Walk in Hell

IX

Jake Featherston went from gun to gun, making sure all six howitzers in the battery were well positioned, supplied with shells, and ready to open up if the Yankees decided to pay the trenches a call. He didn’t think that would happen; the drive through Maryland had taken an even crueler toll on U.S. forces than on those of the Confederacy, and the latest Yankee push had drowned in an ocean of blood a couple of days before.

All the same, he made sure he hunted up Caleb Meadows, the next most senior sergeant in the battery, and said, “You know what to give the damnyankees if they hit us while I’m gone and you’re in charge.”

“Sure do.” Meadows’ Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he spoke. He was a scrawny, gangly man who spoke as if he thought somebody was counting how many words he said. “Two guns sighted on that ridge they got, two right in front of our line, and t’other two ready for whatever happens.”

“That’s it,” Jake agreed. “I expect I’ll be back by suppertime.”

Meadows nodded. He didn’t say anything. That was in character. He didn’t salute, either. How could he, when he and Featherston were both sergeants? Jake had commanded the battery ever since Captain Stuart went out in a blaze of glory. He was still a sergeant. He didn’t like still being a sergeant.

He went back through Ceresville, past a couple of mills that had stood, by the look of what was left of them, since the days of the Revolutionary War. They weren’t standing any more. U.S. guns had seen to that.

The bridge over the Monocacy still did stand, though the ground all around both ends of it had been chewed up by searching guns. Military policemen stood on the northeastern bank, rifles at the ready, to keep unauthorized personnel from crossing. Jake dug in his pocket, produced his pass, and displayed it to one of the men with a shiny MP’s gorget held on his neck by a length of chain. The fellow examined it, looked sour at being unable to find anything irregular, and waved him across.

He had to ask several times before he could find his way to the headquarters of the Army of Northern Virginia. They were farther back toward Frederick than he’d thought, probably to make sure no long-range U.S. shells came to pay them a call. Once he got into the tent city, he had to ask for more directions to get to Intelligence.

A corporal who looked more like a young college professor was clacking away on a typewriter inside the flap of the tent, which was big enough to be partitioned off into cubicles. He finished the sentence he was on before looking up and saying, “Yes, Sergeant?” His tone said he outranked Featherston regardless of how many stripes each of them wore on his sleeve.

“I have an appointment with Major Potter.” Jake displayed his pass once more.

The corporal examined it more carefully than the military policeman had done. He nodded. “One moment.” He vanished into the bowels of the tent. When he came back, he waved for Jake to accompany him.

Major Clarence Potter was typing, too. Unlike the corporal, he broke off as soon as he saw Featherston. “Sit down, Sergeant,” he said, and then, to the noncom who’d escorted Jake back to him, “Fetch Sergeant Featherston a cup of coffee, why don’t you, Harold? Thanks.” It was an order, but a polite one.

“Good coffee,” Jake said a minute or so later. You couldn’t make coffee this tasty up near the front, not when you were brewing it in a hurry in a pot you hardly ever got the chance to wash. Jake realized he couldn’t complain too much, not when the infantry hardly boasted a pot to their name, but made their joe in old tin cans.

“I’d say you’ve earned good coffee,” Major Potter said equably. “Glad you like it. We get the beans shipped up from a coffeehouse in Washington. But enough of that.” He glanced down to whatever paper he had in the typewriter. “I’d say you’ve earned any number of things, but my opinion is not always the one that counts. Which is, I suppose, why you asked to see me today.”

“Yes, sir,” Featherston said. And then, as he’d feared it would, all the frustration came boiling to the top: “Sir, who the devil do I have to kill to get myself promoted in this man’s Army?”

Potter frowned at him. The major didn’t look like much, not till you saw his eyes. Sniper’s eyes, the soldiers called a glance like that: they didn’t necessarily mean the fellow who had them was good with a rifle, only that you didn’t want to get on his bad side or he’d make you pay. But Jake was also frowning, too purely ticked off at the world to give a damn about what happened next.

And Potter looked down first. He fiddled with some of the papers on his desk, then sighed. “I’m afraid killing Yankees doesn’t do the job, Sergeant. I wish it did. It’s the criterion I’d use. But, as I told you, my views, while they have some weight, are not the governing ones.”

“I been running that battery every since Captain Stuart went down, sir,” Jake said, and Clarence Potter nodded. “We’ve fought just as good with me in charge of things as we did with him, maybe better. Besides”-he had enough sense to hold his voice down, but he couldn’t keep the fury out of it-“that damned fool would have got every man jack of us killed for nothin’ better than him goin’ out in a blaze of glory. We would have lost every man and every gun we had.”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” Major Potter said. “But you asked whom you had to kill to get a promotion, Sergeant?” After waiting for Featherston to nod in turn, he went on, “The plain answer is, you will never be promoted in the First Richmond Howitzers, and you are most unlikely to win promotion anywhere in the Confederate States Army, for the simple reason that you killed Captain Jeb Stuart III.”

Jake stared at him. Potter was dead serious. “I didn’t, sir, and you know I didn’t,” Jake said, holding up one hand to deny the charge. “When I was starting to move the battery out, I did everything I could to get him to come along. He stopped me. He stopped the whole battery. If the damnyankees hadn’t shot him, he would have kept us there till they overran us.”

“‘If the damnyankees hadn’t shot him,’” Potter repeated. “And why, Sergeant, did he put himself in a position where the Yankees were able to shoot him so easily?”

“You ought to know, sir,” Jake answered. “On account of the trouble he got into with you for keeping that snake-in-the-grass nigger Pompey around and not letting anybody find out the son of a bitch really was a Red.”

“That’s right,” Major Potter said. “And, having fallen under a cloud, he did the noble thing and fell on his sword, too-or the modern equivalent, at any rate.” His nostrils twitched; by the way he said the noble thing, he meant something more like the boneheaded thing. “But now we come down to it. Who was it, Sergeant Featherston, who first alerted Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence to the possibility that there might be something wrong with this Pompey?”

When a heavy shell landed close to the battery, it picked you up and slammed you down and did its level best to tear your insides out right through your nose and mouth and ears. That was how Jake Featherston felt now, sitting in a wood-and-canvas folding chair in a tent too far back of the line to have to worry about shellfire. “Christ,” he said hoarsely. “They’re blaming me.”

“Of course they are.” Major Potter’s manner was as mild as his appearance; to look at him or listen to him, you’d peg him for a schoolteacher-until you noticed what he had to say. “You wouldn’t expect them to blame Jeb Stuart III, would you? All he did, Sergeant, was cause the suppression of an investigation. If some low, crass individual hadn’t mentioned this Pompey’s name, no one would have needed an investigation in the first place, and Captain Stuart could have continued on his brave, empty-headed track toward a general’s stars and wreath.”

Featherston stared at the Intelligence officer again, this time for an altogether different reason. Once he’d drunk the stuff the Russians cooked up from potatoes. It didn’t taste like anything, so he hadn’t thought he was drunk-till he tried to stand up and fell over instead. Potter’s words were like that. They unexpectedly turned the whole world sideways.

