In the drawing Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty stand side by side on the shore. We see them from behind, but know, by their dress, whose pensive vista we are sharing.

There is a breeze coming in, the flame from the Lady’s torch, held tentatively at her hip, blowing toward us slightly. The vast ocean stretches before them, and the sun, rays crepuscular on the rolling waves, is only a sliver above the far horizon. Filling the darkening sky above and dominating the page is a question mark.

We are looking west.

We can’t see their faces, of course, can’t tell if they are seeking adventure, longing for treasure, anticipating unknown horrors. That will come later.

Hod is the first on deck to see smoke.

“That must be it,” he says, pointing ahead to where the mountains rise up and pinch together to close off the channel. “Dyea.”

There is a rush then, stampeders running to the fore and jostling for position, climbing onto the bales of cargo lashed to the deck to see over the crush, herding at a rumor as they have since the Utopia pulled away from the cheering throngs in Seattle, panicked that someone else might get there first. Store clerks and farmers, teamsters and railroad hands, failed proprietors and adventurous college boys and scheming hucksters and not a few fellow refugees from the underground. Hod has done every donkey job to be had in a mine, timbering, mucking ore with shovel and cart, laying track, single-jacking shoot holes with a hand auger. He knows how to look for colors in a riverbank, knows what is likely worth the sweat of digging out and what isn’t. But the look in the eyes of the men crowding him up the gangplank, the press of the hungry, goldstruck mass of them, five days jammed shoulder-to-shoulder at the rail of the steamer dodging hot cinders from the stack, half of them sick and feeding the fish or groaning below in their bunks as the other half watch the islands slide by and share rumors and warnings about a land none have ever set foot on — he understands that it will be luck and not skill that brings fortune in the North.

Though skill might keep you alive through the winter.

“Store clerk outta Missouri, wouldn’t know a mineshaft from a hole in the ground, wanders off the trail to relieve himself? Stubs his toe on a nugget big as a turkey egg.”

“You pay gold dust for whatever you need up there — won’t take no paper money or stamped coin. Every night at closing they sweep the barroom floors, there’s twenty, thirty dollars in gold they sift outta the sawdust.”

“Canadian Mounties sittin up at the top of the Pass got a weigh station. It’s a full ton of provisions, what they think should stand you for a year, or no dice. Couple ounces shy and them red-jacketed sonsabitches’ll turn you back.”

“Put a little whiskey in your canteen with the water so it don’t freeze.”

“Hell, put a little whiskey in your bloodstream so you don’t freeze. Tee-totaller won’t make it halfway through September in the Yukon.”

“Indins up there been pacified a long time now. It’s the wolves you need to steer clear of.”

“The thing is, brother, if you can hit it and hold on to it, you float up into a whole nother world. Any time you pass an opera house west of the Rockies, the name on it belongs to another clueless pilgrim what stumbled on a jackpot. This Yukon is the last place on earth the game aint been rigged yet.”

If the game isn’t rigged in Dyea it is not for lack of trying.

There is no dock at the mouth of the river, greenhorns shouting in protest as their provisions are dumped roughly onto lighters from the anchored steamer, shouting more as they leap or are shoved down from the deck to ferry in with the goods and shouting still to see them hurled from the lighters onto the mudflats that lead back to the raw little camp, deckhands heaving sacks and crates and bundles with no regard for ownership or fragility, and then every man for himself to haul his scattered outfit to higher ground before the seawater can ruin it.

“Fifty bucks I give you a hand with that,” says a rum-reeking local with tobacco stain in his beard.

“Heard it was twenty.” Hod with his arms full, one hand pressed to cover a tear in a sack of flour.

“Outgoing tide it’s twenty. When she’s rolling in like this—” the local grins, spits red juice onto the wet stones, “—well, it sorter follows the law of supply and demand.” Hod takes a moment too long to consider and loses the porter to a huffing Swede who offers fifty-five. Left to his own, he hustles back and forth to build a small mountain of his food and gear on a hummock by a fresh-cut tree stump, crashing into other burdened stampeders in the mad scramble, gulls wheeling noisily overhead in the darkening sky, little channel waves licking his boots on the last trip then three dry steps before he collapses exhausted on his pile.

When he gets his breath back Hod sits up to see where he’s landed. There are eagles, not so noble-looking as the ones that spread their wings on the coins and bills of the nation, eagles skulking on the riverbank, eagles thick in the trees back from the mudflats. He has never seen a live one before.

“They’ll get into your sowbelly, you leave it out in the open,” says the leathery one-eyed Indian who squats by his load.

“I don’t plan to.”

“Better get a move on, then. That tide don’t stay where it is.”

The man introduces himself as Joe Raven and is something called a Tlingit and there is no bargaining with him.

“Twelve cents a pound. Healy and Wilson charge you twice that. Be two hundred fifty to pack this whole mess to the base of the Pass. We leave at first light.”

It is already late in the season, no time to waste lugging supplies piecemeal from camp to camp when the lakes are near freezing and the goldfields will soon be picked over. All around them Indians and the scruffy-bearded local white men are auctioning their services off to the highest bidder. One stampeder runs frantically from group to group, shouting numbers, looking like he’ll pop if he’s not the first to get his stake off the beach.

“That’s about all the money I got,” says Hod.

The Tlingit winks his good eye and begins to pile Hod’s goods onto a runnerless sledge. “Hauling this much grub, you won’t starve right away.” He tosses a stone at an eagle sidling close and it flaps off a few yards, croaking with annoyance, before settling onto the flats again.

“Eat on a dead dog, eat the eyes out of spawn fish, pick through horseshit if it’s fresh. Lazy bastards.” Joe Raven winks his single eye again. “Just like us Tlingits.”

There is some folks say the pine air is good for you but Clarence is not one of them. Nothing but the trees all around, pine and pine and pine till you come to the swamp and get some tupelos, the wood the quarters been built from cut from pine and the boiler fires burning pine and the barrels Old Brumby make out of pine and the smell in your nose while you hack and pull is pine like everything else in the damn turpentine camp they keeping him at.

But this is the day.

Clarence reaches high with his long-handle chipping ax, raking a V-shape into the wood to get the gum bleeding. It’s him and Wilbert hacking the old section on ladders with Shiflett, who is a free white peckerwood, cutting sap boxes in the virgin pine off to the left. How stupid you got to be to stay in this gum patch if they don’t chain you to the beds at night? All Shiflett got that the turp gang don’t is his nasty, stringy-hair wife, who Stewball seen her once and it put him off thinking bout women for a week.

“Sooner stick it in a snappin turtle mouf than in that mess,” he say. “Even her own childrens is scairt to look at her.”

There is a gang of dippers on the right, collecting the flow from the notches in the young trees. Even further off he hears Crowder, which is another free peckerwood, chopping at the used-up pines for boiler kindling. And here come Reese the woods rider on his little glass-eye pony they call Sunshine, shotgun across his lap, right wherever you don’t want him to be. Thirty mile of swamp and longleaf pine, legs chained for the short-step, they aint afraid you gone to run. Reese just here to remind you.

“Put a little muscle in it, boy,” he mumble through all that chaw in his mouth. “You aint nearly scratched the face yet.” And he spit.

They all spit, the shotguns, chaw and then spit, but Reese win the turkey every time. Twice as far and right on the bullseye. He sneaky, too, that little pony catfoot up behind you and if Reese don’t like how you workin splat! it fly right past your ear and hit the tree. Come on a stretch of pines got black juice runnin down longside the white gum it mean Reese been there.

But even with him and all the rest around Clarence know that this the day.

Clarence wipes his brow with the back of his sleeve and can’t help but touch where he’s slipped them into the seam of his county-issue forage cap. He hopes his sweat don’t soak into the match head.

When they first brung Clarence in he pick out Brumby straight away cause that old man been in camp the longest, ever since they built it, and the old hands always know how it stacked.

“I was a blacksmith before I learn this here,” Brumby say, never looking up from his work. “Back on the Langford plantation. Make you anything you can think of out of metal. Mister Langford always brag on me, ‘My Brumby save me five hundred dollars a year,’ he say. Five hundred dollars. And then when he start boilin his own molasses and seen what a barrel bought from up north cost, he send me out to prentice at cooperage.”

They give Brumby a half-dozen green convicts to help make his staves, cutting and planing and drying the boards, but he do all the bevel work and the rest by hisself, shaving and sanding and setting the hoops and gouging the croze so the head fit in tight — make you seven, eight straight-stave turp barrels a day if they don’t want him for no metal work on the stills. They more than three hundred convicted in the camp and Brumby one of five that don’t wear the hobble irons. Once in the winter when it was raining too hard to go out and cut boxes he shown Clarence through the whole deal.

“You a young man yet,” he say. “You learn to be a cooper, then you got a trade when they set you loose.”

“That’s four years left they give me.”

Brumby laugh at him. “Four years aint nothin. I was here makin barrels before you was born.”

Story is Brumby had him a young wife and she start slippin round on him, take up with a man run a spirits house by the Georgia line. One day this man don’t show up there, and nobody think much of it till he found floatin toward Savannah in one of Brumby’s barrels.

“Trade or no trade,” Clarence let him know, “I aint doing no four more years here.”

Come evening when none of the shotguns was near Clarence step into one of the barrels didn’t have its insides glued yet and try to squeeze down till he nearly stuck. Brumby think this is funny.

“I know what you thinkin, son, but nobody gone sneak out this camp in a turp barrel.”

“But they told me—”

“That nigger was in pieces,” he say, quiet. “And even then it was a tight fit.”

The only part that bothers Royal is when the doctor sits on the stool to stare into the hole in the head of his pizzle. The doctor is a white man, which he didn’t know it would be but is not too surprised since it is their army. The rest — showing his teeth, making a muscle, bending his knees up and down, the mirror bouncing light into his eyes and ears, even the white man’s fingers around his wrist while he counts, silently moving his lips — barely starts him sweating. Six of them at a time, naked, standing with eyes forward and arms hung loose at their sides as the doctor moves down the row and the colored boy in the uniform who seems to be his helper slides the stool along. The floor is cold under Royal’s feet.

“Peel em back and hold em at attention,” says the little colored boy, who the doctor calls Earl and the boy keeps answering Private Beckwith. A couple of the naked men snigger. Royal knows what this is for, he thinks, and does what they say.

“This is our only chance,” Junior has told him, “so you got to act right.”

It’s not like a dare, exactly, not like when him and his brother Jubal were little and would get up high in the branches over the creek, way too high and the water not near deep enough, sick in the stomach like how he feels now, and if one stepped off the other honor-bound to follow. Wild-ass stupid. But Junior has made it clear enough that nothing short of this will cause people to pay heed to Royal Scott, lift him up in their eyes.

In her eyes.

The doctor bends and squints at it. The sweat comes now, rolling down his sides and Royal can’t help but give up a shiver. Junior’s father, Dr. Lunceford, got an eye that can make you sweat like that, even with all your clothes on.

“Any problem making water?”

“No sir,” he says. “Aint never had that.”

His own Mama did for Towson Miles with her roots a while back, but she didn’t need him to take it out and show it in her face.

“Less you want to be a dribblin idiot by-an-by,” she told him, “you got to stew these roots twice a day and drink it all down.”

“It taste bad?” Towson wasn’t ever up to much good, wore him a path between Sprunt’s cotton press and the Manhattan Club, dogging anything in a skirt he met on the way.

“What you got,” Royal’s Mama told him, “it taste as bad as it ought to.”

The doctor stands and steps to the side, cocking his head to look at Royal the way the old men in Wilmington do when they’re set to swap mules.

“Cough.”

Royal doesn’t know if they’re watching for a strong cough or a weak one, so he pushes one out somewhere in the middle, careful not to blow air on the white man.

“That’s enough with these, Earl,” says the doctor, crossing to write on some papers at his desk.

“Private Beckwith,” corrects the colored boy in the uniform, softly. “Put your clothes on and wait outside,” he says to the naked men and they hurry to it, rolling eyes at each other and grinning. Royal doesn’t dare smile even though the doctor has his back turned. This little Earl might see and tell the doctor something after.

Junior sits on one of the benches along the wall in the hallway with the other dozen who went before. He shoots Royal an asking look, but there is nothing to tell him. It is up to the white doctor and whatever he wrote down.

“You got to fit the uniform, is what,” says one of the men who was naked with him. “That’s why the man look at you so careful, cause they already got all their suits and they only want them what fits in em.”

Royal sits and nobody talks for a while, the sounds drifting in from deep-voiced men calling cadence as they drill. They were a sight all right, just like Junior told him they’d be, colored men of all shades and ages marching in squared-off groups with their blue shirts dazzling in the afternoon sun, tall as pines with their rifles held just so over their shoulders. He thought that there would be a stockade wall, but no, just a huge open rectangle of a parade ground surrounded by wooden buildings, sitting by the river at the base of evergreen-covered mountains.

Fort Missoula.

He pictures himself standing in that blue uniform in the parlor at Junior’s house, Dr. Lunceford’s hard eye digging into him and her, Jessie, standing behind, seeing him like it’s the first time. Not the same Royal.

But only they choose him. If they take Junior and send him away that is all there is to it, go back to Wilmington and press cotton at Sprunt’s, forget about Jessie. If they take him and not Junior — but that won’t happen.

Another colored soldier steps into the hallway, darker and older than Little Earl who shoved the stool along, this one with more yellow stripes on his arm, standing wide-legged and hands on hips, looking down on them like he owns it all.

“On your feet.”

He doesn’t shout, doesn’t talk loud at all but the men jump up. He reads off a list.

“Hazzard, Drinkwater, Lunceford—” he reads and Royal hears a small gasp of relief from Junior, “—Brewster and Scott, stay here. The rest of you go out that door and get back to where you come from.”

It takes a while for the ones they don’t want to mumble out, disappointed. Royal wonders if some have come from as far as him, all the way up here where they still got Indians who wear deer hide on their feet, a half-dozen of them smoking and looking you over when you walk through the post gate.

“Lunceford,” says the older one.

“Yes sir!”

Junior sings it out. He has had Royal practicing his Yes sir and No sir which is how he says you got to answer everybody above you even if they’re not old or a white man.

“Step forward.”

Junior steps forward smart and stands with his eyes locked ahead. Junior is not so filled in as the others they picked, chicken-chested with skinny pins, but his clothes are nice and he’s lighter complected and carries himself high.

“You been to school, Lunceford.” The soldier says it as a fact.

“Yes sir. Hampton Institute and then half this year at Fisk.”

“Anything you learn there, you gone have to forget it.”

There is something in his friend’s eyes Royal has never seen before, hesitating before he speaks.

“Yes sir,” says Junior in a quiet voice. “I’ll try to do that sir.”

“You call me Sergeant.”

“Yes Sergeant.”

“Get back in line.”

Junior steps straight back two steps without looking and ends up square with the other four. Royal wonders if he’s practiced that too.

“I am Sergeant Jacks,” says the dark man evenly, the man with the stripes on his arm. “And you sorry niggers have the good fortune to be selected to join the 25th Infantry.”

Royal jumps off the branch.

In the last few years it has been the Italians, Guglielmo Tell mostly, or Un Ballo in Maschera, or something new by Puccini. Diosdado stands smoking with a group of his classmates outside the Teatro Zorilla, slightly rumpled in their white linen as students are expected to be, positioned to watch the daughters of the wealthy and their dueñas alight from their closed carriages, each one opening like a box of bombones to reveal the delicacy within, girls in satin and taffeta and silk and the occasional butterfly in a balintawak, sleeves like delicate, transparent wings, their hair shining with oil and up in combs, bestowing their glances and smiles like the most precious of gifts. Then the ilustrados with their European suits and gold watches endlessly consulted to show them off and the españoles with their air of disdain and condescension — yes, they’d rather be in Madrid but duty entails sacrifice and this sort of event, though unavoidably second-rate here in the Colony, is such a good influence on the indios—the men all lingering in front of the ornate, circular temple of culture until the orchestra is well into the overtura. Diosdado searches over their heads for Scipio, who said to meet him here. But Scipio never makes an entrance — he just appears.

“A well-placed infernal device,” says Hilario Ibañez, eyeing a phalanx of Spaniards talking rather more loudly than the orchestra within, “would do the nation a great deal of good.” Hilario is a poet and given to morbid flights of imagination.

Diosdado shakes his head. “And destroy the best along with the worst?”

He is careful to always seem the conciliator in public, the gradualist in questions of politics. A debater who can argue either side of a question, moderate in opinion and passion. It is a role he is beginning to despise.

Kokoy flicks the butt of his cigarette to the ground, sighs wearily. “We’re needed inside, gentlemen.”

They move, careful to maintain an air of indifference, to the back of the balcony where the smoke from the oil lamps in the chandeliers collects, with the scattered rainbow of young beauties below them and time for a quick flurry of tsismis concerning the romantic lives of the performers, the Italians (or the French, for that matter) eugenically destined for scandal, with the conduttore turning to count empty seats and the Manila fire department, opera lovers all, standing at the top of the main aisle, doors flung open behind them with the hose in hand and ready for service. The ushers shoo the little street girls selling roses and gardenias out of the building and the din of Filipino society in full flower begins to abate and then there is applause as the curtain is drawn and the first notes cut the air. Diosdado smiles to himself, thinking of how he loves it all, loves it as only a boy raised on cockfights and the occasional scabrous traveling puppet show can, a haciendero’s son from the wild coast of Zambales who spent his first year in the great city pretending he had seen it all, that he was not impressed, that he, provincial imposter, belonged there. And usually at this point, lights dimmed to hide him from his cohorts, he would let his guard down and allow the singers to carry him to Paris or Thessaly or ancient Egypt.

Tonight it is the Tell, in a mercifully abridged version, the audience silenced immediately by the stirring overture, lederhosen and dirndls barely able to disguise the uncomfortable parallels with the present situation — a despotic government, an insurrection in the bundoks, blood feuds complicating the political situation, love and honor—

But tonight the music is only background to his own drama.

“They want you,” said Scipio.

This in the Jesuit library, with the late-day sun slanting through the windows and the other colegios absorbed, unsuspecting, in their texts. Diosdado felt the building move a little, as it did during the medium-sized tremors common within the Intramuros.

“Why now?”

Scipio smiled. “Because you’re the best liar in Manila.”

He had hoped they would need his talents as a linguist. Zambal, Tagalog, Spanish, Latin, English from his year in Hongkong, even a bit of Cantonese, all these valuable as the revolt proceeded through its stages. But lying—

“They want me to be a spy?”

“For now. We each serve in our own way.”

Diosdado had guessed for some time that his best friend was a member of the Katipunan, but Scipio would never admit it. “I am a patriot,” he would say, lifting an eyebrow, whenever Diosdado asked to be sponsored into the Brotherhood, “but not a suicide.”

“What do I do?”

“Tonight at the Zorilla,” said Scipio, smiling, and then was gone.

But at intermission, the apple successfully bolted from son Walter’s head and Tell imprisoned by the haughty Gessler, Scipio has still not appeared. Diosdado shuffles downstairs in the throng, shoulder to shoulder with a butcher of a militar, a uniformed capitán de cazadores whistling the rousing call to arms that closed the first act.

“Elíxer para el alma,” says the Spaniard, smiling and catching his eye, and Diosdado muses that if the oppressors do in fact have souls, then music must be good for them.

He follows the university boys across the street for buñuelos and chocolate and talk of music, theater, women, all the things young irresponsible students should be preoccupied with, the militares at the next table laughing a little too loudly as always and both groups pretending to ignore the fact that there is a revolution in progress not so far from Manila, that in a few months, a year at the most, they may be trying to kill those other hijos de puta.

“I wonder how many will stay, after it is done?” says Kokoy, careful as always to remain vague, in public places, about the exact nature of it.

“The ones from Madrid or Barcelona will go home,” says Epifánio Cojuanco, who has spent a year studying piano in Spain. “But some of those places, in the bleak mountains — why would you bother?”

“They’ll have to give up their privileges, of course.” This from Kokoy, who has a manservant who waits outside the classroom door in case his dueño should desire anything.

“I long for the day,” says Hilario Ibañez. “To breathe our own sweet air again, to walk unburdened on our own fertile soil, among free men.”

They can rhapsodize about independence for hours, his friends, but Kokoy is too rich and Epifánio too timid and Hilario a poet doomed to unwittingly plagiarize Dr. Rizal’s literary work, from which he no doubt conjured the image of the infernal machine, for the rest of his days. And he, Diosdado Concepción, is still waiting for the call—

“To a better day,” says Epifánio, and they touch their cups together. It is Scipio’s favorite toast, Scipio who has not yet appeared, most often invoked at a café table like this one, surrounded by Spanish soldiers, looking like any other group of Filipino dandies in white suits and straw skimmers. “A un día mejor!” Scipio will say, raising his glass, and then down the throat, all of them smiling with their secret knowledge.

Until this afternoon it has seemed only naughty.

The bell sounds and they hurry back and stand just inside the doors to witness the re-entrance of the damas, their fans fluttering in a myriad of gown-matching colors, the students dizzied by passing waves of perfume, and then there is the dress they are waiting for, the dress that has the great fortune to caress the body of Ninfa Benavides, a whisper of organza the color of ripe guayaba, with a border of translucent French lace and a cameo brooch nestled between her artfully displayed twin doves of nubility.

“If the fakirs are correct and one revisits this earth in different forms,” sighs Hilario Ibañez, “I would end my life now to come back as that cameo.”

Ninfa, whose father is the Policarpio Benavides who supplies fresh beef to the Spanish army and can destroy men’s lives with a word in the proper official’s ear, whose aunt is the renowned Sister María de la Coronación de Espinas who teaches music and deportment at Santa Isabel, Ninfa carries herself like what she is, a jewel of the nation. There are so many peninsulares seeking her hand, or merely her interest, as well as the countless criollos and filipinos ilustrados, that some nights the crowd under her balcony erupts into terrible rows that warrant the militia being called to action. The rumor, for Diosdado has never been privileged to speak with her, is that she is as intelligent as her father is ruthless, and can puncture a man’s soul with a single flecha irónica. In his reveries it is Ninfa, stepping regally from her landau and catching his eye to say, with a half-secret smile, “You, campesino, belong here. And if you work hard, if you study the minds of men and learn to turn them to your will, you may some day be worthy of me.”

“Far too rich for your blood, muchacho,” says Scipio as she passes. He is there suddenly, watching Ninfa with his own private smile. “Follow me.”

Hod is working on the wagon road three miles out of Skaguay, felling trees and dragging logs through the mud with a chain rig, when a dude strolls up with the road boss.

“That’s the one,” says the road boss.

The dude, checked sack suit, street shoes and the only straw boater Hod has seen since coming north, cocks his head and speaks loud enough for Hod to hear over the chopping and whipsawing and cursing of laborers.

“I expected a larger man.”

But he continues to watch Hod work, a little dude smile on his face, smoking three cigarettes and dancing out of the way as trees are felled, as logs are dragged and dropped on the corduroy road, and is waiting when the shift ends.

“Niles Manigault,” he says, offering a soft hand and smiling. “And you are?”

“Brackenridge.”

“Splendid. May I ask, Mr. Brackenridge, if you are a practitioner of the fistic arts?”

The words make no sense at first. Hod rolls his shoulders, feeling the chafe marks where the chain cut in. “I fought a couple guys. In Montana.”

“Montana.”

“Three fights. With other miners.”

Niles Manigault nods, considering, then taps Hod on the chest with his finger. “No matter. The lure of ample recompense should outweigh any lack of experience.”

“You offering me a job?”

The young man has a markedly Southern accent and a very neatly brushed moustache. “A business opportunity, yes.” He indicates the hodgepodge of felled trees around them. “Something of a step up for you, I would imagine.”

“What I have to do?”

They walk back toward town over the roadbed that has already been laid, Hod with his ax over his shoulder, the dude trying not to sink his street shoes too deep in the muck.

“You’ll need to absorb a certain amount of punishment,” says Niles Mani-gault, smiling. “And, if able, to deal some out.”

An older colored man with a pushed-in face sits in a battered wagon pointed toward town.

“Our barouche,” says Manigault, gesturing for Hod to get in. Hod climbs onto the bed while the dude sits up front by the drayman, and they begin to thump home over the logs, passing the other road workers slogging back through the mud, lugging their tools over their shoulders. “This is our new pugilist, Smokey,” says the dude. “What do you think?”

The negro casts a quick look back at Hod.

“He gonna beat Choynski,” he says, turning his attention to the slat-ribbed nag pulling the wagon, “he best carry that ax into the ring with him.”

The new docks have pulled all the action from Dyea here to Skaguay, and the town has more false-fronted wood buildings than tents now, new structures being thrown up on every block of the grid the original claim jumpers laid out, the frozen-mud streets swarming with new arrivals in a hurry to reach the Pass and merchants and buncos hustling to pick them clean before they get there. There are dogs everywhere, dogs too small or stubborn or weak or vicious to be useful pulling sleds on the trail, dogs of all shapes and sizes formed into packs that fight over slops thrown on the street or over territory or just for the mean dog delight of it. A half-dozen of them crowd around barking and snapping as Smokey guides the wagon past the little brewery, then scamper away when it’s clear there is nothing worth eating or killing. Hod and Manigault climb down onto the board sidewalk that runs in front of the buildings and tents, weaving around stampeders and drunks and the tame Russian bear doing tricks and a hatless, startle-eyed wild man predicting that the usurers, whoremongers, and worshippers of the Golden Idol who rush about ignoring him will soon be cast into a lake of fire.

“Any idea how much you weigh?” asks Niles Manigault.

“A sight less than when I got here,” says Hod, and then the dude pulls him down onto Holly Street.

He has passed Jeff Smith’s Parlor several times, but prefers the big dance halls on Broadway or Clancy’s on Trail Street. All the resorts are pretty much the same, dedicated to separating a man from what’s in his poke as quick as possible, but some do it with a lighter touch. Smith turns out to be another Southerner, a bearded, dark-haired, dark-eyed man in a big-brimmed wideawake hat, leaning back with elbows propped on the bar and one bootheel hooked over the brass rail.

“You’re not a boxer,” he says, looking Hod up and down.

“Never claimed to be,” Hod tells him. Manigault takes a seat on a stool, the bartender laying a short whiskey in front of him. “I just been in a fight or two.”

“And how did you fare?”

“Held my own.”

A half-dozen other men drift close around him, watching with appraising eyes. Smith has a soft voice and a friendly manner.

“Take your shirt off,” he says. “We’ll have a look.”

Hod hesitates, then begins to peel the layers, draping his work-grimed clothes over the bar counter. They are paying six a day on the wagon road, good wages on the Outside, but prices in Skaguay leave nothing much to show for it, and on every corner there are a dozen busted stampeders ready to work for coffee and johnnycakes. When Hod is down to his skin, Niles Manigault puts in a word.

“Devereaux says he’s the strongest of the lot out there, best stamina, most stubborn—”

Jeff Smith raises a hand to silence him, steps close to lock eyes with Hod.

“Young man,” he says, smiling, “how would you like to earn an easy one hundred dollars?”

White folks’ hair is easy. Dorsey never stops wondering at the way it just grows out straight from their heads, offering itself up to be trimmed. And the shaving, for the ones like Judge Manigault who don’t keep a beard or moustache, you just pull the skin taut and slide with the blade. It never curls back into the pores to make a bump or get infected like his own. If only they would keep their mouths from moving while you try to work.

“Humiliation.” The Judge sits in Dorsey’s chair, lathered up next to Mr. Turpin who owns the pharmacy, who is getting his trim from Hoke. Old Colonel Waddell waits near the door, his face hidden behind the Messenger. “We have attempted to hold on to our heritage, to our custom of living,” says the Judge, “and we have failed. So now we must be humbled.”

“I don’t know, Judge,” says Mr. Turpin as Hoke clips out the hair in his ears. Hoke is a good boy, stay on his feet the whole day if needs be, only sometimes he forget and commence to hum while the gentlemen are still talking. “You scratch under the surface just a bit, you’ll find somebody making a profit on it. That’s what politics is all about.”

“Russell got sufficiently fat before he was governor. But this appointing of half our aldermen — unprecedented. Another chance to force us to eat crow. I believe the yankees are behind him.”

“But our own Supreme Court—”

“Failed in their duty to protect the citizens who maintain it.” The Judge is one of those who keeps his own shaving mug here at the shop, has a favorite razor. He won’t let Hoke shave him, good as the boy is. Dorsey, of course, is famous at the Orton, and hasn’t drawn blood since he was a novice.

“Lex ita scripta est,” mutters the Colonel, lowering his newspaper a bit. “That was their verdict.”

“The law as it is written,” the Judge scowls, “is not meant to serve scoundrels.”

Dorsey cuts the guests at the Orton Hotel — merchants from around the state, politicians, even Governor Russell once when he was still running a dairy across the river — but many of the finest white gentlemen who live in the city come to be trimmed here as well. The Judge is a daily customer, as is Mr. Turpin. Colonel Waddell wears a full gray mane of hair and beard, like he did before the Emancipation, when he was known as a real fire-breather. Looks just like the Jeff Davis statue they put up in Raleigh, and only wants a bit of neatening up once a week. He waxes the tips of his moustache at home.

“They’ve got the governor and they’ve got the numbers,” says Mr. Turpin. “The way they’ve got it fixed, it’ll take a revolution to push them out.” Mr. Turpin is thin on top, and Hoke is carefully spreading what’s left with his comb to cover the scalp.

“We must not bow to the tyranny of numbers,” says the Judge. “What if tomorrow the Sprunts decide to bring in five thousand Chinamen to bale their cotton? Should we be ruled then by Chinamen? I think not.”

Dorsey waits, razor in hand, for the Judge to stop moving his jaw.

“Humiliation, I tell you,” the Judge goes on. “Russell and his gang sold the farmers and the illiterate mountainfolk a bill of goods, they bought the colored vote with bribes and favors and white men’s positions, and now he means to rub our noses in his success. He means to ruin this city.”

Dorsey crosses to put a couple towels into the steamer. When the Judge gets going like this it’s best to wait him out. He’s been known to jump to his feet and pace, so you have to be careful with the cutting edges.

“The Redeemers have worked wonders in other states,” says Turpin, soothingly. “South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana—”

“Where they’ve looked the thing in the eye and dealt with it.”

“It could happen here, Judge. And very soon.” Hoke is whisking the back of the pharmacist’s neck. “Somebody’s just got to put the thing in motion.”

“We’ve got them on the police force now.” The Judge shakes his head violently, ignoring the lather on his face. Dorsey taps a couple drops of witch hazel into his palm, holds it under his nose. Mrs. Scott brews up a batch of it for him and he has Hoke pour it into the store-bought bottles when they get low. The Judge swivels his chair around to face Mr. Turpin, getting himself indignant. “Do you think they’ll arrest their own? Not on your life. And if they do, they’ve got the juries packed and the darky walks out free as daylight and twice as bold as he was before.”

It is the gentlemen’s right to choose their topic, of course, but Dorsey always prefers sport to politics. He’s one of the sponsors of the Mutuals, and can hold the floor on the relative merits of every ballplayer in New Hanover County, black and white. He can talk horses, he can talk Bible if there’s a man of God in the chair, he can even recite The Arrow and the Song if pressed into service. Politics, though, especially the Wilmington variety, make him sweat.

“Plato believed that men should be governed by philosopher kings,” Colonel Waddell observes. “I fear we have drifted away from that ideal.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” says the Judge, “that if it serves the interests of these Fusioneers or Repopulists or whatever they’re labeling themselves now, we’ll have women’s suffrage thrown into the mix.”

“Women, white women, have the sense to listen to their husbands’ counsel,” says Turpin. “Giving them the vote would be redundant.” There is still a separate entrance for ladies at the Orton. Dorsey cannot imagine them in politics — the harangues and heated confrontations, the spitting and swearing. Women are above all that, made to bind up what the men have broken.

The Judge snorts and lather flies. “Well I daresay they wouldn’t have given the city over to carpetbaggers and Hottentots.”

Mr. Turpin laughs. “That’s what the illustrious Mrs. Felton would have us believe.”

“A woman who writes,” Colonel Waddell muses behind his paper, “is like a singing dog. The fascination is not that she does it well, but that she does it at all.”

Dorsey always starts around the ears, tiny little strokes to outline the sideburns. The Judge has a large mole on the left side he has to be careful of.

“The key,” says the Judge, finger jabbing underneath the cloth to make a point, “is to have some sort of qualification as to who is allowed to vote. That’s what the Founders envisaged. Responsible government issues from informed voters.”

“You’re suggesting a literacy test.”

“That is one possibility, yes.”

“An awful lot of them can read now. I see them at my store with the — what’s it called, Dorsey? Your colored paper?”

“The Record, suh.” Dorsey advertises in the Manly brothers’ paper for his other shop, where they cut colored hair.

“Do you read it?”

“No, suh. Don’t have the time.”

“Well, there is a group over in Brooklyn got them a bit more leisure,” Turpin winks to the Judge in the mirror. “Unless it’s to wrap fish in, I see an awful lot of em look like they read it.”

“I would not propose that puzzling out the limited vocabulary displayed in a colored daily constitutes literacy,” says the Judge. Dorsey can do his neck if he’s steady. “If we were to take a section of the state constitution and have the voter demonstrate his competence by explaining its meaning—”

Mr. Turpin laughs. “We’re going to do that with every voter in the city?”

“Selectively, yes.”

“Selectively.” Hoke is bending close to clip out Turpin’s nose hairs.

“We administer the test to those whom we — we suspect of being illiterate, on a ward-by-ward basis.”

“I would suspect that half the poor whites in Dry Pond might fail that test, Judge. Including a goodly number of loyal Democrats.”

“Well, of course, if there is a tradition of voting in the family—”

“Record turnout in the last election, Judge—”

“Selling your vote for a glass of whiskey does not qualify as a tradition. What I’m suggesting is that if you can prove your grandfather was a registered voter—”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“—you would be passed unchallenged at the polling place.”

“The Louisiana clause,” adds Colonel Waddell. The old gentleman been in office himself, before Dorsey’s day, rumored to be a great one for the oratory. He is always very quiet in the shop, but well-spoken, using words like impecunious and recondite that Dorsey makes sure to look up in his dictionary when he gets home and then slip into his conversations at Lodge meetings.

“Of course, given the present infestation here and in Raleigh, such an amendment to our statutes would stand no chance.”

“I wouldn’t give it up so easily, Judge. When his back is pressed to the wall, the true white man is capable of—”

Dorsey catches the Judge’s look in the mirror, just a tiny nod of warning to Mr. Turpin. Hoke is rapidly snipping air with his scissors, made nervous by the turn of the conversation.

“What?” says Mr. Turpin. “Dorsey? Dorsey doesn’t mix in politics, do you, Dorsey?”

“I try to keep my nose out of em.”

Hoke shakes the cloth out and Mr. Turpin stands. “What I tell you? The good ones know enough to steer clear of it.”

“Almost all absurdity of conduct,” Colonel Waddell observes, “arises from the imitation of those we cannot resemble.”

Turpin steps a little closer. Dorsey can feel him over his shoulder, watching him do the Judge’s cheeks. “You planning to vote this coming election, Dorsey?”

The Judge cocks his head. Colonel Waddell lays the newspaper in his lap, waiting to hear the answer. Hoke retreats to get the broom. Dorsey always voted, ever since he was old enough, but nobody made any fuss about it till lately.

“No, suh,” he lies softly. “Don’t suppose I will.”

“If the rest of your people show that kind of good sense, it’ll stay peaceful in this city.” It sounds a bit like a threat, but he can see Mr. Turpin is smiling in the mirror, gently tapping the thin layer at the top of his head with his fingers. “Say, Dorsey, how come a good-looking young fellow like you isn’t hitched yet?”

Dorsey flicks lather off the blade, rinses it clean in the pan. “Oh, I been studyin it, Mr. Turpin. Got a gal picked out.”

“That’s good to hear.” The pharmacist winks. Dorsey always hates it when they wink, especially if there’s a nasty story coming after. “Before we know it you’ll have a whole tribe of pickaninnies to support.”

Dorsey turns away, strops the blade hard on the leather. “Whatever you say, Mr. Turpin.”

“The tyranny of numbers,” grumbles the Judge. “If we bred like damned jackrabbits we might stand a chance.”

Mr. Turpin leaves two nickels on the counter and turns at the door. “Don’t you worry, Judge,” he calls. “Plans are being formulated. Prominent citizens are involved.” With that he steps out onto the street, setting his hat over his haircut before the breeze can muss it.

Colonel Waddell settles into the next chair as Hoke flaps the cloth out and drapes it around his neck. “If a move to remedy the situation is afoot,” he says, frowning, “I have not yet been informed of it.”

The Judge seems lost in thought, and the lather has been sitting on his face long enough. Dorsey reaches two fingers under but doesn’t quite touch him. “Chin?”

The white man grunts and tilts his head back for the razor.

“Here’s Soapy’s other nigger,” says Tommy Kearns as Hod walks into the Palace of Delight.

He is used to it by now. “You got some tables?”

“In the back.”

A few customers are sleeping off the night’s celebration beneath the elaborate painting on the rear wall, Seven Muses in transparent wisps of gauze dancing in a sylvan glade with a thick-muscled man. Smokey has been shy of stepping in here since the night he was accused of staring at it by a cabin-crazy sourdough and nearly lynched.

“What Jeff need tables for?”

“He doesn’t,” says Hod, crossing toward the back room. “Ham-Grease Jimmie needs tables and he’s got a side of beef going over to the Old Vienna who are sending some empty liquor bottles to the Pantheon where they put whatever it is they mix up there into them.”

