylvania gusher at the Morning Call and then put out pap for no better reason than that I've come home at night."

"Can I expect you to keep in mind that your son will believe you no matter what you say, while the politicos who read your editorials won't believe you no matter what you say?" Alexandra was never more dangerous than when she worked hardest to hold on to her patience.

Sam wagged a finger at her. "You had better be careful. You will make me remember that once upon a time I was fitted out with a sense of shame, and that's dangerous excess baggage for a man in my line of work."

"Hmm," was all Alexandra said. "Joke as much as you like, but-"

Orion broke in: "Pa, will you really and truly fix my soldiers?"

"They will rise from the dead-or at least the maimed-like Lazarus coming forth from his tomb," Clemens promised. Orion looked blank. His father explained: "In other words, yes, I will do that. If only General Willcox could make a similar-"

Alexandra suffered a coughing fit of remarkable timeliness. Sam shot her a look half annoyed, half grateful. Orion said, "As long as they really and truly get fixed, it's all right." He paused, then asked, "When you get 'em soldered, will it leave scars on 'em, like?"

"I expect it may," Sam said solemnly. "I'm sorry, but-"

"Bully!" Orion exclaimed, which made his father shut up with a snap.

The next morning, Sam walked over to the Morning Call carrying the mortal remains of the lead soldiers in a jacket pocket. One of the printers, a wizened little Welshman named Charlie Vaughan, took a look at the casualties of war and said, "Yeah, we can set 'em right again." His cigar, made from a weed even nastier than those Clemens favored, bobbed up and down as he spoke. "Damn shame we can't fix the real soldiers this easy, ain't it?"

"You, sir, have been listening at my window," Sam said. Vaughan shook his head before realizing the editor was joking. He gave Sam a sour look. "Never mind," Clemens told him. "You'll make my son very happy and help my daughter out of trouble." He rolled his eyes. "And God forbid I should use that particular phrase fifteen years from now."

Jerk, jerk, jerk went the printer's cigar as he chuckled. "Know what you mean," he said. "I have three of 'em. Married the last one off a couple years ago, so I don't have to worry about that any more."

"All your children out of the house, then?" Clemens asked. When Charlie Vaughan nodded, he aimed another question at him: "How the devil do you stand so much quiet?"

"You think you're making fun of me again, only you ain't," Vaughan said. "Gets almost spooky-like, sometimes." The cigar twitched. "Would be worse, I suppose, if my missus'd ever learned to shut her trap."

"I'll be sure to tell her you said that, next time I see her," Sam said, and beat a hasty retreat in the direction of his desk before the printer could choose one of the numerous small, heavy objects within arm's length and throw it at him.

"Morning, Sam," Clay Herndon said when he walked in a few minutes later. "What have you got there?"

"This? Police-court story Edgar turned in last night," Clemens answered, excising an adverb. "Man bites dog, you might say: three Chinamen charged with setting on an Irish railroad worker, whaling the stuffing out of him, and departing with his wallet. Since the Celestials decided the wallet was worth keeping, they must have caught the mick before he started his round of the saloons."

"Ha," Herndon said, and then, "You're right-that's not the way it usually goes. The Irish get liquored up, they cave in John Chinaman's skull, and the judge slaps 'em on the wrist. We've seen that story so many times, it's hardly news enough to put in the paper."

"Back when I first started working for this sheet, in the days when the office was over on Montgomery, you couldn't have put that story in the paper," Sam said. "Publisher wouldn't let you get by with it. He thought it would offend the Irish, though I always reckoned not more than a double handful of 'em could have read it."

"Those must have been the days," Herndon said. "This would have been a rip-snorting town back then."

"It was, when I first got here," Clemens agreed. "Then the United States went and lost the war, and San Francisco got a lot of the snorts ripped clean out of it. The panic was a hell of a lot worse than it ever got back in the States." For the first time in a long while, he hauled out the old California expression for the rest of the USA. "The railroad hadn't gone through yet, remember, and we were about as near cut off from the rest of the world as made no difference-and the rest of the world seemed to like it just fine that way, too."

"I've heard it was pretty grim, all right," Clay Herndon allowed.

"Grim?" Clemens said. "Why, it made dying look like a circus with lemonade and elephants, because once you were dead you didn't have to try and pay your bills with greenbacks worth a hot four cents on the gold dollar-oh, they dropped down to three cents on the dollar for a week or two, but by then everybody who could be scared to death was already clutching a lily in his fist."

"Hard times," Herndon said. "Every time somebody who went through it here starts talking about it, you wonder how people got by."

"You hunker down and you hang on tight to what you've got, if it isn't that damn lily," Sam answered. "The great earthquake of '65 didn't do us any good, either. You'll have felt 'em here now and again, but there's never been anything like that since, thank heavens, not even the quake of '72, which wasn't a piker. I don't reckon we'll see the like again for another couple of hundred years, and, if God pays any attention to what I think, that'd be too soon, too."

