front hall where it rested. He was always delighted at escaping the mistress' attention-except when she sent him out to Cassius. Her eyes remained closed to the double game Scipio was playing. Whatever else you said about him, Cassius had his eyes wide, wide open.
He was sitting on the steps in front of his cottage, running a cleaning patch through the barrels of his shotgun, when Scipio came up. The hunter's weathered face cracked into a leathery grin. He jumped to his feet, limber as a man half his age. 'Kip! What fo' you do me de favor o' yo' comp'ny?' Ignoring the irony, Scipio told him what Anne Colleton wanted. Cassius nodded vigorously. 'I do that.' He waved Scipio an invitation. 'Come inside. You 'n' me, we talk.'
Normally, Scipio dreaded that invitation, though he found it impossible to refuse. Today, though, he thought he would do more talking than usual. As soon as Cassius shut the door to give them privacy, he began, 'You know what de Socialists do in New York City? They rise up, an' do Jesus! they make the USA — '
Cassius waved him to silence. 'Kip, dat ol' news,' he said scornfully. 'Dat happen las' week. It over an' done with now, 'cep' fo' de 'pression. De 'pression, dat go on a long time. Always do.' He sounded very cynical, very sure.
Scipio stared. 'But de newspaper jus' say today-'
'White folks' paper.' Cassius laced his voice with even more scorn than before. 'Dey got to wait, dey got to decide what they want they good little boys an' girls to hear about. De buckra, you give bad news to they, they get res'less.'
'How you know 'fo' de newspaper come?' Scipio asked.
'Somebody not so far, they got a wireless set,' Cassius answered after a moment's hesitation. In lieu of staring, Scipio looked down at the weathered pine boards of the floor. That somebody-presumably a Negro-among the Red would-be revolutionaries had the knowledge to run a wireless set, that that somebody (and, unless Scipio was wrong, a lot of somebodies in the CSA) had acquired such knowledge under the nose of the Confederate authorities… put that together with the undoubted desperation of the rising that would come, and maybe, just maybe…
'Maybe, jus' maybe, come de revolution, we win,' Scipio said softly.
'Do Jesus! Hell yes, we win,' Cassius declared. 'De dialectic say, when de whole of de proletariat rise up, de capitalists an' de bourgeoisie, they cain't no way put we down again.'
Saying a thing didn't make it so. Scipio knew that. He'd even tried telling Cassius and Island and the other Reds as much. They didn't listen to him, any more than the preacher would have if he'd denied Jesus. If they had men on wireless sets-maybe, just maybe, they had reason not to listen.
Chester Martin ducked behind a stretch of brick wall that reached up to his belly button. It was a hard landing; more bricks lay all around what was left of the wall. Somewhere not far away were two whitewashed pieces of wood nailed together at right angles. Once upon a time, this had been a church on the outskirts of Big Lick, Virginia. Now it offered him a different kind of salvation.
A Confederate bullet smacked the other side of the bricks. Maybe it had been aimed at him, maybe fired at random. He had no way of knowing. What he did know was that the bricks were good and solid, and would keep rifle and machine-gun fire from him, as long as he stayed low. Anybody who hadn't learned to stay low by now was already dead or wounded.
Martin took advantage of the momentary respite to put a fresh, full clip on his Springfield. Never could tell when you'd have to try to kill somebody- or several somebodies-in a hurry. If one of the Rebs had more bullets in his rifle than you did in yours… 'You'd be sorry,' Martin muttered. 'I don't want to be sorry. I want the other son of a bitch to be sorry.'
Paul Andersen crawled up beside him. 'Ain't this fun?' he said, also pausing to reload.
'Now that you mention it,' Chester said, 'no.'
Andersen's grin was wry. 'Let me ask it a different way. Ain't this fun, next to leave back in White Sulphur Springs?'
Martin considered that fine philosophical point. 'Nobody's trying to kill you back there,' he said at last. 'Other than that, though, you got a point.'