Tommy Kearns laughs. “And somewhere along the line it ends up in Jeff’s pocket.”

“Right now we just need the tables.”

Smokey is waiting with the wagon in the alleyway. They are halfway loaded when they hear the whistle echoing on the sides of the channel.

“City of Portland,” says Smokey, who is never wrong. “Made good time.”

They quickly empty the wagon and pull it around front and join the rush down to the water. The steamer is pulled up to the Juneau Wharf, just throwing the gangplank down when they arrive. Steering is Hod’s least favorite part of the job, but Niles says he was born for it.

A steam whistle blows and the greenhorns come down the chute and immediately men are shouting offers to them, pulling their coats and promoting their resorts, handing out cards and handbills, promising to grease the wheels on the way to paydirt and warning to watch out for their fellow touts. Hod picks out the likeliest mark, a man who pulls an expensive watch out on a gold chain to check the time every few seconds and skitters over to eyeball each bit of his truck when it hits the planks.

“This is mine,” he says to no one in particular, then hurries over to claim the next sack of meal.

Hod waits till he has his back turned, arguing with a deck ape about being in a hurry, and begins to load the man’s goods.

“Whoah! Whoah! Whoah! That’s mine!”

Hod and Smokey have a heavy crate in hand. “This here?”

“Yes!”

“You sure?”

“Yes!”

They lay the crate on the ground. “Where you going with it?”

“Over the Pass to the goldfields, goddam it, what do you think?”

Hod rests a foot on the crate and stares at it, scratching his head.

“How you gone get it there?”

The mark gets a shrewd look in his eye. “You men packers?”

“No, but we work for the Merchant Exchange. That’s who will set you up with packers.”

“That’s where we goin,” says Smokey, “once we load up some goods offen this boat.”

The mark narrows his eyes even more. “How much to haul my lot over there?”

Hod shrugs, grins. “Our horny-handed sons of toil,” Niles Manigault is fond of saying, “possess more guile than is apparent.”

“We goin there anyhow,” he says. “Don’t spose it’s no bother.”

They pile the wagon with the mark’s whole outfit and four crates of fresh oysters Jeff Smith has promised somebody for a favor and roll up Runnalls Street to Jeff’s Merchant Exchange building which also holds the Dominion Telegraph Service where greenhorns send their messages home, five dollars for ten words, on wires that end three yards from the back door. Syd Dixon is working the store.

“You get them oysters to the Golden North?” he says, face buried in a ledger book.

“This fella here going over the Pass.”

Dixon jumps to his feet, looking pale but not as shaky as some mornings.

“You’re a lucky man, sir, to be spared the riffraff at the wharf. We are a young city, growing every day, and it is much too easy for an honest fortune-seeker like yourself to be — well — taken advantage of. You’ve already purchased the necessary equipment, I trust?”

“I—”

“We left it on the boardwalk out front.”

“Capital.” Dixon makes a shooing gesture with his hand. “Now get those oysters to the hotel before they spoil.”

The mark gives Hod a dollar coin for a tip.

“You done all the talkin,” says Smokey when Hod offers it to him, riding back to the Palace of Delight for the tables.

“Mr. Smith pays me to pick things up and put em down,” says Hod, laying the coin in Smokey’s lap. “I don’t want any profit from the other.”

At least once a week he has to be the Eager Prospector, making a show at the Assay Office in front of some mark who will be inveigled to buy out from under him the worthless claim that he lacks the proper paperwork to file on. Or the Desperate Husband, forced to relinquish promising digs to join his dying wife in Kansas. Or the Assayer, approached to verify that the bar of coated lead Doc is peddling, at a severe financial loss, mind you, is indeed solid gold.

“Men so greedy,” Jeff Smith likes to say when he has an audience gathered, “men so ignorant, such men cannot withstand the rigors of the frozen wilderness. We do them a service, skinning them down to their birthday suits before they can put their lives in peril.”

They drop off the oysters and haul a crated player piano from the wharf to the Garden of Joy just as the winter sun drops behind the mountain and the dance halls begin to fill up. Smokey leaves Hod outside the Nugget.

“You watch out for them womens,” he grins, and turns the nag toward the livery barn.

The floor is shaking under the weight of heavy-footed men and brightly dressed women dancing to band music, Hod fading into a corner to watch Addie Lee work. She twirls with one clomping sourdough or another as the fiddler saws out shortened versions of Mountain Canary or Turkey in the Straw or The Irish Washerwoman at a dollar a go till the girls are breathless and suggest their partners sit out the ballad, sung by Dingle Rafferty, who during the daylight hours removes horseflops from in front of those establishments willing to pay, and there is Addie Lee drinking teawater and the sourdough a two-dollar whiskey, sitting in one of the little boxes partitioned against the north wall—

As I trip across the Dead Horse Trail

With an independent air

— sings little Rafferty from atop a liquor crate next to the piano, chin lifted to the ceiling, eyes closed—

You can hear the girls declare

“He must be a millionaire!”

— Hod watching from his corner as half the men crowd back to the bar for a quick one, Suds dealing out the house mixture and sloppily weighing dust on the scales and the percentage girls who are left with no partner clustering together to steady themselves on each other’s shoulders as they adjust shoes and straighten stockings and the ones in the boxes allowing just enough to keep their escorts’ pokes open—

You can see them sigh and wish to die

You can see them wink the other eye

At the man who found the mother lode in Dawson!

— Rafferty adding verses till he gets the high sign from somebody in the bar and finishing with a high, sweet, wavering note, men stomping and clapping as he hops off his box with the fiddle skreeking a lead-up to a schottische, the banjo man and tubthumper waiting till negotiations on the floor are settled before joining in and Addie Lee out being hurled around in yet another man’s paws.

She is catching her breath near the entrance door during a waltz, Rafferty sentimentally warbling After the Ball, when Hod steps in.

“Young McGinty.” She likes to tease him with the name, though she knows it isn’t his real one.

“I was wondering — later—”

Addie Lee nods. “I got one lined up already, but if you want to wait—”

He doesn’t want to wait, but she has expenses to keep up and he is a barter client.

“I’ll be here.”

“All you men,” she says, giving him something like a smile. “Give a girl a big head.” And then the band swings into American Beauty and she is two-stepped away by a man with a hundred-dollar bill pasted to his sweaty forehead.

The dancing goes on and on, Hod watching the other girls work their marks, easing away from three different fistfights, his reputation in the camp as a fighter now a liability, Rafferty’s tenor lifting higher after every drink he takes. They are still dancing, fresh prospectors replacing the ones who are too drunk or tapped out, when Addie Lee crosses back toward the bar with Ox Knudsen staggering after her like a drunken bear. The fiddler apparently knows only five songs and no one seems to care as he repeats them again and again till he is spelled by a professor who bangs out Coonville Cakewalk on the ivories, the girls rolling their eyes at each other and giggling as the men, reeking of booze and tobacco and wet wool, gallantly offer their arms to escort them in a wavering parade around the floor.

There is no mystery where she is going with the Swede and what they’ll be up to. Hod can’t help himself and follows.

Jeff Smith and Niles and big Arizona Charlie and skinny Billy Mizner and Tex Rickard down from Circle City are at a table playing poker and eyeing the marks. Rickard has been setting up fights for the Ox, who works as a blacksmith when he isn’t bulldogging startled prospectors in the ring.

“Our young Apollo,” notices Niles Manigault, always paying more mind to the room than to his cards. “Mooning over his soiled dove.”

Hod finds an empty stool and turns his back to them.

“Make him an eggnog,” calls Charlie Meadows. It has become a source of great amusement to them all that he doesn’t drink.

“No liquor, no tobacco,” says Niles, drawing a pair. “If it wasn’t for his fascination with the scarlet sisterhood he’d be a model for our youth.”

“Leave the boy alone,” says Jeff Smith. “He’s in training.”

Rickard laughs. “What, with old Smokey?”

“One needs to acquire the fundamentals of the science.”

“One needs to render his opponent immediately unconscious,” says Billy Mizner, “like our Swede in there. See your twenty and call.”

Father—

Please forgive the tardiness of my correspondence, but we have been in transitu of late and the regular mail schedule is not in effect. As you may surmise from the postmark on this missive, I am in St. Louis, part of a specially chosen unit testing a novel mode of military transport.

Our commander Moss, of whose organizational skills I have written before, has long entertained General Miles with the notion of replacing the temperamental, noxious, and oat-burning horse with a vehicle less expensive in its upkeep and more in tune with our age. Thus was born the Infantry Bicycle Corps. Though the cavalry was afforded the first opportunity to participate in this great experiment, they proved much too fond of their equine cohorts (and, I must say, of the dashing figure they cut mounted upon them) to accept. As the colored troops invariably are saddled (apologies) with whatever duties our paler brethren-in-arms abhor, and as Lt. Moss was the originator of the scheme, the honor of implementation has fallen on the 25th.

Junior kneels, tablet resting on a stump, writing. He has been left to guard the wheels while the rest of the squad are off tom-catting on the east side of the river. He had taken it for a display of trust, the lieutenant recognizing the most responsible of his troopers, till Moss went off with the mayor’s party and the others started in about all the high times he would be missing. Telling him to polish their wheels while he was at it, Army humor never subtle or kind.

The Corps has, previous to my enlistment, cycled dispatches about the Bitterroot Valley and taken one longer journey, which I am very sorry to have missed, to the Yellowstone area and its attendant natural wonders. A pair of the lieutenant’s stalwart wheelmen having since mustered out of the service, I volunteered myself and Pvt. Scott (who, by the way, sends you and family his warmest regards) to take their places. My own recreational familiarity with the device gave me a leg up, so to speak, on poor Royal, but in no way prepared me for the rigors of extensive cross-country cycling. We pedal our steel-rimmed Ramblers over the roads, such as they are, in these vast, unpeopled spaces of Montana, whenever they are available and in passable condition. Otherwise it is the bumpy course through scrub and sagebrush, flushing rabbit and antelope in our path and deploying rapidly to “hand-over” our metallic steeds when we encounter the occasional stock fence. On these training jaunts we carry only our bedrolls, on a rack bolted in front of the handlebars, and our rifles slung over our shoulders.

Junior kneels before the stump, writing, because he cannot sit, may never, in fact, be able to sit again. There is no glory in his wound, the simple mention of being “saddle sore” drawing the wrath of the former cavalrymen in their party, and he has resolved himself to suffer in silence. He talks to Royal, of course, and Royal seems to listen, but there has been a reserve in his friend lately, an edge of What have you gotten us into? Not just the cycling, but the whole idea of joining the 25th in hope of heroic action when there has been little more than monotony and cursing and scutwork of the lowest variety.

It wants a battle.

“The bicycle requires neither water, food, nor rest,” General Miles has written, and at times it appears that the same qualities are expected from the colored soldier. Our training at the wheel is additional to our other duties at the fort, so as you may imagine only the most intrepid (some would say “ambitious”) of the enlisted men have stepped forward. Lt. Moss’s quest this year was a sojourn from Missoula to St. Louis (over 1,000 miles as the crow hobbles) and back, to demonstrate that the only limit to this method of transport is human “spunk” and endurance. We are principally under the tutelage of Sgt. Mingo Sanders, a veteran of some years who has distinguished himself, despite being nearly blind in one eye, in several of the regiment’s more trying engagements. Largely uneducated but possessed of an ample reserve of “mother wit,” he is a man the younger soldiers look up to — sanguine under pressure, resolute in action, a sympathetic guide to the rawer recruits.

Of these we had the addition, shortly before our departure, of a fellow Royal recognized as a figure of some ill-repute in Wilmington. Cooper (not his real name according to Pvt. Scott) is the devil-may-care type often attracted to the service in search of adventure, or, as I suspect in his case, refuge from legal authorities. Though no shirker when it comes to our daily routines, he is lacking in the esprit de corps one would wish for among fellow rookies, repeatedly suggesting that the bicycle experiment is a ruse designed to humiliate the colored soldier rather than an opportunity for him to stand out from the pack. Our reception, however, has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic and cordial, a seemingly endless celebration, though some disappointment is voiced on the discovery that we do not also play instruments. (Our 25th band is lauded as the finest musical aggregation in western Montana.)

We have passed through mountain, meadow, desert, and prairie on the way, alternately slogging through rain and “gumbo mud” and baking, with insufficient water, for days through the aptly named Badlands, vagabonding in conditions many a cavalryman would not deign to expose his mount to, averaging something less than forty miles a day on vertical terrain and something more than sixty on the horizontal. For this odyssey we carry a full kit including half-tent, rifle slung over the back, and fifty rounds of ammunition in our belts, plus food, water, and cooking gear, but severe rain and hailstorms and the great distances between points of resupply have often forced us to travel on extremely short rations. The mountains require “walking” the bicycle up the slope and a cautious, serpentine descent to avoid loss of control. Where wagon roads do not exist we follow the railroad — our machine is not designed for progress on stone ballast or cross ties, and Lt. Moss imagines a special attachment enabling us to “ride the rails.” We camped one night on the Custer battle site, wild roses of various colors growing on the hills that witnessed that great slaughter. Most trying, as it turned out, were the sand hills of Nebraska, the roads unpaved, the temperatures well over 100 degrees each day, and water only available from railroad tanks erected at considerable distance from each other. Despite these deprivations, or perhaps because of them, I shall never forget this trip, particularly Sgt. Sanders’s fine tenor cutting through the hail that pelted our faces somewhere in the Great Plains to lead us in a heartfelt chorus of The Girl I Left Behind Me or Marching Through Georgia (humorously replacing “darkies” with “crackers” in the second verse of the latter) or the thousands, yes, thousands of spectators here in St. Louis, black and white, who cheered our drills and demonstrations upon our arrival yesterday at the Cottage in Forrest Park.

Father, I have seen (and cycled across) the Mississippi River. It is not a disappointment.

There is some talk that we will be returned to Ft. Missoula by rail — whether prompted by recent events in Cuba (or, perhaps, China) or merely that we have made our point to the Dept. of War, I do not know. The people we speak with throughout the country are “spoiling for a fight,” especially the youth, and it seems not to matter who the opponent shall be. Our near neighbors at the Fort, the Salish (popularly termed Flatheads, though their heads are not flat at all), have never developed a taste for the warpath, due either to a congenitally pacific nature or the ministration of the Jesuit worthies in their midst. Their chief, one Charlo, seems if not content at least resigned to their recent removal from the Valley to a reservation farther north, and our Missoula post remains an “open fort” without walls to block our sight of the magnificent vistas nor to shelter us from the punishing winter winds. (I do hope that October affords us the opportunity of battle in sunnier climes.) The tales Sgt. Sanders relates of our regiment’s role during the labor troubles haunting the Northern Pacific in Coeur d’Alene and other locales sound more like police work than “Injun fighting,” and at times I worry I have chosen the wrong unit in which to prove myself. But a soldier’s lot is to keep himself prepared for hazardous duty at all times, and to accept that he has no say in how his services will be employed.

A humbling lesson for Yrs. Truly.

(But if the next war is to be fought on bicycles, the 25th shall be in the van.)

Please share this offering with Mother and Jessie, and let them know they are ever in my thoughts. Do inform me of the latest concerning the “politicking” at home. The other fellows are much entertained by accounts of our little struggles there.

With respect from your wandering son,

Private Aaron Lunceford, Jr.

Junior kneels, as if praying, facing an orderly row of bicycles, and the unit’s rifles stacked in pyramids — polished, oiled, unloaded. The celebration continues, a band playing a patriotic air, but it is very far away.

The screw is supposed to sever your spine at the base of the neck before you are choked by the collar.

Of course no one has ever survived to report whether this is true, and the official document lists judicial asphyxiation as the cause of death. Maybe the man who turns the crossbar, the executioner, knows, standing just behind the condemned — maybe he can hear a crack of bone, perhaps sense the moment when the desperate message from the brain is cut short, sense the sudden slackening of convulsing limbs.

Diosdado files onto the balcony that overlooks the courtyard of the Cuartel de España with the others — two militares, a choleric haciendero over from Mindoro, Benítez the defense lawyer from the Ministry of Justice, and Padre Peregrino. There is another fraile waiting in the courtyard below, a round, red-nosed Franciscan, knotted rope taut around his stomach, waiting to deliver the sacrament. Diosdado moves to the extreme left, with the box, hidden under his coat, pressed against the balcony rail. He is sweating as much from nerves as from the heat. When the Committee asked him to do this he agreed at once — he has been among the witnesses before, his political sympathies not yet known to the authorities, and he was able to ask to be invited without arousing suspicion. It was only some hours later, after they had given him the box and made sure he knew how to operate it, that the consequences fully dawned upon him. Once the photograph is copied and distributed there will be no doubt as to who has taken it, and his enviable life in Manila will be ended forever, or at least until a better day.

Men must have felt the same way in ’96, when Bonifacio told the crowd to rip their cédulas to pieces. With this act, thinks Diosdado, I not only tear free from Spain, but destroy my own identity. The Committee has given him a new, forged cédula personal that displays his face with a different name, and have promised to wait till he wires from Hongkong, safe with the other exiliados, before they spread copies of the photograph across the country.

“For murderers and thieves we admit the public,” says the Comandante to his visitors as they settle in, “but with the políticos, these days, a bit of discretion must be observed. No use stirring everybody up for nothing.”

“An occasional blood-letting does a body good.” The general is a tall, pox-scarred man with an impressive moustache. “Blood that is never spilled can only fester, eh Padre?”

Padre Peregrino frowns. “I have never cared for the public ones,” he says. “A dying man should be alone with his God.”

“If he has one,” grumbles the haciendero.

“If he accepts his Lord,” corrects the padre. “Believers or not, we are all his children.”

“I could do without all the moro-moro.” The haciendero is wearing a coat that looks fresh from the tailor, paid for that very morning. He points at the device below with a silver-tipped cane. “Making a solemn ceremony of it, proclamations, witnesses — it lends them a dignity they don’t deserve.”

“You’d shoot them in the streets like dogs,” smiles the Comandante.

“And perhaps leave them lying there a few days, as a lesson to the others.”

“We must have law.”

“Of course,” snorts the haciendero. “That’s the point of it. Make it against the law to move the body from where it lies for a week.”

“And what do you think, young man?” the Jesuit asks.

They are all looking at him. Diosdado has angled his body slightly, better to hide the box when it has to come out, and turns only his head to answer.

“I think we have to balance what is instructive,” he says, “with what is sanitary.”

The men laugh.

The condenado is led out from the holding cell then, and Diosdado is spared their attention. This one has shoes.

The one whose execution he witnessed two years ago had been barefoot, just another young Juan Tamad from Bayombong who had been swept up by the movement, joined the Katipuneros, been captured and then chosen to be executed as an example here in Manila. He was a long-legged boy who before they put the saco over his head had worn a tentative expression, looking around as if afraid to betray his ignorance of protocol in the presence of his betters. When the moment came his toes had splayed apart, had curled and clutched like fingers, had clawed a frenetic design into the dust at the foot of the stool.

This one has shoes. Cheap ones, scuffed and lusterless from the weeks of his incarceration, but shoes nonetheless. He is a gambler, the Committee told Diosdado, an indio with more audacity than sense who wandered down from the north to match wits with the Chinese, as if anyone can equal them at the dice. Not a patriot at all, really, till he was destitute and willing to risk his life itself for a palmful of gold. Valdevía, operating under a false name, hired him to post the edict throughout Binondo, an exploit requiring stealth and speed but no great intellect. The boy he brought along to carry water and paste managed to escape, though shots were fired. But this one — his name is Magapuna, Fecundo Magapuna — possessed no more luck at subversion than at cards.

He has been interrogated, no doubt, and no doubt tortured when his ignorance of the authors of the edict, of the call for resistance, struck his captors as dissimulation. And when the authorities were satisfied that he knew nothing, or were perhaps merely impatient to get on with it, the brief trial and sentencing had taken place. The Committee, of course, did not provide an advocate, and hapless Fecundo was represented by Benítez here, the aptly nicknamed “butcher’s assistant” who has never missed the garroting of one of his clients. He leans over the balcony railing now, eyes bright with excitement.

They’ve chained the condemned man’s ankles very close together, and as he is led, no, pushed toward the device, he shuffles with short hopping steps like a chino carrying one end of a pallet on Rosario Street. With him are the capitán encargado and two soldiers, and, walking with measured dignity some paces behind them, the stocky executioner.

“This one looks like a pimp,” says the haciendero.

The condemned man has longish black hair, oiled and combed straight back from a broad forehead. His mouth is twisted in a bilious sneer, as if his last meal has left him disgusted. One of the soldiers turns him by the shoulders and guides him onto the stool as the other stands by with rifle at port-arms. The condemned man, Magapuna, does not resist as the soldier pushes him back flat against the board and fastens the collar. They are on the little raised platform that makes it easier for the public to follow the ceremony, when the public is allowed, and there is noise from the street beyond the wall. The wheels of a calesa that need to be oiled, horse hooves on hard dirt, vendors selling mangos and lanzones. Within the cuartel, ringed with barracks and stables built around the remnants of the old Colegio de San Ignacio, only a few off-duty cazadores glance out at the preparations, then drift back inside to their card games. Dr. Rizal was tried in here, away from plebian support and a stone’s throw from the killing ground. Diosdado eases the box out from under his coat and rests it on the balcony railing, hidden from the others by his body.

“We had one try to break free,” says the Comandante, still smiling. “The spectators got quite a show that day. As if there was anywhere for him to go. As if those extra few minutes, running like a chicken before the slaughter, falling over his chain into the dirt and having to be carried back, were worth the bother.”

“Every moment is precious to a dying man.” The Jesuit is smiling as well, as if he is encouraging a joke in progress.

“Was he making a speech?” asks the haciendero. “No matter how ignorant they are, no matter how little of any interest they have to say, put the irons on them and they all become orators.”

“He kept shouting ‘I don’t want to sit down!’ ” says Benítez.

They laugh again, all but Diosdado, who uses the noise to mask the click of the shutter. The laughter draws a sharp look from the capitán encargado below.

“Decorum necesita est,” says Padre Peregrino softly, and the men bring their faces to order. Before Diosdado moved on to Santo Tomás, Padre Peregrino was his mentor at the Ateneo, teaching Classics and History. He is a stirring lecturer, passionate about the struggle for Christianity and the martyrs it has produced. His favorite is Saint Perfectus, who was decapitated and hung upside-down for display by the moros when they ruled Córdoba.

“He raised his chin to the sword,” the padre will say, tears gathering in his eyes, “and cried ‘I come to You, my Lord!’ ”

Diosdado did not tell the padre he had been a witness before when he requested the invitation. “I’ve been thinking more about the nature of death,” he said, trying to sound more philosophical than pious, because the padre knows him well. “I need to look it in the eye.”

“Or at the least peer over its shoulder,” the Jesuit replied. Peregrino is the most liberal of the masters at the Ateneo and a fountain of enlightenment compared to any of the Dominicans at Santo Tomás, encouraging the young ilustrados to visit Madrid. “So you’ll have something interesting to confess,” he likes to say. He even admitted once that Dr. Rizal’s ideas had some merit, but that he had been criminally irresponsible in disseminating them to the rabble.

He is the best of the enemy, but the enemy nonetheless.

The hood is slipped on, just a white linen sack really, and the portly Franciscan leans close, the scapular hanging out from the rolls of his neck, to intone in the condemned man’s ear.

Diosdado’s fingers are wet against the leather of the box as he steadies it, winding surreptitiously to the next exposure. The platform and device are far enough away to guarantee they will be in the photograph even if they are not centered perfectly. There are cameras for sale in Madrid with a viewing sight on the top, but this one, an Eastman Bullet, is what the Committee had at hand. Scipio was very thorough, very scientific, pacing off the distance measured and assuring that the focus would be sharp. A new cartridge was inserted. It would be best, Scipio told him, if the condemned man’s face is recognizable in the first photograph, best to treat the public to human features, a man with eyes, ears, mouth like their own, rather than just an anonymous form, choking in a sack.

“If we cannot have a Christ,” Scipio told Diosdado and the Committee, that tiny pucker of self-love denting his cheeks as his voice rose poetically, “then give us Barabbas. If we cannot have another José Rizal—” and here he indicated the leather-bound cube in Diosdado’s hands, the “instrument of emancipation” as he liked to call it, “—then give us Fecundo Magapuna.”

“Qué fragancia,” mutters the general.

The condemned man’s bowels discharge the moment the executioner’s footsteps ring out on the platform behind him. The Franciscan is several feet away now, lips moving rapidly, Bible opened close under his riotous nose, the soldiers standing at attention on either side of the device, eyes forward, feigning no reaction to the puddle forming between the condemned man’s feet. It is a sharp smell that reaches them in the balcony, feces and urine intermingled, and the man’s body is trembling now, trembling all over as a dog not trained for hunting will tremble at the blast of a shotgun or a crack of thunder. The links of the chain binding his wrists rattle softly and the capitán looks to the executioner and says “Ahora.”

Diosdado forgets to cough as he triggers the shutter and it sounds like a cannon-shot to him but not one of his companions looks over, watching intently, their arms resting on the balcony rail, leaning forward toward the moment.

The verdugo has thick, muscular arms, as one would expect, though the task is not a particularly strenuous one. Padre Junípero explained the principle of Mechanical Advantage in class for them, enumerating the use of simple machines in everyday life — the lever, the pulley, the screw. This device is a classic variation on the Spanish Windlass. A combination of the lever and the screw, tightening the collar around the condemned man’s neck, the cloth of the sack huffing in and out now as he fights for breath, the executioner’s face fixed in concentration like any good craftsman at his work. The verdugos are always condemned men themselves, murderers, who have agreed to do the government’s killing in exchange for a pardon and sixteen pesos per neck.

“Watch him dance,” says the haciendero, louder now that the ceremony has entered its active phase.

And dance he does, Fecundo Magapuna, the cheap shoes stomping and scraping, digging in at the heel then kicking out as far as the shackles will allow, twisting at impossible angles till one works its way off the man’s foot entirely, lying still on the platform while Diosdado snaps and winds, no worry now of the others hearing, caught up as they are in the buckings and writhings of the man’s torso, body thrashing like a panicked goose clutched at the neck and the verdugo turning the crossbar slowly, stolidly, a man adjusting a valve. The condemned man’s legs might come out a blur, thinks Diosdado, but the executioner will be still in the photograph, and the capitán and his two soldiers and the praying Franciscan and even the shrouded head of the condemned Magapuna, cocked at an unnatural angle and cinched to the board by the tightening collar, all frozen together in tableau.

There is an audible crack! of the star-nosed bit through the condemned man’s vertebra as Diosdado triggers the shutter. The Franciscan raises his voice in supplication, Padre Peregrino softly speaking the Latin words in tandem with him, savoring their weighty euphony, and Diosdado secures the camera under his coat while another man, a doctor, is brought out to verify the act. The executioner, secure of his handiwork, steps down. The doctor lifts the hood from the man’s face, places a small mirror under his nose. Blood spreads downward from the nostrils, staining the man’s lip and chin, pooling in the cleft of his neck. The doctor removes the mirror, says something to the capitán, then steps quickly out of the sun-baked courtyard. Benítez the lawyer notes the exact time. Diosdado can hear but not see the buzzing flies around the soaked earth at the man’s feet. The foot without the shoe on it is clad in a dark blue stocking, three toes protruding obscenely through a hole in its tip.

“I suppose if the verdugo kept on turning,” says the haciendero, “the head would pop right off.”

Carnaval was invented by spies. There is no other explanation — an entire week when one is allowed, no, expected, to traverse the city behind a mask, one among thousands of dizfrazados, black and white, rich and poor, attending gilded balls or singing in processions or just noisily decorating the streets of La Habana. The gaslights are on now, the breeze blowing ever so slightly out into the Harbor as Quiroga strolls along the Malecón. It is a calm night, waves caressing rather than assaulting the sea wall, and the few lights left burning on the big ships anchored not so far away rise and fall in a gentle rhythm. Quiroga wears a simple domino and his dress suit, only a lector de fábrica down from Florida for the holiday. Nobody to worry about. There is tension, yes, and he heard footsteps behind when he left the hotel this morning, but with so much life on the street, so many crowds to lose himself in, Quiroga is certain that his sombra has been lost as well.

Individuals have disappeared mysteriously, especially here in the capital, and the arrival of the American armed cruiser has set the always fertile Cuban imagination afire. Quiroga would not ordinarily be needed, parties often transported to and from the island without involving the “sleeping patriots” up in Ybor, but this extraction is more sensitive than the norm. Ambassador de Lôme’s missive to Don José Canelejas of El Heraldo de Madrid, in which he describes the American president in decidedly undiplomatic terms, has somehow fallen into the eager hands of the New York Journal. Unsurprisingly, those worthies have published a copy of the original alongside a translation, and the yellow press are tumescent with outrage to see their leader portrayed as “weak, catering to the rabble — a low politician who desires to leave a door open to himself and to stand well with the jingoes of his party.” It is not an inaccurate assessment, mild compared to statements made daily by members of the Cuban Junta in New York or Tampa or even by American interventionists in the editorial pages of the self-same Journal. But de Lôme is not a wild-eyed revolutionist or ink-slathered provocateur — he is meant to be the benign, conciliatory face of the Spanish Crown in the United States. Very few persons must be in the position to intercept or purloin the Ambassador’s writings, and that nervy fellow, Quiroga assumes, is who he is meant to smuggle out of La Habana.

He pauses by the wall to light a puro, cheaper here by a few pennies but considered superior to the product manufactured in Ybor. He is no judge, though, the cigar only part of his contact signal and perhaps the poorest element in the elaborate construct that has been explained to him. Any Spaniard trained in espionage, he believes, will be instantly aware that Quiroga is not a smoker and have his suspicions aroused. Quiroga takes enough of a puff to keep the thing burning, then turns his face out to the placid sea.

There is a sudden thickening of the air, felt more than breathed.

The drums.

A comparsa, a twisting, writhing creature of more than a hundred chanting negros, winding down Calzada de Infante toward the Malecón to the racket of a dozen men flailing with their bare hands on what they call a conga or tres golpes—elongated, barrel-staved drums hung from the shoulder of the player with their bullskin heads just above the man’s hip. Barefoot urchins without masks run alongside the aggregation, some dancing wildly to the noise, others leaping and screaming whenever the spirit enters them. Authorities have banned such displays at times, even on the Día de los Reyes, fearing, in the not-so-distant epoch of slavery, that the cabildos might use the anonymity afforded by the occasion to perpetrate atrocities upon their masters. But with Emancipation the African societies have lost much of their power, and the Spanish understand that repressing Carnaval will engender more mayhem than it will prevent.

As they approach and are illuminated by the gas lamps Quiroga recognizes the celebrants as the Abakuá, dancers wearing their colorful, horned diablito masks, legs and arms fringed with thick rings of grass and palm fronds, whirling and leaping and shaking their torsos and limbs as if driven epileptic by the music. The secret heart of Cuba, he thinks, beating to an African pulse. Their sound envelops him before their bodies surround him, the hammering of the congueros complex yet insistent, and yes, he thinks, this is the force that drove the great Maceo and his mambís into battle. This is the very life-blood of revolt.

Quiroga stands with an unsmoked puro in his hand and the Havana moon peeking through the clouds over the Harbor and smiles as the masked tribesmen gyrate, circling, within inches of him. He feels honored rather than mocked. His exile is a voluntary one, merely an economic decision, but an exile nonetheless. Every canción he hears in Tampa is a song of longing.

The comparsa continues riotously down the Malecón, but one diablito stays behind. The mask is Abakuá, but the man wearing it is not even a negro, a man in a white sack suit and mesh-topped spectator shoes. He waits for the thunder of the drums to recede somewhat before he speaks through the mouth-slit cut in the elongated, red-and-black máscara.

“These clouds,” he says, looking out over the vessels, great and small, that bob in the vast Harbor, “portend a storm from the North.”

Quiroga has always disliked the passwords, the codes and secret handshakes, smacking of boys at play, and contends that they are as likely to entrap one as to mollify fellow conspirators. But it is a formality that must be honored.

“We could do with a stiff wind,” he says, “to clear the air.”

They stand side-by-side, looking out over the water. Quiroga thinks he may recognize the voice behind the mask.

“You have the documents?”

“Not on my person,” Quiroga answers, annoyed. “I have been at this since Martí was in Guatemala. I am not feckless.”

“I was not inferring that. I merely—”

And then the night erupts before them.

Quiroga’s puro flies out of his hand and his hat is blown off his head in the initial glass-breaking bang and flash, the concussion thumping him in the chest like the kick of a mule and then a more brilliant display in the sky and at the waterline, each blinding airburst accompanied by a ground-shaking explosion, vessels in the harbor illuminated for a moment so brief that the images are like separate photographs — immense, lucent, terrible. It is the American battleship that is ablaze, the first third of it seemingly gone and the rest tilting into the sea as huge, twisted shards of debris plummet sizzling into the water around it. Between the pop and whine of ammunition set off by the fire he can hear the cries of burning men.

Quiroga smells sulfur.

The man beside him has pulled his mask back to see more clearly — as he suspected it is Camilo Gotay, who taught natural sciences at the University until his sympathies became too well known. Each new volley of detonation splashes red light upon him, eyes glowing, his pox-scarred face more devilish without the mask than when hidden behind it.

“They can’t be this stupid,” says Quiroga, his mind racing to find an explanation as sirens scream all over the city. The presence of the American gunship has been an insult, yes, and the Spaniards are stupid in their arrogance, but this slaughter, if a deliberate provocation—

“Not even Weyler at his most obdurate—”

“And it can’t be us,” adds Gotay, though with a note of uncertainty. “I would have been informed.”

Men are rushing toward the pier, on foot and in carriages, lanterns lit, boats starting away toward the ship which is quickly settling on the seabed with the tops of its remaining stacks jutting above the waterline. The running lights have been lit on every other vessel in the Harbor.

“This will be good for us,” says the professor, tears in his eyes, “won’t it?”

Bells are ringing on the Alfonso XII now, Spanish sailors rushing to lower their boats and rescue those who have not already perished. There is another airburst, one of the larger shells exploding, and in the quick-fading light Quiroga sees men swimming away from the burning wreck, dozens of tiny bumps on the rolling surface of the water. Cocoanuts, he thinks. At this distance they could be cocoanuts floating with the tide. A pair of guardia rush past them on the way to the dock.

De Lôme’s letter is nothing now. A hundred thousand Cubans may die, tortured, hanged, shot, starved to death as reconcentrados, but give us one apple-cheeked Sailor Jack, one blue-eyed American martyr for the yellow press to canonize — yet how can this chaos, this Hell on the water, be good for anyone?

Quiroga smells sulfur, sulfur and hot metal.

“I see the hand of God,” he says, turning his back on the sea wall, on the burning ship, on the desperate swimmers. “But we will blame it on the Spanish.”

The art of it lies in what first strikes the eye, and what that in turn stimulates in the mind of the reader. A screaming head is just that — information shouted across the track at a railroad station as the train is pulling out, steam blasting, whistle shrieking, with only the most vital, most incendiary of the words understood—

USS MAINE EXPLOSION CAUSED BY

BOMB OR TORPEDO?

If you bother to haul out the brass type it had better cause a sensation—

SPAIN’S WAR

A crowd of men have gathered in front of the Mondamin, listening to Jeff Smith up on a barrel of nails. Hod sees Smokey standing a few feet back from the throng, nervous.

“Our boys asleep,” says Smith. “Defenseless. Then the furtive approach, the infernal device installed at water level, the fuse ignited—”

“What happened?” Hod whispers.

“Seattle papers come in,” says Smokey. “This is bad.”

“Then the dormant city shaken by a terrible explosion!” Jeff Smith has his hat over his heart now, a tear in his voice. “Our brave lads blown to smithereens. Dismembered. Horribly burned. Drowned in the unforgiving waters.”

“They gone blame this on me,” mutters Smokey, shaking his head.

“Bodies float to the surface.” Smith is using his soap-selling voice, dark eyes burning with indignation. “The malefactors feign innocence.”

Hod is confused. “What do you have to do with it?”

Smokey looks around at the red-faced men, steam rising from their mouths and noses, jaws clenched in anger. “Cause I’m the closest thing they got to a Spaniard in this camp.”

“But will Americans countenance this treachery?” Jeff Smith raising a fist in the air. “Will we quail and run? Will we falter before the swarthy Dago assassin?” The men shout No! to each tremulous query. Smith spreads his arms wide and smiles. “I knew it in my heart. Our country needs us, gentlemen. I have wired the Territory requesting commission. Any red-blooded American among you—” and here he points with his hat toward a tent that has been set up in the middle of the street at Broadway and Seventh, “—may strike a blow for liberty by signing on with the Skaguay Guards! God bless America!”

There is cheering and fist-waving and then the band from the Garden of Joy steps out to play The Stars and Stripes and most of the crowd, townsmen and busted stampeders alike, hurries to enlist, loudly describing the beating the wicked Spaniards are about to suffer. Jeff Smith hops down and crosses to Hod and Smokey.

“Most of them are hoping Uncle Sam will provide free passage back to the Outside,” he winks. “Let’s see how bold that reform outfit been nippin at my heels is when I’ve got my own army.”

“We gone to war?” Hod hasn’t looked at a newspaper since he’s been in the Yukon. It all seems very far away.

“We will, son, soon enough.” He claps Hod on the shoulder. “I’ll expect you to join the roll, of course. Sergeant McGinty.”