“That’s not fair, sir,” Jake said. “That’s-”

“Shooting the messenger for bad news?” Potter suggested. “Of course it is. What do you expect? That they should blame their own? Not likely, Sergeant. You must know the First Richmond Howitzers are a blue-blood regiment if ever there was one. You must know Jeb Stuart, Jr., has a fancy office in the War Department down in Richmond, from which he sends eager young men out to die for their country. I’ve done everything I can for you, Sergeant. I know your record. I’ve urged your promotion. Set that against the traditions of the First Richmond Howitzers and the animus of Jeb Stuart, Jr., and it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. I’m sorry.”

“If I transfer out, I’ll be-”

“A sergeant, I’m afraid, till your dying day,” Major Potter interrupted. “Jeb Stuart III blighted his career by being wrong. You’ve blighted yours by being right. Sergeant Featherston, I am sorry. I feel I ought to apologize for the entire Confederate States of America. But there’s not one damned thing I can do about it. Have you got any more questions?”

“No, sir.” Jake got to his feet. “If that’s how it is, then that’s how it is. But if that’s how it is, then something stinks down in Richmond. Sir.”

He figured he’d said too much there. But Clarence Potter slowly nodded. “Something does stink down in Richmond. If we try to root it out now, we’re liable to lose the war in the confusion that would follow. But if we don’t try to root it out, we’re liable to lose the war from the confusion it causes. Again, I have no good answers for you. I wish I did.”

Featherston saluted. “Thank you for trying, sir. I hope you don’t end up hurt on account of that. All I’ve got to say is, sooner or later there has to be a reckoning. All these damn fools in fancy uniforms who let the niggers rise up without having a notion they were going to, all the damn fools who can’t think of anything past promoting their friends and relations-they ought to pay the price. Yes, sir, they ought to pay the price.”

“That’s a political decision, not one for the military,” Potter said.

“If that’s what it is-” Jake broke off. He saluted again and left the tent, heading back to his battery. All right, he wasn’t going to be a lieutenant. He had a goal even so.

Major Abner Dowling hurried into the fancy house on the outskirts of Bowling Green, Kentucky. “Here’s the motorcar, sir, come to take you back toward Bremen,” he called loudly-you had to call loudly, if you expected General Custer to hear you.

Libbie Custer heard him. She was sitting in the parlor, reading Harper’s. Her expression became remarkably similar to that of a snapping turtle on the point of biting. Back in Bremen was Olivia. She didn’t know-Dowling didn’t think she knew-about Olivia, not in particular, but she knew there was someone like Olivia back there, and she didn’t like it for beans. But the car had been laid on not at General Custer’s instance, but at that of the Secretary of War, and she couldn’t do anything about it. No wonder she looked ready to chomp down on a broom handle.

And here came Custer, looking no happier himself. “This is all a pack of nonsense and idiocy,” he said loudly. “Why don’t they leave a man alone so he can run a proper campaign? But no, that doesn’t satisfy them. Nothing satisfies them. Pack of ghouls and vultures is what they are back in Philadelphia, crunching the bones of good men’s reputations.”

At first, Dowling thought that soliloquy was delivered for Libbie’s benefit. But Custer kept on grumbling, louder than ever, after he went outside and waddled toward the green-gray-painted Ford waiting for him in front of his residence. The driver scrambled out and opened the door to the rear seat for him and Dowling. Neither of them was thin, which made that rear seat uncomfortably intimate.

As they rattled off toward the northwest, Custer leaned forward and asked the driver, “What is this stupid barrel thing you’re taking me to see? Some newfangled invention, I don’t doubt. Well, let me tell you, Lieutenant, I am of the opinion that the world has seen too many new inventions already. What do you think of that?”

“Sir,” the driver said, a gloriously unresponsive but polite answer. Dowling didn’t know whether to wish the First Army commander would shut up or to hope he’d go on blathering and at long last give the War Department enough rope to hang him.

A couple of miles later, Custer ordered the driver to stop so he could get out and stand behind a tree. Along with so much of the rest of him, his kidneys weren’t what they had been forty years earlier. He came back looking even more dissatisfied with the world than he had when he’d scrambled up into the motorcar.

The road ran roughly parallel to the railroad line. Every so often, it would swing away, only to return. At one of the places where it came very close to the tracks, the driver stepped on the brake. “Here we are, sir,” he said.

Here was a meadow that had been part of the Confederate line defending Bowling Green, about halfway between the tiny towns of Sugar Grove and Dimple. But for wrecked trenches and dozens of shell holes big enough to bury an elephant, the only thing to be seen was an enormous green-gray tent with a couple of squads’ worth of soldiers around it. Why the driver had chosen to stop at this particular place was beyond Abner Dowling.

It was evidently beyond Custer, too. “We aren’t even halfway back toward Bremen,” he complained. Olivia had been on his beady little mind, then. Libbie Custer knew her husband well.

“If you’ll just come with me, sir.” The driver got out of the automobile and handed down Custer and Dowling as if they were a couple of fine ladies. He headed for the tent. The general and his adjutant perforce followed: it was either that or be left all alone by the motorcar. At every other step, Custer snarled about what the mud was doing to his boots.

A man came out of the tent. He was wearing ordinary Army trousers, but with a leather jacket and leather helmet that put Dowling in mind of flying gear. With a wave, he hurried toward Custer. As he got nearer, Dowling saw he wore a major’s oak leaves on that jacket, and, a few steps later, that he had the eagle-on-star badge of a General Staff officer.

“General Custer?” he said, saluting. “I’m Ned Sherrard, one of the men from the Barrel Works.” The way he said it, you could hear the capital letters thudding into place. The only trouble was, Dowling had no idea whether or not whatever he was describing deserved those capitals.

Custer had evidently formed his own opinion. “And when do you and the Barrel Works go over Niagara Falls?” he inquired with acid courtesy.

Major Sherrard’s smile showed white, even teeth, as if Custer had made a good joke. “We can’t quite manage that yet with our barrels, sir, but we’re working on it.” He stuck out his hand to Dowling, a greeting of equal to equal. “Major, I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased to meet you, too, Major,” Dowling returned. “So what are these barrels, anyway? I’ve heard the name a few times the past couple of weeks, and I’m curious.”

“I wish you hadn’t heard it at all,” Sherrard said. “Security, you know. But it can’t be helped, I suppose. We’ve got one inside the tent, and you can see for yourself. We’ll even put it through its paces for you. We want the commanding generals on all fronts familiar with these weapons, because they will play an increasing role on the battlefield as time goes by.”

“Newfangled foolishness,” Custer said, not bothering to keep his voice down. But Sherrard’s cheerful smile didn’t waver. He was made of stern stuff. Turning, he led Custer and Dowling toward the tent. Some of the soldiers outside came to attention and saluted. Others ducked into the tent ahead of the officers.

Sherrard held the flap open, but not wide open. “Go on in,” he said invitingly. “You can see what barrels are like better than I could explain them to you in a month of Sundays.”

Custer, of course, went first. He took one step into the enormous tent and then stopped in his tracks, so that Dowling almost ran into him. “Excuse me, sir, but I’d like to see, too,” the adjutant said plaintively.