"Even the common, garden-variety earthquakes are bad enough," Herndon said with a shudder. "Makes me queasy just thinking about 'em." He deliberately and obviously changed the subject: "What's the war news?"

"They're killing people," Sam said, and let it go at that. When his friend coughed in annoyance, he blinked, as if surprised. "Oh, you want the details." He pawed through the blizzard of telegrams on his desk. "General Willcox has proved he can get stuck in two different places at the same time-a lesser man would have been incapable of it, don't you think? The British gunboats on the Great Lakes have bombarded Cleveland again, though Lord knows why, having visited the place once, they felt inclined to come back. The Indians arc on the warpath in Kansas, the Confederates are on the warpath in New Mexico Territory, and Abe Lincoln's on the warpath in Montana Territory. And, with ruffles and flourishes, the War Department announced the capture of Pocahontas, Arkansas."

" Pocahontas, Arkansas?" Clay Herndon asked in tones that suggested he hoped Sam was kidding but didn't really believe it.

And Sam wasn't. He waved the telegram to prove it. "In case you're wondering, Pocahontas is almost halfway from the border down toward the vital metropolis of Jonesboro," he said solemnly. "I looked it up. At first I thought it was only a flyspeck on the map, but I have to admit that further inspection proved me wrong. Hallelujah, I must say; no doubt the shock waves of the seizure are reverberating through Richmond even as I speak."

" Pocahontas, Arkansas?" Herndon repeated. Sam nodded. "Ruffles and flourishes?" the reporter asked. Clemens handed him the wire. He read it, grimaced, and handed it back. "Ruffles and flourishes, sure enough. Good God Almighty, we shouldn't cackle that loud if we ever do take Louisville."

"You can't cackle over the egg you didn't lay," Clemens pointed out. "We haven't got Louisville, but Pocahontas, Arkansas, by thunder, is ours." He clapped his hands together, once, twice, three times.

"Sam…" Herndon's voice was plaintive. "Why do we have such a pack of confounded dunderheads running this country?"

"My theory used to be that we get the government we deserve," Sam said. "Bad as we are, though, I don't think we're that bad. Right now, I'm taking a long look at the notion that God hates us." He glanced up at his friend. "I know somebody who's going to hate you if you don't set your posteriors in a chair and get some work done." To soften that, he added, "And I'd better do the same." Returning his attention to Edgar Leary's story, he killed seven adjectives at one blow.

A brisk crackle of gunfire came from the northern outskirts of Tombstone, New Mexico. Major Horatio Sellers turned to Jeb Stuart and said, "You were right, sir. They are going to try and hold the place. I didn't reckon they'd be such fools."

"I think we rolled most of the real Yankee soldiers back toward Tucson — the ones we didn't capture at Contention City, I mean," Stuart answered. "What we've got left in these parts is mostly Tombstone Rangers and the like, unless I miss my guess. They'll be fighting for their homes here."

"And they haven't got the brains God gave a camel," Sellers said, with which Stuart could not disagree, either. His aide-de-camp rubbed his hands together in high good cheer. "They'll pay for it."

Boom! A roar louder than a dozen ordinary rifle shots and a large cloud of smoke rising from the graveyard north of Tombstone declared that the U.S. defenders had found a cannon somewhere. Stuart stayed unperturbed. "I hope to heaven we know better by now than to pack ourselves together nice and tight for a field gun to mow us down." His smile was almost found. "Those smoothbore Napoleons did a good business during the last war, but we've come a long way since."

His own field artillery, posted on the hills that led up to the Dragoon Mountains north and east of town, consisted of modern rifled guns that not only outranged the Tombstone Yankees' obsolete piece but were more accurate as well. No sooner than the Napoleon revealed its position, shells started falling around it. It fired a couple of more times, its cannonballs kicking up dust as they skipped along, then fell silent.

"So much for that," Horatio Sellers said with a chuckle.

A couple of minutes later, though, the old-fashioned muzzle-loader came back to life. "We must have knocked out their number-one crew," Stuart guessed, "and sent them scrambling around for replacements. They've got some brave men serving that gun."

"Much good may it do them." Sellers grunted. "They likely never did have a whole lot of men with much notion of what to do with a cannon. If you're right, sir, and their best gun crew's down, they won't be able to hit a blamed thing now, not without fool luck they won't."

"That makes sense to me," Jeb Stuart agreed. "We don't want 'em to get lucky, though." He turned to Chappo, who, along with Geron-imo, was watching the fight for Tombstone alongside the Confederate commander. "Will you ask your father if he can slide some Apaches forward and pick off the Yankees who are tending to their gun?"

"Yes, I will do that." Chappo spoke to Geronimo in their own language. Young man and old gestured as they spoke back and forth. The Apaches used their hands as expressively as Frenchmen when they talked. Chappo returned to English. "My father says he will gladly do this. He wants to punish the white men of Tombstone, to hurt them for all the times they have hurt us. If we take this place together, he will burn it."

