Pompey came up and said, 'Captain Stuart, suh, your supper will be ready in a couple minutes. We found us a nice wine to go with your lamb chops, suh. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.' 'I don't doubt that,' Stuart said. Pompey went on his way. Watching him, Stuart returned to the argument with Jake: 'Without our niggers, the Yankees would squash us flat, no way around it. But with them to build the works we use, every white Confederate man is a fighting man. We use our resources more efficiently than the USA can.'
'Yes, sir, that's a fact,' Featherston agreed, now anxious for nothing so much as to get the battery commander out of his hair. He was watching Pompey, too, still wondering whether he'd been right to tell that major about Stuart's servant. He'd never find out now, not with the influence a Stuart had in Richmond just because he was a Stuart.
Happier now that the sergeant was agreeing with him, Captain Stuart headed off, presumably to enjoy his lamb chops. Featherston wasn't going to be eating lamb chops; he'd have whatever came out of the battery kettle, probably some horrible slumgullion whose sole virtue was filling his belly. He wouldn't have a nice wine with his slop, either. He clicked tongue between teeth. The First Richmond Howitzers had been an aristocratic regiment since the days of the War of Secession. He'd managed to get in because he was good at what he did. Everybody above the rank of sergeant had got in by being good at who he was. Some times the differences were more glaring than others.
To Nero, Perseus said, 'Bet you that Pompey, he gwine eat hisself lamb chops tonight, too.'
'I dunno,' Nero answered. 'Maybe he gwine wait till Cap'n Stuart done used 'em up, then go to the latrine to git 'em.' Both black men laughed. So did Jake Featherston, down deep inside. Seeing the Army's Negroes distrusting one another made white men sleep better at night.
Actually, nothing could have made Featherston sleep well that night. U.S. aeroplanes buzzed over Hampstead, dropping bombs at random. None of them landed within a couple of hundred yards of the battery; none of them, so far as Jake could judge from the absence of screams and cries of alarm from Confederate soldiers, landed within a couple of hundred yards of any worth while target.
Even landing out of the range where they could do any damage, though, they made a hell of a racket. Antiaircraft guns hammered away at the U.S. bombers, adding to the din. They didn't hit anything — or, at least, the rhythm of the engines throbbing overhead didn't falter.
Eventually, the U.S. aeroplanes gave up and flew back to the north. Jake rolled himself tighter in his blanket — which was stiflingly hot but which had the virtue of shielding large areas of his anatomy from mosquitoes-and went back to sleep.
Some time in the wee small hours, another flight of bombing aeroplanes visited Hampstead. Again, they dropped their bombs with nothing more than the vaguest idea of where those bombs might land. And again, the bombs did no damage Featherston could discern. They did, however, wake him up and keep him awake when he would sooner have grabbed as much sleep as he could get.
The next morning, shambling around like a drunk, barely remembering his own name, he realized the bombers had done some damage after all.
XIX
A few miles outside of Boston harbor, Patrick O'Donnell stuck his head out of the cabin of the Spray and called to George Enos, 'The submersible has cast off the tow and the telephone line. Haul 'em aboard.'
'Aye aye, Skipper,' Enos answered; the biggest difference between life aboard the Spray and the way things had gone aboard the Ripple was that commands got answered in Navy talk these days.
George wished he had a winch with which to haul in the thick line and the insulated telephone wire wrapped around it. But the Spray had no winches for its own trawls, and one would have looked decidedly out of place at the stern. The steam trawler wanted to look like an ordinary fishing boat, not arousing the suspicions of Entente warships till too late. And so he did the work by hand.
Harvey Kemmel said, 'Talk about locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen.'
Although he had been in the Navy for years, Kemmel still flavored his speech with Midwestern farm talk George Enos sometimes found incompre hensible and often amusing. Today, though, he could do nothing but nod. 'We were a little on the excited side when we sank that Rebel submarine,' he admitted. 'Beginners' luck, you might say.'
'One way to put it,' Kemmel said. 'Christ, our pictures in the paper and everything. Felt good while it lasted, but we haven't had a sniff from the Rebs or the Canucks since.'
A nibble, Enos would have said. However you said it, though, the message was the same. Nobody could prove the enemy was wise to the trick the Spray and other boats like her were trying to play, but neither she nor any of those other boats had lured a cruiser or a submarine to destruction since, either. 'Hey, we've got a good load of fish in the hold,' George said, pausing for a moment to look back over his shoulder.
Kemmel rolled his eyes. 'I don't think I'm ever going to look a fish in the face again, now that I know what a hell of a lot of work it is to try and catch the bastards. I thought I was tired on a destroyer, but I didn't know what tired was. I feel like somebody rode me hard and put me away wet.'
That was another comparison Enos never would have come up with on his own; he had trouble remembering the last time he'd ridden a horse. Again, though, he understood what his comrade was driving at. He answered, 'The smaller the boat, the more work it takes.'
'You did this stuff for years, didn't you?' Kemmel said. 'Each cat his own rat, but — ' He shook his head in bemusement.
'I'd sooner fish than watch a horse's rear end all day,' George answered, dirt farming being the only thing he could think of that might possibly have been harder work than fishing.
'Soon as I got old enough, though, I got off my pa's farm and as far away as I could go,' Kemmel shot back. 'War hadn't come along, you would have kept on doing this your whole blessed life.'
George Enos shut up and went back to pulling in the heavy, wet rope and the telephone line, one tug after another, hand over hand. It was hard work, but easier than bringing in the trawl full of fish. There was, at the moment, nothing at the end of this rope.
He'd just brought in the dripping end and coiled the rope neatly in place when a tug steamed up alongside the Spray and demanded her papers: no ship got into the harbor these days without being stopped and inspected first. Since they were Navy, passing the inspection proved easy enough. A pilot came aboard to guide them through the mine fields protecting Boston from enemy raiders. Every time they came back from a trip out to one fishing bank or another, more mines had been sown. Every once in a while, the mines came loose from their moorings, too. Then, pilot or no pilot, a boat or even a ship was likely to go to the bottom in a hurry.
'Wonder where the submersible's gone,' Enos said. As had become its custom, the submersible had remained under the sea after releasing the tow- line. Maybe it went into Boston, sneaking under the mines, or maybe to one of the other ports nearby.
Harvey Kemmel laughed. 'I can tell you ain't been in the Navy long — you still ask questions. What they want you to know, they'll tell you. What they don't want you to know ain't your business anyhow.' George would have argued with him, but he looked to be right.
The pilot brought them in to T Wharf as if the Spray were an ordinary fishing boat. Patrick O'Donnell disposed of the catch as if she were an ordinary trawler, too. Then the illusion that she was still a part of the civilian world took a beating: an officer with a lieutenant commander's two medium-width stripes surrounding a narrow one strolled up the wharf to the Spray and said, 'Men, you'll come with me. We have some matters to discuss.' By that, he meant he would tell them what to do and they would do it.
'What's going on, sir?' George asked him. Off to one side, Harvey Kem-mel snickered. Enos' ears got hot. He did still ask questions. The United States were a free country, and most places you could do things like that. But when you were in the Navy, your freedom disappeared.
'I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that,' the lieutenant commander said. The hell of it was, George understood the fellow was doing him a favor.
They all walked down T Wharf after the officer. Real fishermen and other people with business on the wharf gave them curious looks, those who didn't know they were Navy themselves. What the dickens did a spruce