As usual, Dowling had to repeat himself before Custer took any notice of him. When the general commanding First Army finally did move out of the way, Dowling stared in wonder at the most astonishing piece of machinery he’d ever seen.

It impressed Custer, too, which wasn’t easy. “Isn’t that bully?” he said softly. “Isn’t that just the bulliest thing in the whole wide world?”

“More like the ugliest thing in the whole wide world,” Dowling said, too startled for once to watch his tongue as well as he should have.

He got lucky. Custer didn’t hear him. Major Sherrard did, but didn’t act insulted. Custer said, “So this is what a barrel looks like, eh? Bigger than I thought. Tougher than I thought, too.”

Had Dowling named the beast, he would have called it a box, not a barrel. Big it was, twenty-five feet long if it was an inch, and better than ten feet high, too: an enormous box of steel plates riveted together, with a cannon sticking out from the slightly pointed front end, four machine guns-a pair on either flank-a driver’s conning tower or whatever the proper name was sticking up from the middle of the top deck, and, as Dowling saw when he walked around to the rear of the thing, two more machine guns there.

“You’ve got it on tracks instead of wheels,” he remarked.

“That’s right,” Sherrard said proudly. “It’ll cross a trench seven feet wide, easy as you please-climb out of shell holes, too, and keep on going.”

“How big a crew?” Custer asked.

“Eighteen,” Major Sherrard answered. “Two on the cannon-it’s a two-incher, in case you’re wondering, sir-two on each machine gun, two mechanics on the engines, a driver, and a commander.”

“Engines?” Dowling said. “Plural?”

“Well, yes.” Now the major sounded a trifle embarrassed. “Sarah Bernhardt here does weigh something over thirty tons. It takes a pair of White truck engines to push her along. They’re a handed pair, like gloves, one with normal rotation, one with reverse. That lets us put the exhausts, which are very hot, in the center of the hull, and the carburetors and manifolds toward the outside.”

“Thirty-tons,” Dowling murmured. “How fast will, uh, Sarah go?”

“Eight miles an hour, flat out on level ground,” the barrel enthusiast told him. “You must remember, Major, she’s carrying more than an inch of steel armor plate all around, to keep machine-gun fire from penetrating.”

“Are these chaps gathered here and around the tent the crew?” Custer asked eagerly. “If they are, may I see the barrel in action?”

“They are, and you may,” Sherrard said. “That’s why I brought you here, sir.” He clapped his hands and called out a couple of sharp orders. The crew scrambled into the barrel through hatches Dowling had hardly noticed till they swung wide. Major Sherrard opened the whole front of the tent, which was, Dowling realized with that, a special model itself, made to shelter barrels. The War Department was serious about barrels, all right, if it had had tents created with them in mind.

The driver and commander, up in that little box of a conning tower, opened their armored vision slits as wide as they could; no one would be shooting at them today. The engine-no, engines, Dowling reminded himself-must have had electric ignition, because they sprang to noisy, stinking life without anyone cranking them.

“Let’s step outside,” Major Sherrard said. “Even with the slits wide, the driver hasn’t got the best view of the road. Wouldn’t do to have us squashed flat because he didn’t notice we were there, heh, heh.”

Dowling’s answering chuckle was distinctly dutiful. Custer, though, laughed almost as loud as he had on learning Richard Harding Davis had dropped dead. He was enjoying himself. Dowling wasn’t. The day was hot and sticky, the worst kind of day for anyone with a corpulent frame like his. As the sun beat down on him, he wondered what it was like for the crew of the barrel inside that steel shell. He wondered what it would be like in combat, with the hatches and slits closed down tight. He decided he was glad to be on the outside looking in, not on the inside looking out.

The rumble changed note as the driver put Sarah Bernhardt into gear. Tracks clattering, the barrel slowly crawled out of the tent. Through the slit, Dowling heard the commander shouting at the driver. In spite of the shouting, he wondered if the driver could hear anything.

Down into a shell hole went the barrel. The engine note changed again as the driver shifted gears. Up out of the hole the barrel came, dirt clinging to its prow. Down into another hole it went. Up it came once more. It rolled over some old, rusty Confederate barbed wire as if the stuff hadn’t been there. As Major Sherrard had said, it showed no trouble crossing a trench wider than a man was tall.

“Do you know what this is, Major?” Custer said to Dowling. “This”-he gave an utterly Custerian melodramatic pause-“is armored cavalry. This, for once, is no flapdoodle. This is a breakthrough machine.”

“It may well prove useful in trench warfare, yes, sir,” Dowling agreed-or half agreed. Custer had always wanted to use cavalry to force a breakthrough. Dowling remembered thinking about armored horses, but, to his mind, Sarah Bernhardt didn’t measure up-the barrel struck him as more like an armored hippopotamus.

But Custer, as usual, was letting himself get carried away. “Give me a hundred of these machines on a two-mile front,” he declared, “and I’ll tear a hole in the Rebs’ lines so big, even a troop of blind, three-legged dogs could go through it, let alone our brave American soldiers.”

Major Sherrard coughed the polite cough of a junior-grade officer correcting his superior. Abner Dowling knew that cough well. “War Department tactical doctrine, sir,” Sherrard said, “is to employ barrels widely along the front, to support as many different infantry units with them as possible.”

“Poppycock!” Custer exclaimed. “Utter goo and drivel. A massed blow is what’s required, Major-nothing less. Once we get into the Rebs’ rear, they’re ours.”

“Sir,” Major Sherrard said stiffly, “I have to tell you that one criterion in the allocation of barrels to the various fronts will be commanders’ willingness to utilize them in the manner determined to be most efficacious by the War Department.”

Custer looked like a cat choking on a hairball. Dowling turned to watch Sarah Bernhardt climb out of yet another shell hole so his commanding officer wouldn’t see him laugh. Custer had gall, all right, if on three minutes’ acquaintance with barrels he presumed to offer a doctrine for them wildly at odds with that of the people who’d invented them in the first place. Well, Custer’s gall wasn’t anything with which Dowling had been unacquainted already.

“Very well,” the general commanding First Army said, his voice mild though his face was red. “I’ll use them exactly the way the wise men in Philadelphia say I should.”

“Good.” Major Sherrard smiled now. Of course he smiled-he’d got his way. “Progress on this front, I am sure, will improve because of them.”

“I’m sure of that myself,” Custer said. Now Dowling did look at him, and sharply. He was sure of something, too-sure his boss was lying.

Reggie Bartlett glanced over at Senior Lieutenant Ralph Briggs. Briggs no longer looked like a recruiting poster for the Confederate States Navy, as he had all through his stay in the prisoner-of-war camp near Beckley, West Virginia. What he looked like now was a hayseed; he was wearing a collarless cotton shirt under faded denim overalls he’d hooked off a clothesline while a farm wife was busy in the kitchen. A disreputable straw hat perched on his head at an even more disreputable angle.

Reggie looked down at himself. By his clothes, he could have been Briggs’ cousin. His shirt, instead of hiding under overalls, was tucked into a pair of dungarees out at the knee and held up by a rope belt in lieu of galluses. The straw hat keeping the sun out of his eyes was even more battered than the one Briggs wore.