Stuart looked down at Tombstone 's wooden buildings, baking under the desert sun and no doubt tinder-dry. "If we take this place, it's going to burn whether he burns it or not, I reckon."

Even though he watched with a telescope, he could not spy any of the Apaches moving up toward the Napoleon the Tombstone volunteers were still firing. He wondered whether Geronimo had ordered them forward. The ground beyond the graveyard offered more cover than a billiard table, but not much. He wouldn't have cared to send his own men up to try to knock the gunners out of action.

That's why we're allied with the Apaches, the cold, calculating part of his mind said. Let them get hurt doing the nasty little jobs like that.

He glanced over at Geronimo. The Indian-medicine man, was the closest term Stuart could find for his position-was watching litter-bearers carrying wounded Confederate soldiers back toward the tents where the surgeons plied their grisly trade. When Geronimo felt Stuart's eye on him, the old Indian quickly moved his head and looked in a different direction.

He didn't do it quite quickly enough. I will be damned, Stuart thought. I know just what that dried-up devil of a redskin is thinking, and nobody will ever make me believe I don't. He's thinking, sure as hell he's thinking, That's why we're allied with the Confederates. Let them get hurt doing the nasty big jobs like that. To hell with me if he's not.

Stuart whistled " Dixie " between his teeth. Weeks of travel with Geronimo and the other Apache leaders had taught him they were more than the unsophisticated savages the dime novels made them out to be. They were, in fact, very sophisticated savages indeed. Not till that moment, though, had Stuart paused to wonder who was using whom to the greater degree.

Now Geronimo looked over toward him. The Apache seemed to realize Stuart had peered into his thoughts. He nodded to the white man, a small, tightly controlled movement of his head. Stuart nodded back. The two of them might have been the two sides of a mirror, each reflecting the other's concerns and each surprising the other when he realized it.

All at once, Stuart noticed the Napoleon had fallen silent again. Now Geronimo looked his way without trying to be furtive about it. The Apache raised his Tredegar to his shoulder and mimed taking aim. Stuart nodded to show he understood and doffed his hat for a moment in salute to the Apache warriors' skill. Geronimo's answering smile showed only a couple of teeth.

Losing their cannoneers once more dismayed Tombstone 's defenders. They fell back from the graveyard into the town. Had Stuart commanded them, he would have had them hold out among Tombstone 's tombstones as long as they could; when they retreated, the Confederates and Apaches promptly seized the high ground.

The Confederate field guns started hammering away at Tombstone itself. When shells struck bare ground, smoke and dirt leapt skyward. When a shell hit a building, it was as if a spoiled child kicked a dollhouse. Timbers flew every which way. No doubt glass did, too, though Stuart could not see that even with his telescope. But he knew what flying bits of glass could do to a man's body, having been educated in the War of Secession.

"Do we wait for fire to do our work for us?" Major Sellers asked. A couple of thin threads of smoke were already rising into the sky.

"No, we'll press it a bit," Stuart replied. "Even in fire, the damn-yankees can hold out for a long time down there, and it wouldn't burn them all out. Besides, if we take the town instead of burning it, we also get to forage to our hearts' content."

"Yes, sir," his aide-de-camp said enthusiastically. The Confederate army in New Mexico Territory operated on the end of an enormously long supply line. Thanks to their victories, Stuart's troopers had plenty of food for themselves and fodder for their animals. They had enough powder and munitions for this fight, too. Looking ahead to the next one, Stuart didn't like the picture he saw.

Down from the hills toward Tombstone came the dismounted Confederate cavalrymen, four going forward for every one who stayed behind to hold horses. Down from the hills, too, came the Apaches. Stuart was sure that was so although, again, he could see next to no sign of the Indians.

After a bit, he watched Geronimo instead of trying to spot red-skinned wills-o'-the-wisp. The Indian could plainly tell where his braves were and what they were up to, even if Stuart's eyes could not find them. The Apaches were convinced Geronimo had occult powers. Watching him watch men he could not possibly have seen halfway convinced Stuart they were right.

The volunteers in Tombstone kept on putting up a brave fight. As they had been in the valley south of Tucson, the U.S. forces were caught in a box with opponents coming at them from three sides at once. Here, though, they had good cover. They also had no good line of retreat from Tombstone, which made them likelier to stand where they were. Whenever Confederates or Indians pushed them, they drove off their foes with an impressive volume of fire from their Winchesters.

But then more and more of the saloons and gambling halls and sporting houses-which seemed to make up a large portion of Tombstone 's buildings-on the northern edge of town caught fire. The flames forced the defenders out of those buildings and farther back into Tombstone. The smoke from them also kept the Tombstone Rangers from shooting as accurately as they had been doing. Confederates and Apaches began dashing between flaming false fronts and into Tombstone. As Stuart rode closer to the mining town, the cheers of his men and the Indians' war cries drowned the shouts of dismay from the U.S. Volunteers.

Major Horatio Sellers rode alongside him. "Sir, will you send in a man under flag of truce to give the Yankees a chance to surrender?"