A long line has formed in front of the tent, getting longer every moment.

“I suppose I ought to.”

“That’s the spirit!” Jeff Smith’s eyes are glowing. He hasn’t changed from last night’s poker game, cigar ash on his pants, whiskey on his breath, the butt of his Navy Colt jutting out from the open front of his otterskin coat. “But first you two must bring me an eagle,” he says, and steps back inside the hotel.

“Eagles been gone for months,” says Hod.

Smokey is already on the move. “I know who find us some.”

In the drawing there are a half-dozen young men standing aimlessly, many with their hands in their pockets, as if in line for a free lunch. They are placed, however, on a ramp leading into the maw of a huge iron pot atop a roaring fire.

The pot is labeled CUBA.

A leather-aproned Hephaestus-as-blacksmith grins down into the brew, steam curling around his large, boyish face — unmistakably a caricature of the Chief — as he pumps a large hand-bellows to excite the flames. A chute extends from the base of the pot, and marching out on it is a neat row of identical, uniformed soldiers with rifles on their shoulders.

THE CRUCIBLE OF WAR

— reads the caption, and the Cartoonist is hard-pressed to say whether the whole effect is critical or laudatory. The soldiers look manly and forthright, a vast improvement over the loafers they had once been, and the Chief might seem either demonic or merely industrious. Since an equal number of men are seen leaving as are seen entering the crucible, there is no indication that any have been lost within it. The word is that the Chief pinned this one on the wall of his office and called the Herald to compliment them on the likeness.

The other drawing portrays him as an old geezer, bent double with age and supporting himself on a crutch labeled WAR WITH SPAIN. A Latin-looking nurse wields an oversized hypodermic, injecting JINGO JUICEinto his buttocks while Joe Pulitzer, hands on hips, observes disapprovingly.

GOOD FOR THE CIRCULATION

If anything will improve circulation it is the nurse, one of Templeton’s specialties, her dress much more form-fitting than would be allowed on a white woman. Pulitzer’s World has always been merciless to the Chief, of course, accusing him of having manufactured the Evangelina Cisneros affair and of scuttling any hope of diplomatic solution in Cuba. But Old Jewseph has jumped on the war wagon so wholeheartedly himself that this can only be viewed as a purely personal attack.

So once again the Cartoonist is drawing the Eagle.

He has a knack for birds, better than any of the big salary boys, and the Chief knows it. The trick is to make them express themselves with their feathers. The Chief wants not only to rebuke the Spanish and his competitors, but to remind the readers that we need a good scrap, that this won’t be American against American, no — if certain people would just get out of the way we could step out and take our place among the Great Powers.

The Eagle, spear and arrows clutched in its talons, strains its wings as it attempts to soar skyward despite the chain around one leg, with Pulitzer and Senator Hanna and a couple of the other naysayers hauling back on it, heels dragging the ground as the mighty raptor threatens to lift them all away. His Pulitzer needs some work, a decent enough likeness but not sufficiently craven. The Eagle’s feathers, if you had to put it into words, are proud but angry. Uncle is there already, speaking to his companion yet to be drawn, President McKinley.

SHE’LL FLY IF YOU LET HER

— Sam is saying. The Chief wants the President to be uncertain but dignified. He also wants to try a small boy, an onlooker, off to one side and very much upset by the spectacle, labeled OUR FUTURE WARRIOR or something similar. The terrible effect of peace-mongering on tender minds. The Eagle is looking with furious concentration at a trio of distant islands, Cuba, Porto Rico, and Guam, each with a palm tree and a Spanish flag sticking up from them. Adding China, though in tune with the ambition of the picture, might be confusing.

And maybe Sam should have a rifle.

Hod rides the Utopia back to Seattle with the other beaten men. They are a sorry-looking collection, frostbit sourdoughs with empty eyes and greenhorns fleeced before they even got to the fields, a few who probably made a small pile and blew it in town and can’t face another winter freezing their lungs and hacking the ground. The fog, constant up on deck, is a relief. Men appear in it, flick a glance at the state of Hod’s face, then turn away without meeting his eye. There is no brotherhood on this ship, each defeated stampeder minding his own troubles.

Hod has been down before, but never this alone. He misses the Army.

If the coolies are curious about Diosdado they don’t show it. There are four of them who have bribed their way on board, squatting around the light of an oil lamp in a tiny clearing in the hanging forest of bananas in the hold, rolling dice on a jute sack and sing-songing in a Cantonese dialect it is nearly impossible for him to make out. Something about what they’ll do when back in their villages, what big men they’ll be. Diosdado is relieved to note the amounts they are gaming for are small, none of them likely to lose too much of their hard-earned contract pay on the quick voyage home.

The freighter rolls heavily, and Diosdado feels, for the hundredth time on this trip, as if he will be violently ill.

The hold smells of coal dust, ripening bananas, and, he imagines, his own foul stench. Somehow the photographs of the execution appeared in Manila sooner than Scipio had promised and Diosdado was forced to spend a night and a day on the river hiding beneath a pile of zacate on a stinking lancha till he was finally transferred, stuffed into a packing crate, to the hold of the banana boat. It was dark, of course, and surprisingly cold, and though his muscles cramped and his imagination grew morbid and he wet himself more than once, he obeyed his instructions not to try to break his way out of the crate. Hours in the close air of the wooden tomb before the jolt of the engine as they got under way and then, seemingly, more long hours of sickening pitch and roll.

“Just in time,” said the captain, holding his nose when the lid was pried off. “This one’s already ripe.”

Diosdado sits on his damp, half-filled sack of belongings on the floor of the hold, swallowing constantly to try to control his stomach, which seems to be climbing up into his gorge. The huge stems of pale-green bananas tied to the overhead rails swing in unison with each roll of the freighter. He shuts his eyes tightly and tries to imagine something else, something not pitching or rolling, something planted in the unmoving earth.

If Uncle Wicklow got any second thoughts about being a colored man’s colored man, he keeps quiet about it. He’s worked for Dr. Lunceford since Royal can remember, driving, keeping Boots fed and stabled, keeping the yard up, hauling coal and ice and doing all the other chores most folks got to do on their own. Not that Royal takes anything away from the doctor.

“Man like Dr. Lunceford,” his mother is fond of saying, “provide a aspiration for you young ones.”

Wick is wiping clean the dash on a new carriage when Royal steps in. It is a moment before recognition creases his face in a smile.

“Look at you.”

“Wick. How you coming, old man?”

“Look at you.”

There was a crowd at the station, almost all colored, when the troop train pulled in, cheering and waving flags while brass instruments thumped out a welcome, little boys dancing alongside him for blocks calling him Mr. Soldier Man and wanting to touch his uniform.

“They’re carrying us down to Georgia,” says Royal. “Got a few hours to stretch our legs.”

“So Mr. Lunceford Junior be coming by?”

Royal feels a tiny pang at the old man’s excitement. Wick is his uncle, not Junior’s.

“He’ll come by shortly.”

“You been to your mama?”

“That comes next. I got business here.”

Wick shakes his head. “You can shinny up the tree, boy, but you aint getting no peach.”

“How is she?”

Wick turns back to his work. “Bout like you’d expect. A fine young lady.”

If it was somebody else’s daughter the old man would be winking and nudging, calling back on his own adventures to offer a plan of action. But this is his livelihood, and there is a part of him that cringes every time Royal steps into the Luncefords’ parlor.

Royal makes a show of inspecting the carriage.

“This is a new one.”

The old man’s face brightens. “Two-seater Park Phaeton, all the way from Massachusetts.” He steps back to indicate the features. “Cut under to the reach, folding top for rain, and the springs — nephew, you roll on these springs you aint riding, you floatin. I seen Dr. Lunceford fall right to sleep on that seat beside me, coming home from a long day of visitations. Sleep through shell road, cobblestones, pot-holes, you name it.”

“It’s smooth.”

“Like a dream on water. Look here—” Wick runs his hand over the black leather of the front seat. “You ever seen polstry like this? That pattern there, that’s diamond-tucked and button-tufted is what that is. That is quality. Wherever I stop, these other old boys that’s driving, don’t matter for what kind of white people, they got to shut up and wonder. You know Preston McNary, what they call Pinkeye?”

“Ned McNary’s daddy.”

“That’s the one. He’s in livery for Judge Manigault, got more airs than a peacock got feathers, and even he got to say ‘Wicklow, that is a fine piece of craftmanship you settin on. A fine piece.’ ”

Before Royal left the Doctor had an old physician’s coupe, beautifully kept by Uncle Wick but a little secondhand box-on-wheels nonetheless. Royal’s stomach tightens as he studies the coach. He is climbing, the uniform is emblem of that, but maybe the Luncefords are climbing even faster.

“Now if I was a sporting man,” Wick goes on, always one to rhapsodize about his rides, “and Boots was still in his prime, I could make me some pocket silver racing against them young bloods as gets together Saturdays at the river run to match their wagons. Phaeton is built for comfort,” he says, patting a fender, “but that don’t mean she won’t fly.”

Another soldier steps into the carriage house.

“Uncle Wick.”

Junior calls him Uncle too, but in the manner of the white people. It is supposed to be affection, maybe even respect, but it always grates on Royal.

“Mr. Lunceford Junior!” Wick makes a show of wiping his hands clean on the chamois cloth before shaking Junior’s hand. “All turned out in blue! What is it now — Lieutenant? Major?”

Junior smiles. “Just a private, like Roy here.”

“We don’t go past sergeant in the regulars,” says Royal. “Commissioned officers are all white men.”

“But that will change soon enough.” Junior has submitted letters to editors, has solicited the aid of congressmen, has made it abundantly clear he is a New Negro seeking his proper place in the Army’s hierarchy. He is not the easiest friend to have in the barracks.

“Mrs. Lunceford gonna throw a fit. You didn’t write you was coming.”

“Sudden orders,” says Junior. “We’re moving faster than the mail.”

“I heard there was colored troops passing through, but they never said no regiment numbers.”

“You’re looking well, Uncle.” Junior gives the old man a small pat on the arm, ready to move on. He turns to give Royal a once-over.

“Are you prepared for battle, Private?”

Royal does not feel ready, but there is no telling where the Army will take him next and it is only by chance they’ve stopped in Wilmington on the way.

He tries to avoid Uncle Wicklow’s eyes. “I won’t say very much.”

Junior smiles. He wears his confidence like he wears his clothes, even in Montana with the sergeants chewing you out on the training grounds. There are men in the ranks maybe got more smarts than Junior Lunceford, but none of them carry themselves so high, so sure. If colored officers ever do come in, thinks Royal, Junior be commissioned on the spot.

“Modesty would be prudent,” says Junior. “This is only to put a new image of you in their minds. Replace the shoeless boy and stripling dockworker of their memories with a very presentable military gentlemen.”

“And Jessie?”

It might be hopeless. “Aint no lack of colored women in this world,” his mother likes to say. “They no sense in sniffin after what you can’t have when they plenty at hand do you just fine.” His mother never runs out of sayings, most of them made to ward off disappointment. If she ever hoped for something good in life it is a secret to him.

Junior laughs and puts his hand on Royal’s shoulder. “My sister dwells in a romance novel,” he says. “She will swoon.”

Hod hacks at the chalky ground as tow-headed Mormon boys crawl beside him. Big Ten is over two rows, backing up as he stabs his shovel down, leaving a jagged rut behind. The older Mormon boys have long-handled hoes, crouching to block out plants from the tangled mat of sugar beet, making them into separate islands of green, while the smaller ones crawl after them, rags wound around their bony knees, chopping each cluster back till only the thickest stem remains. The air is dry heat and flies and fine dust coughing up from the mat like a rug beaten on a line and flies, always flies this time of year, worrying your eyes and nose, frantic in your ear as you hack baked soil into yet more dust. Sweat runs off Hod’s face, cutting salty rivulets down his mask of dust and crisping away in the dry oven heat before it can reach the thirsty ground. Other young men, Saints, scrape out irrigation rows off to the right, joking and calling out to each other, keeping a cautious distance from him and the big Indian. Big Ten wears a bowler mashed down on his head and barely sweats, chopping his shovel down as if killing snakes.

Hod’s ditch is uneven but the first run of water will smooth it out. Saints got just enough sense to plant their stand near the American Fork, he thinks, and have jiggered all kinds of canals and gates, reservoirs and tanks to bring it close. There is no water at the moment, though, the little boys charged with running buckets making a wide arc around Hod and Big Ten to serve their own people, Hod’s tongue a dusty hank of wool stuck to the roof of his mouth. His hands have blistered and cracked and blistered again, the gloves he bought in Reno worn through and tossed away two states ago, and there is sticky blood beneath his palms on the wood of the hoe.

“You been to Chicago?” asks Big Ten.

They’re not supposed to talk much, Indians, but this one never heard about it. In the barn at night Hod pretends to snore so he’ll shut the mouthworks down.

“Never got that far.”

“I tried it a few years back.”

“Find a job?”

Their blades fall into rhythm as they chop and shovel, Hod moving forward, Big Ten backing up.

“Oh, there’s plenty of work, you got a strong back and a weak mind.” He says he’s from Wisconsin, that he’s Ojibwe and Cree and at least half French. “Only it’s too jumbled-up there.”

If you don’t shift your hands on the shovel, just keep them clamped tight the same way, they won’t hurt so much.

“You ever been in these beets through a harvest campaign?”

Hod has bucked barley and wheat, has husked corn and dug potatoes, chopped and picked cotton, loaded melons and cut cane in Texas, even picked strawberries once. “Can’t say I have.”

“You turn the crop up, it’s a big fella—” the Indian works methodically, regular as a steam-hammer, “—slice the tops off for the sheep, knock away the dirt, and you got a nice fat sugar beet. Only sometimes it got the root-crazies. Then it isn’t just one taproot, it’s dozens of em, hundreds maybe, all twisted over and around each other. Make your stomach feel funny just to look at it.”

“I never seen that,” says Hod. “I come up, we had turnips, and they’d get the knot gall.”

Big Ten shakes his head as he chops. “Chicago they got so many different kind of people living all up against each other, over and under each other — if you know who you are when you get there you bound to forget it pretty damn soon.”

“A big city.”

“I kilt hogs there.” The shovel blade slams down and a chunk of crusted earth breaks free. “In the winter the steam come up from the blood when it’d blow out of em, then it froze hard on the ground. Hogs’d shit, scream, kick, and die. Haul that one away, there’s another thousand pressing down the chute to take its place. I come back nights, somebody look at me wrong, I just as well cut their throat too.”

There is no anger in the telling, the Indian fixed on the hard ground at his feet, chopping and digging.

“Believe I’ll give it a pass then,” says Hod.

Big Ten wears huge clodhopper brogan shoes with twine for laces and black pants and a black undertaker coat he never takes off even in the middle of the day with the old dusty bowler crammed down over his ears. He chops the shovel blade into the hard ground the Mormon boys have exposed with their thinning, twists and flicks the soil aside. Hod is slashing with a hoe, the heaviest he could find in the barn, and would be swinging a rock pike if they’d offered him one. He can’t recall how many days he’s been cutting this ground, can barely remember, in the heat and the dust and the constant flies, how he came to be here.

“Only thing a place like that is good for,” says Big Ten, “is if you got to disappear.”

Disappearing is not Hod’s problem. There is a little piece of mirror glass, a jagged triangle stuck in one of the stall posts in the barn that he can’t help but look at least once a day while it is light, and the thought is always the same.

Still here?

“You got a reason to make yourself scarce?” asks Hod. The Indian has hinted before that he is some kind of fugitive.

Big Ten lifts his chin at something behind him. “Garvey comin.”

Hod sneaks a look back and there is Elder Garvey wandering through the beet-vacation boys, pretending to be looking over their work. Never good when the boss man steps into a field.

Hod puts his head down, chops at the earth. The stand of plants stretches to the horizon, flat and dusty green. It’s best never to look at the work ahead, just punish the little bit of it lying at your feet.

“You two!”

Hod blows flies away from his ear and turns to face the farmer. “I’m just loosenin it up,” he says, defensively. “Then I come back through with the shovel and scoop it out.”

Elder Garvey looks off past him to the untamed crop. They look you in the eye to holler orders and argue pay, but when they look away—

“I got kin showed up,” he says.

Hod has to peel his hands off the shaft of the hoe.

“You want us to finish the day?” asks Big Ten. He is still chopping the blade of his shovel down, still backing up as he digs.

“Figured you’d want time to find something else.”

Meaning we’re let go, thinks Hod. Meaning off the property by nightfall.

Big Ten drops his shovel in the jagged trench he has dug and starts to walk away.

“If it wasn’t kin,” mutters Elder Garvey, looking off to the other side of Hod. He told them there was work all the way past the harvest campaign. Back then there was fruit to pick down by Provo, there were shovel jobs for the railroad, but he promised them that this would last through the winter. “Pay you for a half-day,” he adds.

Hod nods and steps around the old man, carrying the hoe on his shoulder. The nickel-a-day thinners don’t look up as he passes, fixed on their little patch of pain, and the older boys turn their heads away and keep blocking. He drops the tool and catches up with the big Indian.

Grasshoppers and beetles scatter in a frenzy on the ground before them, uncovered by the tow-headed boys, and a flock of lake gulls feast on the insects, rising and falling like a white blanket flapped by the wind.

“Make a white man feel like a nigger,” Big Ten grumbles when Hod catches up. Hod chooses not to point out he is the only white man been fired this day, and gingerly pulls his fingers straight.

When they reach the yard, Normal, Garvey’s oldest son, has a plow laid upside-down and is sharpening the coulter with a file. “I got your pay,” he says without looking up. “Gon’ pick up some lumber at the station later, I could run you in.”

Big Ten grunts and they step into the barn. There is a family spread out around the bunks along the wall, a hungry-looking bunch with hair bleached near white from the sun and blue eyes so clear that at first Hod thinks they’re blind. His little pile of things is already laid out on the floor on a blanket, right beside Big Ten’s.

“We had to get settled,” says the one who looks like the father, scrawny and unshaven. Some of the anti-Manifesto crowd most likely, the kind where you can’t tell if the middling-sized girls are daughters or wives. Near a dozen of them if you count the twins chasing the cat across the floor and the one nursing from his mama on the bottom bunk. “Say if there’s anything you’re missing.”

Big Ten pokes his pile with the toe of his shoe, then wraps the corners of the blanket around it to make a bundle.

“Sorry,” says the man.

“Aint none of your fault,” says Hod. Scabs back in Montana had this look, hollow-ribbed people with their bodies set tense, staring big-eyed past the militia boys protecting them. They can always find somebody hungrier to replace you.

“We come in just this morning from Tooele,” the man says, “and he told us to get settled then get on out there in the field. Sorry to touch your belongins.”

Norm has the wagon hitched when they come out with their bundles. They climb onto the bed.

“Met your cousins,” says Hod, arranging his bundle so he can sit on it.

“No relations of mine.” Norm switches and the bay mare starts ahead. Norm looks like his old man, thin and hard-mouthed, dry as the soil. “It’s just you can’t be feeding Gentiles when your own turn up needing work.”

“I aint a Gentile,” says Big Ten, stretching out to lay his head on his own bundle. “I’m a Ward of the State.”

The game is friendly till the ladies arrive. The 12th are regulars, at least, though Sergeant Jacks is convinced their moundsman is a ringer, snuck in from the Atlanta pro team after the officers made their wagers. He has a smoking fastball and a wicked, late-hooking curve that has the right-handed batters back on their heels and popping up. It has stayed tight only because the boys he’s picked for the outfield, especially Scott in center, cover their ground at a gallop and rifle the ball to the proper base when the white team makes a hit. Private Coleman, who they call Too Tall, has been adequate in the box, but is starting to tire from whipping fastball after fastball over the batters’ slab.

“Don’t you have a change-of-pace pitch, son?” Sergeant Jacks asks him when he trots forward from second after calling time-out.

“Course I do,” the veteran answers. “I rolls the ball to the catcher.”

“What I thought. How’s the arm?”

Too Tall spits tobacco and works his shoulder a few times, cocking his head as if listening to something inside the muscle. “Won’t be able to lift her tomorrow,” he says. “But now she’s fine.”

Jacks nods and moves back to his position. They are down four runs to two, a runner on third and a single out. A couple hundred of the 12th are gathered along the first-base line cheering their batter, a big, sunburned boy with a dent in his nose, while an equal contingent of the 25th urge Coleman on from the third-base side. Colonel Burt and his rival sit together with some other officers and the sheriff from Lytle and other dignitaries on a little set of bleachers that has been set up, sipping whiskey from tin mess cups and enjoying the contest like plantation lords, while the rest of the cracker civilians over from town are either clumped behind home pulling for the whites or scattered in the outfield, moving out of the way or becoming obstacles depending on which team’s ball is in play. It is dusty as ever but enough breeze to keep the flies from settling on you. Jacks tries to spit but can’t make enough water.

The batter, overswinging, fouls the first two pitches off, and as they are playing the old rule there is no count against him. Coleman has been throwing for seven innings now, putting the mustard on every pitch, and it’s clear the white boys aren’t afraid of him anymore.

“Come on, Pitch,” Jacks calls, adding his voice to the infield chatter. “Throw that pellet past him!”

Coleman delivers high and wide for a ball.

The 25th was the first unit to arrive at the Chickamauga camp, helping to clear new roads in the park, to dig the near-useless wells. Then the other regulars started coming and finally the state volunteers with their swagger and their suspicion and their amateur officers. There are too many men here and not enough for them to do and if something doesn’t change soon the flies are going to win the campaign. Combat will be no problem, combat keeps them occupied, but this — a hodgepodge of units waiting for orders, regulars and volunteers all mixed together under the pines, their sentries challenging each other for the pure spite of it, Lytle a hellhole for the colored troops and Chattanooga, if you’ve got the time to get there, not much better. Missoula was pie, the town used to them, friendly even, cheering them onto the trains and telling them to be sure and come back. But the reception has cooled with every mile farther south traveled and they are still only to the very top of Georgia. Short of combat, of course, a ball game is always the best way to let off some steam.

Even better if you win.

Too Tall bounces one off the plate for another ball.

“Bear down, big man, bear down!” calls Jacks, taking a step back into the shallow outfield. Let the run score, just get the out.

It is then that the ladies appear, a good dozen of them with pastel dresses and parasols, a lane parting among the white spectators, chatting with each other as they walk without a glance to the field, confident that play will be suspended till they are settled. Too Tall just looks at the ball in his hand, rolling it around as if counting the stitches in the cover, and most of the others break out of their crouches and kick at the uneven pasture, waiting. But Dade at first base, who is from Rhode Island of all places, puts his hands on his hips and stands gawking at them like an idiot.

The tin cups disappear and the officers jump up to be gallant, smoothing their moustaches and brushing off the boards so the ladies may be seated. From the corner of his eye Jacks can tell that these aren’t camp followers or sporting gals, but the cream of whatever Chattanooga claims for society. He checks the sky for rain.

The umpire, a second lieutenant from Headquarters staff with a whimsical sense of what qualifies as a strike, waits until the last parasol is positioned before starting again.

“Let’s play ball!” he calls out. “And mind your language.”

Coleman puts a strike past the batter then, grunting as he releases the ball, and Jacks can tell he’s hurt. It’s the first time the whole regiment has been together in years, and each company has voted two men to make up the squad, forgetting that pitching is half the game. His only left-hander, Gamble, is in the sick tent with dysentery and Ham Robinson mustered out a week before the Maine blew up. The next delivery is slow and wide but the 12th man swings anyway, dribbling it foul off the top of the bat. The ball rolls dead at the feet of one of the young ladies in the bleachers, the others twittering as she picks it up and holds it as if it may bite her. Before any of the officers can relieve her of it that fool of a yankee first baseman Dade steps right up and plucks it out of her hand. It gets too quiet then. He is a pretty boy, Dade, buff colored with reddish hair, and he smiles to show the blond girl his gold tooth, tips his cap, and trots back to the field.

Nothing happens right away, but Jacks can feel a change in the air, like it gets on the Gulf in Texas before a big blow, backs stiffening among the local crackers behind home, an edge to the cheering from the men of the 12th standing on the sideline. Too Tall throws again, wincing, and Jacks doesn’t like the sound when the batter lays into the ball. He turns, expecting the worst, but there is Scott backed up deep in center, the boy waiting, waiting, then charging a few steps forward to catch the ball and winging it in on the fly, Jacks letting it sizzle past him to skip off the front of the mound and continue to the catcher so quick the runner is four feet from home when he’s tagged. Double out, inning over.

The whole regiment lets out a Comanche whoop then, slapping the Carolina boy on the back when he comes in from the field, sharing out a sack of oranges somebody has foraged. Water at the camp is not much for drinking, boiled and allowed to settle it still tastes like mud, so even hot from the sun the orange soothes his throat.

“I took something off it,” says Too Tall. “I knowed he’s gonna pop up.”

The pop-up would have been out of reach in any fenced ballpark Jacks has played in, but he leads off the inning and can’t deal with the pitching now. He digs in at the plate, splits his grip on the bat for control, and watches the white boy’s legs. His fastball still has too much pop to do much with, but his curve is a lot slower and starting to break earlier. In his windup for the curve he twists his hip and swings his lead leg across his body, almost stiff at the knee, while he bends the knee and lifts it high for the straight pitch.

Jacks waits for a curve.

“Come on, Sarge!” calls Cooper, not playing but plenty active on the sideline. “I got some serious paper on the line!”

Laughter from the men then. There is no cash left in the camp, soldiers writing “checks” to each other in their card games and charging what little there is to buy at the colored canteen against next month’s pay. Jacks waits out two fast ones, a strike and a ball.

On the next throw the hurler keeps his lead leg stiff and Jacks steps back while he’s still in motion, waiting on the ball then slapping it hard between the shortstop and the third baseman.

“Atta go, Sarge! Runner on board!”

The pitcher has a good quick-throw to first and has almost caught them napping a couple times. Jacks hasn’t stolen a base in ten years and stays close to the bag while Curtis strikes out on a pitch in the dirt. Dell Spicer who married the Blackfoot gal back in Montana comes up then and swings late on the first pitch, slicing it just fair of the first-base boundary that has been laid down with lime. It gets lost in the spectators, who complicate things by trying to help, and Jacks ends up on third with Spicer standing up at second. The umpire makes them both move back a base, claiming interference. Jacks knows it will do no good but needs to make a show for the boys, calling time and stomping over to complain.

“If they hadn’t grabbed it, it would’ve rolled for a triple!”

The umpire is in military uniform. He taps his second lieutenant’s bar. “All decisions final.”

Jacks returns to second with the white side of the field catcalling after him. Horace Bell from B Company is up now, the swiftest of their runners but not much with the bat. Jacks sees the 12th infield playing back, and signals for a bunt.

“Good look now!” he calls, catching Bell’s eye and tugging twice on his cap. “Wait for your pitch.”

But the curve snaps in on his hands and hits the neck of the bat before he can pull it back, popping up easily to the catcher.

Jacks calls time again and has them wake up Sergeant Lumbley, who has been snoozing in the shade under the bench. Lum can’t run any more on account of the bullet he took in the knee during a scrap in Bozeman, but he can grit his teeth and march the boots off most of the boys. And with a hickory club in his hands, well—

The big sergeant steps up to the plate, a pattern of field grass dented into one side of his face, squinting sleepily and looking around the bases. He hasn’t been awake enough to know what stuff the pitcher has got, but with Lum it’s never mattered much.

“Strike this darky out!” hollers one of the locals and Lum turns to stare at him as the first pitch sails over for a strike. The crackers laugh.

Lum turns his sleepy gaze back to the pitcher then and knocks the next one over the left fielder’s head and it just rolls and rolls, rolls so far that two runs score and he is able to quick march all the way to third before they get the ball back in. Jacks sends a runner to take his place and Lum returns to the bench, rubbing his eyes.

“We ahead or behind?” he asks.

“Tied.”

“What inning?”

“Top of the eighth.”

“Damn.” He looks up at the sun. “This day done slip by me.”

Shavers bounces out and they take the field, Jacks walking out next to his pitcher.

“Can you do this?”

Too Tall spits tobacco. “I’ll keep it low.”

The first batter up for the 12th is a pinch-hitter too, a long-limbed drink of water who has been corked black wherever his skin shows out from the uniform. The crackers behind the catcher think this is a riot, and the boy coons it up, dragging the bat to the plate, dangling his loose limbs like rubber, turning to doff his cap, revealing a shock of yellow hair, and bow to the ladies who cover their mouths as they giggle.

“Send one to the moon, Rastus!” calls the sheriff through cupped hands.

“I sho’ly do mah best, sah!” he answers, bugging his eyes wide. He walks with his buttocks stuck out and arched high, and waggles them to great amusement as he settles in at the plate.

“Send me the sauce, Boss!” he calls to Coleman.

It is bad enough down here in this shithole Georgia not knowing if there’s going to be a war or not or if there is will they be allowed to go and wearing the damn woolen tunics in this heat while you drill and then what’s supposed to be your own people who you are fighting for treating you like dirt every time you wander off the reservation.

Jacks sees it coming.

Jacks sees it coming in the way Coleman holds his body. In the way he grips the ball, but he just stands at his position and says nothing.

Too Tall sends one upstairs and the blackface boy hits the dirt.

It is dead quiet for a long moment.

“Ball one!” calls the second lieutenant, and gives Jacks a look.

The crackers and a good number of the boys from the 12th are screaming as he walks to the mound this time, faces red, a few stepping across the lime onto the infield to make their threats. He hears nigger this and nigger that, something about when the sun goes down. The 12th are regulars, a good outfit, but the pastel ladies are here now and it changes everything. Both the colonels are standing up in the bleachers, looking concerned.

Jacks takes the ball from Too Tall. “You don’t really have nothin left, do you?”

“Spose not,” the pitcher says, turning to spit tobacco, face a mask as the crackers shout. “If I still had it, I’d of tore that boy’s head off.”

“You walk straight for the middle of our fellas over there, keep your eyes to yourself.”

“I can get these bastards out.”

“You done enough today, Trooper. Nice job.”

The private walks extra slow to the waiting wall of blue shirts, tucking his glove under his arm and seeming not to notice his life is being threatened by the mob on the other side. Jacks waves for Hooks to go in at center, and brings Scott in to take the mound. The word is that the Carolina boy can throw it some, and at this point he wishes Colonel Burt would step down and run the damn team like he did when they played the railroaders in Missoula.

“Get us through this inning alive,” Sergeant Jacks says to Scott as he hands the ball over, looking him hard in the eye. “You know what I mean.”

The boy, Royal is his name, gives him a big grin. “Sure thing, Sergeant.”

He takes his time getting ready, strolling over to say something to Corporal Ponder at third base and giving him his glove. Ponder trots to the bench, whispers something to the one they call Mudfish, and returns with a different one. The crowd, impatient, are shouting for action as Scott puts this one on. He winks to the second lieutenant.

“My pitching glove,” he says.

He asks for a couple warm-up throws then, which brings a new howl of protest from the white side, and proceeds to out-coon the batter, windmilling his arm in an elaborate windup, catching the return throws behind his back like the boys do when they’re just fooling among themselves. The white folks aren’t sure what to make of it, and neither is his own side, but the burned-cork boy looks a little embarrassed now, waiting to take his turn.

“Batter up!” calls the second lieutenant. Jacks crouches and pounds his glove.

Scott rears back and throws hard overhand — only he doesn’t let go of the ball, instead wheeling off the mound and striding over to the bench, the 12th men and the locals catcalling again as he gets his original glove back from Mudfish.

“Sorry, sir,” he calls to the umpire as he takes the mound again. “Just didn’t feel right.”

The minstrel boy digs in, looking pissed off to have the attention of the crowd pulled away from his antics.

“You aint gonna need a glove if you’ll throw me that thing,” he calls. “You gonna need binoculars to follow where it’s goin!”

“Comin right up,” smiles Scott, and goes into his windmilling wind-up.

The pitch he lobs in is so fat Jacks could run to the sidelines, grab a bat, and still get to the plate in time to hit it. The white boy in the blackface takes a mighty swing, connecting with it square over the plate — but instead of a crack of wood there is a heavy, soggy THOOMP!, the ball flying apart into a hundred little bits that spray outward like a fireworks explosion. Jacks is hit on the shoulder with a piece of it, a wet scrap of orange, the peel made white with lime from the basepaths.

People are stunned at first, minds taking a moment to grasp the phenomenon. Then the whole 25th falls out laughing, whacking each other on the back and miming the batter’s dumbfounded reaction. Even a few of the white folks join in, the white ladies clapping their little gloved hands with delight. The second lieutenant, though, is not smiling as he steps to the mound.

“Let’s cut out the nigger show and play ball.”

“Nigger show is at the plate, sir,” Scott tells him, nodding toward the batter, who is looking sheepish and still picking flecks of orange off his front.

“You gonna get serious,” says the officer, “or do I call a forfeit?”

“Yes, sir.” Corporal Ponder tosses Scott the real ball. “I will seriously strike this coon out.”

And proceeds to put the side down with only nine pitches — in-shoots and drop-offs, fast balls that seem to hop at the last moment and a big roundhouse curve that starts out heading halfway between home and third before hooking back over the heart of the plate, the regiment whooping louder after every strike. The last man to whiff slams his bat down in frustration and Jacks hurries to join Scott as they leave the field.

“Don’t smile, don’t wave your hat,” he says. “Just walk off.”

Of course Scott is the first batter up to begin the ninth. The pitcher gives him a long look and then throws a steaming fastball into his ribs. There is a sound like the orange exploding and Scott drops to his knees and then it is very quiet again.

If this was two white teams or two colored teams it would just be base ball, part of the game, and if there was a fight with nobody sent to the hospital they’d all meet after at the canteen to compare bruises over beer and pretzels. But instead Jacks and Mingo Sanders have to grab Cooper to keep him from running across the field and the officers are out of the bleachers waving their arms to keep the regiments apart and the crackers are asking Scott if he thinks he’s so damn smart now and when the whistles start blowing Jacks thinks it’s the provost guard come to make some arrests. But there is Colonel Daggett with a quartet of majors around him, marching up onto the mound, and in a flash the junior officers and noncoms have their people in formation, base-ball uniforms scattered among the blue, the 25th formed on the third-base side of the field and the 12th on the first, and Daggett waits till even the civilians are on their feet and silent before he speaks.

“I’ve just received a wire from Washington,” he says, “and it applies to both regiments present. We have orders to break camp, pending transport to Tampa. The Congress has voted and it is on, gentlemen.”

A cheer erupts on both sides of the field. Hats fill the air. The ladies in the bleachers spin their parasols in excitement.

The game has begun.

WAR! is the one word the Yellow Kid can read. The rags have been hustling the WAR! for months, and now here is Specs passing it out in the day’s first special edition behind the Journal building. Specs has got an ink smudge on one of the lenses of his cheaters, ink all over his hands.

“By the time you little bastids unload this batch,” he says, “we’ll be ready with another extra.”

The Yellow Kid elbows in, slaps down a quarter’s worth of pennies and Specs slams a bundle of fifty against his chest, nearly knocking him over.

“Watch it, four-eyes!”

“Yer lucky I let you have em, you little Chiney piece a shit.”

Just because there is WAR! doesn’t mean their daily battle with the circulation gink is off.

“He aint Chiney yella,” explains Ikey for the hundredth time as he grabs his bundle, “he’s sick yella.”

“Yer both a friggin disease. Get outta here and sell those papers.”

They run around the building, shouting “WAR! Congress declares WAR!” and selling a few on their way.

“The Chief gotta be shittin himself,” says Ikey, pausing on the corner of William Street to adjust his load. They’ve seen him arriving late at night a couple times, Boy Willie himself pulling up in his hack with the white horse and his two sweet babies who look like the Riccadonna Sisters in the Hogan’s Alley comic he stole from the World, one on either side, fresh from some uptown theater or lobster palace. Big smooth-faced character in his glad rags. As far as they can figure he runs the dogwatch shift at his Journal dressed just like that, still in his silk top hat and swallow-tail coat. He always calls hello but never throws any mazuma their way.

“Willie been peddlin this yarn hard all year,” says Ikey. “Gonna be bigger than Corbett and Jeffries!”

They step out into Newspaper Row and the Yellow Kid takes the north side. They are at the center of the whole friggin works here. There is the tallest building, the World with its gold dome towering above, the glass boxes of the Electro Monogram out front swiveling to tell the folks that it is WAR! with the Tryon Building behind where the Staats Zeitung used to roll and the Sentinel and the mick Freeman’s Journal still do and then the Tribune Building with its clock tower showing that it’s nearly noon, the Yellow Kid better with the numbers and the hands of time than with letters, then the Times and the Sun behind it on Nassau, all of them flying their own flags along with the Stars and Stripes or even hoisting some kind of Cuban banner like Boy Willie’s paper, and then there’s the construction on the Park Row Building, already got the four giant Amazons with their giant stone melons up front and just across Ann Street the St. Paul Building is racing it story by story, both of them sposed to top the World by a good eighty feet when they’re done say the birds who bring the tours past and “WAR!” cries the Yellow Kid, waving a rag to display the scarehead, “Congress Declares WAR!” stepping over into the park in front of City Hall, geezers snatching papers and flipping him their pennies on the way in and out of the building. The Kid tries the can’t-find-change-for-a-nickel dodge on one old whitehair with a pair of muttonchops halfway out to his shoulders but the geezer is wise to it and waits with his palm out, the cheap bastid.