Catching the glances, Briggs clicked his tongue between his teeth. “We’ve got to do something about our shoes,” he said fretfully. “If anyone takes a good long look at them, we’re ruined.”

“Sure are, Ralph,” Bartlett said in his not very good rendering of a West Virginia twang, an accent altogether different not only from his own soft Richmond intonations but also from the Yankee way of talking Briggs had tried to teach him. His brown, sturdy Confederate Army boots were at least well made for marching. Briggs’ Navy shoes, both tighter and less strongly made, had given him trouble after he and Reggie and several others tunneled their way out of the prisoner-of-war camp. Reggie went on, “Hard to steal shoes, though, and no promise they’ll fit once we’ve done it.”

“I know,” Briggs said, unhappy still. “Wish we could walk into a town and buy some, but-” He broke off. Reggie understood why, all too well. For one thing, they had no money. For another, in these little hill towns they were strangers with a capital S. And, for a third, showing himself in Confederate footgear was the fastest ticket back to camp Reggie could think of.

Way off in the distance behind them, hounds belled. The sound sent chills running down Reggie’s spine. He didn’t think the hounds were after Briggs and him; they’d been free for several days now, and had done everything they knew how to do to break their trail. But other pairs of Confederate prisoners were also on the loose. Every bunch the damnyankees recaptured hurt the cause of the CSA.

And besides-“Now I know what niggers must have felt like, running away from their masters with the hounds after them,” Reggie said.

“Hadn’t thought of that.” Briggs paused for a moment to take off his hat and fan himself with it. He set the straw back on his head. His expression darkened. “I’d like to set the dogs on some niggers, too, the way they rose up against us. They ought to pay for that.”

“Way they lorded it over us in camp, too,” Reggie said, full of remembered anger at the insults he’d endured.

“Damnyankees set that up,” Briggs said. “Wanted to turn us and them against each other.” Reggie nodded; he’d seen the same thing himself. The Navy man went on, “I will say it did a better job than I ever thought it would. Those niggers had no loyalty to their country at all.”

He would have said more, but a bend in the road brought a town into sight up ahead. “That’ll be-Shady Spring?” Reggie asked doubtfully.

“That’s right.” Ralph Briggs sounded altogether sure of himself. It was as if he had a map of West Virginia stored inside his head. Every so often, when he needed to, he’d pull it down, take a look, and then roll it up again. Reggie wondered how and why he’d acquired that ability, which didn’t seem a very useful one for a Navy man to have.

Whatever the name of the town was, though, they had to avoid it. They had to avoid people and towns as much as they could. U.S. forces paid a bounty on escaped prisoners the locals captured. Even had that not been so, West Virginians weren’t to be trusted. When Virginia seceded from the USA, they’d seceded from Virginia, and made that secession stick. They had no love for the Confederate States of America.

The hillsides surrounding Shady Spring weren’t too steep. Forests of oaks and poplars clothed them. So Ralph Briggs said, at any rate; Bartlett, who’d lived all his life in Richmond, couldn’t have told one tree from another to escape the firing squad.

When he and Briggs came to a rill, they stopped and drank and washed their faces and hands, then splashed along in the water for a couple of hundred yards before returning to dry land. “No point making the dogs’ lives any easier, in case they are on our trail,” Reggie remarked.

“You’re right about that,” Briggs said, although hiking through the water soaked his feet and did his shoes more harm than it did to Bartlett’s taller boots.

Here and there in the woods, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in small clusters, sometimes in whole groves, dead or dying trees stood bare-branched, as if in winter, under the warm spring sun. Reggie pointed. “What’s wrong with them?” he asked, having developed considerable respect for how much Bartlett knew.

And the Navy man did not disappoint him. “Chestnut blight,” he answered. “Started in New York City ten, maybe twelve years ago. Been spreading ever since. Way things are going, won’t be a chestnut tree left in the USA or the CSA in a few years’ time. Damnyankees let all sort of foreign things into their country.” He spat in disgust.

“Chestnut blight,” Reggie echoed. Now that Briggs mentioned it, he remembered reading something about it in the newspapers a couple of years before. “So these are chestnuts?” He wouldn’t have known it unless Briggs had told him.

“These were chestnuts,” Briggs corrected him now. “The Yankees got the blight, and now they’re giving it to us.” He scowled. “Chestnuts, the war-what’s the difference?”

Reggie’s stomach rumbled. It had been doing that right along, but this was a growl a bear would have been proud to claim. Reggie went through his trouser pockets. He came up with half a square of hardtack: the last of the painfully saved food he’d brought out of camp. Even more painful was breaking the fragment in two and offering Briggs a piece.

“We don’t get our hand on some more grub, we’re not going to make it out of West Virginia whether the damnyankees catch up with us or not,” Reggie said.

“You’re right.” Briggs sounded as if he hated to admit it. “We’re going to have to kill something or steal something, one or the other.”

They tramped on through the woods. Bartlett’s nostrils twitched. “That’s smoke,” he said. At first, he thought it came from Shady Spring, but they’d gone west to skirt the town, and the breeze was blowing into their faces, not from their backs. “That’s a farm up ahead somewhere,” he added.

Briggs was thinking along with him. “Lots of chances to get food from a farm.” He sniffed. “That’s not just smoke, either. Smells like they’re smoking meat-venison, or maybe ham. Hell, in these back woods, maybe even bear, for all I know.”

Reggie knew nothing about bears. The thought of there being bears in these woods hadn’t occurred to him till the Navy man mentioned it. He looked around, as if expecting to see black, shaggy shapes coming out from behind every tree. Then he sniffed again. Smelling meat after months on camp rations made him ready to fight every bear in the USA for a chance at some-or to eat one if the farmer had done the fighting for him. “Let’s follow our noses,” he said.

Carved out of the middle of the woods were some tiny fields full of corn and tobacco. A couple of children fed chickens near a barn. A woman bustled between that barn and the farmhouse. No man was visible. “He’s probably in the Army,” Briggs whispered as he and Bartlett stared hungrily from the edge of the forest at the hollow log mounted upright over smoldering hickory chips. From the top of the log issued the wonderful smell that had drawn them here.

“We’ll wait till dark, till they’ve all gone to bed,” Reggie said. “Then we grab it and get the hell out.”

“Liable to be a dog,” Briggs said. “Meat’s liable not to be smoked all the way through, either.”

“I don’t see any dog. I don’t hear any dog. Do you?” Bartlett asked, and Ralph Briggs shook his head. Reggie went on, “And I don’t care about the meat, either. Hell, I don’t care if it’s raw. I’ll eat it. Won’t you?” When Briggs didn’t answer, he presumed he’d won his point.

And the thievery went off better than he’d dared hope. A couple of kerosene lanterns glowed inside the farmhouse for half an hour or so after sundown, then went out. That left the night to the moon and the stars and the lightning bugs. Reggie and Briggs waited for an hour, then sauntered forward. No dog went crazy. No rifle poked out of a window. They stole the hollow log and carried it away with nobody inside the farmhouse any the wiser.