Geronimo and Chappo were also riding forward with the Confederate commander. Before Stuart could answer, Chappo spoke urgently to his father in the Apache language. Geronimo answered with similar urgency and greater excitement. Chappo returned to English: "Do not give them a chance to give up. They have done us too many harms to have a chance to give up."

Sure as the devil, the Apaches were using the Confederates to pay back their own enemies. But then Major Sellers said, "It's not as if they were Regular Army men, sir, true enough. Probably better than half of them are gamblers or road agents or riffraff of some kind or another."

The spectacle of his aide-de-camp agreeing with Geronimo instead of trying to find a persuasive excuse to massacre him bemused Stuart. It also helped him make up his mind. "If the Tombstone Rangers want to surrender, they can send a man to us. I won't make it easy for them."

Chappo translated that for Geronimo. His father grunted, spoke, gestured, spoke again. Chappo didn't turn his response back into English. From the old Indian's tone and expression, though, Jeb Stuart thought he could make a good guess about what it meant: something to the effect of, Oh, all right. I'd sooner every one of them bit the dust, but if they give up, what can you do?

A dirty-faced Confederate came running back to Stuart. "Sir, the damn-yankees put a couple of sharpshooters up in that church steeple"-he pointed back through drifted smoke toward what was plainly the tallest structure in Tombstone — "and they've done hit a bunch of our boys."

"I can't knock 'em out by myself, Corporal," Stuart answered. He looked back to see where the field guns were. A couple of them had already taken up positions in the graveyard, not far from where the Napoleon had stood. "Go tell them. They'll take care of it."

The range was short; the gunners were barely out of effective Winchester range from the outskirts of Tombstone, and might have come under severe fire from U.S. Army Springfields. Stuart watched shells fall around the church. Then one gun crew made a pretty good shot and exploded their shell against the topmost part of the steeple. No further reports of Yankee sharpshooters there came to Stuart's cars.

That church, he found when he rode into town, was at the corner of Third and Safford. The Tombstone Rangers made a final stand a block south of it, at the adobe Wells Fargo office at Third and Fremont and the corral across the street from it, whose fences they'd reinforced with planks and stones and bricks and whatever else they could find. The OK Corral was a target artillerists dreamt of. After a couple of salvos turned the place into a slaughterhouse, the defenders raised a white flag and threw down their guns, and the fighting stopped.

Geronimo, seeing the men who had so tormented the Apaches now in his allies' hands, wanted to change his mind and dispose of them on the spot. "No," Stuart told him through Chappo. "We don't massacre men in cold blood."

"What will you do with them?" the medicine man asked.

"Send them down to Hermosillo, along with the rest of the U.S. soldiers we've captured," Stuart answered.

Geronimo sighed. "It is not enough."

"It will have to do," Stuart told him. "We haven't done too badly here, when you think about it. We've cleared U.S. forces from a big stretch of south-western New Mexico Territory, and we did it without getting badly hurt at all."

"Much of what you did, you did because we helped you," Geronimo replied through Chappo. "We should have some reward."

He could not force the issue; he had not the men for that. Stuart said, "You do have a reward. Here is all this land with no Yankee soldiers on it. Here are your braves with the fine rifles they have from us. How can you complain?"

"It is not enough," Geronimo repeated. He said nothing more after that. Stuart resolved to keep a close eye on him and his followers.

As soon as Abraham Lincoln saw the crowd that had come to hear him in Great Falls, he knew he would not have such an appreciative audience as he had enjoyed in Helena. By the standards of Montana Territory, Helena was an old town, having been founded just after the end of the War of Secession. Great Falls, by contrast, was so new the unpainted lumber of the storefronts and houses hardly looked weathered.

More to the point, though, Helena was a mining town, a town built up from nothing by the labourers who worked their claims-and who, most of them, worked luckier men's claims these days-in the surrounding hills. Great Falls, by contrast, was a foundation of capital, a town that had sprung to life when the railroad out to the Pacific went through. If it hadn't been for fear of the British up in Canada, the railroad would probably still remain unbuilt. But it was here, and so were the people it had brought. Storekeepers and merchants and brokers predominated: the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat.

Lincoln sighed. In Helena, he'd got exactly the response he'd wanted. He'd told the miners some home truths about the way the country treated them. Without more than a handful of Negroes to exploit, it battened off the sweat of the poor and the ignorant and the newly arrived and the unlucky. Capitalists didn't want their victims to know that.

Capitalists had reasons for not wanting their victims to know that, too. After he'd told the miners some things of which their bosses would have preferred them to remain ignorant, they'd torn up Helena pretty well. He smiled at the thought of it. He hadn't touched off that kind of donnybrook in years.

He'd won the supreme accolade from one of the local capitalists, a tough, white-bearded fellow named Thomas Cruse: "If I ever set eyes on you again, you son of a bitch," Cruse had growled, "I'll blow your stinking brains out."

