shoulder. The bullet caught the fellow right in the middle of the chest. He got his left foot off the ground for one more step, but he never finished it. He crumpled and fell instead.
Cassius worked the bolt and fired again, as fast as he could. Jake Featherston jerked before his face hit the asphalt. While he was lying there, Cassius put another bullet into him. This one made red bits spurt from his head. Cassius chambered one more round. When you were shooting a snake, you didn't know for sure what it took to kill him.
One of the men in butternut knelt by the President of the CSA. The just-risen sun shone from his spectacles and their steel frames. He leaned toward Jake Featherston. Cassius could easily have shot him, too, but waited instead to see what happened next. The bespectacled man started to feel for Featherston's wrist, then shook his head, as if to say, What's the use? When he rose, he seemed suddenly old.
The rest of the Confederates might have turned to wax melting in the sun, too. When Cassius saw they slumped and sagged, he began to believe Jake Featherston was dead-began to believe he'd killed him. Were the tears in his eyes joy or sorrow or both at once? Afterwards, he never knew.
'Y'all surrender!' he shouted blurrily, and fired another shot over the Confederates' heads.
As if on cue, Gracchus ran up the road from Madison. Four or five white men in green-gray pounded after the Negro. One by one, the Confederates standing in the roadway raised their hands above their heads. The officer with the automatic Tredegar carefully set it on the tarmac before he lifted his.
Only then did Cassius step out from behind the tree. Gracchus skidded to a stop beside him. 'Who is them ofay shitheads?' the guerrilla chief panted.
'Dunno. Big-ass ol' Confederates, that's all I kin tell you,' Cassius said. 'But I just shot me Jake motherfucking Featherston. That's him on the ground there, an' he's dead as shoe leather.'
'No,' Gracchus whispered. The U.S. soldiers heard Cassius, too. They stared north toward the knot of Confederates and the corpse in the road. Then they stared at Cassius.
'Kid, I'd give my left nut to do what you just done,' one of them said.
'My right nut,' said another.
'Do you know how famous you just got?' a third one added.
'It doesn't matter,' Cassius said. 'He killed my whole family, the son of a bitch. Shooting's too good for him, but it's all I could do. I heard his voice, and I knew who it was, and then-bang!'
Gracchus set a hand on his shoulder. 'You got that, anyways. Rest of us, we don't got nothin'. He done kilt all our famblies. But you kilt him? You really an' truly did?' His voice was soft with wonder.
'I sure did.' Cassius sounded amazed, too, even to himself. 'Now I want to see him dead.'
He walked forward, his rifle still at the ready in case any of the men ahead tried something. He had only one round left in the clip, but he wasn't too worried about that, not with Gracchus and those U.S. soldiers to back him up.
Flies were already starting to buzz above the blood pooling around the corpse in the roadway. Cassius stirred the body with his foot. Jake Featherston's lean, hungry face stared sightlessly up to the sky. A fly landed on his cheek. It crawled over to the rill of blood that ran from the corner of his open mouth and began to feed.
'Well, you did it. You just sank the Confederate States of America.' The officer with glasses talked like a Yankee. But he wore a C.S. uniform with, Cassius saw, a general's wreathed stars on his collar. He took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes with his tunic sleeve. 'Jake Featherston was a son of a bitch, but he was a great son of a bitch-and you killed him.'
He looked as if he wanted to say more. Telling off somebody with a Tredegar was never a good idea, though.
Another man, a heavy fellow in a gray Party uniform, figured that out, too. He said, 'Who would've reckoned a…colored kid could do in the President?' The pause meant he'd almost said nigger, or more likely goddamn nigger, but he swallowed anything like that before it got out.
'Who the hell are you people, anyway?' one of the U.S. soldiers-a sergeant-demanded.
'Ferdinand Koenig, Attorney General, CSA,' the heavy man answered. Cassius almost shot him, too. Koenig ran the camps. He was Jake Featherston's enforcer. But shooting anybody with his hands up wasn't so easy.