It proved to be pork in there, ribs and chops and all sorts of good things. “Don’t eat too much,” Briggs warned. “You’ll make yourself sick, you were empty so long.”

He was an officer, so Reggie didn’t scream Shut up! at him. He ate till he was deliciously full, a feeling he hadn’t known for a long time.

Carrying the smoked pork they couldn’t finish, the two of them headed south again. They’d done a deal of traveling by night, when they could use the roads with less risk of being recognized for what they were. And every foot they gained was a foot their pursuers would have to make up in the morning.

Since the war started, the USA had punched a railroad south and east from Beckley through Shady Spring and Flat Rock to join the lines already going into eastern Virginia. “The damnyankees are throwing everything they’ve got into this war,” Reggie said, pointing to the new bright rails gleaming in the moonlight close by the road.

“I know.” Briggs’ voice was bleak. “It worries me.”

Half an hour later, a southbound train came by. Reggie and Briggs hid by the side of the road till it passed. To Bartlett’s surprise, it had only a few passenger cars; behind them came a long stretch of flatcars carrying big shapes shrouded in canvas. Each flatcar also carried a couple of armed guards.

“They’re singing something.” Now Ralph Briggs sounded indignant, as if U.S. soldiers had no business enjoying themselves. “What in blazes are they singing?”

“I know that tune,” Reggie told him. “It’s ‘Roll out the Barrel.’”

A couple of officers from the Corps of Engineers came up to the stretch of trench on the Roanoke front Chester Martin’s squad called their own. “What are you up to?” Martin called to them, curious about the strips of white cloth they were tying to pegs.

“Setting up the approach,” replied one of the engineers: a stocky, bald, bullet-headed fellow with a close-cropped fringe of gray hair above his ears and at the back of his neck. The answer didn’t tell Chester anything much, but it didn’t anger him, either; the engineer sounded like a man who knew his own business so well, he forgot other people didn’t know it at all. Martin approved of people who knew what they were doing. He’d seen too many who hadn’t the foggiest notion.

Sunshine glinted off the wire frames of Captain Orville Wyatt’s glasses. Martin worried about his captain, another competent man he didn’t want to lose: those spectacles might make him easier for a sniper to spot. Wyatt said, “Don’t joggle Lieutenant Colonel Gross’ elbow, Sergeant. This has to do with what was discussed in the briefing yesterday.”

Martin shook his head, annoyed at himself. “I’m sorry, sir. I should have figured that out.” He looked around to see how many of his men were paying attention. He hated looking dumb in front of them.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lieutenant Colonel Gross said. He seemed younger when he smiled. “This is new for everybody, and we have to work out what needs doing as we go along. The real point is, this’ll be new for the Rebs, too.” He pointed over past the U.S. barbed wire, past no-man’s-land, past the C.S. wire, to the trenches beyond.

“If everything goes according to Hoyle,” Captain Wyatt said, “we’ll take a big bite out of the Rebs’ real estate tomorrow morning.”

Specs Peterson was standing not far from Martin. He pitched his voice so the sergeant could hear but the captain couldn’t: “Yeah, and if it doesn’t work, they’re going to bury us in gunnysacks, on account of the Rebs’ll blow us all over the landscape.”

“I know,” Martin said, also quietly. “You got any better ideas, though, Specs? This duking it out in the trenches is getting us nowhere fast.”

“Hey, what are you talkin’ about, Sarge?” Paul Andersen said. “We’ve moved this front forward a good ten miles, and it hasn’t taken us two years to do it. At that rate, we ought to be in Richmond”-the corporal paused, calculating on his fingers-“oh, about twenty minutes before the Second Coming.”

Everybody laughed. Everybody pretended what Andersen had said was only funny, not the gospel truth. Specs Peterson liked an argument as well as the next guy, and wasn’t shy about arguing with his superiors, but he didn’t say boo. He just made sure he had the full load of grenades everybody was supposed to carry over the top.

Darkness fell. This sector of the front had been pretty quiet lately. Every so often, a rifle shot would ring out or somebody on one side or the other would spray the foe’s trenches with a couple of belts of machine-gun fire, but the artillery didn’t add its thunder to the hailstorm effects from both sides’ small arms. Martin knew that wouldn’t last. He rolled himself in his blanket and got what sleep he could. He wouldn’t be sleeping much tomorrow, not unless he slept forever.

At 0200, the barrage began. Martin didn’t sleep any more after that; the noise, he thought, was plenty to wake half the smashed-up dead whose corpses manured the Roanoke River valley.

Some of his men, though, did their damnedest to sleep right through the bombardment. He made sure everybody was up and ready to move. “Listen, this is my neck we’re talking about, Earnshaw,” he growled to one yawning private. “If you’re not there running alongside me, it’s liable to mean some damn Reb gets a chance to draw a bead on me he wouldn’t have had otherwise. You think I’m going to let that happen so you can sleep late, you’re crazy.”

Captain Wyatt was up and prowling the trench, too. “Where the hell are the barrels?” he said about half past three. “They were supposed to be here at 0300. Without them, we don’t have a show.”

That wasn’t quite true. The infantry, no doubt, would assault the Confederate lines with or without barrels. Without them, the foot soldiers were sure to be slaughtered. With them, they were…less sure to be slaughtered.

Two barrels came rumbling up at 0410. “Where the devil have you been?” Wyatt demanded, his voice a whiplash of anger. Chester Martin didn’t say anything. This was the first time he’d actually seen barrels. Their great slabs of steel, spied mostly in silhouette, put him in mind of a cross between a battleship and a prehistoric monster.

“Sorry, sir,” one of the men riding atop a barrel said through the unending thunder of the barrage and the flatulent snarl of the machines’ engines. “We got lost about six times in spite of the tape, and we broke down a couple times, too.”

“That’s where Bessie McCoy is now,” somebody else added. “The engine men said they thought they could get her running again, though.”

Martin approached the barrel. “You fellows better get inside, if that’s what you do,” he said. “You’re at the front now. The Rebs figure out you’re here, a few machine-gun bursts and you won’t be any more.”

With obvious reluctance, the soldiers climbed down off the roofs of the barrels and into their places inside the contraptions. It had to be hotter than hell in there, and stinking of gasoline fumes, too. Maybe the steel kept bullets out, but it kept other things in.

Bessie McCoy limped into place at 0445, fifteen minutes before the attack was due to start. As twilight brightened toward dawn, Martin made out the names painted on the other barrels: Vengeance and Halfmoon, the latter with an outhouse under the word. He still didn’t know whether to be encouraged all three barrels had made it or dismayed they’d had so much trouble doing it. If dismayed turned out to be the right answer, he figured he’d end up dead.

At 0500 on the dot, the barrage moved deeper into the Confederate trench system, to keep the Rebels from bringing up reinforcements. Captain Wyatt blew his whistle. The barrels rumbled forward at about walking pace, treads grinding and clanking. The cannon each one of them carried at its prow sent shells into the Confederate trenches.