"Thank you, sir," Lincoln had answered, which only served to make Cruse madder. Lincoln wasn't about to lose sleep over that. From what he'd heard, Cruse had once been a miner, one of the handful lucky enough to strike it rich. Having made his pile, he'd promptly forgotten his class origins, in much the same way as an Irish washerwoman who'd married well would come back from a European tour spelling her name Brigitte, not Brigid.

Another sigh came from his lips. No, no sparks tonight, not from these comfortable, well-dressed people. A couple of Army officers sat in the second row, no doubt to listen for any seditious utterances he might make. One of them looked preposterously young to be wearing a cavalry colonel's uniform. Lincoln wondered what sort of strings the fellow had pulled to get his command, and why he'd tied a red bandanna around his left upper arm.

Rather nervously, a local labour organizer (not that there was much local labour to organize) named Lancaster Stubbins introduced Lincoln to the crowd: "Friends, let's give a warm Montana welcome to the man who makes it hot for capital, the fiery champion of the working man, the former president of the United States, Mr. Abraham Lincoln!"

Despite Stubbins' images of heat, the most enthusiastic word Lincoln could in justice apply to the round of applause he got was tepid. That did not surprise him. Here in Great Falls, he would have been surprised had it proved otherwise. When he took his place behind the podium, he stood exposed to the crowd from the middle of his belly up. That didn't surprise him, either; almost every podium behind which he'd ever stood-and he'd stood behind a great forest of them-had been made for a smaller race of men.

He sipped at the glass of water thoughtfully placed there, then began: "My friends, they ran me out of Helena because they said I made a riot there. As God is my witness, I tell you I made no riot there."

No applause came from the crowd. Shouts of "Liar!" rang out. So did other shouts: "We have the telegraph!" and "We know what happened!"

Lincoln held up a hand. "I made no riot there," he repeated. "That riot made itself." More outcry rose from the audience. The young colonel in the second row wearing a red bandanna seemed ready to bounce out of his chair, if not out of his uniform. Lincoln waited for quiet. When he finally got something close to it, he went on, "Do you think, my friends, the honest labourers who heard me in Helena would have turned the town on its ear had they been happy with their lot? I did not make them unhappy with it. How could I have done so, having only just arrived? All I did was remind them of what they had, and what in law and justice they were entitled to, and invite them to compare the one to the other. If that should be inciting to riot, then Adams and Franklin and Washington and Jefferson deserved the hangings they did not get."

Sudden silence slammed down. He had hoped for as much. The people still remembered freedom, no matter how the plutocrats tried to make them forget. Heartened, Lincoln continued, "So many in Helena, like so many elsewhere in the United States-so many even here, in Great Falls-labour so that a few who are rich can become richer. Ignorant old man that I am, I have a moderately hard time seeing the fairness there.

"A capitalist will tell you that his wealth benefits everyone. Maybe he is even telling you the truth, although my experience is that these capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people. Or do you not think his wealth would benefit you more, were some part of it in your pocket rather than his?"

That got a laugh-not a large one, but a laugh. "Tell 'em, Abe!" somebody called. Somebody else hissed.

Lincoln held up his hand again. Quiet, this time, came quicker. He said, "Even before the War of Secession, I made my views on the matter clear. As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. Democracy has no place for slaves or masters. To whatever extent it makes such a place, it is no longer democracy. A man with silk drawers, a gold stickpin, and a diamond on his pinky may disagree. What of the miner in his tattered overalls or the shopkeeper in his apron? Does not the capitalist trample them down, by his own rising up?

"And does he not sow the seeds of his own destruction in the trampling? For when, through this means, he has succeeded in dehumanizing the labouring proletariat by whose sweat he eats soft bread, when he has again and again put the working man down and made him as nearly one with the beasts of the field as he can, when he has placed him where any ray of hope is extinguished and his soul sits in darkness like the souls of the damned… When the capitalist has done all this, does he not fear, while he sips his champagne, that the demon he has made will one day turn and rend him!"

That was the sentence upon which his speech in Helena had ended. He had not intended it to end there. He had planned to go on for some time. But the ragged miners there construed his words literally, and acted on what he had taken for (or part of him had taken for) a mere figure of speech.

Here in Great Falls, he got no riot. He did get an audience perhaps more attentive than it had planned on being. When he saw men leaning forward to hear him better, he knew he'd succeeded. "My friends, the defense of our nation lies not in our strength of arms, though 1 wish our arms every success in this war upon which we are engaged. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. If we let it perish, we grow the seeds of tyranny on our own soil. If we suffer our labourers to wear the chains of wage slavery, we look forward to the day when the nation is enchained.

"To our north, in Canada, we find a people with a different government from ours, being ruled by a Queen. Turning south to the Confederate States, we see a people who, while they boast of being free, continue to hold their fellow men in bondage. At present, we are at war with both these peoples, not least because we do not wish to permit their unfree power to be extended. If is altogether fitting and proper that we should struggle, if struggle we must, for such a cause.