The Yellow Kid’s corner, by common understanding, is at Broadway and Warren where the omnibuses stop at the park and you can sell to the top-hat crowd heading for the Astor Hotel, with Graub’s restaurant, where the builders go if they haven’t brought their lunch, on one side of Warren and Donnegan’s, which is the reporters’ favorite gin mill, on the other. A hell of a location. But because today there is WAR! he can make a quick run through City Hall Plaza with the horse trolleys turning around and the noise and the dust and the drays pulling up with stone for the new buildings or the new bridge over to Brooklyn to the east and the Tammany hacks and city clerks coming and going and boys hawking the Journal and the Sun and the World and the Times and the Herald and the Trib and the Telegram and the Telegraph and the Daily News and the Mail and Express and the Star and even one poor clueless little street rat trying to pawn off day-old copies of the Weekly Post, just don’t stop moving and there’s no trespass, before he takes up position on his own spot.

“WAR!” he hollers. “Special edition, Congress Declares WAR! Only in the Journal!”

It isn’t only in the Journal, of course, at least he doesn’t think so, but the geezers don’t know that yet, do they?

Nobody muscles you off your spot, the place that is understood to be yours by the Unwritten Law. The one time somebody tried with him, big stupid spaghetti-bender wearing a different color shoe on each foot, thought just cause the Kid is sick-looking and little and skinny he’ll roll over easy, he sold maybe three papers before the Kid come back with a brick in each hand and half the newsies below Canal Street to teach him how it works. The wop tried to run but they caught him and knocked the stuffing out of him till he just rolled into a ball on the cobblestones and then they all pissed on him.

The Yellow Kid took the spot over from Dink Healy when Dink got too big and switched over to the Western Union, working as his striker for halvsies the first year, buying the corner a nickel a day. Dink has the glimmer that don’t focus right and was maybe a little scary toward the end when he got tall, so the Yellow Kid would sell most of his bundle.

“You look like death on a friggin soda cracker,” Dink would always say, tugging the Kid’s cap down over his eyes. “I couldn’t have a better striker if you was crippled.”

“Read about the WAR!” hollers the Yellow Kid. Some of the builders coming out of Graub’s buy on their way back to work, then he tries Don-negan’s but the joint is empty.

“Haven’t seen em all day,” calls Sweeny from behind the counter. “They’re all at work, poor miserable bastids, slapping together them extras.”

The Yellow Kid sells out to a mick priest heading for St. Paul’s and hotfoots it as fast as he can go back to the Journal building.

“You get the last dozen,” says Specs, jerking his nose at the pallet.

“When’s the next run?”

“Sposed to be out at three o’clock. All new headers.”

The Kid buys the dozen and heads up Centre Street. “WAR!” he cries. “Spanish Invasion Plans, this issue!”

He does a circuit around the Tombs and the Criminal Courts Building, always good for a few sales to the turnkeys, got nothing to do but sit on their keisters, pick their noses, and read. He unloads two under the Bridge of Sighs on the Franklin Street side, then stops in front of the Bummer’s Hall and looks up from where Maminka brought him to wave up at the windows the first time Janek got pinched. The food was lousy in the Tombs, said Janek, but Alderman Burke from Tammany treated him to steak and spuds the day they sprung him.

There is a horse trolley running up Broadway that the Kid manages to catch up to, hauling himself aboard as it rolls and hollering his way up the aisle to the front.

“WAR!” he cries. “Spanish Fleet Sighted in East River!”

He sells all but one, hands it to the conductor before the old grouch can lay a collar on him. “Read all about it,” he says, then ducks under the man’s arm and leaps off the moving trolley in front of Blatnik’s.

The working stiffs have fed their faces and gone back to their stalls so now it is only newsies who have peddled their morning bundle at the counter — Nub Riley and Beans and Ikey and Chezz DiMucci and Yid Slivovitz. The Kid grabs a stool and shouts for his burger and pie and a chocolate fizzer which Yid likes to call an egg cream though they don’t put neither egg nor cream in the thing.

“About friggin time with this WAR!” says Nub, who is a fiend for red-hots and always has two, one with onions and one with pickle relish, laid on thick. “I mean shit or get off the friggin pot.”

“This is gonna be big,” says Ikey, pushing the scoop of vanilla under the surface of his root beer with the spoon. “You remember how we sold when they sprang the Señorita?”

“That was only the Journal.”

“So? This’ll be good for everybody.”

The Journal made a big deal out of this beautiful Cuban Señorita the Spanish bastids had violated and tortured and locked up in a dungeon in Havana, got the Women of America to write letters to their king or queen or whatever they got over there, then finally lost patience and sent their own guy, just a scribbler, down to spring her out of the joint with a ladder and some men’s clothes for disguise. Boy Willie hogged the headlines for a week.

“Well it’s a damn sight better than that Cross of Silver malarkey they were floggin. Jesus, Mary, an Joseph, how’s a guy spose to sell papers, they can’t make up better news than that?”

“You at least need a society dame floatin in the river. Or a riot where the Army gets to blast away—”

“Like that Pullman strike.”

“Okay for a week,” says Chezz DiMucci. “But them labor things burn out quick.”

“What about that Coxey’s Army circus?” says Beans.

“Or Dr. Holmes who croaked all the people in Chicago?” says Yid Slivovitz.

“Most of youse weren’t born yet,” says Slow Moe Hershel who is flipping burgers behind the counter, Moe who used to be a newsie himself when the Sun was the hottest rag in town, “but when they brung Geronimo in off the warpath, that was a story. Couldn’t print em fast enough.”

“And leave us not forget—” says Nub Riley, spreading his hands to signal he’s got the topper, “Remember the Friggin Maine.”

They all have to pull their faces out of their feedbags for that one. What a day that was, what a week.

“I had a guy bought my whole bundle, gimme a buck. Couldn’t of been more than fourteen, fifteen left.”

“Jeez, the way they played it out — Day One, the ship blows up. Day Two, who blew the ship up? Day Three, we think we know. Day Four, we sent down our experts, here’s the facts — and on and on and on—”

“The extra where they printed the names of the diseased—”

“You mean deceased.”

“You sure?”

“Diseased is your mama’s bunny hole. Deceased is them unfortunate sailors on the Maine.”

“But WAR!—”

“WAR!—”

“Fellas, I been in the newspaper business a long time,” says Yid, who is thirteen, “but nothing we been through in our lives has prepared us for this.”

Slow Moe lays a burger down and the Yellow Kid flips the lid and dumps ketchup on it. It comes with potatoes cooked in the same grease and half a kosher dill.

“Over in Europe, China, Italy, places like that,” Yid continues, “they got a massacre every day of the week. But here in America, what—” he looks to Moe. “When was our last big WAR!?”

“Week ago Saturday,” says Moe, not looking up from the grill. “The Eastmans took apart a social function the Five Pointers was hosting.”

“Friggin numbskull. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Even when I sold em,” says Moe, “I never looked past the headlines.”

“It must have been the Civil WAR!, that they put up all the statues about,” offers Ikey.

“Yeah,” says Chezz. “When we took over Mexico.”

“I bet Boy Willie goes down there to Cuba himself, bags a couple Dagoes for the front page.”

“Yeah, then what’s Jewseph Pulitzer gonna do? He’s too old to ride a horse.”

“Any stunt Hearst pulls, Poppa Joe’s gonna try to top him. If we’re sellin this good already and nobody’s fired a shot yet, just wait’ll the lead starts flying. We just gotta pray they can keep it going awhile.”

The pie is hot and full of apples and cinnamon and his stomach is full, tight even, like the chocolate fizzer is still bubbling inside him when they cross the street to Newsome’s Palace of Pleasures. Music blasts them as they enter, the Coinola Orchestrion that Gruesome Newsome who owns the arcade feeds to attract business pumping out a version of Down Went Mc Ginty, piano tambourine bells xylophone woodblock triangle snare bass and cymbal all-in-one mechanically slamming out the song punched on the paper scroll. Ikey and the Yellow Kid march straight down the center aisle, past the bagatelle games and the Big Six slots that never friggin pay off and the Electro Shock Machine and the Fortune Teller and the Automatic Billiards and the Lung Tester and the Skill-Shooter Pistol Range and the box-ball setups and the Scientific Punching Machine and all the Black Diamond Gum vendors to the last Mutoscope viewer on the left.

“This is the one,” says Ikey, pointing at the photo card above it that advertises the view. “I seen it the other day, twice.”

The Kid feeds it a Lincoln and gets on his toes to get his eyes to the slot. They put the ones that are spose to be for adults up on a board to make them taller, but not really so tall you can’t look if you want to. The light comes on and he starts to crank, nice and steady, so the Lady Undressing for Bath moves a little slower than normal.

“Careful you don’t run it out,” says Ikey. “She don’t ever make it into the tub.”

The Kid cranks it backward then, which Gruesome Newsome says you can’t do cause it hurts the machine but really cause he doesn’t want anybody getting more than a minute view for their penny, but what fun is it to see the lady put her clothes back on?

He cranks it forward again, real slow, till what must be nearly the last card flips into view and holds it there.

“Nice melons.”

“What I tell you?”

The woman is down to her unders, a white corset cinched tight in the middle and black stockings you can follow all the way up to her—

Whap! His cap flies off as Gruesome smacks the back of his head.

“What I tell you little shits?”

“Hey, I paid!”

“That don’t mean you can park yourself there with your tongue down the slot.”

The Kid bends to retrieve his cap. “Don’t cost you nothin extra.”

“You monopolize the machine, nobody else can see it.” There is ten or eleven of the guys in the joint at the moment, and plenty of machines to go around.

“Besides, you got the same crappy pitchers every week,” says Ikey. “Even Fine changes his once in a while.”

Fine runs the Garden of Delights two blocks down, but it’s smaller and dirtier and there’s a character they all call Creepy Drawers who seems to hang there all day long.

“You don’t like it,” says Newsome, “you can hit the bricks.”

They stroll around a few more minutes just to show him he can’t boss a paying customer, and then the Kid has to blow.

“I told my sister I’d come by,” he says.

The Yellow Kid, running, always running in the daytime cause there is money to make if you are quick on your feet and loud and fearless, cuts across Worth Street, the morning’s pennies rattling in the grouch bag tied around his waist and stuffed into his crotch, four more in his pocket in case the guinea kids catch him when he hurries past Mulberry and Mott and he needs something to surrender, running all the way to Chatham Square where he stops in front of Altgeld’s to look at the crates.

All the downtown Social Clubs buy from Altgeld when one of their brothers kicks the bucket, the crate from Altgeld and flowers from Kil-murray’s. There are three in the window now, two full-size and one cut short for kids. One of the full-size is the basic model, a wood rectangle with no metal fittings like the old-country hebes have to use, but the other is a real beauty, a polished box that juts out wider at the shoulders, with the shiny brass handles for your pals to hang on to and all kinds of fancy carving on the lid. If he’d had the dough he’d have popped for something like that for Maminka, instead of her riding the damn barge that might as well be a garbage scow up to Hart Island where One-Nugget Feeny says they just dump you in the common trench, shoulder to shoulder packed three deep with the other dead. Or worse, give you to the junior croakers to cut apart and learn their trade. But there was no dough and the Old Man fell apart, stupid Bohunk bastid, so there she was.

The child’s coffin looks more like a cake you want to eat than something to get planted in, all white and smooth on the outside with red plush trimmings and a little satin pillow. You see that crate roll by on the back of the wagon and you know it was somebody inside, not some pile of horseshit scraped off the street. A steam train curves overhead on the Third Avenue El, making the window glass vibrate and blurring his view of the coffin. He’s told most all of the guys that’s what he’s saving up for, figures it’s half the size it should be half the price of the ones they use for big people, but he has not quite got around to going in and asking old Altgeld what the ticket is.

The Kid turns up Bowery then, trotting, and at the corner of Pell runs into Janek shuffling out into the sun. Or Hunky Joe, which is what the other pugs in the Eastmans call him these days. He’s got the goo-goo eyes already, not even two o’clock, which means he’s just come from the Chinks.

“Frantisek,” he says, grinning stupidly, using the Yellow Kid’s Bohunk name.

“Janek.”

“It’s Hunky Joe—”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it.” The Kid looks him over — nose crooked where it’s been bust a couple times, jacket too short on his long arms, bowler too small for his fat Bohunk head. “You been on the hip?”

Hunky Joe shrugs, grins wider. “I like to do a pipe or two in the mornin. Takes the edge off things. What you doin up here?”

“Going to see Vera. The Old Man been around?”

His brother spits on the bricks. “I aint been over there for weeks,” he says. “If she’s lucky the old bastid’ll finally drink hisself to deat’.”

“Yeah, well—”

“You doin all right?”

“Can’t complain.” The last time the Kid saw Hunky Joe his brother touched him for a buck. The Eastmans are spose to be such a hot outfit and there he is stumblin up Chrystie Street with his mitts out, practically begging.

“Money’s a little tight,” adds the Kid, looking away.

“Good news, though—”

“You mean the WAR! Yeah, as long as the papers don’t rise the price up on us.”

Hunky Joe gives him a once-over, the wheels in his head clunking the way they do when he’s trying to pretend he’s not doped up. “Listen, I got a proposition,” he says. “You still on your corner, right?”

“Yeah—”

“I and some of my associates have branched out into the policy racket. We are currently scouting for operatives—”

“Nigger pennies.”

Hunky Joe shrugs. “You got the location, a steady flow of clientele—”

“Brannigan just barely leaves me alone as it is—”

“Brannigan owes his uniform to the Hall. We, I and my associates, are the mighty right arm of Tammany. Brannigan, therefore, works for—”

“The thing is, Joe,” says the Yellow Kid, searching quick for a believable lie, “I just can’t handle the numbers. Anything past two plus two, I’m lost. I didn’t get up to the fit’ grade like you.”

“Just tink about it, all right?”

“I’ll do that. And stay away from the friggin Chinks. You look skinnier than I do.”

“Numbers, bullshit,” grins Hunky Joe. “You was always the smart one.”

The Yellow Kid runs away from his brother then, runs up Bowery till he hits Hester and cuts right to where the pavement ends and there are so many people you can’t run anymore. The sheenies are all out selling their second-hand everything, horsecarts and pushcarts and funny-smelling geezers wandering around wearing wooden trays full of buttons or ties or hot Jew food. Little girls empty ashcans or finger through yesterday’s bread to find a roll softer than a rock or watch from the stoops, latched ahold of the ones who can just walk or carrying the ones that can’t yet, the ragpicker yelling out but outyelled by the pots-and-pans hondler who knocks his metal together and both of them whispers compared to the big raw-throated ladies hollering down from their windows, lowering baskets and hauling up whatever they bought from the street vendors. Chickens hang by their feet, pickles float in barrels, and if Mott Street was garlic Hester is salt herring.

The Kid squeezes through till he finds the Hat Man. He needs a new cap. The one he’s got One-Nugget Feeny says looks like he took a dump on it, which is fine for the paying customers, the rattier you look the better you sell if you’re little, but it’s nothing you want topping your knob when it’s just you and the guys.

He tries on a few lids, checking his reflection in the butcher’s window behind as the Hat Man watches him warily, sure that he’s going to bolt with the merchandise. The Kid has his eye on a pair of shoes one stall over, light brown and shiny, with real laces that were made to go with them instead of string, a buck for the pair. His own old high-tops that Janek — that Hunky Joe passed down are split at the sole up front and his toes stick out if he doesn’t curl them under.

“Nu?” says the Hat Man, impatient, but the Kid knows the Customer is King and just keeps trying on lids. There’s a yellow-checked number that he pulls down over one eye.

“How much?”

The Hat Man holds up way too many fingers, so the Kid counters with a few fingers of his own. They keep it going for a while, the Kid knowing the bastid has a bottom price and when the old zid hawks something gray into the dirt at his feet and starts to shake his head and mutter in sheeny it’s clear they’ve reached it. The Yellow Kid has to go to his grouch bag, not so easy here on Hester where there’s a dozen eyes every way you turn, so he just digs into his pants, what Ikey calls cradling the cubes, and comes up with the mazuma.

“I’d say it’s been a pleasure doin business with you,” he says, “but it hasn’t.”

The Hat Man looks at the pennies in his palm like they might be slugs, exactly the kind of old tightwad who deserves a wooden crate with no brass, and the Kid takes a last look at those sweet brown shoes and shoves his way back out to Bowery.

There is a horse down on the corner of Broome. Little kids are circled staring like they never seen a dead nag before and a wop is trying to sell them shaved ice with lemon syrup from his bicycle box and a cop stands with his hands on his hips, thinking up what fine he’s gonna strongarm out of the dinge whose wagon it was pulling. The dinge is down on his knees wrestling the harness off in a big puddle of horse piss that’s still steaming hot though it smells like the nag’s been dead for weeks. Friggin cops always got their mitts out for a donation and get one or not he’ll just walk away and leave the carcass for somebody else to deal with it.

While the big mick has his back turned the Kid hops the back of a milk wagon headed uptown at a pretty good clip, the cans rattling empty over the cobblestones. Angelo Pino who shined shoes in front of Donnegan’s got rolled over a couple weeks back hopping a dray full of crushed stone leaving the Park Row Building, the wheel popping his head open the guys said, but he was lugging his box and only had one hand free and that’s when accidents is bound to happen. Angie’s little brother Pasquale has the spot now, but the newshounds that drink in Donnegan’s can’t tell the difference and call him Guido, which was the name of the kid who worked there before Angelo.

The Yellow Kid lucks out and the milk wagon keeps rolling across Canal, keeps rolling uptown, the driver never looking back, carrying him up to Houston where he hops off and runs five blocks up to see Vera.

The old place don’t look any worse. They moved a whole lot of times before he was old enough to know about it, is what Hunky Joe says, but this dump is the one the Kid remembers. Three stories, front and back entrance, toilet for the whole building out back, bring your own paper, jammed up next to three more shitboxes just like it. The Nemecs’ kid Dusan who’s never been right sits slobbering on the stoop and the Yellow Kid takes a minute to catch his breath before going in. His heart is racing. If the Old Man is there the odds are he’s not conscious, and even if he is the Kid knows he can outrun the bastid, even in these damn flap-sole high tops. It got worse after Maminka died but he was a guzzler from Day One, old Kazimir. The Kid used to rush the can for him on the one outside job the Old Man had, making bricks. Wrestle a big pail of beer over to him twice a day, never a tip like some of the other kids got. Get plastered and moan out those old Chesky songs, go on one of his cursing, spitting stomps, pacing all five steps from one side of the apartment to the other. Bohunks come in Catholics and Free-Thinkers and the two brands just friggin hate each other. The Old Man is an ateista, a Free-Thinker, always going on about the idiot Pope and the idiot Bohunks who kiss his holy ass, like any of that matters here on East 5th Street. Make you glad to be an American. He was a miner back where they come from says Hunky Joe, but left to get away from Germans and Catholics and the coal dust. After he drunk himself out of the brickyard he holed up and started rolling cigars like every other stupid greenie on the block, Vera and Maminka stripping the leaves and Janek out getting into scrapes with the neighborhood gangs and him, Frantisek back then, running up and down the friggin stairs with buckets and bottles to keep the old bastid lubricated.

It’s dark in the downstairs hallway and somebody is sleeping right by the stairs, got to step over to climb up. It smells like cabbage. At the door he hollers — you knock and they figure it’s the landlord’s collector come to jerk a few shekels out of you — and Vera answers. From the look on her face he can tell the Old Man is not at home.

“Frantisek!”

She looks like a ghost, Vera, pale and big-eyed and already a little bit stooped though she’s only a year older than Hunky Joe, a couple of her teeth gone missing since the Kid saw her last.

“I come to say hi.”

She pulls him in though he’s happy to stay in the hallway. The room smells like the inside of a cigar box, tobacco winning out over the kerosene, with piles of leaves and stacks of wrappers and the day’s work spread out thick on the table. Enough to make you gag. The window was always closed before to keep a breeze, should such a thing ever wander onto East 5th Street, from getting in and drying the leaves out. Then after Maminka jumped the Old Man nailed it shut forever.

“You are hungry?”

Vera never went to any school and speaks Bohunk English when nobody in the room, like the Kid, is willing to talk Chesky with her.

“Got a bellyful right now. He been around?”

Vera smiles, shrugs. He has tried to get her to give up on the Old Man, to walk outside in the sun and never come back, but it’s like she’s been sentenced to live in these little rooms forever, doing a jolt for some crime she can’t even imagine.

“He is very sick.”

Sick was how Maminka used to call it too, especially once he’d passed out and couldn’t hit or kick anymore.

“You o.k. here? You need anything?”

It is a stupid question. She needs everything.

“I am no problem,” says Vera. “Where do you sleep?”

This is always the big question with her, worrying about where he lays down at night ever since he told the Old Man to shove it and run off for good.

“Here and there,” says the Yellow Kid. “Depends on where I am when it gets dark.”

It was looking at the same damn walls every day that done it, finally, more than the Old Man going off with his hootch and his temper. “It’s worse than the friggin Tombs in here,” said Hunky Joe just before the last big fight, the one where he ended up on top of the Old Man with both of them bleeding and it was time for him to move on. The walls that Maminka tried to wash once and gave up on cause you had to haul the water up so many stairs, the walls with lighter-colored squares everywhere the Old Man took down pictures of saints the last poor bastids, some kind of Catholic Germans who snuck out a month behind in the rent, had left hanging. You put a nail in the window in this apartment, it might as well be in your coffin lid.

“Listen,” he says, “you gotta forget that old soak and take care of yourself.”

It’s a waste to try to get Vera to take money, so he says he’s got the afternoon extra to deal with and lets her hug him once. When he steps over the body propped against the bottom of the stairs he bends to see that it is the Old Man, in the tank again, wheezing a little as he breathes.

Any other day he might head over to the bathhouse on Rivington, give you a towel and chunk of soap for two cents and let the shower run a good five minutes before they shut it off on you. But there is WAR! and special editions waiting to be peddled.

The fellas got a crap game running behind the Journal when the Kid gets back, breathing hard from running the last six blocks. Ikey is holding the stones.

“Look who’s got a new lid!”

“Yellow hat for the Yellow Kid!”

“You’re so flush, you oughta get in on this,” Ikey calls, shaking the dice softly by his ear the way he does, as if they are whispering to him. “I’m rollin hot here.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Cheap bastid. You don’t never play.”

“He’s savin up for his goin-away party,” says Beans. “Gonna invite the whole city, get planted in a solid-ivory crate.”

“That’s all a racket,” says Specs, rolling out a dolly loaded with a pile of specials. “Them coffins got a false bottom. Everybody goes home and they yank out their goods, leave the stiff in the dirt with the worms. Everybody knows that.”

The newsies scoop their pennies off the ground and scramble to line up by seniority, boys who been selling the longest first, and the Kid takes a chance on another fifty. The schoolboys are out and ready to sell now, waiting at the back of the line.

“Bunch of friggin amateurs,” says Ikey, who left classes after the sixth grade, “cloggin up the sidewalks.”

Most of the stores and offices have dicks in the lobby to keep newsies and peddlers out, but the saloons are always open for business. The Kid stuffs his new cap inside his shirt, slaps the old one on his head, and makes a show of staggering under the weight of the bundle as he comes into Donnegan’s.

“Lookit this kid,” says Boylan from the Sun, who likes to sit by the door and listen for sirens to chase. “Little bastid’s on death’s door, he’s still hustlin papers. Lay em down here, kid.”

He offers his stool and the Kid parks his bundle, pulling a dozen off the top to work the room. It is elbow to elbow with reporters now, trading rumors about the WAR!, guzzling whiskey, ribbing each other. They are the best customers for print, some getting their own rag to crow over a byline, or buying three or four of the competition to see what the poop on the Row is.

“What’s Boy Willie got to say now he’s finally done it?” says Pope from the World, grabbing one from the Kid. “Probly wants to be made Admiral.”

“Over Roosevelt’s dead body.”

“If that could be arranged,” says Callan from the Journal, “the Chief would be only too happy.”

“I’m takin names for the Regiment,” Sweeny calls from behind the counter, waving a paper that dozens have signed. “Shall I put you on it, Kid?”

“Sure,” says the Kid. “Sign me up.”

That gets a laugh and somebody says he’s already got the Yellow Fever so why not and he sells more papers and there is lots of kidding about who is too old or too young or too much of a hopeless souse to go to WAR! Then Lester Schoendienst gets up on his hind legs and calls for order.

“I’ve got me colyum fer tomorra ready,” he says in the voice he puts on like a Ninth Ward mick, “and I’d aprayciate yer opinions.”

From what the Kid can tell this bird writes a column where he pretends to be these two bog-trotters, Gilhooley and O’Malley, the former who is spose to be a beat cop and the other a sanitation worker who specializes in horse pucky.

“My opinion is it stinks,” calls Pope, “and I haven’t heard a word of it yet. Finley Peter Dunne, on his worst day—”

“Can outwrite you on yer best, we’re all aware iv that, we are,” Schoen-dienst comes back as he steps up on a chair to be seen over the crowd. “Now kape yer pie-hole buttoned while the true gentlemen iv the press give a listen.”

“You break that chair, Lester,” calls Sweeny, “you bought it.”

“So Martin O’Malley is plyin his trade,” starts the scribbler, reading from his ink-smeared notebook, “with a shovelful of road apples in mid-air, whin Officer Gilhooley strolls by on his rounds.”

The reading is always good for the Kid. He keeps moving through the room as the newshounds listen, jamming papers under their elbows and into their hands, the men paying without looking at him.

“ ‘It’s quite a swagger yer walkin with today, Tom,’ says the man with the spade. ‘Have they lowered the price on whiskey?’

“ ‘Sure and hasn’t the Congress itself signed the Articles iv WAR!’ says the copper.

“ ‘Ohhh — have they finally done the dade? Tis a hysteric occasion—’

“ ‘It’s got me martial spirit inflamed,’ says Gilhooley. ‘If there was a Spaniard at hand I’d pop him in the beezer meself!’

“O’Malley throws a glimmer around the street. ‘And where is the swarthy little fandango-dancers whin you nade im? I don’t suppose an Eyetalian would do?’

“ ‘Diffrint race altogether, Martin. Yer Dons has been a haughty and crool outfit since the days of the conquistadoros, whereas your Eyetalian is more iv a Jovanny-come-lately to the Table iv Nations. Columbus himself was wurrkin for the Spaniards whin he bumped into the United States.’

“ ‘They’re a seafarin paypul, yer wops,’ agrees O’Malley. ‘Sure and haven’t ye ivver seen em on the Staten Island Ferry, with the rag and polish in their hands? All the grrreat ocean voyages — Magellan, Cook, Henry Hudson sailin up our own West Side — there was always a little Jewseppy aboard to kape a sparkle on their boots.’

“ ‘There’s a call out fer fightin men,’ says Gilhooley, twirling his stick. ‘I’ve half a mind to throw me name into the hat.’

“ ‘Half a mind indade,’ says O’Malley, filling the back of his wagon.

“ ‘Tis a grrreat day fer the Republic,’ continues the officer, a far-off look in his eye. ‘And the Cubings will be throwin a party as well.’

“ ‘The divvil with the Cubings,’ says O’Malley, tamping down his haul with the back of his spade. ‘This is our donneybrook now. They want a fight, they can attack Porto Rico or one iv them ither islands in the Carrybium. Forst come, forst served is what I say!’

“ ‘That’s the spirit—’

“ ‘And whin the Pearl iv the Aunt Tillies is free,’ he adds, ‘can the Emerald Isle be far behind?’ ”

There is cheering and banging on tables then and Schoendienst buys a round for anyone who can shove their way up to the bar. At the door the Yellow Kid runs into Maxie Schimmel, lugging in a stack of Heralds.

“Two more rounds in these jokers,” he shouts to Maxie over the sound of the scribblers stomping their feet in time and singing Glory, Glory Hallelujah, “and they’ll buy yesterday’s paper.”

He heads over to the Park Row turnaround then and attacks the commuters getting into their trolleys to go home.

“WAR!” he hollers. “Spanish Threat to Burn Washington!”

He is bumping shoulders with One-Nugget Feeny, who’s got an armful of the World.

“WAR!” cries Feeny. “World Exclusive, Cuba Declared Newest State!”

“WAR!” yells the Kid. “Houdini Disappears in Havana!”

“WAR!” shouts Feeny. “The World Remembers the Maine!”

“WAR!” screams the Yellow Kid. “The Journal Declares WAR! on Spain!”

Wu sits back among the crates as his assistant pores over a page of sums, clacking an abacus. The warehouse smells of sandalwood and machine oil. Wu speaks English with Diosdado and never ceases smiling.

“You are an emissary.”

“I assure you that the money is secure,” Diosdado explains. “Here in a bank in the city.”

“We have all heard of your General’s settlement with the Spanish crown.” Wu slumps with his hands folded on his stomach, a round man dressed in the Western style, with a white fedora tilted back on his head. His assistant wears a blue cotton work tunic and makes small noises as he calculates.

“We can make a purchase, then?”

Wu shows Diosdado the palms of his hands. “The merchandise you seek is unavailable.”

“I was told that if anyone in Hongkong could accommodate us—”

“It would be I, yes. But our new administrators, in their wisdom, have forbidden trade in weapons.”

It is always hard to tell with them, the Chinese, what is bargaining and what is fact.

“Many things are forbidden in the Crown Colony,” says Diosdado blandly, “and yet you are known to deal in them.” Wu is alleged to be head of the Three Harmonies Society and an exporter of illegal coolies from Macao. He continues to smile.

“This city is alive with rumor. Weapons, however, are of a great concern to the British government. May I inquire what purpose you might have in acquiring so many of them?”

“For our people,” says Diosdado. “To fight the Spanish.”

“But the terms of your Treaty—”

“Have been violated repeatedly.”

Wu sighs and shakes his head. “Politics. Irresolvable conflicts. I am so very content to remain outside of their sphere.”

“If you were to quote me a price—”

“The Germans in Shandong are growing wary of our — our more excitable citizens,” says Wu, leaning forward to make his point. “And the British do not wish to upset the Germans—”

“We are not going to give weapons to the Boxers.”

“Be that as it may, there are none here to be purchased.”

Wu turns and tells the assistant, in Cantonese, that Diosdado wants to buy guns for the naked savages back home, as if they could be taught to use them. The assistant has a coughing laugh that rattles his abacus. Diosdado remains expressionless.

“Do you know of anybody who might have something we could buy?”

“If you are going to fight the Spanish,” says Wu, “surely there will be wounded. I can offer you an excellent deal on medicinal herbs—”

“I’m not authorized to buy opium.” Diosdado stands to leave. “Thank you for your time.” At least this one did not promise like the Japanese, promise and never deliver. Only Dr. Sun, the Chinese revolutionist, actually sent them weapons, but the boat foundered in a typhoon and all was lost.

“So very sorry to disappoint you,” smiles Wu from his throne of crates.

“We carry one foreign power on our back,” Diosdado says in Cantonese as he bows goodbye, “while China opens her legs for a dozen.”

Leadville is a wound festering between the Mosquito Range and the Wasatch Mountains, a high-plains sprawl of new-built structures surrounded by treeless hills pocked with diggings, hills that at closer look are only piles of tailings excreted from the holes men have torn into the earth. Blasted rock spews from tipple chutes into ore cars that rattle and slam down tramways behind coal-devouring engines, wooden headhouse towers marking the mine portals where hoist cables screech lowering men crammed in steel cages down tomb-dark vertical shafts, tongues of candles flickering on their hats, oil lanterns in hand, dropping with stomach-shifting speed past the played-out silver, the abandoned tunnels, past Level Three, Level Four, Level Five, down four hundred feet more sucking air hammered into the ground by a compressor, Level Eight, Level Nine, then thunk to bedrock and the door clanging open and the men spilling out into the main chamber to face a half-dozen galleries. The newest of these, the rawest, leads back a thousand feet, only half that distance with track on the floor. At the end of it, in the nervous light of three candles, Hod braces himself in a narrow fissure and rams a seventy-five-pound stoper drill straight up into the stony roof above him, rock dust filling the crevice, filling his nose his mouth his lungs, ear-shattering trip-hammer roar as he drives the cutting bit into hardrock a thousand strokes per minute, vibration coursing through his chest down his backbone and out through his legs into the rock he is wedged in, muscles of his arms taut cables pushing the drill steel up, up, every part of him straining and concentrated on the shoot-hole above till Cap Stover reaches up to swat his leg. Time to change bits.

Sudden quiet.

Hanging rock dust.

Hod hands the drill down to the chuck tender, who twists the bar stock and pulls out the old steel, still hot to the touch. The edges of the star-shaped cutting bit have been hammered smooth. Cap jiggers in a new rod of drill steel, twists it to lock.

Grimes, the foreman, calls up through the winze from the level below. “You all right up there?”

“Changing steel, boss,” Cap calls down into the little opening.

“How’s it coming?”

Cap looks up to Hod, who shows him fingers. If he tries to talk it will start the coughing again.

“Three more to go, then you can shoot,” calls Cap.

“Keep on it,” calls the foreman, and then nothing.

Hod starts the tip of the steel into the shoot-hole, then guides the rod as Cap hoists the body of the hammer drill back up to him, unkinking the wire-belted cable that leads back to the compressor at the head of the gallery.

“Need a minute?”

Hod shakes his head, then braces himself again and muscles the heavy drill upward till the bit jams against the unyielding top of the hole. The air is almost clear now and he takes a big gulp of it and squeezes the trigger — shriek of metal cutting rock, vibration filling his body once again.

Maybe he’ll find her tonight.

One of the girls on the Row who recognized him from Skaguay said Addie Lee is in town, staying at the Crysopolis, but the desk jockey said there were no redheads upstairs and nobody going by any of the names Hod recalled her using. Hod drills and thinks how it would be to be with her, to hold her. He searched the town last night and the night before, she’d been there and gone, sure, happy to pass it on, what was his name again? Hod drills and concentrates on a single image, her cheek resting in sleep against his bare breast, the smell of her hair, her breath warm and steady against his skin. He’ll find her tonight, or she will find him.

Here we scribe truth in hot lead.

The phrase makes Milsap smile as he sits at the machine, compositing the front page for the morning edition. It’s what Mr. Clawson always shouts out when he’s giving someone a tour of the paper and stops by the Linotype. The visitors, whether they’re schoolchildren or adults, will have their hands over their ears against the din, but they nod, understanding, and it makes Milsap swell.

“Drew, here,” Mr. Clawson will say, putting a hand lightly on his shoulder, “is an extension of this wonderful machine.”

The left header has been set, in 24-point Clarendon—

NEW OUTRAGE IN EAGLE ROCK

RURAL WOMEN LIVING IN FEAR

— another violation in what seems to be an epidemic throughout the state. Milsap’s fingers fly over the keys, brass and steel rattling into the assembler box and molten metal flowing down to make the slugs. He did it by hand in what they’re already calling the old days, building sentences a letter at a time with a dozen other setters in the room. Mr. Clawson got the Model 1 five years ago and Milsap is the only one left who can look into the machine and savor its intricate beauty, the interplay of belts and blocks, gears and wheels, the way it cycles the matrices back into the distributor, every letter into its distinct channel, drink in the thick, hot-metal smell of it. And he is the only one who can glance at a piece of copy, even something scrawled with hasty hand, and see it in solid block columns before his fingers touch the keyboard, edit the wording on the fly without resorting to awkward hyphens or loose lines for his justification. There are no orphans or widows dangling from Milsap’s paragraphs. He understands better than anybody that words are not sounds made of air but solid objects, with weight and consequence.

Milsap hesitates for a scant second — Mr. Clawson prefers not to separate black and brute on a line break — he adds burly and it squares off nicely. Milsap is hammering out slugs faster than little Davey, his printer’s devil, can supply him, but as he moves down the column the feeling begins to creep on him. It is upsetting, naturally, what has been going on throughout the state this fall, every day another story or two he types in, not to mention what he reads in the Raleigh papers Mr. Clawson lays out in the lunchroom. It is enough to make a white man pick up a gun. But this is different, it’s not anger — it’s that other strange sensation, that feeling where you’re sure you’ve seen it before, read it before, even if it is plain you could not have—

What tips it is that nameless crime is naked, unsheathed of its inverted commas, which Mr. Clawson believes add impact to the phrase without offending delicate sensibilities. The upstate papers, the Caucasian and the News and Observer, leave them off, though, just like they prefer to throw exclamation points on their scareheads, which Mr. Clawson considers vulgar and unnecessary.

None of the other compositors actually read the copy, allowing some very sloppy errors into print. But Milsap has the gift, has had it since he was a boy and could read the McGuffey’s across the room and upside-down, the gift of seeing and understanding a whole block of story at the same time instead of plodding through it word by word. Mr. Clawson says he ought to be an attraction for P. T. Barnum, only Barnum couldn’t pay him enough to give up Milsap. There were other boys growing up who called him freak, and his mother once had Reverend Calhoun from the Pentecostal cast devils out of him, but here, tucked into the metal racket of production, he is indispensible. “Drew practically resides here,” Mr. Clawson is fond of saying. “I’m only a daily visitor.”

Milsap finishes the page and stands slowly. Sometimes he is at the machine for so many hours without a break that the blood rushes from his head when he gets up. Once he even fell over.

Davey looks puzzled to see him step away before the paper is all set.

“I’ll be right back,” he says, and heads for Mr. Clawson’s office.

He passes Stokely Burns, preparing the line block for a cartoon for the editorial page, the negative photograph of the drawing clipped up on his lamp shade. Milsap likes to decipher the images from the negative—

“I see a lot of clear,” he says, pausing to cock his head and examine it.