From across no-man’s-land, Chester Martin heard the shouts of fear and alarm the Rebs let out. Rebel rifles and machine guns opened up on the barrels. They might as well have been shooting at so many ambulatory boulders. Sedate but deadly, the barrels kept coming. They rolled through the U.S. barbed wire. They went down into shell holes and craters and came up the other side, still pounding the Rebel trenches. They flattened the Confederate barbed wire.

“Let’s go, boys!” Captain Wyatt shouted. “That Bessie, she is the McCoy!”

Chester Martin and his squad scrambled out of the trench and sprinted toward the Confederate lines. Only light fire came their way; most of what the Rebs had was focused on the barrels. It wasn’t doing much good, either. All three machines kept moving forward, firing not just cannon now but the machine guns on their sides, too.

Bessie McCoy rumbled up to the foremost Rebel trench and poured enfilading fire down its length. Vengeance and Halfmoon were only a few yards behind. Vengeance went right over that first trench and positioned itself to enfilade the second. Half-moon blazed away at Confederate soldiers who were-Martin rubbed his eyes to make sure he saw straight-running for their lives.

Half a mile to the north, a couple of more barrels had forced their way into the Confederate position. Half a mile to the south, two others had done the same, though a third sat burning in the middle of no-man’s-land.

Martin noticed the other barrels only peripherally. He scrambled over the parapet and leaped down into the Confederate trenches. A lot of men in butternut lay in them, some moving, some not. He threw a grenade over the top into a traverse and then dashed into it, ready to shoot or bayonet whomever he’d stunned.

“Don’t kill us, Yank!” several men cried at once. They threw down their rifles and threw up their hands. “We give up!”

“Go on back there, then,” Martin growled, pointing toward the U.S. position from which he’d come. The new-caught prisoners babbled thanks and obeyed.

“What are those horrible things?” one of them asked, pointing toward the barrels, which were systematically raking trench line after trench line, concentrating most of all on machine-gun nests.

“I think,” Martin said, “I think they’re called victory.”

All along the line, Rebs were giving up in numbers greater than he ever remembered seeing, and they were running away, too, unwilling to die to no purpose trying to halt the invincible barrels. In all the time he’d spent at the front line, he’d never seen Confederate soldiers run like that. He’d dreamt of it, but he’d never seen it.

Paul Andersen shouted another word of which he’d dreamt: “Breakthrough!”

For much of the rest of that morning, Martin thought his buddy was right. They stormed through the Confederate trench system. Whenever a machine gun or some holdouts in a strong position gave them trouble, one barrel or another waddled over to it and poured bullets or shells into it until the diehards either surrendered or died.

“I don’t believe it,” Captain Wyatt said, over and over. “We’ve come a good mile since daybreak.” No wonder he sounded disbelieving; on this front, mobility was more often measured in yards. “We keep it up, we’ll be out of the trenches and into their rear by nightfall.”

“Yes, sir,” Martin said. He had trouble believing it, too. A deep-throated rumble behind him made him turn his head. “Here comes Bessie McCoy, over another trench.”

The barrel, by then, had crossed so many of them that he’d come to take its ability for granted. The lip of this one, though, was soft and muddy, and gave way under the weight of the massive machine. It went into the trench at an awkward, nose-down angle. Martin saw at a glance that it couldn’t move forward any more. Its engine roared as it tried reverse. That didn’t help, either.

One of the side machine-gunners opened up a hatch and shouted, “We’re stuck! You’re going to have to dig us out if you want us to keep moving.” More hatches opened, and barrel crewmen came out to help with the digging and to escape the heat and fumes in which they’d been trapped for hours. Some of them simply sprawled in the dirt and sucked in great long breaths of fresh air.

Now Captain Wyatt looked worried. “That’s the second barrel we’ve lost. Halfmoon broke down back there, and they still haven’t been able to get it going again. If anything happens to Vengeance-”

The barrel in question fired its cannon. The men who’d pushed farthest into the Confederate works started shooting, too, and kept it up even though not much answering fire came back. Martin stuck his head up to see why everybody was excited.

Here came a battery of those cursed Confederate quick-firing three-inch guns. They sensibly stopped outside of rifle range, in such cover as they could find, and started firing over open sights at Vengeance. The barrel returned fire, but it had only one cannon, and that far slower between rounds than the Rebel pieces. Vengeance was armored against rifle and machine-gun bullets, but not against shells. If you let a sledgehammer fall onto an iron floor from a building a hundred stories high, you might get a noise like the one the shells made slamming into armor plate.

Vengeance started burning. Hatches popped open. Crewmen dove out. The Confederate guns shelled them, too. Rebel yells announced the arrival of reinforcements for the enemy. Now U.S. troops, thin on the ground and without barrels to support them, were the ones who had to fall back. Bessie McCoy’s crew salvaged her guns and set her afire to deny her to the Confederates, then joined the retreat.

When night fell, Martin was still in what had been Confederate trenches, but not very far in; the Rebs had taken back about two-thirds of what they’d lost in the morning. He turned to Paul Andersen and let out a long, weary sigh. “Not quite a breakthrough.”

“No, I guess not,” Andersen allowed. “We got more work to do.” He started rolling a cigarette. “Not quite a breakthrough, but goddamn-you could see one from where we were.”

“Yeah.” Martin sighed again. “And I wonder how long it’ll be before we see another one.”

Arthur McGregor rode his wagon toward Rosenfeld, Manitoba. Maude sat on the seat beside him, her back ramrod straight, hands clasped tightly in her lap. They both wore seldom-used Sunday best; the wing collar and cravat seemed to be trying to strangle McGregor, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d put on a jacket with lapels.

“Maybe we should have brought the girls,” Maude said, her voice under tight rein. Only her mouth moved; she did not turn her head to look at her husband.

He shook his head. “No-better we left them with the Lang-dons.” His own harshly carved face got harsher yet. “The Yanks won’t take pity on us because we’ve got ’em along, Maude. Next Yank officer who knows what pity’s about will be the first. If we’re going to persuade them to let Alexander go, we’ll have to make a case, like we were in court.”

She nodded once, jerkily, and then sat still again. The wagon jounced on toward Rosenfeld. The ruts in the road didn’t fit the width of the wheels any more; U.S. trucks had cut their own ruts. Outside of town, U.S. soldiers inspected the wagon as carefully as they had when the whole McGregor clan came into Rosenfeld the day Alexander was seized. Finding nothing, the soldiers let the wagon go on.

As usual these days, Yankees far outnumbered Canadians on Rosenfeld’s few streets. Their traffic-wagons, trucks, a swarm of honking Fords-took priority over civilian vehicles, too. McGregor hitched the wagon as soon as he could, put a feed bag on the horse’s head, and walked toward what had been the sheriff’s office and jail but now confined not drunks and burglars but men guilty of nothing worse than wanting to be free of the smothering embrace of the United States.

Outside the entrance stood two armed sentries in green-gray. One of them patted down McGregor. The other spoke to Maude: “Come with me, ma’am. We have a woman next door to search you.” When she made as if to balk, the sentry said, “Ma’am, if you aren’t searched, you don’t go in. Those are the orders I have, and I can’t change ’em.” Back quivering with indignation, she followed him.

“You aren’t trying very hard to make friends for yourselves, are you?” McGregor said to the remaining sentry.