"Yet will we fight for the cause of freedom abroad, while allowing the same cause to perish at home'} We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some, the word means for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and with the product of his labour. With others, the same word means for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labour. The fullness of time, I am convinced, will prove to the world which is the true definition of the word, and my earnest hope remains that the United States of America shall yet lead the way in the proving."

In Great Falls, he got applause, warmer than when he was introduced. In Helena, that passage might have touched off the riot had the previous one not done it. In a way, he appreciated the polite hearing. In another way, he would sooner have been booed off the platform. People who listened politely and forgot an hour later what they'd heard were no great asset to the cause of liberty.

"We shall have change in this country, my friends," he said. "I leave you tonight with this thought to take to your homes: if we cannot find a peaceable way to bring about this change, we shall find another way, as our forefathers did in 1776. We have now, as we had then, the revolutionary right to overthrow a government become a tyranny to benefit only to the rich. I pray we shall have no need to exercise this right. But it is there, and, if the need be there as well, we shall take it up, and the foundations of the nation shall tremble. Good night."

As he stepped down, he got about what he'd expected: cheers and catcalls mixed together. One fight started in the back of the hall. Instead of joining in, the men around the fighters pulled them apart and hustled them outside. Lincoln smiled, ever so slightly: no, it hadn't been like that in Helena.

Lancaster Stubbins came up to Lincoln and shook his hand. "That was very fine, sir, very fine indeed," he said. "You'll stay the night with my family and me?"

"I should be honored," Lincoln said. Stubbins was earnest and sincere, and, when and if the new revolution came, would undoubtedly be swept away. Still-"It will prove a better bed, I am sure, than the one I enjoyed-though that is scarcely the proper word-in Fort Douglas."

Getting to the promised bed would take a while. Some people came forward to congratulate him. Some people came forward to argue with him. Half an hour after the speech was done, he was still alternately shaking hands and arguing. That brash young cavalry colonel stuck a finger in his chest and growled, "You, sir, are a Marxian Socialist."

His tone was anything but approving. Lincoln found himself surprised; men who so emphatically disagreed with his positions seldom came so close to identifying their true nature. "That is near the mark-near, but not quite on it, Colonel…?" he said.

" Roosevelt," the cavalry officer answered impatiently. "Theodore Roosevelt." He scowled up at Lincoln through his gold-framed spectacles. "How do you mean, sir, not quite on the mark? In what way am I in error?" The challenge in his voice declared that, like George Custer, he saw disagreement as affront.

Still, Lincoln judged the question seriously meant, and so answered seriously: "A Marxian Socialist, Colonel Roosevelt, believes the revolution will come, no matter what measures be taken to prevent it. My view is, the revolution will come unless strong measures be taken to prevent it."

"Ah." Roosevelt gave a slow, thoughtful nod. "That is a distinction." Unlike Custer, he evidently could feel the intellectual force of a counter-argument. That index finger stabbed out again. "But you do believe the pernicious Marxian doctrine of the class struggle."

"I do believe it, yes," Lincoln said. "I do not believe it pernicious, not after spending my time since the War of Secession observing what has been afoot in the United States, in the Confederate States, and, as best I can at a distance, in Britain and Europe as well."

"Class struggle is balderdash! Poppycock!" Roosevelt declared. "We can attain a harmonious society by adjusting our laws and their interpretation so as to secure to all members of the community social and industrial justice."

"We can, surely. I said as much," Lincoln replied. "But shall we? Or will those in whose hands most capital now rests seek only to gain more? That looks to be the way the wind is blowing, and it blows a fire ahead of it."

Roosevelt surprised him again, this time by nodding. "The worst revolutionaries today are those reactionaries who do not see and will not admit that there is any need for change."

"You had best be careful, Colonel Roosevelt, or people will be calling you a Marxian Socialist," Lincoln said.

"By no means, sir. By no means," the brash young officer said. "You believe the damage to our body politic is… I shall give you the benefit of the doubt and say, all but irreparable. My view, on the contrary, is that the political system of the United States remains perfectible, and that resolute action on the part of the citizens as voters and the government as their agent can secure the blessings of both liberty and prosperity for capital and labour alike."

"I have heard many men with your views, but few who express them so forcefully," Lincoln said. "Most, if you will forgive me, have their heads in the clouds."

"Not I, by jingo!" Theodore Roosevelt said.

"I wish I could believe you likely to be correct," Lincoln carried out. "For reform to be carried out in the manner you describe, though, a man of truly titanic energy would have to lead the way, and I see none such on the horizon. I do see workers by the millions growing hungrier and more desperate day by day. Now if you will excuse me, Colonel, this other gentleman wished to speak with me." Roosevelt turned away. Lincoln heard him mutter "Poppycock!" under his breath once more. Then the former president, being greeted by a supporter, forgot about the young cavalry colonel.

Frederick Douglass wished he could go home to Rochester. In fact, nothing save his own pride and stubbornness kept him from going home to Rochester. If he went home, he would be admitting defeat: not only to those who read his despatches from the Louisville front in their newspapers, but also, and more important, to himself.