The clear will become pure black when printed, and anything opaque will be white.

“If we keep running these nigger pictures,” Stokely says without taking the cigarette out of his mouth, “we gonna run out of ink.” Stokely’s greatest skill is burning a long ash on his cigarette but never dropping any onto the gel plate.

“He’s a big one.” Milsap can see it now, the negative reversing in his mind to show a huge black negro complete with plaid pants, vest and coat, bow tie, top hat, walking cane, sparkling diamond stickpin, lit cigar, spats and enormous black shoes, one of which is pressing on the splayed body of a tiny, underfed white man.

NEGRO DOMINATION reads the caption beneath. HOW LONG WILL IT LAST?

“Is this ours?”

“The Journal sent it over. We run it tomorrow.” Without looking Stokely flicks an inch of cigarette ash into his wastebasket.

Mr. Clawson’s door is open and a poker game is in progress. There is Mr. Stedman and Mr. Parmelee who used to be the chief of police and Mr. Walker Taylor whose father was mayor once and is a colonel in the State Guard, sitting around the editor’s desk with cards in their hands, chewing over the important questions of the day. Milsap waits in the doorway, crossing his arms to hide his hands under his armpits. There are dozens of little burns from the hot lead on each, pocked up as bad as his face from the smallpox when he was eight, and away from the machine they draw attention. Mr. Clawson is studying his cards and doesn’t see him right off.

“Most of em, whether they admit it or not, would be pretty damn happy if we just stepped in and took over the whole shebang.”

“The people are crying out for Christian guidance, for responsible hands at the tiller — gimme two—”

This is the quietest part of the floor, but living in the machinery has taken away Milsap’s hearing and he has to strain to make out what they’re saying.

“A few of the you-know-whos might put up a fight. The ones that got big ideas in their heads. But push come to shove, I don’t think they’ll find a whole lot of support, not even from their own people — drawing one—”

“There’s a financial side to all of this, of course. A nickel.”

“Of course—”

“See you. No way we can hold our heads up out in the world if we just let nature take its course. We’ve got to be firm.”

The sudden wave of rape and terror in the state has pushed the Cuban situation off the front pages, but Milsap has been following that story, too, reading everything he can find in Wilmington. Victory, if the enemy is engaged, is less of a question than the fate of the natives once they are liberated.

“I’ll fold. The thing is, some people can deal with free will and some can’t. Poor witless bastards don’t know if they’re coming or going. I think it’s nothing short of our Christian duty to take over the reins.”

“The timing will be tricky, of course. Some people will need to be brought along.”

“The first thing I think we need to do,” says Milsap, forgetting that he has not been invited into the conversation, “is to get this Teller Amendment repealed.”

The men look up at him through the smoke in the room, a bit surprised. Mr. Clawson squints as if trying to make out who he is.

“Something wrong with the machine?”

“No sir. I just—”

“Then to what do we owe the honor of this visit?”

“I was setting the front page and—”

“What’s the Teller Amendment?” asks Mr. Stedman.

“It’s the one that says if we boot the Spaniards out we can’t keep the island,” Milsap explains. “You were talking about Cuba, and—”

The men all laugh, even Mr. Clawson who had seemed annoyed before.

“I’m afraid the conflict we were discussing is much closer to home,” he says. He indicates Milsap and addresses the others. “Drew here is the reigning mechanical genius of the Messenger. The content of our publication, however,” he adds, smiling, but his eyes going cold as he looks back to Milsap, “is not within his purview.”

“Our lead story, Mr. Clawson, the nameless crime—”

“Yes?”

“I’ve read it before. In the News and Observer, over a month ago.”

The smile remains fixed. The eyes remain cold.

“And what of it? We frequently reprint items of public interest—”

“The headline says New Outrage. If the story is that old, how can we say—”

“Do you believe our average reader is as diligent as you in perusing the upstate dailies?”

“No, but—”

“If they have not read the story before,” Mr. Clawson says with an edge in his voice, “the story, and the outrage caused by it, is new to them—is it not?”

The card players are chuckling.

“Yes, but—”

“But what?”

“In the original story the crime was in Zebulon. This version says it was Eagle Rock.”

Mr. Clawson sighs and then exchanges a strange kind of smile with the seated men. “Were you at the scene of the violation, Drew?”

“Mr. Clawson, I only know what I read in the papers—”

“And that, gentlemen,” interrupts the editor, “may well be the salvation of our fair city.”

The men laugh again and Milsap wishes he had just let it slide.

“I thank you for your concern for our — our veracity, Drew, but we have a public duty to fulfill. We mustn’t let mere facts stand in the way of larger truths.”

“Yes sir.”

“And I’ve decided to move the article describing Mrs. Felton’s little soirée tonight to the first page, bottom right.”

“I’d just ignore the old crow,” says Walker Taylor.

“You may do just that,” smiles the editor. “But she has the more soft-headed of our local ladies in a dither, and that makes her appearance in our city news. And I have heard tell that her advocacy has been drifting in a more — a more pertinent direction of late.”

“I’ll make it fit, sir,” offers Milsap.

Mr. Clawson looks away from him then, finished, and glances at his hand. “I am going to raise you gentlemen ten cents.”

Milsap turns and immediately passes Mr. J. Allen Taylor, the colonel’s younger brother, looking impatient as he always does when he visits. Half the big wheels in town in the office, something big cooking no doubt, and he has to go pester Mr. Clawson with trifles.

“Fresh meat!” the editor calls from inside his office. “Sit down, young man, and we’ll deal you in.”

In Denver they don’t make him undress.

The meeting is in the bigger bar downstairs at the Windsor, the one with the silver dollars inlaid every few feet in the floor and walls. Masterson perched on a stool pulled away from the bar counter as the pencil artist sits and stands and squats to draw his face from different vantage points, Niles Manigault obligingly skittering out of the eyeline whenever it changes, the fat man blocking most all the daylight from the open doorway.

“He knows the deal?” asks Masterson, flicking his eyes briefly at Hod.

“He fought Choynski,” says Niles. “Held his own.”

“The three great virtues of a prizefighter,” says Masterson, lifting his chin a bit to catch the light angling in from Larimer Street, “are Talent, Heart, and Obedience. In my book the last of these is the greatest.”

“He’s a sharp lad,” says Niles. “Once the deal, whatever it is, has been agreed upon—”

“Twelve rounds,” says the fat man, slowly circling Hod, poking his bicep once with his cane. “Reddy needs time to sell beer, and if the Kid and Mongone are fighting straight—”

“For eight rounds they’re fighting so that both stay on their feet,” interrupts Masterson, “and then they can knock each other’s brains out.”

“You’ve placed some wagers.”

“Move, Otto,” says Masterson, holding his pose and wiggling a finger sideways. “You’re throwing a shadow.”

The fat man snorts in annoyance but moves to the side a few feet. He wears a bright checked suit and a red vest. “If you’d just have a photograph taken like a normal man—”

“It lacks the human dimension,” says Masterson. His face is fleshier than Hod has imagined, his eyes sharper. In their boyhood games he always insisted on being Masterson, his brother Zeb left with a choice of badmen to represent. “It lacks the soul. These likenesses, which will appear in — what’s this one to be called?”

“Bat Masterson, Plague of the Kansas Outlaw,” answers the crouching artist, eyes fixed on his sketchpad.

“These likenesses convey the spirit of the man, his sense of vitality. A photograph freezes time, character becomes a mask, motion a blur—”

“What about the moving pictures?”

“Overrated.”

Hod catches the eye of Niles Manigault, who discretely motions for him to sit back at the bar. He wonders what they do to keep men like himself, desperate men, from prying the silver dollars out of the woodwork.

“They could have used one of those cameras in San Francisco when your friend Earp handed the fight to Sharkey—”

“The man fouled—”

“Fitz had him all but knocked out.”

“On a punch delivered when the Tom’s knees were on the canvas.”

“A film wouldn’t have lied—”

“Were you there?”

The fat man pushes the skimmer back on his head. “No. But if there had been a camera—”

“I was there. It was the correct decision.”

The artist clears his throat. “Do you think,” he asks softly, “you could assume a gunfighting stance?”

“About to draw or piece in hand?”

“Either one would suit me.”

The Hero of Adobe Walls stands and pulls a short-barreled Colt from inside his jacket. The fat man takes a step backward.

“That isn’t loaded, is it?”

“What fucking use under God’s blue firmament would it do me to carry an unloaded firearm?”

Hod looks down to the end of the bar. A large man has folded his arms on the counter and is dozing upon them. Tabor had the hotel built during the first gush of silver from his holes, had supervised the details in both of the bars. This is a drinking man’s dream of heaven — inlaid panels of ebony and oak, cherrywood on the bartop, enamel spittoons with Chinese designs, gleaming brass and silver metalwork and a dozen cut-glass chandeliers hanging overhead. A bartender in sleeve garters is polishing glasses, feigning indifference to the negotiations.

“They wanted to make a moving picture of the border fight,” says Mas-terson, crouching slightly and pointing the iron held at his hip toward an imaginary foe. “I’m down in El Paso with Tom O’Rourke, sitting on the ten thousand cash prize, when the Rangers run the lot of us — fighters, managers, promoters, fans — out on a rail. So Roy Bean down in Langtry says he can handle it and he builds a little bridge out to a sandbar in the middle of the Pecos. ‘It’s not Texas and it’s not Mexico,’ he says, ‘and is subject only to the laws of Nature.’ The fellow with the camera had paid a bundle to Stuart for the right to photograph, and when Fitzsimmons’s people demand a percentage of his profits, he turns them down cold. As it was, Ruby Robert put Maher away with one of his corkscrew punches in less than a minute of the first round.”

“A disappointing afternoon,” ventures Niles.

“Not for Judge Bean, who had the liquor concession. He sold out his stock to the sporting crowd, then issued an ordinance that not a drop could be consumed in Langtry. It was a memorable train ride.” Masterson turns and points the gun barrel at the fat man. “What’s this I hear of the ‘Otto Floto Circus’?”

The fat man shrugs, embarrassed. “One of Harry’s ideas. The newspaper would promote it.”

“And you could donate one of your old opera capes,” says Masterson, turning away, “to use as a tent.”

The fat man grips his cane with both hands. “If you weren’t armed, Mas-terson—”

“Gentlemen,” interrupts Niles. “We agreed that this would be civil. Have we settled on a referee?”

“It’s Reddy’s hall,” says Otto Floto. “He wants to run the bout.”

“No objection,” says Masterson. He sits back on the stool, looking at the pistol held in his lap. “There was a different filmist in Carson City,” he says. “This one had a special tower built by the ring, with a slot cut out for all three of his cameras, and he made sure to throw some money at both Fitz and Corbett before the battle.”

“Ensuring a prolonged contest,” ventures Niles.

“I was there,” says the fat man.

“As was I.” Masterson’s glare is like a bullet. “Earp and I providing security in case a riot ensued—”

“Like the one Earp started in San Francisco.”

Masterson idly twirls the pistol on his finger. Niles takes a few cautious steps to the side. “Photographed every bloody minute of it. Jim knocking the starch out of Fitz, but the bald-headed little bastard hanging in, and his wife there by the corner — I wouldn’t like to meet her in a prize ring, either—‘Hit him in the slats, Bob!’ she hollers. ‘Hit him in the slats!’ and out he staggers in the fourteenth and does just that, square on the mark, and Jim is done for the day.”

“The film is a sensation,” says Niles. “They set up a special projecting machine called a Veriscope, and—”

“I’ve seen it,” says the gunfighter flatly.

“And your impression?”

“Greatly inferior to my own remembered impressions of the bout,” says Masterson. “Smaller than life.”

“The man has made a fortune.”

“That I do not deny. At the presentation I attended more than half of the spectators were females, and I do not mean those of the lowest stripe. Something is afoot here that I mislike.” He stands and looks at Hod again, then at the sleeping man beyond him. “Do you know what they showed before they put the fight up on the wall? Professor Welton’s Boxing Cats! The noble art, turned into a raree show.” He turns to Floto.

“Your man,” he says, pointing to the sleeper at the bar, “Chief Rain-in-the-Face—”

“He’ll be fine for twelve if I tell him.”

Niles interrupts. “The Blonger brothers specified ten.”

“The Blongers can lick my kiester,” says Masterson. “Do you think he’d put the warpaint on?”

Otto Floto makes a face. “We tried that once. It got on the gloves, in the fighters’ eyes—”

“A headdress perhaps? When he comes in the ring—”

“I think Harry has one at the paper.”

“Little prick probably puts it on when nobody’s looking. And your boy here—”

“Brackenridge,” Hod calls out.

“A name that is neither here nor there,” says Masterson. “Something Irish—”

“I’m not Irish.”

“And Fireman Jim Flynn is a Dago, what of it?”

“He fought before under Young McGinty,” Niles blurts.

Niles promised Hod before that it wouldn’t be McGinty, just in case the warrant has traveled from Alaska, but now only puts a finger to his lips to warn him off.

“Young McGinty versus Chief—?”

“Strong Bear,” says the fat man.

“It’s a match. We advertise a prize of five hundred dollars, and out of that the fighters share—”

“Excuse me,” says Niles, holding up a hand. “If we’re talking business—”

He holds a fiver out to Hod. Masterson and Otto Floto and Niles and even the artist all stare at him as if he shouldn’t be there. Hod takes the five and steps to the back of the room.

“That’s to feed yourself,” calls Niles jovially. “Not for an excursion to Holliday Street.”

He gives the sleeping man a nudge as he passes on the way out the back door. “Lunchtime, buddy.”

They are out on 18th before Hod realizes that the man is Big Ten.

“If you don’t mind,” says the Indian, eyeing the five, “I haven’t eaten in days.”

The Americans are there before the sun comes up. Just there, out in the bay, somehow passing the Corregidor batteries without a shell being fired.

“Como Pedro por su casa,” says the Spaniard next to Diosdado at the sea wall, a long-nosed ayuntamiento clerk wearing the yellow armband of his volunteer unit. It is first light and already there are hundreds lined up along the Malecón to watch, men only, though there are a few women among those fleeing behind them on the Paseo, the poorest with their rolled tampipis over their shoulders, the wealthiest trailed by barefoot coolies staggering under bulky pieces of furniture. This day has been known, has been inevitable, for weeks — what can they have been waiting for?

“Do you think they’ll bombard the city?” asks Diosdado. His orders are to gauge the mood of the people, both Spaniard and Filipino, and it has required a sociability he never thought himself capable of.

“That is the present subject of discussion,” the clerk tells him. “Do you see their light?”

At the bow of one of the still distant American warships a beam flicks rhythmically on and off. The clerk points across the road behind them, where a corporal and his capitán stand on top of the Baluarte de Santa Isabel, the capitán watching the signaling ship through binoculars and the corporal wig-wagging a pair of flags, one red, one white, in a complicated sequence.

“If General Augustín promises not to fire from the shore batteries,” the Spaniard explains, “their Admiral Dewey may agree not to level the Intramuros.”

“So you think no shells will fall on our heads?”

The clerk gives Diosdado a weary smile. “Leaving more available to murder our boys in the fleet.”

The fleet, if the less-than-a-dozen Spanish ships fanned out uncertainly in front of Las Piñas, escape route blocked by Sangley Point, may be conceded that name, has nowhere to go.

“What are they doing?”

The clerk watches the closer ships for a moment.

“One would hope,” he says finally, “they are making their peace with the Creator.”

This same bitter humor, this mix of exasperation and stoicism, has infused every conversation Diosdado has engaged in or overheard since the news arrived that the Americans were steaming away from Hongkong. Haunting the Escolta in his moustache and country planter’s outfit, in for a quick drink at the Tabaquería Nacional or La Alhambra or the San Miguel beerhouse, rubbing shoulders with the peninsulares, infantry, cavalry, volunteers — for every Spaniard between sixteen and sixty has been called to service — it has been the same shameful story.

“We have been abandoned,” said the teniente, said the merchant, said the cargo inspector. “The people in Madrid make speeches and wave their fists, but they send us no ships, no arms, no men.”

“They have the insurrection in Cuba to deal with.”

“An insurrection fueled by yanqui gold.”

“Nonetheless—”

“They have abandoned us. They have hooked a monster this time, have roused the interest of these overgrown Americans, and have decided to cut bait rather than endure the fight.”

“But we will fight,” they all add. “If only for our sense of honor. If only to stand as men, under our flag and God’s eyes, till the very end.”

And then, enraptured with their own tragic Iberian nobility, intoxicated with sentiment for their beloved archipelago, their Pearl of the Orient, each Spaniard will turn to lay a hand on Diosdado’s shoulder and speak as if to a brother.

“Y tu, amigo—what will you do?”

They do not mean what will Diosdado Concepción do, or Idelfonso Ledesma, the name on the newest cédula the Committee has given him. They worry, they obsess, about what the Filipino people will do.

“So many of our prominent figures,” Diosdado reassures them whenever asked, “have sworn to stand with our mother Spain against these invaders. Look at those already leading volunteer battalions — Pio del Pilar, Buencamino in Pampanga, Paterno, Ricarte, Licerio Gerónimo, the Trias brothers—”

Diosdado has spoken to almost all those that Alejandrino, too well-known by the Spaniards to operate secretly, has not been able to reach. Hurrying about the provinces in his flimsy disguise, General Aguinaldo’s faceless envoy to those he hopes will follow him in a revived insurgency. They are all, perhaps with the exception of Ricarte, practical men, and have deduced that the safest position in the coming upheaval is at the head of a large body of armed men, preferably from one’s home province.

“But will they stand to the end?”

And because he is an imposter, with a radically different notion of what that end should be, Diosdado can look the Spaniards in the eye and say, honestly, “I hope so. With all my heart.”

He raises his binoculars as the American ships form a line, one behind the other, speeding past the Malecón now, the shore batteries silent. The lead vessel is within two hundred yards when the Spaniards begin to fire. One by one the American ships turn hard right and run parallel to the Spanish line, rapid-fire cannons delivering a continuous broadside, balls of smoke and then the booming report over the water. The Regina Cristina and the Don Juan de Austria charge forward and immediately begin to come apart. They are old, badly fitted, wooden-hulled relics facing gray-painted fortresses of steel. It is target practice. The Mindanao is on fire off Las Piñas beach, the Castilla is sinking, only its chimney stack still above water, and the Regina Cristina explodes with a concussion that jolts the solemn watchers all along the sea wall.

The clerk has the side of his hand in his mouth, biting down on it. There are men in the water now, some of them on fire, swimming away from the wrecks or rowing lifeboats, desperate to be out of killing range. The American ships each take a second, then a third and a fourth turn, as evenly spaced as a line of mechanical ducks at a shooting gallery, only they are the sportsmen and the thrashing Spanish marineros the prey.

Most of the Filipino leaders were evasive, or at the best noncommittal, when he spoke to them, noses to the wind.

“Give Miyong my regards,” said Buencamino, who fought for the Span-iards in the ’96 uprising. “Tell him I will do what is best for our people.”

Any of them watching this carnage will have chosen sides by now.

Diosdado has planned for this day, he and his fellow universitarios have longed for it, but at this moment, with the mighty Spanish Navy revealed as a floating scandal, his heart is with the men struggling to keep their heads above the waves. Morning sun flashes off the steel hull of the last American warship in the procession as it turns, then the rolling smoke and the roar of cannons and one of the long lifeboats is blasted into flying splinters, the rowing men simply gone, gone from the world. Somebody beside him is sobbing.

Quiroga sits on his platform, surveying the bowed heads below. They never look up, not even if he pauses for a very long time, not even at the most emotional moments, as when poor little Nell died in Mr. Dickens’s wonderful tale — only a wagging of the bowed heads, maybe a cry of “Ay, Dios!” from one of the women at the back benches, stripping the fibers from the leaves, and the one instance where Fermín Pacheco was so upset that it seemed one of the Musketeers had been killed he slammed his fist down and ruined a Corona. No matter what Quiroga reads or how powerfully he presents it, the work, the chopping and pressing, the rolling and wrapping, the tap-tapping of wooden boxes being assembled, continues unabated, the fingers keep on moving.

“ MUCH CONJECTURE IN LIBERATORS’ CAMP,” he reads in the tone he reserves for newspaper headlines and chapter headings. La Verdad and most of the other Ybor City papers invariably refer to the American force as “los liberadores” unless they choose to use the more fraternal “nuestros hermanos de la Causa.” Don Vicente allows him to read the Cuban papers if he sticks to the reporting, the editorials invariably too inflammatory and likely to injure the sensibilities of the Spaniards at the fábrica, who are, after all, his key employees.

“General Shafter Cites Progress in Organization.”

Still declamatory, but at reduced volume. Quiroga prides himself on delivering the sensation of reading, even for those few illiterates in the factory, prides himself on finding an equivalent for the effects of font and justification. He has a vocal technique to match everything in the arsenal of author and printer.

The fingers keep moving.

“United States Major General William R. Shafter, in an interview granted today from his headquarters at the Tampa Bay Hotel, displayed a cautious but optimistic viewpoint when asked about the readiness of his force for the impending confrontation on Cuban soil. ‘The logistics of transport and supply for an army that has not been employed on foreign shores in one hundred years are daunting,’ he stated. ‘But I am confident we shall overcome them in time to engage the enemy to our best advantage.’ When pressed to verify that Havana will be the primary focus of the assault, he reiterated that all sensible military options remain open. Major General Shafter reassured this newspaper that contacts with Cuban patriots already in arms on the island are being maintained, and that these groups are considered an invaluable part of the liberation process.”

Though the author of the article, a Cuban zealot of his acquaintance named Flores, employs a very high and impassioned style, Quiroga tries to deliver the story in the matter-of-fact tone befitting a news dispatch. He is paid by the workers themselves like any other lector, but he understands he is here at the sufferance of Don Vicente.

Quiroga notes that Señor Aragon is not at his bench. It has been entrusted to him, Quiroga, to “keep an eye” on Aragon, a Spaniard of openly Royalist sympathies. But Aragon is a crafter of perfectos, an artisan paid by the bundle and not by the hour and thus able to stroll out onto La Séptima whenever he wishes. When a special order was presented to the wonderful writer, humorist, and cigar aficionado Mr. Samuel Clemens, it was Aragon who was honored to fashion the puros. Any man who makes nearly three cents per cigar is an aristocrat among workers.

The elite here and at the Sanchez and Haya fábrica down the street are Spaniards. Cubans, thus far, are only the masters of a few storefront operations, full of moody Sicilians churning out inexpensive cheroots for those who can tolerate them.

“ LOCAL MERCHANTS OFFENDED, ” Quiroga announces, switching to the other front-page story. “ Colored Troops Behind Disruptions.”

Aragon has never so much as acknowledged his existence, even when he is reading from the more exhortatory of the Cuban papers. In fact, the only Spaniard he can be sure is listening is wizened old Infante, the blade-sharpener, who puts something especially dull and noisy on his wheel if the writer’s opinions upset him.

“Several Tampa merchants have complained of distasteful and sometimes violent incidents involving bands of negro soldiers set loose on the city streets each night. They complain that military officials have not considered the effect on local sensibilities of encamping such troops in the area without adequate supervision. ‘We are left at the mercy of these insolent brutes,’ a prominent merchant accuses, ‘and ask at least that the authorities disarm them before allowing them to leave their bivouacs.’ The murder of a white man by members of the colored 10th Cavalry, prompted by his refusal to serve them in his establishment, has terrorized the inland community of Lakeland recently, and residents there warn of impending retribution. ‘We have plenty of white boys down here ready to fight, and more coming from our Western states,’ continued the downtown merchant. ‘The colored should either be sent home or immediately dispatched to Cuba, where their loss on the battlefield will be no great misfortune.’ ” Quiroga folds the newspaper carefully. “Reprinted from the Tampa Post and Defender.”

A few of the negros americanos stand in the rear talking softly to each other, the ones who tend the wagons and carry crates to and fro. He wonders if they have any Spanish. Most of the Cuban rollers know only a scant handful of English words, and with the Sicilians it is impossible to tell. English is not necessary here in Ybor City.

His facility with the two tongues, his lector’s erudition, has led the Junta to employ Quiroga as an interpreter for their overtures to the American command. But the latest meetings on the vast porch of the Tampa Bay have been polite in protocol alone, the Junta being told in no uncertain terms to tend to their flag-waving and leave military intrigue to the professionals. Undaunted, they have convinced themselves of dire Spanish plots to reveal details of local troop maneuvers, when in fact the schedule of Don Vicente’s trolley service into Tampa City is harder to divine than the open and predictable drilling of Shafter’s regiments. No doubt the Crown has spies in Tampa, feverishly translating the reports of the flock of war correspondents that hovers about the palatial hotel waiting for something, anything, to happen, but Aragon the puro artist is not likely to be one of them.

It shamed him, the American officers smug in their rocking chairs, cocktails in hand. Arturo Quiroga knows when he is being condescended to. He wanted to tell the yanquis to keep their ten thousand men and send instead fifty thousand rifles with twenty rounds of ammunition each, to tell them that with these Cuban patriots would control the country in a week. It made him wish he was a true orator, not just a medium, a channel for other men’s words. Martí—he met the man at the Pedrosos’ boarding house just after the Spanish tried to poison him — Martí should have been on the porch of the Tampa Bay Hotel. “The belly of the Beast” Martí called America in his speech at the Liceo, the speech praised or blamed for starting the Ten Years’ War, “he vivido en la barriga del Monstruo del norte,” and offered no apologies when the quote was picked up by the yanqui papers. He was a little man, slight of build and stature, but the voice, the eyes — he spoke and every Cuban in Ybor became a believer. Quiroga was there listening on the stage with his own brother, Pablito, not much more than a boy, who was moved to buy a pistol and join Martí’s fated expedition of ’95, and gunned down in Dos Ríos at the side of the Apostle.

He is no orator though, Quiroga, only a channel for other men’s words, other men’s ideas. The torneadores have their favorites, books they love to hear again and again, Mr. Dickens and Monsieur Dumas fils prominent among these, but occasionally he is able to widen their scope, to introduce them to authors and ideas of his own choosing. It is a tiny act of persuasion, an act not of revolt but of subversion. “Each serves as he may,” said Martí, standing not an arm’s length away from him in the boarding-house parlor, “and ideas may triumph while weapons fail.” Are they listening, these bowed heads, stacking, pressing, rolling, binding, cutting, fingers ever moving, these human machines spread at the benches below his platform? And if listening, do they intuit a connection, decipher a metaphor, find instruction or reassurance in the lives of those fictive characters? Or is it all just a story, buzzing over their heads?

Quiroga is beginning a novel today, and has some question as to how its content will be received. Don Vicente Martínez-Ybor, though a Spaniard by birth, is said to be sympathetic to La Causa, allowing on the premises the collection of monies to arm and organize the revolt, Quiroga faithfully tithing his ten percent like most of the others. But Don Vicente’s opinions on organized labor are less tolerant, the move from Key West blatantly an anti-unionist stratagem, and though the old man rarely enters the factory these days, his ears, as they say, are long. Freedom, true freedom, is not only a matter of what flag flies above your head. After the star and the triangle are raised over Havana, the struggle will truly begin—

The fingers keep moving.

Quiroga opens the new volume gently, attempting not to crack the spine.

“Germinal,” he announces. “Escrito por Don Émilio Zola. Capítulo Uno.”

The White Admiral sits in a wicker chair in his quarters on the flagship of the victorious Fleet. He is dressed in white, with a white head of hair and a thick white moustache, resplendent against the stateroom’s dark, polished wood. This could be a room in a grand hotel, the Olympia so huge that they are barely rocked by the waters of the Bay. The White Admiral crosses his hands and rests them against his middle, while the smaller brown men sit facing him with their hats in their laps, afternoon rays slanting into their eyes from the skylight above. One of them, the exiled General, ventures to speak in careful Spanish.

He congratulates the White Admiral on his great naval victory.

The White Admiral smiles and nods when this is translated for him.

“We have come,” the Admiral says in English, looking the exiled General directly in the eye, “to lift the yoke of Spanish rule from the backs of the Philippine people.”

Diosdado sits behind and to the side of the White Admiral, hired by the Americans to help if the exiled General cannot say what he wishes in Spanish and needs to revert to Tagalog. But Aguinaldo’s Spanish is adequate if not elegant, and Diosdado only listens.

The exiled General expresses his admiration for the grandeur and beneficence of the American nation. It is a courtly dance, between partners who have been only recently introduced.

The White Admiral asks if the exiled General will not soon return to his country and lead his people against the Spanish forces still occupying it.

“My people are willing,” replies the General, “but lack arms with which to demonstrate their patriotism.”

The White Admiral and the exiled General discuss details of bringing arms into the country. A quantity of Mausers and ammunition are already here, carried up from Corregidor Island, and many more can certainly be purchased and shipped from Hongkong with the help of the U.S. Consul. An aide to the White Admiral, standing discretely to one side and speaking as if it is a somewhat insignificant consideration, mentions the sum of seven American dollars per rifle, of thirty-three dollars and fifty cents for a thousand rounds.

The exiled General is soft-spoken and polite as always, his expression guileless. Did his face look like this, wonders Diosdado, when the Bonifacios were led away to be slaughtered?

“I must tell you,” says the General to the White Admiral, “that there is some uneasiness among my fellow patriots, men who worry that once the Spaniard is vanquished and we are weakened by the struggle, your country may decide to replace them as our masters.”

The White Admiral nods pleasantly. The floor of his stateroom is littered with wicker baskets overflowing with congratulatory cables and letters and gifts. There is a rumor that his cook travels into the blockaded city by launch every day, to buy fresh fruit. He answers slowly in English, as if reassuring a child frightened by a storm.

“America is wealthy in both land and resources,” he says. “It has no need of colonies.”

Pepito Leyba, younger even than Diosdado, translates for the General, managing to transmit both the White Admiral’s condescending yet friendly demeanor and his lack of specificity.

“This is reassuring for me to hear,” responds the exiled General. “My colleagues, however, will be more reassured, more likely to rally to our cause, if they could read of your intentions in an official statement.”

“An official statement like the one you signed with Spain,” counters the Admiral, sitting back on his wicker throne, “that stipulated your permanent exile?”

There are men, friends of Diosdado’s, who will never forgive the General for the Treaty of Biak-na-Bato. To accept money from the Spaniards, to accept amnesty and exile, even if—

The General appears unperturbed. “The Spaniards did not honor the Treaty,” he says flatly.

“And so you will see,” smiles the White Admiral, “that the word of honor of an American is more positive, more irrevocable, than any piece of paper.”

The exiled General flicks his eyes to Diosdado when Leyba says the word irrevocable.

“Manatili,” Diosdado translates. Leyba speaks Spanish, French, English, Tagalog, and who knows what else, but perhaps the General is asking for more than a word here. Do not trust these people, Diosdado thinks, and hopes the thought is transmitted through his eyes.

The General’s expression does not change. The White Admiral either will not or has not the power to promise their independence if Filipinos lead the fight to expel the Spaniards. If they do not fight, however, do not show their willingness to kill and be killed, how much more likely, with German warships hovering in the bay, with the Japanese so rapidly building up their own navy, that the yanquis will choose to stay?

“We must proceed with the liberation of the islands,” says the White Admiral, “and must act toward each other as friends and allies.”

On being introduced, Diosdado feigned that he had never before met the General or Pepito Leyba, had shaken hands formally and stepped back into his place. After the General is gone the Americans will ask him for his impressions, and he will say “I think he believes everything he said.” And then later he will report to the General and be questioned and say he thinks the Americans have not yet made up their minds. And though both statements are obvious and true he will be a spy, and neither side will give him their complete trust. The Americans have destroyed the Spanish fleet, the dreaded gunboats that precluded any chance of Filipinos attacking Manila, their blackened hulks still visible in the shallows off of Sangley Point. The Americans have taken the Cavite Arsenal and have their big guns trained on the Spanish garrison within the Walled City of Manila. There is no saying how they will fare in Cuba, the liberation force as yet to leave American shores, but here, here they have been godlike in the speed of their devastation. If the White Admiral lacks guile, it is because up to this moment he has not required it. Whereas Aguinaldo—

“I am willing to sacrifice my own life in this great undertaking,” says the exiled General, “as is every true patriot in our nation.”

In the pilot boat on the way out the American ensign who came for him was much amused by the crowd of lanchas being poled back and forth with their loads of zacate fodder and piled stems of bananas.

“Look,” he winked to Diosdado, “it’s the Filipino Navy.”

The White Admiral rises above them, an avuncular smile on his face, and offers his hand.

“Go and start your army,” he says.

Tampa is a fever dream.

They wake to a fusillade of noise, every regiment on the Heights with its own drummer up and driving the sticks, men cursing on their ponchos before the bugle’s first assaulting note. The chigger bites along Royal’s ribs remind him where he is. The scramble for socks, the insult of the woolen pants and he’s out with the others, the canvas of the tents whiter than the sand, ghostly rows like headstones in the failing wisp of moonlight. There is no warning of the heat to come. Royal pulls the flannel shirt on, sits to wrestle with his boots. Junior crawls out from the tent, then Little Earl, looking surprised, as he always does, to find himself awake at this hour. No one speaks. The air is bitter with the coffee Stewpot Sims has begun to boil on his cookfire, one of a half-dozen glowing throughout the camp. The 25th stumble forward to be counted.

Sergeant Jacks knows his book and expects the same from you. His eyes remain calm, even when chewing on some rookie who does not know his left from his right or his bunghole from a bayonet. He allows them to drill without their blouses due to the heat, except for the one day the company dogged it so bad during the morning close-order routine the lieutenant let him lead them on a five-mile jaunt around the camp weighed down with full kit, Merriam packs, and three days’ provisions.

“You think this is bad,” he said during one of their pauses to see if a fallen man was dead or just resting with his face in the sand, “wait till we get to Cuba. They got your steam heat.”

There is a rumor that their winter-issue uniforms will be replaced soon, but that seems the unlikeliest of all the many stories contaminating the Heights. Yes, the Army might load them into their transports tomorrow or send them to China to pacify the yellow hordes or make peace with the Dons and call off the whole Cuba invasion, but the idea of Supply, in this fly-ridden dump of men and munitions, coming up with anything to make a common soldier’s burden lighter is unimaginable.

Sergeant Jacks wears his blouse though, all day long, service stripes halfway down to his wrists. No one has ever seen him take a drink of water, or step away to relieve himself, through Coop won a two-dollar bet the day the sergeant allowed himself to squash a mosquito crawling up his neck.

“Man eat bricks and shit gravel,” Coop will say when the sergeant is out of earshot. “Probly kilt more nigger privates than he ever did Indians.”

Jacks calls their names and the men bark out in response and then he announces Sick Call, which nobody who can stand dares report for since the Doc has taken to dosing all internal complaints with a ginger-root concoction that cleans you out, and not gently, at both ends.

“We have the healthiest regiment in the camp,” muses Sergeant Jacks with the tone in his voice that substitutes for a smile. “Fall out.”

They make their way to the chow-line then, and as Junior is first it falls on him to do the honors.

“What have we today?” he says, raising his voice to be heard by all. “Sowbelly with no bread or sowbelly with no eggs?”

“No breakfast,” says Stewpot Sims. Thick, stumplike Sims, who if he even hears the kicking anymore does not respond to it. “Coffee if you want it.”

Royal dips in, coffee scalding in his pint can, dark coffee this morning, with an acid taste that lingers for an hour after but is better than nothing. He tried to drill one day with nothing in his stomach, hung over from a night in Ybor, and by noon his legs were jelly.

“No breakfast. Maybe they packed it all up on the transports, we be leaving today.” Little Earl is the source of many camp rumors. Royal likes to hear how they have grown, have sprouted arms and legs by the time they’ve circled back to the company at the end of the day.

“Maybe it just smelt so bad they had to bury it,” says Corporal Puckett, one of the veterans from Fort Missoula.

“Not yet, they haven’t,” says Coop. “Don’t no hole get dug in this camp but what I digs it. Something to eat got buried, I’d know.”

The men laugh. Coop is the sergeants’ favorite goat, though there is nothing visibly wrong with his soldiering. He jumps when jump is called for and flops on command. Something in his eye, though, the way he stands, an attitude. I am here, it says. Royal and the other greenhorns all with their shoulders pinned back, chins down, guts pulled in, trying to be invisible to the officer of the moment while Coop stands there taking up his space as if it belonged to him. As if he still belonged to himself and not the 25th Regular Infantry, Colored.

“You ever been hanged, Cooper?” Sergeant Jacks asked him just the other day at muster, body almost pressed up against the taller private.

“Not yet, Sergeant.” Voice innocent of tone, but steady.

“Must be an oversight.”

The men who smoke keep one eye on the bugler, Kid Mabley, trying to burn one down before he brings the metal to his lips. The sand crabs are up now, skittering from hole to hole as if their business, whatever it might be, needs finishing before sunrise. Royal forces the coffee down and takes a few steps in place. The blisters are still there, no chance to heal, but not too angry yet. The worst is taking the boots off at the end of the day, something Junior and he help each other with, comparing the size and state of their raw spots.

Dellum from Company C moves close to him. “Any tobacco on you, rookie?”

“Don’t use it.”

“That’s no reason not to have it.”

“I get hold of any,” says Royal, “I’ll let you know.”

The veterans ragged them pretty hard at first, pushing at the new recruits to see how far they’d give, but there was nothing mean in it. Except with Coop sometimes, coming back weary from whatever punitive duty he’s caught that day, Coop will go right back after them. Even Scout, the little spaniel they keep for a mascot, spoiled on mess-hall scraps and stolen biscuits, knows enough to slink away when he sees Coop with that look on his body. Once he held Little Earl by the throat so hard, over a remark that had nothing to do with him, that there were bruises the next day, bruises that showed on a black man’s neck.