The fellow shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.”

Maude returned in a couple of minutes, looking even more furious coming than she had going. She must have satisfied the searcher, though, for the sentries opened the door and stood aside to let her and her husband make their petition to the occupying authorities.

Captain Hannebrink sat at a desk, filling out forms. But for his uniform, he might have been a postmaster like Wilfred Rokeby, or perhaps a bank teller. But he’d seemed soldierly enough and to spare out at McGregor’s farm. He set down his pen now and got to his feet. “Mr. and Mrs. McGregor,” he said, polite enough even if his minions weren’t.

“Good morning, Captain,” Arthur McGregor said. He hated having to crawl before any man. He’d worked like a plow horse-he’d worked harder than his plow horse-before the war, but he’d been free.

No. He’d thought he’d been free. It was just that the government-the government he’d frequently despised-had held trouble at arm’s length from him. Then it couldn’t do that any more, and the regime under which he now lived made trouble as close as a punch in the eye.

He might not have crawled for himself. For Alexander, for his only son, he would crawl. What was pride worth, set against your boy? He began again: “Captain Hannebrink, sir, by now you must know Alexander didn’t have anything to do with that bomb on the train tracks.”

“I must know it?” The American officer shook his head. “Here, sit down, both of you. I’ll hear what you have to say.” The chairs to which he pointed were hard, angular, and functional: U.S. Army issue, as out of place in the office as his sharp American accent. He let Arthur McGregor do the fussing for his wife, accurately surmising she would not want him pushing the chair about for her. When she was as comfortable as she could be, he sat back down himself. “All right, tell me why I must know that.”

“Because of what you done to the other boys you caught,” McGregor blurted. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a snarl of anger at himself: he hadn’t meant to say it like that. Saying it like that made him think about how harsh the occupying authorities really were.

Captain Hannebrink steepled his fingers. “The penalty for sabotage against the United States Army is death, Mr. McGregor,” he said. “We have made that very plain. It cannot come as a surprise to anyone, not now.”

“Boys,” McGregor said thickly. “You shot boys.”

“They were playing a man’s game, I’m sorry to say. If they’d succeeded, what they would have done to our train would have been no different because they were young,” Hannebrink said. “This way, perhaps, other boys here in Manitoba will come to understand that this is not a bully, romantic lark. This is a war, and will be waged as such.”

He didn’t look particularly fearsome. He was on the lean side, with sandy hair, mild gray eyes, and a long, thoughtful face. Only his uniform and his waxed Kaiser Wilhelm mustache said he wasn’t a Canadian. Somehow, that very plainness made him more frightening, not less.

Licking his lips, Arthur McGregor said, “But you didn’t shoot Alexander. That must mean you know he didn’t have anything to do with it, because-” Because if you had even the slightest suspicion, you would have dragged him out against a wall, given him a blindfold, and sent him home to me in a pine box for burial. But he couldn’t say that to the American.

“Your son’s case is not clearcut: I admit as much,” Hannebrink said. “It is possible he did not know about this particular explosive device.” He held up one finger, as if expecting McGregor to interrupt. “Possible, I say. By no means proven. There appears to be no doubt he associated with these subversives and saboteurs.”

“They’re his friends,” Maude McGregor burst out. “Captain, they’re boys he’s known as long as he’s been on this earth. And besides, where in Canada will you find any boys that age who don’t-”

Conversations with Captain Hannebrink had a way of breaking down in midsentence. This one should have broken down a few words sooner. Hannebrink fiddled with one point of that absurd, upjutting mustache, then finished for Maude: “Where will I find Canadian boys that age who don’t despise the United States and everything they stand for? There are some, Mrs. McGregor, I assure you of that.”

His matter-of-fact confidence was more chilling than bluster would have been. And Arthur McGregor feared he was right. Some people had to be on the winning side, no matter what, and the USA looked like the winning side right now. Bootlickers, McGregor thought.

But that did not help Alexander. McGregor said, “You can’t blame him for what these others tried to do.”

“Why can’t I?” Hannebrink returned. “Canadian law recognizes the concepts of an accessory before the fact and of concealment of knowledge of a crime to be committed.”

“You’ve never claimed you had anyone who said Alexander knew about this, only that he knew some of the boys you say did it,” Arthur McGregor said stubbornly. “Is that enough to go on holding him?”

“Of course it is,” Captain Hannebrink answered. “I assume anyone who consorts with saboteurs and says nothing about it either is a saboteur himself or wants to be one.”

“You don’t want reasons to let my boy go.” Maude’s voice went shrill. “You just want an excuse to keep him in an iron cage when he hasn’t done anything.”

Arthur McGregor set a big-knuckled, blunt-fingered hand on his wife’s arm. “That doesn’t help,” he said mildly. If Maude lost her temper here, it wouldn’t just be unfortunate. It would be disastrous.

Captain Hannebrink said, “Mrs. McGregor, I can understand how you feel, but-”

“Can you?” she said. “If we’d invaded your country and dragged your son away to jail, how would you feel?”

“Wretched, I’m sure,” he answered, though he didn’t sound as if he meant it. He went on, “Please let me finish the point I was trying to make. You still do not seem to fully understand the situation. You are in occupied territory, Mrs. McGregor. The military administration of the United States does not need any excuses to confine individuals. We have the authority to do it, and we have the power to do it.”

Maude stared at him, as if she’d never imagined he would put it so baldly. And McGregor stared, too, catching as his wife had not quite done what lay behind the American captain’s words. Hoarsely, he said, “You don’t care whether Alexander had anything to do with that bomb or not. You’re going to keep him locked up anyhow.”

“I did not say that, Mr. McGregor.”

“No, you didn’t, Captain, did you? But you meant it, and that’s worse, if you ask me.” McGregor got to his feet. Maude rose with him, uncertainty on her face. He took no notice of it. He took no notice of anything but his contempt, and that was big as the world. “But then, what do you care what Canuck trash thinks? I’m sorry we wasted your time-and ours. I had chores I could have done instead of coming here.” He walked out onto the street, Maude following.

Maybe Captain Hannebrink stared at his back. He didn’t turn to see.

Nellie Semphroch was about to cross the street to visit Mr. Jacobs, the cobbler, when the guns started roaring north of Washington, D.C. As if drawn by a lodestone, her head turned in that direction. She nodded in slow, cold satisfaction. For a while, Washington had been too far south of the front line to let her hear much artillery fire. Then the rumble had been distant, like bad weather far away. Now it was guns, unmistakably guns, and louder, it seemed, every day.

A Confederate dispatch rider trotted past her, mounted on a bay gelding whose coat gleamed in the hot June sun. He tipped his slouch hat to her. Taken all in all, the Rebs were a polite lot. That made her distrust them more, not like them better.

Flies buzzed in the street as she crossed. She flapped with a hand to drive them away. There were fewer than there had been ten years before. Say what you would about motorcars, they didn’t attract flies.