As he got out of a carriage Captain Richardson had furnished him and headed for the newly built wharves several miles east of Louisville, he knew defeat was there whether he admitted it or not. Captain Richardson kept right on being obliging, still, Douglass was convinced, in the hope that he could get him killed. With each new time Douglass crossed the Ohio into Kentucky, the total chance of his getting killed grew more likely, and he knew it. He kept crossing anyhow, every time he could.

The United States now held two tracts on the southern side of the river, one inside battered Louisville itself, the other projecting toward it from the east. The shape of that second salient, sadly, was deceiving; the front had not advanced more than a couple of furlongs in the past several days. Hope that the flanking manoeuvre would drive the Confederates from Louisville had all but died. With it had also died a great many young men in U.S. blue.

Confederate artillery pounded away at the U.S. positions east of Louisville. This salient was bigger than the one in the city, and had pushed the Rebels out of range of the Indiana side of the Ohio. The amount of ground gained, however, was not the be-all and end-all of the campaign. The be-all had not come to be, and the end-all was not in sight.

Another barge was loading. Barges were always loading, sending in more soldiers to do what they could against the Rebels' entrenchments and rifles and cannon. Some soldiers came back on barges, too, shrieking in anguish. Some stayed in Kentucky and fought and did not go forward. Some stayed in Kentucky and died and were hastily buried. Some stayed in Kentucky and died and were not buried at all.

Sometimes Douglass had trouble persuading the soldiers he had the right to cross. This time, though, he met no difficulties. Even before he drew from a pocket Captain Richardson's letter authorizing him to go into Kentucky, one of the men tending to the barge's engine waved and said, "Got a letter from my cousin, sayin' she really likes the way you're writin' about the war."

"That's very kind of her," the Negro journalist said as he stepped aboard the barge. Had he been white, he thought the soldier would have called him Mr. Douglass. Few white men could bring themselves to call a Negro Mister. Making an issue of an act of omission, though, was much harder than doing so about an act of commission. Douglass kept quiet, consoling himself with the thought that he might have been wrong.

Once the one white man had accepted him as an equal, or something close to an equal, the rest did the same. He'd seen that before, too. People all too often put him in mind of sheep. Had that fellow mocked him and called him a nigger, the others packing the barge likely would have followed that lead as readily as the other.

U.S. guns on the Kentucky shore not far from the riverbank belched smoke and flames as they tried to put their Confederate counterparts out of action. Near the guns lay wounded soldiers who would go back to Indiana aboard the barge once it had unloaded the men it carried. Some cried out, some groaned, and some lay limp, too far gone in suffering to complain. Along with the soldiers headed toward the battle line, he averted his eyes from the bloodstained evidence of what war could do.

He did not accompany the fresh troops to whatever position they had been assigned. Instead, he made his way toward the men of the Sixth New York. They had come closer than any other U.S. troops to breaking the Confederate line and smashing into Louisville as General Willcox had envisioned. Only a desperate countercharge by a Rebel regiment-led by a lieutenant, some said, though Douglass didn't believe it-had knocked them back on their heels and let C.S. forces bring in more troops and solidify their position.

Several Confederate shells came screaming down within a couple of hundred yards of him. He took no notice. Back before the battle began, they would have sent him diving, panicked, for the closest hole he could find. He was astonished at how blase he'd grown about shell-fire.

On toward the line of battle he tramped, not at any great speed but as steadily as if powered by steam. That comparison made him smile. He puffed less now on such hikes than he had when he'd first made them; his wind was better than it had been for years. He'd always been blessed with a robust constitution, which served him in good stead today.

He'd gone up to the Sixth New York's position so often by now, some of the troops behind the line had grown used to his presence. One made as if to set his watch by Douglass. "How are you this morning. Uncle?" another called. The Negro answered that with a nod and nothing more; as usual, Uncle straddled the line between polite and insulting.

Another U.S. soldier whistled and waved and said, "Good morning to you, Fred."

"And to you, Corporal," Douglass answered, this time feeling his face stretch into a broad, almost involuntary grin. A white man who called him Fred might be short on formality, but was also short on prejudice. Douglass reckoned that a fair exchange.

He was drawing near the front line, up into the area where entrenchments seamed Kentucky's smooth fields as scars from the lash seamed his own back, when an officious provost marshal whom he hadn't seen before challenged him: "Who the devil are you, and what business have you got here?"

"Don't you recognize Jefferson Davis when you sec him?" Douglass demanded. The joke fell flat; like most provost marshals, this one had no sense of humor. Douglass produced the letter from Captain Oliver Richardson. The soldier read it, moving his lips. At last, reluctantly, he returned it to the journalist and stood aside.

Up in the trenches, the men of the Sixth New York hailed him as an old friend. "You're a crazy old coot, you know that?" one of them said by way of greeting. "We've got to be here, and you don't, but you keep comin' anyhow."

"He reckons we'll keep him safe, Aaron, that's what it is," another soldier said. "Looky! He ain't even carrying his six-shooter no more."