At a nod from the lieutenant, Kid Mabley blasts into Drill, humping his chest down hard to let the whole camp hear. Mabley is the best on the Heights and knows it, all the other buglers, even the white boys, coming by in the evenings to trade licks with him, holding their campaign hats over the horns to mute their playing in case someone wants to get a head start on their shuteye. No shots have been fired in camp so far, that’s what town is for, but a few men have been left bloody in the sand.

“Spaniards don’t get him,” says Dellum, a nervous sleeper, eyeing Mabley as he starts away, “Imonna kill that boy.”

Hod looks up from the chow line at Camp Alva Adams and can see the flophouse he stayed in the night before he enlisted. The camp is laid out just across from the brickyards above Denver City Park, and it is raining, as it has been for weeks now, the volunteers drilling in the mud and eating under a patchwork canvas awning that sags with collected water and promises to collapse under the weight. Runt has been taking bets as to which unit will be soaked when the inevitable occurs. He and Hod and Big Ten and the other late recruits have been reassigned almost daily, landing just this morning with Company G, whose men are mostly from Cripple Creek.

“Reinforcements,” says a private with a ratlike face as they join the group waiting with mess kits in the drizzle. “And we aint even been shot at yet.”

“We’ve been sent over to shape your outfit up,” says Runt, who is from Pueblo and claims to be a newspaper reporter, “and provide a model soldier for you to study.”

“You’d think they’d have sent a full-size model, then.”

Runt only comes up to Hod’s shoulder, fair game for the wags in every company they’ve been stuck in.

“You figure the bigger the soldier,” says Hod, “the bigger the target he’s gonna make.”

The rain comes harder then and they are soaked by the time their tin plates are weighted with stew and they can duck under the sagging canvas to sit on wet benches.

Big Ten slaps water off his hat, looks to Hod. “To think we could be in a nice dry variety hall, pounding each other’s brains out.”

“It rains every day in Cuba,” the rat-faced soldier tells them.

“You been there?”

“I read all about it in the papers.”

“That’s your tropical climate,” says the Runt. “Hot and wet.”

The soldier looks at him suspiciously. “How old are you, kid?”

“Old enough.”

“The Regular Army got standards,” says the soldier, considering Runt and shaking his head. “But us vols — you ought to see some of the officers.”

“Any more poop on when they ship us out of here?” asks Hod. Today he is feeling especially stupid to have signed on. Marching and saluting and yes sir and no sir and sleeping in tents on the muck and slop for food — at least in a mine you’ve got hours working alone up at the face where the bosses can’t ride you.

“Depends on how much weight Colonel Hale carries with the high mucketymucks. Every outfit in the country is trying to be the first to Havana.”

“What’s the hurry?” says Big Ten, shoveling stew into his mouth.

“No hurry,” grins the long-faced private. “Long as they save a couple Dagoes for me.”

After chow there is Battalion Drill, sloshing with rifle on shoulder through the mud and the cactus, trying to stride and turn as one man, laborers from the brickworks pausing to watch on their way home. Once the whole battalion is moving Hod feels better, losing himself in the mass of it, one little part of four hundred rifle-toting, cadence-shouting men shifting into rectangles of various sizes or swinging in great flanking maneuvers, over and over, the mind numbing with repetition as their boots grow heavy with mud. Since the news of the embarkation at Tampa hit camp there is the real possibility that they will actually get to use the old trapdoor Springfields they’ve been given, to kill and be killed. So far they’ve barely fired a round, the officers more worried about a stray shot hitting the neighbors than the fighting prowess of their troop. If it does come to a real fight, thinks Hod, then hell — the Dons are nothing but bosses, bosses of the cruelest sort, and freeing the poor Cubans from them is a good thing, a noble thing, an American thing to do. There will be breakfast tomorrow, possibly hot, and the next day and the next, his decisions worried out by other men and his hours regulated by trumpet calls. Men like him, homeless, desperate men, are blown about the world like cinders from a locomotive stack, and the Army is as good a place for them to end up as any.

The overcast day loses the last of its light and there is the six o’clock whistle from the Denver and Rio Grande tracks and finally they can march no more. The men stand in ranks and a major struts in front of them and barks loud noises about discipline and teamwork and then they are dismissed till evening meal. Big round Sibley tents have been put up in rows, and the men, sixteen to each, sit on their bedrolls in the gloomy interiors, pulling their sodden boots off, feet facing the center pole, smoking and talking by candlelight.

“Makes you feel right at home, don’t it Chief?” winks a corporal named Grissom to Big Ten. “Back in the old teepee.”

“I never been in a tent,” says Big Ten looking at the simple rigging above. “Except once at the circus. My people live in cabins.”

“We get to Cuba,” says their squad sergeant, LaDuke, “you’ll get a chance to lift some tonsures. Bet that greaser hair comes off easy.”

“Wasn’t nobody in my family ever a barber, neither,” says Big Ten, in a way that announces he’s done with the topic.

“I figure we either go for broke blasting our way straight into Havana,” says Runt, who is full of strategy he reads in the editorial pages of the Post, “or we slip around to the other end of the island and take them from behind. Santiago de Cuba.”

Grissom snorts a laugh. “Oh, they see you, Half-Pint, they’ll be shaking in their boots.”

“Long as you save a couple Dagoes for me,” says the rat-faced soldier.

There is dinner, canned bacon and undercooked beans, and then a little time for card games and another installment in the running debate over which is the finest passion parlor, accessible on a soldier’s pay, on Denver’s Holliday Street. The trumpet signals lights-out at ten. Hod lies back and listens to the rain on the canvas and, only blocks away, the music and shouting from the saloons on Larimer. Once he and Zeb made a pup tent from a tarpaulin and some fenceposts and slept out behind the barn, pretending they were Army scouts out on the range, pretending to listen for hostile Indians and thrilled to feel the ground tremble when the night train from Salina rushed past. He feels like he is pretending now, their little cluster of tents surrounded by the great city, feels like it might as well be the Salvation Army he has joined and not the 1st Colorado Volunteers.

Big Ten begins to snore and it seems as if the ground is trembling.

Nobody is shooting at them. Royal has been imagining it, dreading it, the green mat of jungle facing them crowded with armed Spanish, every one of them sighting his rifle at a spot dead between his eyes. But nobody is shooting, nobody here but a passel of sick-looking locals, nary a one of them got shoes on their feet. At least that, with all the orders shouted and screamed, with the waves washing over the rowboats and the mess with the livestock. The muscles in Royal’s stomach ache from all he’s thrown up on the big ship, his legs feel weak and it is hotter than it ever got in Tampa, but as he lunges out of the boat, waves breaking around his knees, and hurries after the others onto the little strip of sandy beach he is flooded with relief to be here, on solid ground, on Cuba.

“Company H stack rifles here!” shouts Sergeant Jacks, standing on a small rise in a swarm of mosquitoes he chooses to ignore. “Then get on those crates. Move!”

“I don’t see any of the white soldiers unloading cargo,” says Junior. He and Royal butt their rifles into the sand, bringing the muzzles together, and Little Earl adds his to make the pyramid stand.

“Somebody got to do it.”

Junior follows back to the boats. “But it’s always us.”

Royal shrugs as he wades out, then staggers backward into the surf as a crate of ammunition is pushed into his arms. “Didn’t send us down here to sit on the beach and eat cocoanuts.”

It is unseasonably cool, chilly even, a stiff breeze coming in off the Cape Fear as the cab rolls along Water Street to the train station. It will be colder up there, Harry knows, snow eventually, and his coat will be inadequate. Perhaps his first purchase in the great city. He has only the new-bought wall trunk and his old leather satchel, amazed at how few possessions seemed vital enough to warrant inclusion. The wheel shop is only padlocked, no sign indicating his absence or likely return.

The familiar sights roll by — Harry knows the owners of most of the commercial properties, the residents of at least half of the private dwellings — and he muses that away from the noise and smell of riverside industry Wilmington is a lovely town. But compared to the northern metropolis he has read and imagined so much about, only that. A town.

He wonders if there will be trees.

The cabman is one of the sullen rather than cheerful types, a tubercular old negro who sighed and staggered dramatically as he lifted the snugly packed trunk into his vehicle. His horse needs washing. The Judge will be at his Front Street club now, trading stories with his contemporaries, and then on to his nap in the leather chair by the south window. Harry’s note, rewritten several times and left at home in the Judge’s box by the door, presents an orderly rationale for his departure. Harry is not, in fact, getting any younger. Opportunities do exist, up there, which may never be available in Wilmington. And it is his own money, after all, that is being ventured, his own life to lead.

And yet he feels furtive as they pass the busy Sprunt works, cotton press slamming bales together, and roll into the yard before the Atlantic Coast Line depot.

“Wait here a moment, please,” he says to the moping cabman as he carefully lowers himself to the ground. Train schedules have been known to change.

He does not recognize the station agent, which is a blessing. Tuck Sim-mons, who mans the booth until noon, is a familiar of the Judge, having procured the position through the old man’s kind agency after his cigar emporium was destroyed, uninsured, in a suspicious blaze. Wilmington is full of such gentlemen, beholden to his father for this or that act of generosity, and as a boy it seemed a wonderful thing. Only lately has it become oppressive, Harry unable to miss, behind the effusive greetings and inquiries as to the Judge’s health, the silent evaluation.

He must be such a disappointment to the old gentleman.

The agent sits behind his window, contemplating the front page of the Messenger and shaking his head.

“Hell in a hand basket,” he mutters before looking up. “Somebody got to make a stand.”

It is suddenly very close, though it is only Harry and the station agent and the empty benches inside. He removes his hat.

“May I inquire,” he begins, though he has three printed schedules folded in his pocket, though he has all but memorized the timetable, “how one would proceed from here to New York City?”

The agent cocks his head to one side, looking Harry over. “My, my, my,” he says, then glances up at something that must be posted on the wall above the window.

“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday there’s a Florida Special coming through, northbound — it leave here at one-ten, stops in Wilson and Rocky Mount before you reach Richmond. At Richmond you change from the ACL to the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac, take you to Washington. From there you switch to the Pennsylvania Railroad, trains to New York nearly every hour.”

Harry nods at each point of the itinerary. “And the fare?” He has it counted out, folded in an envelope, in another pocket.

“To Richmond, or all the way through?”

“The entire journey.”

“Private compartment?”

“I can share.”

The agent smiles at him. He knows the Judge, knows who Harry is. He must. Harry feels the perspiration on his lip, feels his color coming up. Nobody of his immediate acquaintance, other than Niles, has ever ventured beyond Charlottesville, Virginia, and certainly none has entertained the idea of actually living in what the Judge still refers to as “enemy territory.” The few yankees Harry has met — mostly snowbirds on their way to one of Mr. Flagler’s sunshine resorts — have been less intimidating than he expected, though of course not in their native element. All have commented on the charm of an accent he was not aware he possessed, and assured him that he would be regarded in the North as a creature of refreshing novelty. Rara avis.

“If you were to travel on a single ticket,” says the station agent, “it would cost you sixteen dollars and seventy-five cents. Meals not included.”

It will cost me a great deal more than that, thinks Harry. His legs, both the healthy and the malformed one, do not feel as if they can support his weight. Perhaps he is coming down with something.

“I thank you very much,” he says to the agent as if his idle curiosity has been satisfied, then turns to go. His footsteps, uneven as always, sound very loud on the depot floorboards as he makes his retreat. The Judge will be at cigars and brandy by now, and there is ample time to return home and cover his tracks.

The balers at the Sprunt works seem to be operating inside his head as he steps into the yard, pounding, throbbing. He is short of breath. It is the farthest he has gotten, the last attempt only a long sight-seeing ride past the depot and then up to visit his mother’s grave at Pine Forest. He is ashamed of himself, but not enough to turn and march back inside to make the purchase.

“Not today,” Harry smiles sheepishly to the cabman, who does not seem to care.

They are up and moving before sunrise. No breakfast, not even coffee. The order is silence, though Royal and the others are too tired to have much to say. It has been days of marching since the landing, marching in the heat and the bone-soaking rain and at night only rolling the wet poncho and blanket and tent-half canvas out on the ground to try to stay dry on at least one side and feeding the mosquitoes or out on sentry. At night there are shots, shouting, crabs rustling in the underbrush. And then that whole day spent hurrying in circles in the jungle, trying to relieve the ambushed Rough Riders at Las Guasimas but never finding them, lost, a dozen men falling from the heat and Royal nearly one of them. It is a wet heat that sits heavy on you, like being a steamed oyster says Junior, only oysters don’t carry forty pounds of supplies and a horse-collar blanket roll over their necks.

Parrots and tocororos begin their squawking in the canopy above as the men form twos and start down the pathway that is being called a road. Light filters in through the branches, giving shape to the trees, and by the time they come out into the first canefield the morning mists are rising, then thinning to reveal the distant Sierra Maestras. Royal had never seen mountains, never left the Carolina coast before the Army and Fort Missoula, and these don’t look real to him, their slope too sudden, too steep. He is already sweating under his sodden uniform, haversack strap digging in, already feeling tired when a squad of Cuban fighters lopes past their line. The men and boys are dressed in thin, light cloth, a few with sandals, most not, and every shade under the sun. A few look like white men, a few like the Chinese he’s seen in picture books, and a few are blacker than any man in North Carolina. Achille Dieudonné from G Company who speaks Creole French and border Mex says these dark black ones are Haitians, floated over on rafts from that island where the going is even rougher.

These Cubans are smaller, mostly, than the Americans, and very thin, though that is exaggerated by how little they carry — a sugar sack and a machete, maybe a rifle, their cartridge belts rigged from stiff cloth or no belt at all, just a leather pouch worn round the neck holding the few bullets they have. Thin, but nothing like the ones back at Firmeza, the reconcentrados they found behind barbed wire who looked even more miserable than the drawings in the newspapers. Royal has never seen people so poor, so starving, white, black, and brown thrown in together, hollow-eyed with their bones poking up under their skin.

“I wouldn’t treat a dog that way,” said Too Tall Coleman as they passed. The people only watched them, mute, too wasted to muster an expression.

There is a sound ahead, a deep, coughing, compressing of air like truncated thunder. Four of them, one just after the other. Sergeant Jacks turns to call softly over his shoulder.

“The dance has begun, gentlemen,” he says. “Let’s keep moving here.”

They continue marching, in and out of the thick trees, and Royal can tell by the mood of the sergeants that today it will be real. Last night they were given extra rounds to carry, two hundred more he has twisted into the spare socks in his pack, and the chaplain was busy and the officers were huddling together with maps. The mosquitoes are up now and at their business but Royal knows to crush them not swat them and to strap his load tight so it doesn’t rattle and to not ask questions. He and Junior and Little Earl are rookies but not so green as they once were, real soldiers now except for the one thing and after today that will be done.

They have been marching almost three hours when volunteers begin to appear, coming in the opposite direction in twos and threes, men from the 2nd Massachusetts who have been pulled off the firing line. Many are wounded, pale and a little stunned, a few shot through the body and walking as if it is a conscious effort to hold themselves together, their gaze gone inward.

“Don’t bother, fellas,” says one man with a bloody crease across his stubbled cheek. “They’re sittin up there where you can’t even see em, pourin it down on us. You won’t have no more show than we did.”

“Volunteers can’t see through their own smoke, is what,” says Sergeant Jacks flatly after the man has passed. “Got them old shit Winchesters. Black powder will draw enemy lead like bees to honey. Smart to get them off the field.”

Jacks sees another man moving toward them against the flow, a top sergeant like himself, with a sunburned face, holding one arm close to his body.

“What they dealing out?”

The sunburned sergeant stops ahead of them. “Maybe a couple Hotchkiss guns up there, Mausers.” He grabs his wounded arm by the wrist and raises it to display a small black stain on the bicep of his uniform shirt. “Put one right through me.”

Jacks cocks his head at the wound. “Mauser ball make a nice clean hole, don’t it?”

“We lost a boy in an ambuscade on the way, some of these guerillas up in the trees. Went in over the lung and come out his back the size of a fist.”

“That’d be a Winchester round. She’ll tear the hell out of you.”

Royal wonders if he is saying this for effect, trying to scare the greenhorns like the other veterans do. The two sergeants could be talking about fishing.

“You like a bullet to stay in one piece when it hits you,” adds Jacks.

The white soldier shakes his head. “Don’t know what they think a man can do,” he says. “Aint nobody going to take that hill.”

They continue to move forward, the men watching the treetops now. On the third day ashore they saw a few of the guerillas, hacked dead with machete blows and laid out on the side of the road, already stripped of equipment and some of their clothes. Cubans who fought on the Spanish side of this mess, but not looking any different from the insurrectos.

“Why would a man want to fight against his own people?” Junior wanted to know.

“We used the Crows to track the Sioux,” said Achille, who did a stretch in the 9th Cavalry when he was a young man. “Used the Tonkawa to fight the Comanches. But to a man outside they all just Indians.”

They march past a dead American, sitting propped at the base of a huge ceiba tree bordering another canefield. His whole middle is wet with blood, and there are a half dozen vultures circling in the sky. If the man’s head was at a normal angle it would look like he was resting.

“There’s the music,” says Bevill ahead of Royal and yes, he can hear it now, very light and distant but lots of it, no break between gunshots, just louder ones and softer ones.

They cross the field and fall out under the shade of the mango trees by a big plantation house. Men hurry their fixings out, rolling smokes, Too Tall cutting open a green cigar he has bought from some roadside muchacho and wadding the tobacco into his pipe. Royal drinks, realizes his canteen is already half empty. It is a beautiful spot. It is all beautiful country but for the heat and if you had the right clothes and nothing much to do and nobody was shooting at you it would be a paradise. Royal’s stomach is still not right from the green mangoes they boiled down for dinner last night, smelled like turpentine but tasted sweet. His stomach hasn’t been right, in fact, since the trip over on the Concho, the drinking water warm and brownish, the food no better than usual and all that rolling in the hold, sick even at night and having to take turns for time up on deck.

“Somebody’s catching hell,” says Gamble. “That firing aint let up once.”

The men listen. Birds are still singing, the high-pitched frogs are awake and throbbing, and through it they can hear the rattle and roll of rifle fire punctuated with an infrequent bass note of artillery.

Junior points. “Over there.”

They look and can see a cloud of white smoke rising above the jungle canopy to the right, maybe a half-mile away.

“That’ll be our battery,” says Sergeant Jacks. “Four pieces. Working kind of slow.”

They listen awhile, then lose interest, some men unhitching their loads and lying back on the ground, some talking quietly, most sitting alone with their own thoughts.

“Insurrectos say they cut the Spaniards’ heads off if they catch em,” muses Achille. “Say the Spanish do the same, put em out on a stake.”

“What that mean to us?” asks Coop, who lays back with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his chest.

“Means maybe some of them Spanish boys been wanting to surrender, get sent back home. Now they got us to give up to.”

“Don’t sound like nobody surrenderin to nobody up there.”

“They got their officers behind em, stick em with a sword they don’t keep fighting.”

“So alls we got to do is kill all their officers.”

“That would do it.”

“Good,” says Coop. “I keep that in mind.”

Sergeant Jacks comes by to inspect rifles, just the rookies, and Royal pulls out the oiled rag he keeps stuffed down the muzzle.

“There’s a village called Caney,” says the sergeant as he handles the Krag, “behind a fort on a hill. We sposed to take that, then swing over and help the main force at San Juan.” He has never volunteered this kind of information before, never explained, and Royal wonders why he wants them to know this now. “We get into the shit, you just do what you see everybody else doing.”

The sun is directly overhead when they are formed up again and marched toward the gunfire. Royal is out off the path as a flanker with Junior, struggling through the brush, when they come to a man hanging upside-down from a tree, a rope tied to his ankle. Another Cuban, a guerilla, with palm fronds fastened around his body. Blood has run from the hole where his eye used to be to collect in his hair and spatter down onto the broad-leaved plants below.

“Sniper,” says Junior, pausing to look up into the nearby treetops. “No telling how many of ours he killed.”

The battle is louder now, flankers called in as they approach the end of the cover. Now and again there is the whine of a closer bullet, leaves and palm branches fluttering down from above, snipped by the spillover from the fighting in front of them. A sharp crack here and there and wood chips flying. The men strip off the load of bedrolls and haversacks, jettison everything but rifle, rounds, and canteen. Royal imagines he is dead.

If he is dead they can’t kill him.

He crouches with the others at the end of the woods and looks through the trees at what is waiting. A rugged stretch of mostly open ground, green-brown chaparral with a few spindly trees leading to a steep hill crowned by a stone fort. There are wooden blockhouses stretching off to the left of it, and then, on another hill slightly behind, a village with a tall stone church. Royal imagines his mother at her table, quiet and all cried out. He imagines Jessie with a black armband over her white shirtwaist sleeve, wearing it for him, solemn for a year, maybe more. Being dead is nothing, exactly that, nothing, so much better than being afraid, being injured, in pain, maimed.

He is dead and whatever happens next cannot hurt him.

Lieutenant Caldwell strolls in front of them, still inside the first line of trees, shouting to be heard over the gunfire that seems to be mostly off to the right of the hill.

“We will need to step into the open to form ranks,” says the lieutenant. “And we will advance in extended order at once. We are part of a larger maneuver — people are counting on us and we cannot fail them. Sergeants!”

They step out and form a firing line then, sergeants trotting parallel and shouting, getting the intervals right while the volleys from the fort swing their way. There is nothing to hide behind, and though most of the rounds sing over their heads a few men fall and soldiers sidestep to fill in the gaps. G and H Companies are out front in the firing line, Royal near the far left, with C and D to follow a hundred yards back in support, the rest crouching back in reserve. Royal sees the 4th Infantry, who had been with them on the Concho, whites to port and blacks to starboard, step out to form on their left flank. There had been lots of jokes across the bowline stretched between them about who was being protected from who.

“Firing line, forward — march!”

Kid Mabley blows the order and they quickstep ahead.

The idea seems to be to keep moving forward and hope all of them are not dead by the time they reach the top. Royal checks to each side to be sure he is not getting out front too far and sees that more men are falling. He feels the bullets singing past as much as he hears them and keeps walking through the chaparral, everything very bright, very clear and thinking he should be firing like some of the others but there is nothing, nobody up there visible to shoot at. The line reaches some small trees and there is barbed wire stretched between them, a half dozen strands of it and posts every three feet to kick and club through, something to concentrate on furiously as chunks of wood crack into splinters and more men fall. Somebody is screaming behind him. The line is scattered when he comes into the clear again, Royal trotting with the few left on either side of Sergeant Jacks.

“In rushes!” shouts the sergeant. “Keep moving!”

There are whistles and bugle calls behind but now it is just rush and flop, rush and flop, desperate lunging forward then extending the Krag and diving to the ground. It’s a wildly uneven field with spiky pineapples in rows upon the churned earth and hard to navigate without tripping. Royal flops in a furrow and fires his first shot, not really using his sight but just pointing at the fort and pulling the trigger. Others are firing and the sergeant said to do whatever they did. The thick spat of a bullet near him and there is hot sticky fruit on his cheek and he is up and rushing forward again.

He can see something at the top of the hill, movement, behind the line of barbed wire staked in front of the rifle pits before the fort, and he fires again, trying to aim this time, if not at a person then at a spot a person might be in. The hill is steep, steeper than the sand dunes back in Tampa, Royal holding his rifle in one hand and using the other to grab roots, plants, anything to help haul himself up and something sprays his face again, not a pineapple this time but somebody, a wet part of somebody, men dropping, men stopping movement around him but he climbs upward, upward till he is exhausted and needs to lie with his face on the hot ground a moment, then roll on his back and let his lungs work. The dead can be exhausted, they can be thirsty, but they are never afraid. Royal drinks from his canteen and sees down the hill to the second line coming up past the bodies of the first, sees D Company double-timing forward on the right as flankers, then rolls and struggles upward again.

He reaches a little dip, a depression running across the hill for several yards in which Jacks and half a platoon are lying, and falls down beside them. The artillery has been firing from behind them all this time and finally it seems to have found the range, one shell blowing a breach in the barbed-wire fencing and the next blasting the front of the fort itself, snapping the flagpole off and sending the Spanish colors tumbling to the ground. The men around him cheer. Royal is heaving for breath and drenched in his own liquid and he burns his hand on the barrel of the Krag, hot only from the sun and not his few random shots and he drinks again as more men reach the dip and flop down. They are only a hundred yards from the first of the trenches now and the Mausers are cracking, bullets spanging off rocks and flicking up dirt in front of their faces and it is unthinkable that he will have to stand and go forward.

“Sharpshooters!” yells Jacks, who seems to be the ranking officer on this part of the hill. “Articulate fire! Get those loopholes in the fort, get those bastards in the pits!”

Sharpshooters have been designated back in Tampa and Royal is not one of them. He looks down the ragged line of soldiers, sees men pushing up on their elbows to sight and fire, some rising on a knee, pulling the trigger, working the bolt, rolling on their sides to reload. It is methodical, hot work, and he is suddenly filled with awe for these men and hopes some of them will survive.

The Judge sits in the last car with seven maidens in white. The soot and cinders from the engine can’t reach them here, and there is no excuse for the rough element on board to come passing through. Sally has set her heart on riding the Float of Purity since she heard of it and the Judge has had to explain more than once that Cumberland County is hosting the event and has its own supply of maidens. She has insisted on wearing white from head to foot, though, stating that every other woman attending in Fayetteville will be similarly attired.

“I have heard no such thing.”

“Neither have I, Father, but trust me, they will.”

So she jabbers with her school friends and fellow debutantes while the Judge chaperones the whole clutch of them, unable to so much as light a cigar. Clawson from the Messenger and one of the Meares brothers and George Rountree and Sol Fishblate who used to be mayor and some of his cronies from the ousted board are in the dining car, passing the Scotch, no doubt, and the Judge would join them but for the way those White Government Union layabouts were running their eyes over Sally on the platform this morning.

He looks out at the overcast landscape. It is still drizzling a bit, puddles lying gray in the fields from last night’s downpour, and he wonders if the weather will keep people away. There is a burst of raucous laughter, men’s laughter, from the car ahead. It is the age-old dilemma of revolution — for that, after all, is what they have embarked upon. The rabble, the sans culottes, are needed to storm the barricades, but then must be held in check before they run rampant, mistaking the power to destroy with the sense to rule. Most of the contingent, already four railroad cars full when they pulled out of Wilmington, seems responsible enough, many in the uniform of the Cape Fear Militia. But the White Government clubs, ranks swelled by brother organizations at each whistle-stop, have changed the tone of the excursion. The call themselves a Union, but the only thing uniting them is their mutual unemployment and a hatred of negroes, seeming more like the dregs of Coxey’s Army than the solid base of a political-reform movement. White Emancipation, the purpose of this rally, is too important, too vital a cause to allow it to be sullied by vulgarians.

The train slows to a stop and up in the second car the Fifth Ward Cornet Band blasts into Onward, Christian Soldiers to greet the new passengers, giving it a bit more Sousa than you’d likely hear at a revival meeting. It is the station in Tar Heel, a buggy ride away from the rally site, and only a handful of pilgrims step aboard. A red-cap porter backs away from the train as it begins to roll again, looking a little stunned as the men in the car ahead begin to shout at him from their open windows. The Judge closes his own, hoping to spare the young ladies, but they are too involved in their own excited chatter to have heard anything.

The epithets linger in the air like train smoke.

He was asked to join the hooded riders when they were at their peak back in ’68, when, many would still insist, they were most needed. They performed important services, vital to the day, but the society included too many men of the wrong caliber. The Judge sensed how easily they might sink from moral vigilantism to mere revenge and thievery, and regretfully declined. Roaring Jack Butler was in his heyday then, enrolling blacks in the Union League, ringleader of the Republican militia formed to stamp out the Klan, promoting his version of the “new South.” He made certain allegations against the Judge, merely a lawyer then, in the carpetbagger press, which in his father’s day would have resulted in a duel. But his father’s day had ended with the Capitulation.

“The only thing a man can truly carry to his grave,” the old man would say, “is his honor.”

The Judge realizes now that this was his only lesson, repeated in many forms over the years. Even the nightly treat of Sir Walter Scott, read or recited from memory, was an affirmation of that basic principle. His father said they were descendent from Jacobite Scots who had fled to France after the ’45 uprising, that the blood of kings flowed through their veins. The blood of kings flowed, quite literally, through most of his stories, often to the point of death defending an untenable cause. It was his father who taught him the original meaning of the burning cross, the beacon calling the clan, men of the same blood, together to defend their families, their land, their honor. It was such a potent image — fire, religion, family, the premonition of torture and death — blazing its message through the dark night of oppression.

“Symbols matter,” his father had told him. “They stir men to action. They must never be degraded.”

“Father?”

It is Sally, turned to look over the back of her seat to him.

“When we get there, I’ll need a moment to arrange myself. We all will.”

“I’m sure there will be time.”

The rallying of the clan.

If they had done their work in the daylight he might have joined. But in the uncertainty of darkness, men with masks and firearms — there was too much opportunity for blunder and mismanagement. The only act he ever regretted committing had been at night, in the company of other men. It was at Chancellorsville, though the battle had no name then, just another endless day of slaughter, mostly in a tangle of woods that allowed little opportunity to know if you were in the van or outflanked, no chance to reform ranks on the flag. His only brother, Robert, had been killed that day, as had many other good friends in the 18th. There was murder in his heart and when they assumed the picket they were told that yankee cavalry was operating in the area.

You only had time for one shot if horsemen overran you, the object being to fire quickly and hope to dodge the saber. They heard hoofbeats, a small party approaching at a canter and he joined in the volley toward the looming silhouettes, muzzle flashes on both sides of him, then the cries and the terrible discovery that it was their own officers they had fired upon, with General Jackson unhorsed and sure to lose his arm. He looked into the great man’s eyes when they carried him to a tent — they were glossy with shock and he was moving his lips very slightly, whispering a prayer. There was no knowing if his own bullet had found its mark on any of the wounded, but no comfort in that ignorance. Jackson was stricken with the pneumonia just after his surgery, and died a week after. A few days before Gettysburg the Judge saw a photograph of the coffin, covered by the new Stainless Banner that he thought, with its massive white field, too much resembled the flag of surrender.

They arrive in Fayetteville shortly before noon, a fine mist of rain still in the air, and hurry without organization the few blocks to the Lafayette.

“Oh my,” says Sally, thrilled, “just look at all of us!”

Thousands choke the street. Every sunburned farmer in the county, with wife and tow-headed brood, has come for the festivities, a logjam of buggies and haywagons that needs breaking up before the procession can get under way. Sally and her friends duck into the hotel to freshen themselves, and the Judge finds himself waiting, watching the frantic last-moment pushing and prodding of the rally organizers who shout and wave over the throng, trying to shape the energy and good will present into concerted action.

A half-dozen bands tune their instruments at once, grunting and blatting, snare drums rattling, while wearers of uniforms struggle through the crush of bodies to find each other. The rain stops, which is a blessing, and the Judge manages to get his back up against the hotel and avoid being jostled by the crowd.

The battle flag has reappeared.

During the Occupation it was outlawed by statute, and even after the yankee troops marched out it was rare to see one. But today, from his own limited viewpoint, the Judge can count nearly a dozen. It is the old square cloth of the Southern Cross with thirteen white stars upon it, the flag that came from the St. Andrew’s Cross of Scotland that came from the crux saltire, the X-shaped cross the Romans had used to crucify the apostle. His father, years before the War, told him how St. Andrew had appeared in a dream to King Angus MacFergus the night before battle, how his Picts and Scots had looked above the battlefield to see a great white cross in the sky and were inspired to drive back the Northumbrians. There was no mistaking that banner, held high above the artillery smoke, no mistaking it for the enemy’s flag as with the Stars and Bars. It thrills him to see it again, rippling in the little breeze that has come up, and makes him anxious as well.

They must never be degraded.

He tried to call Jack Butler out. They were boyhood friends, fished and hunted together, their fathers partners in law and business. But the war of ink, each letter to the editor surpassing the last in vitriol, degenerated from my esteemed colleague to notorious scalawag and Secessionist assassin. Action was called for. His father was wounded in a duel as a young man, precipitated by a point of honor so complex he was never able to fully explain it to his sons. He described the confrontation, the deadly honor and solemnity of it, as the event that finally made him a man.

The Judge met his adversary by chance on the courthouse steps, Butler descending with a gang of the officeholders from that benighted time, himself with only poor tubercular Granville Pratt as a witness.

“Sir,” he said, blocking the other man’s way, regretting that the terrain put him at a disadvantage in stature, “I demand satisfaction.”

Butler smiled with condescension. “You won’t receive it from me.”

The carpetbaggers laughed then, as they had been laughing since Appo-mattox.

“You are no gentleman,” the Judge observed.

“That may be true,” Butler replied, and here held a finger in his face, “but neither am I a cutthroat and a terrorist.”

The Judge did not carry a cane then, or he’d have done more damage before they were separated.

It was so clear, in his father’s time, so personal. Insults were redressed face to face, with seconds and pistols, both parties often able to walk away with honor restored or maintained, unharmed.

“I was young and hot-headed and in the wrong,” his father said of his own ceremony. “But the time had passed for apologies. The gentleman grazed my ribs, then I fired into the air. He did not demand a second exchange.”

The Judge looks about at this as yet unfocused mass, this storm-sea of discontent, and thinks of the worst of the fighting. The days when, blackened with powder, he fired into smoke and hoped to hit flesh, days when he felt the indifferent calm of the butcher.

Or felt like the man who killed Stonewall Jackson.

The march begins the moment Sally reappears on the front step of the hotel, as if they have all been waiting only for her. The Cornet Band heads out playing The Carpetbaggers’ Lament and Sally beams and God Himself smiles on their activity, opening the clouds for the first time in days to bathe them all in gold. And then, cutting in from the side street where they must have been assembled and waiting all along, come the Red Shirts. There is a collective intake of breath as they appear, then applause and wild cheering from those lining the streets and leaning out their windows. There must be at least three hundred riders, four abreast as they flow past, smiling and waving their hats. The shirts are not uniform, ranging from silk to the roughest flannel, but together they make a river of color down Hay Street and once again the Judge’s heart is lifted.

“It’s so beautiful,” Sally exclaims, taking his arm. “Niles should be here.”

A passing horse lifts its tail and deposits a steaming load at their feet, but Sally, imbued with her departed mother’s gentility, will not recognize it.

“Our own cavaliers,” she says.

That many or most are mill hands up for the day from South Carolina is not worth mentioning. They were the mailed fist of the Redeemers in that state back in ’76, and their presence here, the Judge can only hope, will inspire a similar rising in the Old North State. It takes ten solid minutes for them to pass, and then, drawn by four mottled Percherons, comes the Purity Float. Twenty-two lovely Christian girls in white dresses, one from each district in the county, smile and wave as they pass on a decorated logging trailer. Sally presses her gloved hands together in delight.

“Oh, they’ve done such a wonderful job of it!” she cries. “Considering what they have to work with.”

The carriages come next, with the Mayor of Fayetteville, the editor of their Observer, the Democratic chairman, and Pitchfork Ben Tillman himself riding in the first. The Senator waves energetically, a solid man of fifty dressed like a middling farmer come to church, his one eye bright with the excitement of the occasion.

“If we had a firebrand like him,” the Judge shouts to his daughter over the tumult, “crisis would not be upon us.”

Mr. Bridgewater, father of Sally’s dearest friend Emilia, beckons them then, and they walk to the elegant landau he has rented for the day. The driver, an Irishman in a jacket a size too small, eases it into the procession once they are settled, the girls facing forward, waving delicately as if they are the true dignitaries and the Judge and Bridgewater facing the rear, with an excellent view of the Fayetteville White Government Union lads footing along on either side in homburgs and plugs and slouch hats, strutting to beat the band.

She has a sense of purpose that neither of his boys possess, Sally, able to chart a course and stay true to it. Harry leaps from one fascination to the next, while Niles — the less he thinks about Niles the better. Sally has her mother’s soft-spoken perseverance, plus an intellect that if not restrained within the limited purview of her sex would be formidable. She is no suffragist, though, feigning no interest in what she condescendingly refers to as “men’s business.” He was surprised that she asked to come with him, until the display of maidens was revealed, and she has asked no questions about the gathering that might not pertain to a country fair. The girls have their parasols up, as it has begun to sprinkle again, and look a picture. One of the White Government boys, transfixed by them as he walks alongside, steps into a lamppost and is heartily mocked by his companions.

Cannons boom across the fairgrounds as they enter, the Cornet Band greeting them with Dixie. The judges’ stand on the racetrack infield is serving for the speakers’ platform, and dozens of benches have been set up on the turf to accommodate those who cannot fit in the grandstand. Tom Mason, a fine academic speaker from up by the Virginia border, is already holding forth when they find seats, Bridgewater having brought a blanket to cover the damp pine. The crowd is only half paying attention, the fairgrounds no venue for fine points and historical flourishes, but all rise to applaud when he introduces the Senator from South Carolina.