She opened the door to Mr. Jacobs’ shop. The bell above it chimed. Jacobs looked up from the buttery-soft black cavalry boot to which he was fitting a new heel. The wrinkles on his face, which had been set in lines of concentration, rearranged themselves into a smile. “Good morning, Nellie,” he said, setting down his little hammer and taking from the corner of his mouth a couple of brads that hadn’t interfered with his speech at all. “It’s good to see you today. It’s good to see you any day.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Hal,” she answered. She didn’t view him with the relentless suspicion she aimed at most of the male half of the human race. For one thing, he was at least fifteen years older than she. For another, he’d never tried to get out of line with her. Up till the year before, they hadn’t even called each other by their Christian names.

“Would you like some lemonade?” he asked. “I made it myself.” He sounded proud of that. He’d been a widower for a good many years, and took pride in everything he did for himself.

“I’d love some, thank you,” Nellie said. He went into the back room and brought it out in a tumbler that didn’t match the one sitting by his last. Nellie sipped. She raised an eyebrow. “It’s very good lemonade.” And it was-tart and sweet and cool and full of pulp.

“For which I thank you,” he answered, dipping his head in what was almost a bow. His courtly, antique manners were another reason why he set off no fire bells of alarm in her mind. “I am going to fill my glass again. Would you like another?”

“Half a glass,” she answered. “I had a cup of coffee a couple of minutes before I came over here.”

“Did you?” He chuckled. “Drinking up your own profits, eh?” He went into the back room again, returning with his glass full and Nellie’s, as she’d asked, something less than that. After giving it to her, he asked, “And what do you hear in the coffeehouse these days?”

Before Nellie could reply, a young Confederate lieutenant came in, picked up his boots, and bustled out again without looking at her once. That suited her fine. Once he was gone, she answered the question that had sounded casual but wasn’t: “They’ve been talking about strengthening the bridges over the Potomac. I don’t know why. It can’t be for anything really important: they keep going on about barrels and tanks, not guns or trucks or wagons. Maybe they’re bringing beer up for their men.”

“Maybe they are. It would be fine if they were.” Jacobs muttered something his bushy gray mustache swallowed. Aloud, he said, “Anything you hear about tanks and barrels would be-interesting.”

“All right.” Nellie knew he wasn’t going to tell her anything more than that. Ignorance was her best protection, though she already knew too many secrets, guilty and otherwise. But Jacobs had connections-about most of which she was also ignorant-back to the U.S. government, whereas she was no more than one of his sources of news. She assumed that meant he knew how to run his business.

Another Confederate officer came in: the owner of the boot on which the cobbler was working. The fellow glowered. “You said that was going to be ready today,” he growled.

“So I did, sir,” Jacobs answered. “And it will be. I didn’t say it would be ready first thing in the morning, though.”

“As soon as you can,” the Reb said. “My unit is heading north this afternoon, and I want these boots.”

“I’ll do all I can,” Jacobs said. “If you come back about half-past eleven, this one should be all fixed up.” Shaking his head unhappily, the Confederate left. Nellie would have bet Hal Jacobs knew to which unit he belonged, and that the information about its movements would soon be in U.S. hands. And Jacobs had his own way of harassing the enemy: “Won’t it be a shame when some of the nails I put in go through the sole and poke the bottom of his foot? What a pity-he’s made me hurry the job.”

The bell rang again. Nellie wondered if it was the Reb, too impatient to wait for eleven-thirty. It wasn’t. It was Edna. That meant something was wrong. Except for a couple of times to get shoes fixed, Edna didn’t come in here.

“Ma,” Edna said without preamble, “there’s a Rebel major over across the street, says he’s got to talk to you right now.”

“You go tell him I’ll be right there,” Nellie said. When Edna had gone, she gave Mr. Jacobs a stricken glance. “What do I do now?”

“It depends on what he wants,” replied the cobbler who wasn’t only a cobbler. “I know you will do your best, come what may. Whatever happens, remember that you have more friends than you know.”

Cold comfort. Nellie nodded, composed herself, and went back across the street. The major was waiting for her outside the coffeehouse, which she did not take as a good sign. When she first came up to him, he said, “Mrs. Semphroch, you are acquainted with William Gustavus Reach.” It was not a question. She wished it had been.

“Yes, I know him some,” she said through ice in her belly so cold, she thought it would leave her too frozen to speak at all. Part of it was fear for herself, part fear for Mr. Jacobs, and part, maybe the biggest part, fear of what Edna, standing not five feet away, would hear and learn. “He came by this place every so often.” She made her lip curl. “Last time he came by, he was trying to steal things when they dropped bombs on us that night.”

“The acquaintance goes back no farther than that?” The Confederate major was one of those smart men who think themselves even smarter than they are. How much did he know? How much had Reach spilled? How much could she say without spilling more to Edna?

She picked her words with care, doing her best to sound careless: “I knew him a long time ago, a little, you might say, but I hadn’t set eyes on him from before my daughter here was born till he showed up again.” That was all true, every word of it; it helped steady her.

“Uh-huh.” The Reb looked down at his notebook. “You are not, and never have been, his wife?”

Edna stared at Nellie. Nellie stared, too, in astonishment commingled with relief. Maybe she’d come out of this in one piece after all. “I hope to Jesus I’m not,” she exclaimed-more truth. “I hope to Jesus I never was, and I surely hope to Jesus I never will be! If I never see him again in all my born days, it’ll be too soon.”

“Uh-huh,” the Confederate major said again. “Well, if you had been his wife and weren’t any more, you might say the same thing, but I reckon-” He didn’t say exactly what he reckoned, but it didn’t seem like anything bad for Nellie. “Maybe you can tell me what sort of friends he has, then.”

“Next friend of his I know about will be the first,” Nellie said.

Edna giggled. The major started to smile, then stopped, as if remembering he was on duty. He said, “This here Reach tells more stories than Uncle Romulus, and that’s a fact. Some of them, ma’am, we have to check.” He chuckled. “We’re going to send him to a place where nobody listens to his stories for a long, long time.”

“If you think I’m going to miss him, Major, you can think again.” Nellie sounded as prim and righteous as she did when taking the high line with Edna. The Rebel tipped his hat to her and went on his way.

“That wasn’t so bad, Ma,” Edna said. “Way he was asking after you, though, heaven only knew what he wanted.”

“You’re right,” Nellie said. You don’t know how right you are.

She went back across the street to the shoe-repair shop. The bell jangled. Mr. Jacobs looked up-warily-from his work. Her enormous smile said everything that needed saying. He set down the little hammer, came around the counter, and took both her hands in his. To her astonishment, she leaned forward and kissed him full on the mouth. She hadn’t done that with a man since well before her husband died. His arms went around her, and he kissed her, too. She enjoyed it. That hadn’t happened since well before her husband died, either.

“Some good out of Bill Reach after all,” she murmured to herself.

Hal Jacobs stiffened. “Out of who?” he barked, his voice too loud, his mouth too near her ear. She explained, sure he’d misheard. He sagged away from her, his face pale as whitewash. “I wondered what was wrong,” he gasped. “Hadn’t heard from him in too long. Bill runs-ran, maybe-our whole organization here. And he’s caught? Good God!”

“Good God!” Nellie said, too, for very different reasons. All at once, she wondered if she was backing the wrong side.