'Clarence Potter, brigadier general, CSA,' said the man with glasses.
'Christ!' the sergeant in green-gray said. 'You're on our list! You're the asshole who blew up Philly!'
'You know that?' Potter blinked, then actually bowed. 'Always an honor to be recognized,' he said. Cassius found himself surprised into admiration. Potter had style, in a cold-blooded way.
The other Confederates gave their names and ranks. The only one Cassius had heard of was Saul Goldman, whom he thought of as the Confederacy's chief liar. But the rest were all big shots, too, except for a young captain with a pilot's wings on the right breast pocket of his tunic.
'Do Jesus!' Gracchus said. 'There here's 'bout what's left o' the Confederate gummint, ain't it?'
'Where's what's-his-name? The Vice President?' The U.S. sergeant snapped his fingers. 'Partridge in a pear tree-him?'
Even with their cause in ruins and themselves in captivity, several of the Confederates smiled at that. A couple of them even laughed. 'The Vice President isn't with us,' General Potter said. 'If you look under a flat rock, you'll find a lizard or a salamander or something. It's bound to be just as smart as Don.'
'Jesus, Potter, show a little respect,' Ferd Koenig said. 'He's President now, wherever he is.'
'Only proves we're screwed, if you ask me,' Potter said calmly.
Three command cars rumbled up from Madison: probably called by wireless. Their machine guns added to the U.S. firepower. A photographer jumped out of one of them. 'Godalmightydamn,' he said, aiming his camera at the corpse in the road. 'That really is the motherfucker, ain't it?' He took several pictures, then looked up. 'Who punched his ticket for him?'
Gracchus gave Cassius a little shove. 'This fella right here.'
A flashbulb went off in Cassius' face. He saw green and purple spots. 'Way to go, sonny. You just turned famous, know that? What's your name, anyway?'
'Cassius,' he answered. Now two people, both white, had thrown fame in his face. 'I'm Cassius. I don't care nothin' about famous. Only thing I care about is, that bastard's dead an' gone.'
'You may not care about famous, buddy, but famous is gonna care about you,' the photographer predicted. 'Bet your ass it will. You're gonna be the most famous smoke in the whole goddamn US of A.'
Smoke wasn't exactly an endearment, but Cassius was too dazed to get very upset about it. More command cars and a halftrack came up the road. Some of the people who got out were soldiers. Others were reporters. When they found out Cassius had shot Jake Featherston, they all tried to interview him at once. They shouted so many questions, he couldn't make sense of any of them.
Some of the reporters started grilling the captured Confederates, too. The prisoners didn't want to talk, which seemed to upset the gentlemen of the press.
Cassius kept looking at the body every so often. I did that, he told himself. I really did.
'Don't pay these mouthy fools no mind,' Gracchus advised him. 'You don't got to say nothin' to 'em if you don't care to. You done somethin' instead.'
It wasn't enough. If Cassius could have killed Jake Featherston five million or six million or eight million times, it might have come close to being enough. But he'd done all he could do. He made himself nod. 'Yeah,' he said.
N ot far outside of Pineville, North Carolina, Irving Morrell stood up in the cupola of his barrel for what he hoped was the last time in the war. Sweat ran down his face. He was glad to escape the iron oven in which he'd ridden north. The cease-fire continued to hold. With a little luck, it would soon turn into something more like a real peace.
A monument of piled stone, two or three times as tall as a man, marked the place where James Polk had been born. Since Polk was President of the United States before they split into two countries, this seemed a good place for the representatives of those two countries to meet.
Close to the monument stood what could only have been a Negro sharecropper's cabin. It was empty now, windows broken, door hanging half open. If meeting at Polk's birthplace symbolized something, that deserted cabin meant something else altogether. Where were the blacks who'd called it home? Anywhere on this earth? Morrell doubted it.
The sergeant in charge of another U.S. barrel peered up the road toward Charlotte with field glasses. He waved to Morrell. 'Here they come, sir!'