The approbation continues for some time. Here is the stalwart of the backcountry farmer in his struggle with robber barons and tidewater Bourbons, the Free Silver man who offered to stick a pitchfork in Grover Cleveland, his own party’s candidate, if he continued to acquiesce to combinations and goldbugs, who lost an eye in the War and proudly claimed to have instigated the Hamburg Massacre. That he lost the eye to disease and saw no battle does not dampen the enthusiasm of the gathering, nor does the fact that his role in the historic first blow of Redemption is greatly exaggerated. He is the people’s man, though never an avowed Populist, blunt-spoken and unapologetic. The Judge’s Charleston acquaintances, of notably bluer blood, complain that Tillman’s accomplishments as governor have been limited to outlawing Greek letter fraternities and denying citizens the right to buy liquor by the glass, but that was ignoring the larger picture. The man has stemmed the tide of defeat.

“They call me Pitchfork Ben,” he opens and there is another cheer, punctuated by rebel yells throughout the gathering.

“Out on the farm we employ a pitchfork to handle manure. And I can tell that you want a long-handled one to deal with the recent political shenanigans in your state.”

The Wilmington contingent, mostly around them on the grandstand, are particularly amused by this.

“As a United States senator, I am asked to consider matters which at first might seem to have little to do with one another. But during my tenure there I have discovered that a great number of the things which affect us here in the South adversely — are all of a piece. Our former candidate, Mr. Cleveland—” booing here, though rather good-natured, “—has been revealed as not only a mono-metalist and a tool of Wall Street, but an accomplice to the international thieves who doom the poor farmer and the honest white working man to patches in his clothes and slim pickings on his table! He so damaged our economy he was forced to bring in Rothschild and his American agents—” more boos now, with an edge of anger, “—to maintain the gold standard. The richest and most powerful nation brought so low as to allow a London Jew receiver to its treasury!”

The Judge looks over to his daughter, the smile never leaving her face, as if she might be at a garden party back home.

“With such men in power, we here in the South are doomed to economic servitude. New York shall ever be the center of manufacture and usury, and we here in the heartland of America shall never be more than drawers of water and hewers of wood, toilers on another man’s plantation.”

The Judge understands that this is the root of Tillman’s popularity, that it brings the bulk of the populace to the fold, but class hatred is a dangerous brew to stir. Easy resentment, simplified solutions—

“Let me talk about numbers for a minute here. There are three negroes in our state to every two white men. Let that sink in for a minute. With a free vote and a fair count, how you gonna beat those numbers? The Federals come down and handcuffed us and threw away the key, propped up their carpetbagging negro government with bayonets—” he looks around at them, indignant, “—and ever since they left we’ve had the damn Republicans trying to put white necks under black heels!”

Applause now, murmurs of outrage and agreement.

“But we took the government away from them in ’76. We took it. We have had no organized Republican party in our state since 1884, and we have fewer negro voters than a hen’s got teeth!”

Handclapping, some stomping on the footboards of the grandstand.

“My people,” he says with humility, “were but simple farmers. They never owned negroes. And I wish to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none had ever been brought to our shores. But that is not the case. So when we began our great movement we scratched our heads to figure out how we could eliminate the last one of them from the election process in our state. How? We stuffed ballot boxes. We threatened them. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.”

Many are standing to cheer now. The Judge looks around uneasily at his confraternity. It is one thing to gain power and change laws — another to openly break those that exist. It should be possible, he believes, to challenge unjust institutions without fostering contempt for the law itself. He is beginning to understand more fully his Charleston friends’ aversion to the Senator.

Tillman turns to address the Red Shirts, dismounted now and standing in rough formation at the base of the judges’ stand. “It stirs my heart to see the demonstration of patriotism, the show of backbone, that these men have offered us today. When the Redemption got going in South Carolina I recall seeing more than five thousand Red Shirts in one gathering, and when they mounted up and rode together through the precincts of our adversary, believe me, those people ran back into their holes like rabbits.”

Laughter again, and a cheer for the Red Shirts, who raise their right fists into the air as one.

“We did not disenfranchise our negroes till 1895,” Tillman continues, easing back a little. “Then we had a constitutional convention which took the matter up, calmly, deliberately, with the avowed purpose of disenfranchising as many of them as possible under the 14th and 15th Amendments.”

Serious booing of the Amendments in question ensue. The Judge has taken them apart in front of a law class, revealed their basic incompatibility with the Founders’ intentions. A federal law must be truly iniquitous, he thinks, for the common man to know of its existence.

“We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us,” Tillman explains. “Now, I hear you got a few overeducated niggers up here in North Carolina—” laughter, applause, “—but if they so smart, they’ll learn to stay clear of the polling places soon enough! Our negro is as contented and well protected as in any state of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he has found the more he meddles in them the worse off he gets. And as to his ‘right’—” Tillman pauses masterfully, seeming to look into the eyes of each man present, letting the last charged word hang in the air, “—we of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men and we never will!” He pounds the podium with a fist as he shouts. “And we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him!”

This is what they’ve come for, and the reaction is enormous. Sally is swept up by the excitement of it, standing and applauding with the others. But Tillman is in no hurry, and draws back.

“Now I’ve been told,” he says, “that your numbers up here come out to two white men for every black.” He makes a puzzled face, holds his arms out at his sides. “Now if that is true, what, short of idiocy, has kept you people from prevailing over negro domination?”

An uneasy laughter follows this. The Judge notices that Colonel Waddell, who he had not seen on the train, is but two rows below them, chuckling and shaking his head.

“This is not meant as an insult, for I am your guest. But I have been invited here as a man of some experience in these matters, a surgeon, if you will, and as such I must not spare the knife when it needs be employed. Your politicians have betrayed you, they have delivered you into the tender mercies of the negro party for their own profit and glorification, and you are seeing the fruits of that irresponsibility, of that treason, in the increasing boldness of those who would put big ideas in small minds.”

Tillman looks to the Float of Purity below him to the right, extending a hand to indicate the ladies, then swinging it toward the audience before him, seeming to look directly at Sally. “I can’t help noticing,” he says, “how many very beautiful girls we have among us today. They are our pride, they are our greatest treasure.”

Yes, thinks the Judge, this is it. This is it exactly.

“And every one of these fine young Christian ladies,” Tillman continues, voice rising in power, “lives in constant peril of losing her most precious possession!” He slams both fists down on the podium. “Why don’t you people get your damn niggers under control?”

And if any had been present they certainly would have been torn apart, with bare hands if need be, such is the vehemence of the reaction. Sally seems bemused, looking around her, taking the curses and protestations as a compliment. Which in a way it is. What do we fight for, thinks the Judge, if not the virtue of our women?

“I have three daughters,” says Tillman when it is quiet enough to be heard, sadness and reflection creeping into his voice, “but so help me God I had rather find any one of them killed by a tiger or a bear and gather up her bones and bury them, conscious that she had died in her purity, than to have her crawl to me and tell me the horrid story that she had been robbed of the jewel of her maidenhood by some black fiend!”

Again the Judge marvels at his daughter’s powers of concentration as men all about forget themselves and curse at the top of their lungs. It is the Southern woman’s great ability to shape reality by recognizing the existence of only those things they wish to, to smooth a rough or awkward moment with a pleasant phrase, to remain pure in the most compromised of situations. His wife, may she rest in peace, was a nonpareil of the breed, in command of any social situation, able to float above the unpleasant, able to disengage herself from — from everything. Sally has inherited much of this, but there is a warmth in her, a womanliness—

Judge Manigault looks at his daughter and Tillman’s image, a sooty paw on her pellucid, ivory skin covered with the finest golden down, overwhelms him to the point of nausea, his hands curling into fists. He knows that much of it is buncombe, an orator’s trick, but the diamond-hard kernel of it is undeniable. Their women will not be dishonored.

“From this day forth,” cries the Senator, “let the enemy live in terror of the slumbering giant he has awakened! The Anglo-Saxon will not be ruled! I don’t care if you been a Populist, Democrat, Fusionist — there must be only one political party in the great state of North Carolina, and that is the White Man’s Party!”

The Red Shirts wave their fists, the maidens on the float wave their hats, the White Government Unionists screech and stomp, flasks of whiskey passing from hand to hand. The Judge holds on to Sally’s arm and to the rail as the grandstand shakes, men pounding the boards with their booted feet. The old Confederate battle flag is waved atop a dozen poles. The rabble have been roused, the fuse lit for an explosion that will rock the state. The Judge decides that they will return on the train after the picnic, though they had planned to stay over at the hotel.

Tonight, he is certain, Fayetteville will not be a safe place for a young lady.

The moon is bright and high in the night sky by the time Royal stumbles back to the 25th.

They regroup, those not dead or wounded, in the mango grove to reclaim their blanket rolls and haversacks. The order comes to take the road back to El Pozo. Trudging through the dark jungle, too tired to talk, unsure if the day has been victory or defeat, Royal surrenders himself to the sight of Junior’s back in front of him and the mindless rhythm of one step after another. In the middle of the night they are allowed to stop and sleep next to the La Cruz plantation house, lying on their gear with their hands on their rifles.

Royal dreams of bullets.

A horizontal hail of bullets, singing down from the top of the endless slope in deadly sheets, no hiding from them, no cease in their nightmare waspwhine swarming till Kid Mabley blows him awake an hour before sunrise.

They are ordered to move to a ridge overlooking Santiago under light fire, intermittent pops and the occasional cry, a man from Company C catching one that smashes the bone of his elbow, his forearm hanging useless. Some of the red-tile roofs below them show damage from artillery. Black smoke rolls up from a fire. Only Cooper seems serious about hitting the few uniformed Spaniards moving behind the breastworks.

“Them I didn’t get yesterday, Imonna get em today,” he says, up on the firing step in the trench some other outfit has left them, peering over his Krag. “Counted a dozen I’m sure is dead and a couple I knows I winged em.”

“Watch out for them truce flags,” says Willie Mills. “You pop one whilst they under that, Sergeant Jacks nail your ass to the shithouse door.”

“White flag only last till I hear a shot comin our way,” Cooper tells him, squinting to aim at a spot where he’s seen movement. “Then all bets is off.”

There is thunder from the bay in the afternoon, the men wondering if the counterattack has begun, if the Spanish reinforcements have come with artillery. It lasts less than an hour, then stops as suddenly as it began.

By dusk Cooper’s count is up to seventeen despite the white flags hustled back and forth and Royal has identified three different kinds of lice living on his body. The regiment is marched back down to the base of the ridge and told to hack a new trench from the hard ground. They were given three days’ rations before the attack and there is nothing left to eat. They dig through the night.

“What they got us down here doin nigger work for,” grumbles Cooper, “when they Spanish left to kill?”

Royal’s hands are bleeding, his bowels starting to twist. The Captain has them pile the breastworks on the rear side, as if they might be attacked from behind.

“You don’t eat nothin,” says Willie as they finally lay out their gear to sleep in the open again, “you starts to shit your body out. Keep this up and we won’t be nothin left but eyes and assholes.”

In the morning, refugees from Santiago appear on the road that cuts through their trench line. Hundreds of them, hungry-looking and scared, old men, women and children, even a few dogs skulking along nervously at the edges of the sorry stream, casting a suspicious eye on the watching soldiers.

“Dog look like stewmeat to me,” says Willie.

“If you kill it, I’ll eat it,” adds Cooper, but nobody shoots the dogs, preferring not to scare the wretched Cubans any worse. Some of them are dressed well enough, one lady wearing cotton gloves and walking stiffly under a parasol, but most are barefoot in rags with a numb, unfocused look on their faces. Where they can all be going is unclear.

“Counterattack comin today,” says Corporal Barnes. “Rats always climb off the ship when it’s set to go down.” Barnes, whose experience of ships is like their own, puking over the rail when he could get to it and in the hold when he couldn’t.

A mule train comes, teamsters haggard and mud-spattered, with sacks of raw beans and cans of embalmed beef and the news that the Spanish fleet attempted to run the blockade the day before and was smashed by the American gunships. There is a cheer, echoed along the lines as the word spreads.

“It’s the 4th,” says Junior, stabbing a can of the slimy meat open with his knife. “We ought to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” asks Cooper, who has sworn off the beef since it made him sick in Tampa.

“Celebrate our naval victory,” says Junior. “Freedom from tyranny.”

Cooper and some of the others laugh. “Why’nt you step up on that ridge and make us a speech?” he says, pointing to their former perch, occupied now by a white regiment. “I guarantee we see some fireworks.”

They stay just beneath the ridge the next day, and the next, when the rain starts in the evening and the men push rags into the barrels of their Krags and the water runs down the slope and into the backside of the trenches and Royal just barely makes it to the tiny ditch of a latrine before the beef runs through him. He has been thinking about Jessie but decides to give it up, something dirty about even the memory of her while he’s in this obscene place, this place where dead men and dead animals lie still unburied. There are a dozen other men squatting in the rain beside him, pants at their ankles, including one being held in position by his bunkie.

“He got the shakes,” says the standing bunkie apologetically, holding his moaning friend by the wrists, head turned sideways to provide the illusion of privacy. “We aint gonna fight no more why don’t they pull us the fuck out of here?”

It rains through the night, wet coming up through their groundcloths and soaking the little half-shelter tents, water over their ankles when they climb back in the trenches, rubber peeling off the flimsy ponchos of the men who bother to wear them. Royal is shivering too, now, though the rain feels warm on his face.

“Guess I’m not one of them Immunes,” he says to Junior, who looks away without comment, mouth tight. Royal’s hands shake as he tries to shovel muck on one of the pointless details the officers are inventing to keep them busy during the endless back and forth of negotiations with the Spanish.

“I can imagine they’re eager to surrender,” Junior says. “Even if they do have us outnumbered. They’ve spent a fever season here before.”

“Don’t let your guard down,” warns Sergeant Jacks, glaring at the make-work he’s been ordered to supervise. “It aint over till the Fat Man says so.”

The Fat Man is Shafter, who they have seen only once, being loaded into a carriage after a visit to the front, the huge, gouty pile of general in charge of the whole circus.

“Spanish just got to wait,” says Pres Stiles, who has been coughing up black, tobacco-looking hunks of phlegm. “Nother week in this shithole gone do us in.”

Heads have been counted. In their company Cousins and Strother are dead and Little Earl is lying under a tent back at Siboney waiting to be shipped home. When Royal left him he couldn’t talk but was still breathing. Lieutenant McCorkle from G was killed right at the beginning with Leftwich, and three men from D were lost on the barbed wire. A few more of the wounded might not make it, but considering the volleys that were poured into their firing line, the impossible open slope they had to cross, it is a wonder to have so few casualties.

“Aint been the bullet made can bring me down,” brags Cooper, who was a good ten yards ahead of the rest of them during the charge to overrun the trenches.

“Yeah, but they makin new ones every day,” says Sergeant Jacks. Royal remembers Jacks walking backward up the hill, heedless of the Spanish volleys, checking to be sure the men didn’t bunch up and blowing his whistle when it was time to flop or rush ahead.

“There’s a lot of stupid things you can do to get yourself killed,” Jacks likes to say, “but there aint much smart you can do to stay alive, except quit the damn Army.”

On the 11th they are marched back to the front lines in the pouring rain. Royal has a fire in his throat and something pressing behind his left eye, has to step out from the column twice to drop his pants and let go. By now it is one man out of four with the aches and chills and they are down to hardtack only, which they break apart to fry in the little bit of rancid sowbelly left to them. Royal threw away his last bit of that days ago but the smell clings to the cloth of his haversack, grease spots attracting swarms of tiny ants if he lays it on the ground during the few hours it isn’t raining. Pete Robey sings at dinnertime when they are making their desperate little fires, smashing charred coffee beans with the butts of their bayonets—

There’s a poor starving soldier

Who wears his life away

Clothes are torn and his better days are oer

He is sighing now for whiskey

With throat as dry as hay

Singing “Hardtack, come again no more!”

Pete has a deeper voice than Littler Earl’s, a voice that rumbles out of his barrel chest, and the others are too beaten to join him for the chorus—

It’s the song, the sigh of the weary

“Hardtack, hardtack

Come again no more

Many days you have lingered

While worms crawl at your core

O-oh hardtack, come again no more!”

When they reach the trenches overlooking Santiago again the white unit who has been holding them staggers away, scrawny and unshaven, filthy uniforms hanging from their bodies.

“You boys are welcome to it,” says a sunburned, runny-eyed sergeant. “Skeeters’ll get you if you don’t drownd first.”

It rains all through the night and for most of the rest of the week. The officers, some of them just as sick as the men, give up on everything but keeping the pickets out and every day another dozen can’t hold themselves upright in the morning.

They put the white flag out an hour after the merienda.

The chino camp followers came up from Manila, and the men paid them to prepare some pancit canton and baboy, and Bayani, the new sargento who reported to him this morning, had the idea of throwing a few of the pork ears on the fire once the breeze shifted to send the odor over the thornbush breastworks to the Spanish garrison crouching without food in Guagua. He is insolent, this Bayani, addressing Diosdado with the tú when he speaks Spanish, which he does ironically and with an atrocious accent, moving among them with a kind of assurance, as if already the platoon belongs to him. It was a good idea, though, a very good idea, and Diosdado shrugged in what he hoped was a manner becoming an officer and said he supposed they could give it a try. The siege has been on for over a week, the Spaniards never even stirring to snipe at their positions until nightfall, Diosdado’s men dug in all around the town and kept busy shuttling from one trench to the next to try to appear like a much larger force and gambling away their meager three-and-a-half-peso monthly pay. Almost all the people from Guagua managed to sneak out with their livestock the night his platoon arrived, and are camped in the fields behind them complaining constantly about how long it is taking to drive the Spanish away.

“If you would like to lead the charge,” said Kalaw, the private with the big nose, to one delegation, “we will be two steps behind you.”

But an hour after they are finished with all the pancit and the baboy and the fried bananas the chinos have brought up, the white flag appears from the belltower of the tiny church in the plaza of Guagua, the high spot from which a Spanish sniper hit Anacleto Darang in the knee, their only casualty so far.

“Come and talk to them with me,” Disodado says to Sargento Bayani, who claims he was a cuadrillero for the Spanish in the Moro islands and understands the thinking of their officers.

“Con placer, hermano,” says Bayani with his strange, insolent smile. “Let me get a flag together.”

It takes nearly a half an hour for one of the privates to run back to the hacienda they liberated a week ago and borrow a sheet. Sargento Bayani holds this banner of truce, tied to a long bamboo pole, high over his head as they step out and approach the Spanish breastworks.

“Our boys need practice,” says the sargento as they walk. “They’ll never get it this way.”

“The point is to regain our country, not to test ourselves in battle.”

“And when we have to fight the yanquis?” He has that smile on his face.

“The yanquis are our allies,” says Diosdado. It is ridiculous, this cynicism. If not for the Americans the Spanish would still control the harbor in Manila, would still be able to resupply themselves, be able to send fresh troops to relieve any besieged garrison. Education will be the key, as Scipio always says. Of all the ills that plague the people, this overriding cynicism, this ignorance, is the worst.

“We’re sending you into the field,” Scipio told him in Cavite. “Very soon, when we are in power, the people will want their leaders to be men who bore arms against the Spaniards, men of action.” Scipio, never a weapon in his hand, has moved up in the hierarchy, though he will never tell Diosdado his official title.

Diosdado had expected to rejoin the Supremo’s staff, Pepito Leyba at one side of their diminutive leader and himself at the other, translating, rewriting proclamations in a more confident Spanish, offering his opinion when asked. He had a detailed scenario worked out in which Ninfa Benavides, looking up at him contritely in the rags of one of her fabulous gowns, begged for his intercession to save her collaborationist father from the wrath of the Philippine Republic. She was so very grateful—

“This is because of my accent,” he said to Scipio at the time, hurt. “Because I’m not a Tagalo, much less a Caviteño.”

His friend did not deny it. “This will be good for you,” he shrugged. “Believe me. Just avoid being shot.”

Diosdado has no training, of course, but there doesn’t seem to be much to it. Setting a good example, being a model of character for the men, explaining the importance of doing one’s duty and not leaving in the middle of an engagement to deal with problems at home. The uniform — he had the foresight to have a pair made in Hongkong before he left — does half the job. When he caught the men looting the hacienda, Diosdado made them replace everything that was not of immediate use in the military campaign, and put Sargento Ramos in charge of making certain the goods taken were shared equally.

“We are soldiers of the Filipino Republic,” he reminds them constantly, “not a gang of tulisanes.”

There is only an alferez under a smaller, improvised white flag on the other side of the breastworks.

“My comandante wishes to hear your terms,” he tells them.

“You will leave your arms and ammunition stacked, neatly, in the church,” says Diosdado. “You will form ranks and march out fifty yards on the road to San Fernando and halt. There I will accept your surrender.”

“Stacked neatly,” echoes Bayani, mocking, and Diosdado shoots him a look.

“And there will be no reprisals?”

“You will be treated with the consideration due to fellow soldiers.”

The alferez looks uneasily to Bayani, then back to Diosdado.

“We are starving.”

Diosdado nods. He wanted to ask the men to save some of the merienda, but realized it would never be enough to feed the garrison.

“There is food in Malolos,” he says. “You will be taken there to join your defeated comrades.”

He has no idea if there is sufficient food for them in Malolos, only that that is where prisoners are to be sent. The alferez nods and offers him a salute. “I will inform my comandante.”

“There is no reason to make them feel ashamed,” he says to the sargento on their way back to the men.

“Of course not. We may shoot them, cut their throats, hack them to bits, but we wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings.”

The ideal is to keep the best of the Spanish — learning, culture, a certain code of honorable behavior — and jettison all that is base and hypocritical. The friars will have to go, of course, though the Jesuits might be allowed to remain if their political inclinations can be discouraged. The native clergy will do well in the villages, but for the ilustrado class a more elevated approach to Heaven will be required. Sadly, there are aspects of the Filipino temperament, shortcomings, brought into sharp relief by a character like this Bayani—

The Spanish begin to come out of the plaza. They are trying to stay in ranks, but the men sent ahead to make a gap in the breastworks are weak and struggle with the spiky mass of aroma bush and a few men collapse while they are waiting. It is thirst, really, Diosdado knows, no well dug within the garrison’s fortifications and his own people tearing down the bamboo acueducto that fed the town from the hillside stream, and finally the alferez appears beside a tall, emaciated comandante, leading the men who can walk, maybe sixty of them, out onto the San Fernando road. Before they left for this outpost, no doubt, these soldiers knelt in their ranks before the Arzobispo in Manila, receiving his blessing and swearing before God that they would never surrender the sacred banner of their nation. Bayani sends two squads of the men who have rifles to quickly flank them, worried about their reaction when they discover how few of their tormentors are present. Diosdado steps up to the tall officer, who salutes him.

“I am Comandante Ramón Asturias y Famy,” he says. “We are at your mercy.”

“We will take you first to the stream,” Diosdado tells him. “And then on to Malolos. Are there wounded left behind?”

“Perhaps a dozen. Sick, not wounded.” The officer looks Diosdado over. He is glad that the uniform fits him well, that he has managed to keep it nearly spotless during the siege. “May I inquire about your training?” asks the comandante.

It seems a strange, if not presumptuous question for a prisoner of war to put forth. Diosdado wonders if he should reveal his inexperience, even to a man unlikely to resume arms against the Cause. Filipino forces will be at the outskirts of Manila soon, circling the final gem of the crown, and the troops inside the Walled City must be made to believe they are outmanned, outgunned, outgeneraled—

“I believe he is very well trained in philosophy,” Bayani interjects, an innocent look on his face, “with an interest in the Classics.”

It is cruel, yes, and Diosdado wonders how he knows. He has not spoken to anyone in the platoon of his education. Asturias y Famy is weeping.

“A university boy,” he says, tears making channels in the grime on his cheeks. The Spaniards have not bathed for a week. “I am surrendering to a fucking university boy.”

After the swim they stop at the Iolani Palace for a picnic. President Dole came aboard looking like Father Christmas with his long white beard and invited the whole sorry bunch of them from the China—Colorado Volunteers and the 8th Infantry and the Utah Battery and the engineers and the hospital people, everybody but the damn mascot goat — and now they’re breathing air heavy with the smell of flowers and spread out at long, long tables set on the grass under the trees with plates and utensils and cloth napkins for what they call a loo-wow. Hod still has water trapped in his ears from the surf, the bottoms of his feet scraped by coral. There were Kanakas riding the waves in on their wooden boards, men and women wearing almost nothing at all, but they disappeared quick once the beach was mobbed by the sickly-skinned, boat-dopey soldiers, peeling their uniforms off to give themselves up to the sea water. Only Big Ten chose not to go in, sitting on the shore with all his uniform still on, even his boots.

“My people will row on top of the water all day and all night,” he says, “but swimming is for fishes.”

Hod thinks it’s so the others won’t see how dark he is all over.

The food is hard to believe and just keeps coming. The local Americans, celebrating the Annexation Bill just passed in Congress, have roasted a whole herd of pigs down in holes in the ground, serving up steaming chunks from them wrapped in palm leaves, and then there are crabs and fish and chickens and yams and huge sweet potatoes and pineapples that never been in a can and bread and cocoanut milk and the best coffee Hod has ever tasted and dates and cocoanut pudding and something called alligator pears that Big Ten at first tries to eat without peeling the hide off. Inside they are light green and creamy and nutty tasting and you eat them with Worcestershire sauce. Everybody eats twice as much as they can hold, the food on the trip so far just pitiful, salthorse and sea biscuit, and no reason to think it will improve for the rest of the way. Three days into the voyage they let some carrier pigeons loose up top, supposed to fly with their messages back to San Francisco.

“I was gonna eat them birds,” said Big Ten, watching them fly. “Now we stuck with fishee ricee.”

The Chinamen and Japs who serve as the crew of the transport always have something you can buy to eat, a nickel here, a nickel there, even doughnuts if you catch them at the right time, but they won’t take Army grub in trade. The yellow men were left on board, helping the stevedores load coal into the ship, when the regiment marched away.

“Yo, Chief!” calls Corporal Grissom down the table. “Introduce me to your sister.”

There have been a lot of them telling Big Ten he looks just like the Kanakas and he takes it like a sport. He turns to the long-haired girl who is serving and speaks some of his lingo at her, but she just covers her face and giggles. There are dozens of the Kanaka girls serving in their bright shifts with flowers in their hair, and white women too, white women in clean white dresses with high collars and little straw hats moving around the long tables under the banyan trees with platters of food and urns of coffee.

“I think she’s a Princess,” says Big Ten. “They aint spose to talk with commoners.”

Corporal Grissom points to the Palace, just visible through the trees. “They say they got the Queen shut up in there. Once the Americans bumped her off the throne she hooked up with some bunch that wanted to put her back on it, so they stuck her under house arrest.”

“Tough duty. Lookit that place.”

“She should of behaved herself.”

“If this was my island,” says Big Ten, looking around, “I’d sure as hell want to get it back. In fact, I think I better volunteer to be on her guard detail, make sure she don’t bust out and cause any more ruckus.”

They all agree that duty here would be paradise, even without women serving you a feast every day. There is a kind of orchestra playing for them while they eat, natives wearing bright-colored shirts and ropes of flowers around their necks and some of the instruments Hod has never heard before. Suddenly it is their table’s turn to give back the compliment and they stand to sing On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away only with the words changed for their section of the country—

Oer my Colorado Rockies flies the eagle

Down the slopes flow rushing rivers clear and cool

Oftentimes my thoughts revert to scenes of childhood

Where I single-jacked for silver, Nature’s school

But one thing there is missing in the picture

Without her face it seems so incomplete

On the ship it is a whore they sing of, each verse nastier than the next, but this is polite company, with officers hovering and white ladies present—

I long to see my mother in the doorway

Of our cabin years ago, her boy to greet

Big Ten has a strong bass voice and can harmonize with anybody. Hod sings along, letting the other voices carry his, wishing he could feel a part of this like he did on the run with the Butte contingent of the Commonweal Army. But all he feels is that he’s hiding from something, that his life is not real, and being here in this dreamland, pleasant as it is, doesn’t help any. When the China was towed up to the wharf there were little Kanaka boys and girls swimming all around the hull who smiled and shouted and dove down under to grab for pennies the soldiers threw overboard. That’s me, Hod thought as he and Big Ten, throwing nothing, watched them splash and shout. That’s my whole damn life. Scrambling for pennies to entertain the folks up high—

Oh, the moonlight’s fair tonight in Colorado

From saloons there comes the sound of men at play

Oer the glory holes the caution lights are gleaming

In my sweet Colorado, far away!

“So the Philippines is just like this, right?” says Private Neely when they have received their applause and are allowed to sit down and gorge themselves again.

There has been a lot of talk during the long, stomach-heaving days at sea as to where exactly the islands are and what the nature of the people on them is.

“They’re just like Cuba and Porto Rico,” insists Corporal Grissom, who has never been to either of those places, “only farther away.”

“It’s part of China,” says Private Falconer, “only the Papists got there before the other religions.”

“You sit under a tree,” says Sergeant LaDuke, “and take a nap, and when you wake up your lunch has dropped down into your lap.”

Runt, before they booted him out for being too small and too young, showed them the islands on a map he got hold of somewheres.

“Jesus, lookit em all,” said Neely, impressed. “We got to liberate every one of those?”

“We just wrap up the big one here,” said Runt, poking his finger onto an island called Luzon, “and the rest of em tip over like dominoes.”

Manigault strolls by them, wearing a white duck uniform and white canvas shoes like the navy officers.

“Dig in, fellows,” he says jauntily. “This will have to last you quite a while.”

“We been hearing plenty talk here, Lieutenant,” says Corporal Grissom. “There was some sailors at the wharf who see everything that comes on the wire, and their scut is that after what Dewey done to the Spanish fleet it’ll be over before we even get there.”

Manigault gives him a pitying smile, then nods toward an enormous roast pig being carried past on a litter by two barefoot Kanaka men.

“There is no feast,” he says, “without a slaughter.”

Halfway home on the Comanche, Royal is strong enough to climb up to the steamer’s aft deck and see the dolphins. The creatures, sometimes three, sometimes four, power along in their wake then leap again and again, sleek and glistening, to the cheers of the men. It is the best he has felt since Chickamauga.

There is a full band on one of the battleships plowing alongside the returning fleet, and several times a day the thump of bass drums is heard across the water, military airs and the new Sousa marches pounding out to cheer their passage. Royal is not stirred. He grips the aft rail tightly, still weak at the knees, and thinks of what a small thing his death would have been. His mother would have mourned him, and his brother Jubal, and his uncle Wicklow and Junior, for a while. They turned to waste so quickly, the bodies of the dead. A white man with a clipboard came through the sick tent, stopping by the cots of the ones who were thought to be dying.

“Next of kin?” he asked Royal.

“Jessie Lunceford.”

Her name came without thought, and when it was out it seemed right. To be mourned by Jessie Lunceford would mean you were someone in the world. You were not easily replaced. The Luncefords kept a horse and carriage, they lived in a house with white folks on either side of them. They were people the world looked at, wondered about, tried to be like.

“Relation?” asked the man with the clipboard.

“We’re going to be married,” Royal answered.

He is no longer delirious, or dying. But he will make it happen.

Hod and the others walk toward Fort San Antonio Abad in double file, wading knee-deep in the river where it spreads and spills into the sea. To the left he can see Dewey’s ships steaming parallel to them, moving into position for the attack. It is cold still, having rained all night, and the men clutch their rifles with grim resolve. There has been shooting and shelling almost every night since they replaced the Filipinos in the positions facing the fort, but nothing much to shoot back at. Rumors of surrender without a fight have been running through the regiment, but here they are, marching straight into it. There is no cover as they climb up onto the sand and move forward toward the stone walls, only the Bay to the left and the flat beach ahead. A perfect killing ground.

“Fear not, gentlemen,” says Niles, or Lieutenant Manigault as he must now be called. “This is mere formality. Our worthy adversaries have their backs to the ocean and a hundred thousand overexcited niggers seething at the gates. They know we’ve come to preserve their posteriors.”

Niles hints that he is privy to the inside dope, that the men with stars on their shoulders confide in him, that today’s action will be a stroll in the park. But even he flinches at the first percussive boom of the cannon.

“It’s the Admiral, gentlemen,” he calls out, recovering. “He’ll soften them up for us.”

Smoke coughs out from the five-inch guns of the ships, broadside to the Spaniards, in a piston-like sequence. The return fire from the shore battery is sporadic and ineffectual. They are close enough now to see chunks of masonry flying from the seaward walls whenever Dewey’s guns find their mark.

“If the Dagoes haven’t shot me by now,” says Big Ten, walking big as a house just behind Manigault, “they aint even trying.”

The barrage is a brief one, followed by much wig-wagging of signal flags on board the Olympia and atop the wall of the Spanish fort, and then there is only the sound of the waves spilling out over the sand. The fort looks something like a beached stone vessel, triangular in shape, with cannon on the parapet walks and poking out from holes in its walls, several of them, it seems to Hod, pointing directly at him. Major Moses organizes them, Hod’s 2nd Battalion spreading out on the sand in support of the firing line before them, and then it begins. Rifle fire from the Spanish trenches in the sand in front of the fort now, a thin whining of Mauser balls overhead, and now and then a Dago running frantically to get the fort between him and the advancing volunteers. Hod holds his rifle ready but does not fire as they walk forward. He feels very calm. Not me, he thinks. Not today. If they’re really shooting at us, why aren’t rounds kicking up the sand?

There is a hatless correspondent scampering ahead of the firing line, pausing here and there to snap with his Kodak — now toward the fort, now turning back to photograph the approaching Coloradans.

“Get the hell out of there, you stupid son of a bitch!”

It is Colonel Hale himself, shouting over a megaphone, advancing along with the reserve line.

“I’ll have you thrown in the brig!”

The correspondent, looking sheepish, stops to allow the firing line to pass him.

Three dead Spaniards have been left like rags, tangled in the sand, when they enter the first of the trenches. Some officer, thinks Hod, some boss told them to sit there and put up a fight or go to jail or maybe be shot if they didn’t. Big Ten turns to look at the reserve line behind them, still advancing.

“I could hit those stiffs from here with my eyes closed.”

“What did I say?” Niles waves his walking stick toward the fort. “More of a foregone conclusion than a test of arms.”

“You don’t think it’s a trap? Drawing us in?”

“I think,” says Lieutenant Manigault, strolling ahead, “they’re all back in the city by now, packing their valises.”

The fort is unmanned by the time they enter. A few dead left from the naval barrage, a boy soldier who has shot himself in the foot so he won’t have to flee and be killed somewhere farther up the beach.

“Check inside,” says Niles as men scatter in groups to search the structure. Hod and Big Ten flank the doorway to one of the low stone buildings, one corner of it collapsed from the bombardment.

“I’ll throw it open,” says Big Ten, “and you shoot anybody who makes a fuss.”

Hod positions himself on one knee, sighting down his rifle, and Big Ten yanks the door. Inside the room is packed with soldiers sitting or lying down, covered in blood. A man with a Red Cross band on his arm turns to look at Hod and says something in Spanish. He does not seem grateful to have been saved from the Filipinos.

The fishhook pokes up through the northern tip of Luzon, snagging it securely.

The Cartoonist has arranged the other islands, eliminating many of the smaller ones, to suggest the body of something long and twisted, a fighting pickerel perhaps, with Luzon the head and Mindanao representing the tail flukes. Sitting forlornly upon the northern isle, under a drooping, sickly-looking palm, is a Filipino man, hatless, elbows on knees and head in hands, his tattered shirt open to reveal the slat-ribbed torso of the undernourished. A poor brown little bugger despondently facing away from the hook and its line, which extends tautly across the Pacific to the tip of the slightly bent cane pole held in Uncle’s firm, knobby-knuckled hands. Uncle has rolled his striped trousers up and cools his bared legs to the shins in the rolling sea.

SHALL I REEL HER IN?

— asks the caption, Uncle turning his head to query the reader with bushy eyebrows raised. An extremely unseaworthy-looking dinghy is being rowed away to the northeast of the hooked fish by a white-moustachioed Spanish admiral, with a greasy merchant balancing a bag of loot at the prow, and a fat, tonsured friar in the rear, turning his head back for a last sad glimpse of his Paradise Lost.

The Cartoonist has modeled the friar after Hastings in editorial, and hopes no one will notice till after the paper hits the street.

Hod watches the cards pile up in front of him, still a little dizzy from the wine Neely smuggled in. Company G is back from the defensive line that’s been set up north of the Pasig, scattered now in the nipa huts serving as their cantonment by the reservoir at the edge of a neighborhood called Sampalac or Salampoc or something just as hard to get your mouth around. They’ve named it Camp Alva after the governor, just like back in Denver.

“The women won’t show in public without their chaperones,” explains Corporal Grissom, who has declared himself the squad’s expert on local customs and has a nasty-faced little monkey named Aggy perched on his shoulder. “Daylight catches a señorita on the street, you can bet she’s got one or two old bulldog aunts clearing a path for her.”

“You mean the Spanish girls,” says Big Ten.

The Spanish haven’t all gone, merchants and friars and even a few soldiers awaiting transport still hanging on in the Walled City, depending on their new amigos yanquis to protect them from the locals. There are days Hod feels like a militia guarding a mine boss.

“I mean the Spanish girls.” Grissom finishes the deal, takes a gander at his hand. He has managed to teach the monkey to throw cocoanuts and other fruit down from the trees and to shit anywhere but on his own shoulder. “And the half-breed ones with money. The dark ones, the whatever — Indian ones, that sell stuff on the street and slick their hair with cocoanut oil, they’ll stare you straight in the eye.”

“Which leaves the field open for you, Chief.”

Big Ten shrugs. “Don’t talk the lingo.”