'Nobody's trying to kill you back there?' Andersen exclaimed. 'You mean you didn't think they were trying to bore you to death?'
'Hmm,' Martin said, and then, 'Yeah, maybe they were. I mean, if you don't like lemonade and you don't like hot water that stinks like somebody cut the cheese in it, not a hell of a lot to do back there.'
'I hear they got saloons-hell, I hear they got whorehouses-in leave towns on what used to be Confederate territory,' Andersen said. 'The Army has charge there, and the Army knows what soldiers want to do when they get away from the front for a while. But White Sulphur Springs, that's back in the USA, and it ain't the Army in charge. It's the damn preachers.'
'No whiskey,' Chester Martin agreed. 'No women, except the Red Cross girls handing out the lemonade. A couple of them were pretty, but once I'm back there and cleaned up, I want to do more than look at a woman, you know what I'm saying?'
'You bet I do,' Andersen answered. 'Me, too. Hell, looking is harder, some ways, than not being around 'em at all.'
'I think so, too,' Martin said. 'I-' He shut up then, and flattened him self out among the bricks, because the Rebs started throwing whizz-bangs into the neighborhood. The shells burst all around, throwing deadly fragments every which way.
The barrage-mostly those damned three-inchers that seemed to fire almost as fast as machine guns, but some bigger cannon, too-went on for about half an hour. Stretcher-bearers hauled groaning, thrashing U.S. soldiers back toward the doctors. Some men didn't need stretcher-bearers. If all that was left of you was your leg from the knee down, your foot still in your boot, doctors wouldn't do you any good.
As soon as the bombardment stopped, Martin and Andersen popped up like a couple of jack-in-the-boxes. Sure as hell, here came the Rebs, dashing forward through the ruins of Big Lick. They ran low and bent over, not wanting to expose themselves any more than they had to. Veteran troops, Martin thought; new fish had less sense.
He was a veteran, too. The more you let the other guys take advantage of a bombardment, the worse off you'd be. The time to smash them was as soon as they jumped out of their holes. If you could pot a couple then, the rest lost enthusiasm for the work they'd been assigned.
He squeezed the trigger. The Springfield slammed against his shoulder. A Reb pitched over on his face. Martin worked the bolt and fired again. Another Confederate soldier fell, this one grabbing at his arm. Martin seemed to have all the time in the world to swing his rifle toward a third figure clad in butternut, to squeeze the trigger, to watch the fellow topple.
Beside him, Paul Andersen was also banging away. Somewhere not far off, a machine gun started hammering. A lot of Rebels went down. But a lot of them kept coming, too. They pitched improvised grenades at the U.S. soldiers. Martin didn't like the idea of carrying those damn things around-if a bullet hit one, it would blow a hole in you they could throw a dog through. But he didn't like being on the receiving end of grenades, either. It was as if the infantry started having its own artillery.
Shouts of alarm from the left made him whip his head around. The Confederates were in among the U.S. trenches and foxholes, trying to drive the Americans back to White Sulphur Springs without benefit of leave.
Martin ran toward the battling, cursing men. In a fight like that, you used anything you had: rifle, bayonet, knife, the sawed-off spade you carried to dig yourself in. The question was brutally simple: would enough Rebs get past the U.S. rifle and machine-gun fire to overwhelm the defenders and make this wrecked stretch of suburb their own once more, or would the men who were in place and whatever reinforcements who could get forward blunt the attack and throw it back?
Butternut smeared with mud and grass stains didn't look much different from similarly dirty green-gray. Being sure of who was who was anything but easy. You didn't want to go after the wrong man by mistake, but you didn't want to hesitate and get yourself killed, either.
An unmistakable Rebel leaped out from behind a pile of rubble and swung one of those short-handled shovels at Chester Martin's head. He threw up his rifle just in time to fend off the blow. The force of it staggered him even so. The Confederate, intent on his work, drew back the shovel for another blow. Before he could deliver it, a bullet-