"As you say, I am among heroes." Douglass smiled at the blue-coat, who, along with his companions, hooted and jeered. Many of them were heroes, but they bore that heroism lightly, as if mentioning it embarrassed them. Douglass had stopped wearing a revolver once the line stabilized, no longer seeing much likelihood he would need it for self-defense. Instead of a Colt, he pulled out a notebook. "And what has gone on here since my latest visit?"

"Snaked a raid over into the Rebs' trenches yesterday afternoon, we did," Aaron said proudly. "Killed two or three, brought back a couple dozen prisoners, only had one feller hurt our ownselves."

"Well done!" Douglass said, and scribbled notes. Inside, though, he winced. This was what the bold if tardy flank assault had come down to: little raids and counterraids that might move the front a few yards one way or the other but meant nothing about when or if the Army of the Ohio would ever drive the Confederates out of Louisville.

Douglass listened to the volunteers as they talked excitedly about the raid. They were caught up by it; because they'd done well in a tiny piece of the war, they thought the whole of it was going well. Douglass had not the heart to disillusion them, even had they chosen to listen to him in turn. He pressed on up to the foremost trench, knowing he would find Colonel Algernon van Nuys there.

Sure enough, van Nuys squatted by a tiny fire, eating hardtack and waiting for his coffee to boil. "Ah, Mr. Douglass, you come back again," the regimental commander said. His knees clicked as he straightened up. "You must be a glutton for punishment. Here, you can prove it: have a hardtack with me." He offered Douglass one of the thick, pale crackers.

"Why do you hate me so?" Douglass asked, which made Colonel van Nuys laugh. Accepting the hardtack, Douglass took a cautious bite. When fresh, the crackers weren't bad. By the way this one resisted his teeth, it might have been in a warehouse since the War of Secession. After he'd managed to swallow, he said, "Do I rightly hear that you poked the Rebels yesterday?"

"A poke is about what it was, a little poke," van Nuys said with a sour smile: he knew too well this wasn't what Orlando Willcox had intended for the flanking move. "Today, tomorrow, the next day, the Rebs'll try to poke us back, I expect. We might as well be playing tag with 'em."

"No, thank you," Douglass said, and the colonel chuckled again. Van Nuys stooped to see how the coffee was doing, and, as if to confirm his words, Confederate artillery opened up on the Sixth New York. Now Douglass did throw himself flat; these shells came crashing down far closer than a couple of hundred yards away. Fragments scythed through the air above his head, hissing like serpents.

Through the din of the shelling, the roar of rifle fire also picked up. "To the firing steps!" Colonel van Nuys shouted. "Here they come! Let's give it to 'em, the sons of bitches."

A moment later, he cried out wordlessly and reeled back into the trench. The cry was necessarily wordless, for a bullet had shattered his lower jaw, tearing away his chin and leaving the rest a red ruin. He gobbled something unintelligible at Douglass. Maybe it was I told you so, but it could have been Tell my wife I love her or anything else. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and, mercifully, he swooned, his blood pouring out onto the floor of the trench. Douglass wondered if he would ever wake again. With that wound, eternal sleep might be a mercy.

High and shrill. Rebel yells rang out from the stretch of ground between C.S. and U.S. trench lines. "Reinforcements!" Douglass shouted. "We need reinforcements here!" But no reinforcements came. Cleverly, the Confederates were using the artillery bombardment to form a box around the sides and rear of the length of entrenchments they had chosen to attack. Anyone who tried to get through that bombardment was far likelier to get hit.

A U.S. soldier a few feet away from Douglass fired his Springfield. One of the Rebel yells turned into a scream of a different sort. But as the bluecoat was slipping another cartridge into the breech, a Confederate bullet caught him in the side of the head. Unlike Algernon van Nuys, he never knew what hit him. He slumped to the ground, dead before he touched it. The rifle fell from his hands, almost in front of Frederick Douglass.

He grabbed for it, wishing it were a carbine, whose shorter barrel would have made it easier for him to reverse it and blow out his own brains. But all his resolve about not being taken alive came to nothing, for a Confederate in dirty butternut leaping down into the trench landed on his back. Pain stabbed through him-a broken rib? He didn't know.

He didn't have time to think, either. "Come on, nigger!" the Reb screamed. "Up! Out! Move! You're caught or you're a dead man!" No matter what his head thought, Douglass' body wanted to live. However much it hurt, he scrambled out of the trench and, after getting jabbed in a ham by the Confederate's bayonet, stumbled toward the C.S. lines.

A Rebel captain was shouting, "Come on, you prisoners! Move! Move fast!" When he saw the journalist captured with eight or ten U.S. soldiers, his eyes widened. "Good God," he said. "It can't be, but it is. Frederick Douglass, as I live and breathe."

"The nigger rabble-rouser?" Three Confederates asked it at once. "Him?"

"Him-the same." The captain had no doubt whatever.

The soldier who'd captured Douglass jabbed him again, harder. "Let's string the bastard up!" His friends bayed approval.