The locals, the ones who aren’t in Aguinaldo’s so-called army, just stare at you. There are rich folks’ houses here with Filipinos living in them, even the bigger bamboo huts in this neighborhood look comfortable enough, but it is hard to get a peep into their lives with them scowling at you. Worse than being a Gentile in Utah.

“Ye just rattle some of them Mexican cartwheels in front of their noses,” says Donovan, who has already been busted down to private for wandering into a posted district. “They’ll get the idea, all right.”

“I wouldn’t fuck a googoo on a bet,” says Grissom.

“Ye’d fuck a rockpile if ye thought there was a squirrel in it. A dead squirrel.”

Hod has had the trots for a week now and the Dhobie itch real bad and it feels raw where he sits. Some of the guys wear red flannel bands around their middles, even to sleep, but they’ve been getting sick just like anybody else. The wine was a bad idea. Hod is tired of their talk, always the same, tired and bored and worried about his insides turning to mush. He hasn’t been right since a day out of Honolulu, stuffed in the three-tier bunks, only two hours on deck a day, trying to eat the slump they shoved in front of you with puke sloshing around your feet. Here inside the hut there are mosquitoes that come out at dusk and dawn, lurking at the edges of the light from the single kerosene lamp they’ve hung over the ammo box they play on, a half-dozen men sitting around it on a woven-mat floor. They don’t buzz, these mosquitoes, and the only strategy seems to be to let them land and fill up with some of your blood before you crush them.

“The young ones don’t look so bad.”

“Monkey faces,” scoffs Grissom.

“Just close your eyes,” says Winston Wall, a private from the Kansas Vols who it seems is a third cousin of Hod’s, demonstrating with his hips. “And then imagine the woman of your dreams—”

Neely reddens, slaps his cards down on the crate. “She wouldn’t do nothin like that.”

The men laugh.

“You in this game or not, Atkins?”

It takes Hod a moment to react to his Army name.

“Let’s go, buddy, shit or get off the pot.”

Hod doesn’t want to think about shitting. He spreads his cards out. Garbage. “Sure. Gimme two.”

A boy in a white provost uniform ducks into the hut, squints at them through his glasses.

“Hey fellas,” he says cheerfully, “long time no see. What we playing for?”

The men take a moment, in the weak light, to recognize the boy.

“It’s Runt!” grins Big Ten.

“How the hell you get over here, son? Thought they threw you back for being too puny.”

Runyon squeezes onto the floor next to Hod. “Stupid bastards. I snuck on the train to Frisco, hung around the camps—” He shrugs. “There was a Minnesota company that come up a few men short one morning, I talked to the sergeant—”

“They must be desperate.”

“It’s a good outfit—”

“That uniform appears a might roomy on you—” says Winston Wall.

“It fits just fine. They got us policing the city now.”

“Well,” says Sergeant LaDuke, scowling at his hand, “least there’s one of you short enough to look the googoos in the eye.”

The boy scrutinizes the backs of the men’s cards as if he could see through them, cards decorated with a lanky Gibson Girl holding a bicycle. “They’re not a happy group of people, our comrades in arms,” he says. “Had their hearts set on chopping up the Spanish, and then along we come—”

“What I want to know is where they keep the sportin gals.”

Runyon grins. “Just down the street here in Sampaloc. What’re you, blind?”

Grissom deals Runt in, the boy throwing a ten-centavo piece into the ante.

“So you Minnesotas are pullin the provost.”

“For the moment, yeah,” he says, studying his hand. “But we were in the thick of it the day the city fell.”

“We were in the thick, what there was of it,” corrects Sergeant LaDuke. “I don’t remember seeing you.”

“Me neither,” says Wall. “Less it was way back in our dust.”

“We hooked up with the Astor Battery, hauling their pieces with those water buffalo,” says Runt, standing pat, “and all day long whatever we run into, Spanish in a blockhouse, Spanish holed up in a church, whatever, we get the Astor boys set up and they blast the hell out of it.”

“Imagine having so much money you can field your own artillery,” muses Big Ten.

“I wish old John Jacob would come over here, build us one of his swanky hotels,” says Donovan. “I can’t sleep in these feckin rat-holes no more.”

“And the rats aint too happy about you snoring like a freight train—”

“I don’t snore.”

“And shit don’t smell. Tell him, Neely.”

“I was a googoo sneaking up and heard that racket coming out of your tent,” says Neely, “I’d turn and run for my life.”

“General Otis has ordered all the saloons closed down on Sundays,” says Runt. “But the boys have discovered this beeno home-brew stuff—”

“General Otis,” complains the Kansas private, “has parked his fat ass on a supply of Krag rifles and won’t give em out to us vols.”

“What we need with new rifles if we’re going home?”

“Hate to break it to you, pal, but we aint going anywhere.”

“I signed up to slaughter Dagoes,” says Donovan. “And at that I’ve been sorely disappointed.”

“You’ll get home when they squeezed the last drop of blood outta you.”

“So they got you playing nursemaid to the drunks and goldbricks,” Sergeant LaDuke says to Runt, “while we keep the googoos in line.”

LaDuke was a militia back in Colorado, and when Private Thorogood called him out as a scab and a strikebreaker the sergeant put him on report for a week.

“For a while they had me guarding this herd of buffalo calves,” says Runt. “When they’re little they’re kind of pink-colored—”

“And when they grow up they wallow in the mud and taste like shoe leather.”

“These aint for eatin. They grow the pox on em, for vaccine.”

“Evry time ye turn around this place there’s a feckin doctor with a needle in his hand—”

“Now we’re inside the walls, keeping order. Most nights it’s about what you’d see in Pueblo on a Saturday after dark. One of our fellas got cut by a pimp and his patrol partner shot the little bastard, almost had a riot on our hands.” Runt and Grissom’s monkey trade a look. “What’s the stakes here?”

They gamble, dice and cards and side-bets about what time it is going to rain or how many insects will they find in a plate of beans or anything that comes to mind, many of the men owing next month’s pay and the one after that, gamble, Hod included, because so far they have only time to kill and nothing to save for.

“Fifty-centavo minimum,” says Grissom, “and if one of our Mariquina googoos picks you off before you settle your debts we don’t pony up to bring the body back.”

Manigault steps in then, and Sergeant LaDuke nudges the wine bottle behind his body.

“As I assumed,” says the officer, looking over the spread of cards and pesos on the ammo crate. “Uncle Sam’s finest issue, ever vigilant, girding their loins for battle.”

“We’re rarin to go, Lieutenant,” says LaDuke. “Only the coons have decided to take the night off.”

He was not popular in training or on the ship, Manigault, the men going through “that cracker peacock” and “Niles Manlygoat” before settling on “Lieutenant Tarheel” when he was out of earshot. Opinion improved on the day of the so-called invasion, Niles striding out in front of the company with a malacca cane in hand, seeming to grow more cheerful with every flurry of sniper fire.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” he says, tapping the cane twice on the edge of the crate. “I had the opportunity to visit headquarters today, and from what I was able to glean—” he winks to the men, a hint of conspiracy in his voice, “—I wouldn’t wander too far from your weapons.”

They’ve been sleeping in their boots for a week, but other than insults tossed across the two hundred yards the forces are ordered to maintain between each other, there has been no action. Hod feels it coming again, stomach churning, but holds to his seat.

“Merely a suggestion to the more prudent among you,” says the lieutenant, raising his eyebrows, then sees Runt.

“Runyon, if I recall.”

“Yes sir.”

“I thought I cashiered you in Denver.”

Runt grins. “But I caught on with the Minnesotas. Some real fighting men.”

“With real officers,” adds Hod, “from what I hear.”

Manigault moves to stand behind Hod. “Insubordination is not looked upon kindly, McGinty. Even in the volunteers.”

“He’s Atkins,” corrects Big Ten. “I’m McGinty.”

Manigault narrows his eyes at the Indian. “I am acutely aware of what you are, Private.” He turns to the others. “None of that wine had better end up in your canteens, gentlemen. I miss nothing.” He gives Hod a smart tap on the shoulder with his cane and steps out into the darkness.

“What’s with the shavetail?” asks Runt when he is gone. “Is that the real goods?”

“They like to start rumors. So’s we don’t become lax and undisciplined.”

“As if the little monkeys would dare start anything.”

“Who says they’ll be the ones to start it?” says Big Ten.

“Give me something to shoot,” declares former corporal Danny Donovan, “or send me the feck home.”

The keys have changed their pattern. Jessie stares at them, trying to remember, trying to let the music in. She feels like her body is sinking, heavy, into the floor as her head floats dizzily above it. The Conservatory is in Virginia, not far from Hampton where Junior went to school, and if she can be the first colored girl accepted there, living away from her parents—

“Jessie?” calls Miss Loretta, the voice, echoing in the near-empty hall, a shock.

“Yes, M’am,” she says. The white man’s eyes challenged her when he said hello, his steady gaze asking Just what do you think you’re doing here?, and at the moment she has no answer for him. Usually she has only to lay her fingers on the keys, all in their proper pattern, and the music is there.

Royal can come to her in Virginia, they can have the ceremony, and if this is what she dreads the most, everything will be made right. She will be forgiven. She only has to survive this test, to prove herself worthy.

The white man clears his throat, impatient, out there somewhere in the staring rows of seats with Miss Loretta. Jessie looks at the sheet music, notes drawn on lines, swimming.

G-Minor, she thinks, and wills her fingers into motion.

Tombstone is closer but the boys say there’s more cooking every night in the Gulch so that’s where they are. It is most of a day’s ride and none of them are cavalry.

They ditch the mounts at a stable and come into the Calumet Saloon all together, nine of them, uniforms but no sidearms, and the miners are too drunk to care. Royal’s sitter is sore as hell so he stands at the bar drinking from the stone jug they fill from a barrel, what they say is Old Crow but tastes like creosote and it doesn’t matter.

My dearest Royal—

Mail call was early, with Corporal Puckett handing out the letters.

“Royal Scott got him three,” he shouted out, holding the envelopes under his nose. “Smell good, too.”

Oohing and aahing and catcalling from the boys then, like they would with anybody.

“What you want to do is read the last one first,” said Hardaway. “Get to the grit.”

But Royal started with the first one and wasn’t one line in before he couldn’t swallow.

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you.

The thing with a jug is you can’t see how much whiskey is left. He hopes there is enough. The miners are singing one song and the boys from Companies A and H something else, but happy, it is early Saturday night and the holes around Bisbee are puking out copper like there is no tomorrow and the Papagos and the Apaches are quiet and the boys will have half of Sunday to sober up in the saddle and Royal is slugging his way through a gallon jug.

My dearest Royal—

Her handwriting is beautiful, like you’d expect, and at first it was hard to understand that something so wrong could be hiding in such gracefully crafted shapes. If she is as upset as she says she is, he thinks, why can’t you see it in the writing? If the handwriting in the letters was a voice it would be soft, reasonable, calm—

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you. Nature itself has betrayed us, and I am with child.

Something he heard from the Bible once. With child. Too Tall is down the bar telling a story about Coop, who is back digging slit trenches at Huachuca cause they caught him smoking hemp on guard duty. Whatever is in the jug feels better when it gets down now, though swallowing is still a chore. His throat started closing right while he was reading, his insides trying to push up out of him, and by the end of the first section he could hardly breathe.

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you. Nature itself has betrayed us, and I am with child. But our love cannot be.

Fort Huachuca is nothing but heat and dust. They drill, they march into the mountains with full packs on, they listen to the officers tell them they may be needed in the Philippines or in China, but finally it is only Army makework and not nearly enough of it.

“Stick the niggers where they can’t make too much trouble,” Coop grumbles whenever they are out on maneuvers. “Any further an we be in Mexico.”

“All I know,” says Too Tall, who got the trench foot so bad in Cuba they almost had to amputate, “is it aint rainin.”

It is crowded in the saloon, crowded in all of the dozens of saloons in Brewery Gulch, and the boys will tie one on and then climb uphill to buy women but Royal is looking straight ahead, past the two busy bartenders who run back and forth, looking to the even busier picture behind them of the 7th being slaughtered by Indians on the hills he has ridden over on a bicycle. At the lower right there are men already stripped of their clothes, others having their scalps lifted or being trampled by horses or shot or stabbed or tomahawked, and only a few able to fight back. More Indians on horseback are on their way, galloping from the mountains at the top of the picture. The General himself is just up and over from the middle, dressed in buckskins, hatless, empty pistol held as a club in his left hand and saber raised high in his right. Above the frame it says that the beer company presented the original of the painting to the regiment, though why you’d want a picture of your friends being murdered and mutilated is not explained. On the bottom it identifies RAIN-IN-THE-FACE and HALF BREED and GENERAL CUSTER and some others and at the far right SQUAW KILLING WOUNDED. Sure enough above it there is a woman in a red dress grabbing a downed soldier at his collar and raising a club overhead to brain him. No prisoners.

We have no engagement to break off, of course, no, we have nothing but our one night of love to remember—

He has seen Custer’s Last Fight in bars before but never studied the details. The old troopers say you kept the last bullet for yourself because if you weren’t finished they would scalp you alive and then do other things. Coop said that in Caney they found a Spanish officer who’d stabbed his woman, a Cuban girl, and then shot himself in the head. But that is just meanness and honor, Dago stuff, and no model for his present situation.

Father will not be moved and I am not of an age to defy him. If it was not for my condition we could wait—

Junior is sitting over with the boys but quiet. And feeling bad, Royal hopes. He drinks more whiskey from the jug. He read all three letters, the second two just more of how bad she feels but she is not the mistress of her own fate, her hands are tied, she suffers with each breath, each word seeming more of a fake than the next, and only the first one has anything for him, scrawled as an afterthought below her name—

I will always love you.

He will not always love her, not if he can help it. He thinks, in fact, that he has already stopped, but that doesn’t make it any easier to breathe. He wants to paint his face like the Cheyenne and the Sioux in the picture and ride straight over somebody, wants to pound somebody to jelly with a club. Dorsey Love is an old man, almost thirty, and he will be the one lying with Jessie, he will be the one raising up Royal’s baby boy or girl, he will be the one that sits at the Luncefords’ big table and the Doctor will have to smile at him and pass the chicken and pretend he is happy about it. The liquor has no bite now, just a smell, and Hardaway is up on a chair reciting The Charge of the Nigger Ninth for everybody in the saloon, though Hardaway is in the 25th and didn’t come up the hill till the second day.

“What you got there?” he called out, passing by as Royal pondered the letters, sitting on the barracks steps. “Some gal that won’t leave you be?”

“Just news from home,” Royal said and looked across at Junior, who was reading his own letter from his mother and knowing by then. “Junior’s sister is getting married.”

“That right?” Mudfish Brown joined in. “Fore you know it he be a uncle. Uncle Junior.”

They were still calling him that on the ride across the scrublands, Junior shooting Royal a sorry look now and then but not saying anything. There is not much he can say that won’t end with Royal hitting him.

I have never understood why Father is so ill-disposed toward you—

Royal understands. Royal has always understood. Junior is the one who doesn’t fit in here, Junior with his little half smile watching the men thumping Hardaway on the back, not a spot on him from a day of riding, Junior the one who grinds through every stupid detail without complaint, who acts like someone even higher than the white brass is watching his every move, judging his deportment, keeping score, while Royal accepts that he is just another sorry-ass nigger no matter how you dress him up.

The second letter didn’t say she would always love him at the end of it, it said how in the light of the terrible circumstances they should probably not correspond any more. And the third one was to apologize for the second one, but it was only a few lines, like she was in a dungeon somewhere and had to write it quick and smuggle it out.

I shall soon reap the consequences of my own weakness. Do not mourn for me, do not even think of me—

She doesn’t say if she means she was weak to come to him at Jubal’s place or weak not to fight more against the Doctor. It doesn’t matter. She is as gone from his life as if she was dead, worse even. Squaw killing wounded. The boys are having too much fun now and he is afraid they will try to pull him into it and the jug is feeling awfully light. He takes it with him, reeling out through the back to the alley behind where you piss and there are two men already sick there, heaving what is probably not really Old Crow and he decides to get the horse and ride somewhere.

But on Commerce Street there are too many men, the town overstuffed with miners come in desperate to spend their pay and get at least as drunk as Royal is. There are three different fistfights in progress and men peeing right out on the curb and a man who has taken his shirt off standing out in the middle and screaming, just screaming. The Gulch rises up steep to the next block, drunken men stumbling down past as he climbs and thrusts the jug into the arms of an already weaving white miner and then passes through an alley between two buildings and just keeps climbing, up the slope and away from the racket of Bisbee and the glowing lights of the copper smelter just below it. It is steep enough that sometimes he has to put his hands down and climb on all fours but finally he is on the ridge, standing unsteadily, looking back down at the lights and the shouting and the raucous music and now and then a gunshot and he can think of nothing more than Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible story. They had it coming and so did he, it looks like, and he wheels around and walks farther away from the light and the noise.

A different story — forty days and forty nights in the desert, Jesus maybe, or maybe Moses. Mama tried to take them regular to church but for a long time was caring for some white people’s children on Sundays and he and Jubal would go but sit in the back and sneak out sometime before the sermon, so sometimes the stories get mixed up in his head. Forty days and forty nights in the desert and turning away from Temptation and then coming back clean and holy but mostly being away from everybody, away from their ribbing and their eyes able to see the shame of it on your face and them talking about you when they think you can’t hear. Might as well give the damn letters to Hardaway and have him read them out loud. He keeps walking up a dry gulley away from the town, don’t look back, don’t look back, that is another story, and it is getting colder fast now and the wind picking up and he starts to howl back at it. There are coyotes at night, of course, a couple big tribes of them around the Fort that set each other off with their noise that can go on for hours, but you don’t see much of them unless you’re out on maneuvers and cook up a mess of bacon and then they’ll come sniffing, head low and ears back. The stars are gone now, no moon, the sky feeling suddenly low and heavy above him and then there is thunder, rolling at first, and sheet lightning flickering up in the clouds, one section of the sky lighting up for a moment, then another, like the clouds are packs of coyotes calling to each other then CRACK! a bolt sizzling down not so far from him and CRACK! another behind and then it is hail, hard and scouring and there is nowhere to shelter, the land here even more wasted, even less friendly than Montana and the hailstones sting like hell where they slap against his skin, Royal ducking his head in under his arms, left his hat on the bar in the Calumet, and thinking I looked back, dammit, I forgot the story and I looked back and now I will turn into a pillar of shit. And CRACK! it answers, close enough to smell fried air this time, answering him, reminding him how small he is, how it don’t care a thing about his troubles.

Royal sits heavily onto the spiky ground, covering his head and waiting for it to end.

It will take a day or two for the word to drift back from Magnolia, and with the election tomorrow it won’t likely compete as big news. The Reverend and Mrs. Cox seem like they’ve hosted plenty of these — wedding party of four, no announcement in the papers. The Record has shut down, of course, Manly supposed to be halfway to Philadelphia, and the Messenger doesn’t bother with colored society. Dorsey doesn’t mind a bit, not any of it. Only too bad Mama passed before she could see him married to Miss Jessie Lunceford.

“From the beginning of creation God made them male and female,” says Reverend Cox with his big deep voice, “that they might be one flesh.” Dorsey has seen him preach once or twice, coming back from Raleigh on a Sunday and stopping halfway for church. A joyful messenger for the Lord. Dorsey is joyful now, surely more joyful than Mrs. Lunceford with her handkerchief to her eyes and Dr. Lunceford grim-faced and wishing it was over and Jessie, so beautiful in her yellow dress holding the yellow roses it was so hard to find, a brave little smile on her face like a girl waiting for her smallpox needle. Dorsey doesn’t mind any of it. There is joy in his heart, and in time hers will follow.

“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves unto his wife,” booms Reverend Cox, voice filling the tiny nave they’ve requested to avoid the empty, accusing pews in the main hall. Reverend Cox knows this is not a judge’s sentence but a joyful sight under Heaven, and thunders out the Scripture while Mrs. Cox keeps an eye on the clock. Dorsey noticed the party waiting in the main hall when they passed through, the girl showing six months if it’s a day. With Jessie you’d hardly guess, maybe just a little butterfat here and there, make her look more womanish.

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things—”

Dr. Lunceford endures the Reverend’s words with shoulders set and chin thrust upward. Dorsey has cut him once or twice, in the days before he moved to the Orton Hotel for the white trade. A serious man, Dr. Lunceford, a race man. People have nothing but good to say for him as a doctor, but the rest scares them some, showing so proud in the world, making the white folks jumpy. They are Episcopalians, the Luncefords, but have chosen Reverend Cox because it’s Magnolia where nobody of any account knows them and because the Reverend is understanding of what he called the ex post facto of the situation. Dorsey expects some heavy ribbing from the boys who cut for him over that, maybe even from some of the white gentlemen at the Orton when they finally hear. But no matter the circumstances, from this day forward Dorsey Love and Miss Jessie Lunceford will be bound in holy matrimony.

“I do,” says Jessie, quiet and sweet and dry-eyed as she speaks.

“I do,” says Dorsey, feeling shivery as the words come out. His life will never be the same.

Diosdado is here because of the uniform. The one that has not been torn or stained in his few desultory engagements with the disheartened Spanish, nor in the weeks of guiding his mongrel company from post to post facing the American defenses north of the Pasig.

“If you’ve still got a decent uniform,” said Scipio, passing close to the front in white linen and straw boater, “I can get you on for the Congress.”

So he stands here at attention beneath a bamboo arch, borrowed sword raised in salute to the delegates as they file past from the train station nearly a mile away. It is all nipa in Malolos, roof panels woven here sold throughout the island, nipa huts strung along either side of the narrow main road, lined now with excited citizens eager to greet and evaluate their representatives.

These great men, perspiring in full evening dress, pause now and then to lift their silk top hats and acknowledge the throng, wiping their brows with dazzling handkerchiefs. There are not nearly enough carriages. The Banda Pasig, up ahead at the massive stone church, are pumping out Alerta Katipunan!, though that old secret society of workers and peasants, wellspring of the people’s revolution, has recently been dissolved by General Aguinaldo.

The entire Philippines is now the only Katipunan, read his decree, published in both Spanish and Tagalog, the real Katipunan, where all are united in saving the Mother Country from the depths of slavery.

A cunning piece of diplomacy, thinks Diosdado, standing at attention, eyes forward, sweat rolling down his face. Certainly none of these gentlemen parading before him were in the original organization, their cédulas torn with Bonifacio’s at Pugad Lawin, nor did they rise up valiantly in ’96 to battle the oppressors. Most have not been elected by the regions they represent, regions they may never have set foot in, but have been appointed by the Supremo to impress the yanquis and the ruling powers of Europe, reassuring them that the new republic will be administered by educated men, men of means and culture.

Here, riding in an open calesa, is the lawyer Pedro Paterno, who after his role in brokering the truce of Biak na Bato petitioned his well-connected Spanish supporters to have himself made “at least a Duke” of Castile, with the position “valued in dollars so that the common Filipino will not hold it in contempt.” Paterno who made his best efforts to rally those Filipinos to the cause of Spain, certainly his Mother Country, when the Americans declared war on her.

And here is Don Felipe Calderón y Roca, grandson of a Spanish friar, who balked at recognizing the Revolutionary Government and decries those who “cater to the ignorant masses” who have shed their blood to make this day possible, with Buencamino just behind him, only a month ago jailed for intriguing with the Spaniards, now strolling at the head of a gaggle of his minions.

One of whom is Scipio Castillero.

Scipio, in a swallowtail coat he never wore to the theater, favors Diosdado with his customary smirk and a discrete nod as he passes, and now the sun is almost unbearable, the dust stirred up by this herd of strolling dignitaries thick in his nose, the Banda Pasig, playing an overwrought version of Jocelynang Baliwag, perceptibly out of tune.

Two local kasamas have camped behind him, men in their forties who look sixty, missing teeth and, in the case of the taller, several fingers.

“So who are they,” asks the shorter, whose name is Eulalio, “these men in the tall hats?”

“Ilustrados,” replies Zacharias of the severed digits. “Men who know things.”

“And what do they know?”

“For one thing,” Zacharias states confidently, “they can speak kastila.”

“But if we have defeated the kastila themselves, if they are banished to their home across the seas, why would we speak their language?”

“Because it is the language of learning,” explains the taller man. “When Padre Fulgencio stole the last five hectares of field from you, in what language did he read the legal decree?”

“Kastila,” Eulalio concedes.

“And when he gives his sermon to admonish us on Sunday, what does he speak?”

“Kastila, again. After speaking that other one for Mass.”

“That is called Latin. The language God uses to speak to His angels.”

“I’ve never understood why the padre does this before us, we who are no angels,” says Eulalio, “when he can speak our language passably well.”

“To remind you of your ignorance,” Zacharias explains. “And to take advantage of you. What is the point of knowledge if you can’t use it to prevail over others? Look at this one—”

It is the fiery Ilocano newspaperman Antonio Luna, tricked out in a general’s regalia, strutting down the center of the road at the side of Dr. Trinidad Pardo de Tavera. A strange and symbolic pair, thinks Diosdado, though comrades from their wild indios bravos days in Paris and Madrid — Luna’s brother Juan, the celebrated painter, very pointedly shot his wife and mother-in-law, Pardo de Tavera’s sister and mother, to death in a jealous rage.

“There are only ten, maybe a dozen families who matter in this country,” Scipio likes to say, “eternally bound by blood and commerce.”

The last of the pedestrian delegates pass. The kasamas and many of the other spectators drift toward the Barasoain Church. Diosdado holds his pose till his arms begin to tremble, then eases the sun-heated blade back into its scabbard and allows himself to look around.

The honor guard is mostly infantrymen, privates favored with footwear and intact rayadillo uniforms, troops who no doubt fought for the Spanish at some point, with junior officers like himself spaced at the bamboo arches for decoration. Capitán Janolino, charged with the detail, hurries down the line with an aide.

“He’s getting in his carriage,” announces the capitán breathlessly. “We’ll greet him at the church.”

They form in double file and march, the rest of the spectators tagging along on either side, till they come to the huge churchyard and create a passageway with their ranks, two hundred yards long, leading to the neo-classical grandeur of the basilica. The shadow of the three-story belltower gives relief to a good half of the waiting soldiers, but Diosdado is not among them. He waits, at attention, in the sun.

Malolos is renowned for its churches, “infested with them” as Scipio would say, and within them many of the Spanish friars captured in the central provinces are being held prisoner. Humiliated, yes, but fortunate to have been spared the wrath of the poor villagers they have bullied and defrauded for so many years. If it had not been for the Church some sort of reform acceptable to Filipinos might have been possible, some link with Spain preserved. But the religious corporations had the ear of the Queen Regent, that girl of sixteen years who famously stated that she would “rather lose all of the Philippines than a single soul for Christ.”

There will be a Philippine Republic now, with Philippine laws and a Philippine Constitution, each new proclamation, Diosdado hopes, no matter how compromised by the principalía in their top hats, further refutation to American designs on the archipelago.

Cheers erupt from the crowd as they see the carriage, drawn by four enormous white horses, passing over the small bridge and under the towering, hastily constructed triumphal arch, a trotting phalanx of infantrymen to keep the well-wishers from mobbing it, now swinging into the passageway of soldiers and stopping in a waft of dust at the foot of the great church.

Diosdado can see the delegates crowding at the entrance to the basilica, the Banda playing the newly written national anthem, cries of “Viva Aguinaldo! Viva la República Filipina!” filling the air.

He is a small man, even smaller than Diosdado remembers from Hong-kong, carrying a large ivory cane with a golden head, flanked by his taller subordinates as he mounts the steps. The mass of cheering delegates part to allow him entrance.

A small detail of Janolino’s men is left to guard the doorway, and Dios-dado is able to squeeze his way back through the spectators who press forward hoping to catch a phrase or more of the Supremo’s opening address, till he reaches the shade of a huge mango tree. It is an honor to be here, he knows, but he can’t escape a twinge of disappointment at being left outside like this, after his close and valuable service—

Eulalio and Zacharias are there beside him, squatting on their heels and fanning themselves with their hats.

“First Don Emiliano will give a speech,” says Zacharias, “and then the rest will make up the new rules.”

“And what will these be?”

“Better ones, God willing.”

Eulalio indicates a dozen Augustinians, no doubt receiving their daily allotment of exercise, being shepherded across the rear of the yard by a pair of armed soldiers. Robes wrinkled and dusty, the frailes hide their unshaven faces from the happy indio throng with their parasols.

“Will they be sending these ones away?”

“Without a doubt. As soon as it is allowed by the Americans.”

Eulalio ponders this. “Why do we need their permission?”

Zacharias sighs at the ignorance of his friend. “Because the Americans control the harbor of Manila and every ship that sits upon it. We can’t make the prayles swim home.”

“I would like to see them try,” says Eulalio, his face brightening. “I bet the fat ones can float for a long time.” He looks around the churchyard. “Are the Americans here?”

Zacharias stands to look over the heads of the crowd, then approaches Diosdado, holding his hat over his heart.

“Excuse me, po,” he says, bowing slightly to the younger man. “Do you know if any Americans have attended? Their great Admiral Dewey, perhaps?”

Every anuncio has been full of praise for “the Mighty and Humanitarian North American Nation, cradle of Liberty,” who has “offered its disinterested protection” to the fledgling republic, but the yanquis remain distant, cloistered within the Walled City and on their menacing gunships, like dark clouds of a typhoon hanging over the sea whose very mention may draw their fury screaming about one’s ears. We have mounted an impressive spectacle today, thinks Diosdado, but our most important audience is absent.

“Perhaps,” he tells the barefoot kasama, “the Americans have other plans.”

They’re supposed to burn the city down. Sally Manigault strolls up Princess, giddy with fear as she carries the basket, but at every corner there is only another pair of men she knows, tipping their hats and warning her not to be long on the street. The only smoke in the sky is behind her, a long black tail from a steamer heading upriver. They’re still working at Sprunt’s and the other big places on the water, but most of the downtown businesses are closed for the voting. It is the quietest Election Day she can recall.

Myrtle Talmadge said he was up on Tenth, so she passes the corner sentries feeling like Little Red Cap from the Grimm brothers’ story, swinging the basket and smiling and greeting the men. Niles would be out here if he hadn’t had his tiff with the Judge and been forced to go out West. Sally is wearing the lavender dress with the leg-o’-mutton sleeves and gloves of a darker purple, embroidered in rose, and the pink and black chiffon touring hat she bought in Charleston last year. Her boots, of course, pinch like the devil, but there is no remedy for that short of surgery. If she had only gotten Niles’s slender, modest feet instead of flat monstrosities like Harry’s, but one is not consulted when physical attributes are being handed out.

The men carry shotguns and rifles and all have a white handkerchief tied on their left arm. They are ever so brave, volunteers all, and she gives them her brightest smile as she walks by. The Judge wanted to send her out of town like many of the other women in their acquaintance, but she told him if the men of Wilmington had suddenly discovered their backbone the least their women could do is be there to encourage them.

He is on the northeast corner of Tenth, as dazzling as Myrtle said, standing a few yards away from a crowd of rough-looking men outside an old carriage barn being used as a polling place.

“Excuse me, Miss,” he calls out shyly. “May I ask where you’re heading?”

“You may not,” she answers, sweetening her response with a smile.

The boy flushes. “It’s just that we have orders — public safety—”

“There are armed citizens on nearly every corner. I can’t imagine any harm coming to me.”

“We don’t know their plans. There’s been all kinds of rumors.”

The burning will be the most difficult to control. One deluded soul with a tin of kerosene, a waterfront piled with cotton bales and wooden shacks—

“Besides,” says the blue-eyed volunteer, “this is where the First Ward begins. You don’t want to be up here.”

Sally casts a glance at the men hanging about, joking and jostling, many of them wearing the red shirts the Dry Pond ruffians have adopted, crudely sewn garments with sailor-type collars bordered in white stitching. She can picture their wives, hair a mess, big feet working the treadle, hunched over the machine by a sooty oil lamp. If anybody is to burn the city down, these are the prime candidates.

“You believe there’s going to be trouble?”

“Pretty sure of it, M’am.” He shoots a look to be sure nobody is listening, bends close and lowers his voice. “In fact, it’s been planned. Gonna be a bit of a rush come time to count the ballots.”

“Indeed.” The Judge has been grumbling around the house about secret plots and cabals all week, more upset by his exclusion from them than by the fact that they seem to exist.

“I got to keep em under control till then.”

“All alone?”

“My — my fellow volunteer was — he had to attend to something.”

“How long do you think you’ll be out here?”

“Oh, as long as it takes, Miss. I haven’t laid eyes on a nigger all morning, which has got to make you suspicious.”

“Perhaps they’ve been discouraged from showing themselves—”

“That’s the general idea, Miss.”

Sally cocks her head and allows herself to look him over. He is a good foot taller than she, a few years older, clean-shaven. He looks a bit like the young man in the Arrow Shirt advertisements.

“I don’t believe we’ve met before—”

He straightens, touches the brim of his hat. “Robert Forrest,” he says. “I come down from Raleigh yesterday.”

“All the way from the capital just to help us out?”

“Least I could do, Miss. The stories in the paper—”

“We are so very grateful.” Sally offers her hand. “Sally Manigault.”

He takes her hand, once more looking to the crowd outside the old barn. Being forthright, she always needs to remind the Judge, is not the same as being forward.

“My father, Judge Manigault, is a great friend of Mr. Daniels of the News and Observer. We visit him there quite often.”

“Well, if you’re ever up there again,” says dazzling Robert Forrest, then leaves the rest to her. He is polite, this young man, and brave, but certainly not gallant.

“Have you and your companion had anything to eat or drink since you’ve commenced your duties here?”

“No, actually—”

“In that case you are in good fortune,” she smiles, and lays the basket on the ground. “I have a tureen of coffee here, sandwiches, some pie—”

“Oh—”

“In response to your initial question, Mr. Forrest, where I was headed was here — to lend my support to the cause, so to speak.” She flips the lid of the basket open and the boy looks into it, somewhat stunned.

“That is very kind of you.”

“Nonsense. It’s the least I can do. Let me pour you some coffee—”

Flirt with them, Myrtle Talmadge always says, and you win their hearts. Feed them, and you own their souls.

When Milsap turns onto Market Street a thousand armed white men are marching toward him. At least a thousand — they fill the wide thoroughfare from side to side all the way from Sixth to the Armory two blocks down. The flood must have come like this through the streets of Johnstown, he thinks as he waits for it to sweep him along, no chanting or haranguing in the ranks, only an inexorable force of nature unleashed to run its course. He knows where they are headed.

Colonel Waddell is in the van, the old gentleman riding ahead with a Winchester held up like a standard, grim as fate. Many of the town’s leading men hurry to keep beside him on foot, armed or not, determined to be noted by the swelling throng behind them. Mr. Clawson is up on the sidewalk staying parallel, with Walter Parsley and Hardy Fennell trailing after, Clawson scribbling in his notebook as he walks. Milsap falls into step — where else in the wide world should he be? — and feels the power of a thousand bodies with one deadly purpose in their consciousness as the mass surges hard right down Seventh Street, picking up speed, more men and boys pushing into the torrent from the side streets as they cross Dock and Orange and Ann and Nun, small brown faces goggle-eyed at the windows of the Williston School till they are pulled away by their teachers and then Waddell raises his rifle over his head and the righteous horde washes out around him facing a two-story clapboard house just south of the colored Methodist church, modest in façade and seemingly empty. The Love and Charity Hall.

Milsap has only seen it once, when he was a boy in South Carolina. By the time he and his friends got there the beating and burning was well over and somebody had strung a cord through the calves like it was a slaughtered deer and three of the Knights were hoisting it by rope over the branch of a sycamore tree. The top part was more charred than the legs, but as it swung, poked by gleeful older boys with long sticks, it was evident that it had been a man. Mr. Hudson, the town’s only photographer, had been summoned to set up his apparatus and there was repeated posing with the trophy, Milsap and his friends sneaking in just before the cord was pulled to be included among the huntsmen. He had not, at that point in his life, seen himself in a photograph. He remembers them all being queasy with excitement, remembers the bitter smell and the strange rush of saliva in his mouth, this confluence of blood and gathered neighbors always in the past leading to fresh cracklins and pickled souse.

“You know who it is?” Milsap asked one of the older boys wielding a stick and the boy laughed and poked the hanging carcass again to make it spin and said “Say hello to Albert Lee.”

But Albert Lee was a man he knew, a man who sat on the dock at the feed store and had once given him a gator he had carved from a chunk of tupelo, and this thing with half a head left strung up by the sinews could not be him.

One of the Red Shirts steps forward to pound on the door and there is shouting from the men who have flowed around and behind the structure and then Milsap is borne in a rush, feet barely touching the ground, in through the door just smashed open with axes and wrenched hard, fighting to keep from falling under the stampede of men squeezing into the downstairs hall, chairs and benches hurled shattering before them, Milsap grabbing a belt and lifted at the head of the crush up the steep incline to the crowded press at the top of the stairs. It is all he can do to avoid being brained by wood or glass or metal as the furies attack Manly’s den and wreak upon his tools of outrage what they had hoped to inflict on his person.

They have been, as Milsap often surmised, still setting by hand here at the Record, and he cannot help but make a hasty inventory as the smaller pieces of equipment whiz past his head to smash against the walls, as stacks of papers are flung about to carpet the floor and sloshed with kerosene from the lamps snatched up from below and a man next to Milsap is beating on a folding table with a compositor’s stick, smashing down again and again screaming “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” while four burly men struggle to tear the bulky rotary press from its moorings and, failing that, allow others to rush in and have at it with ax and sledgehammer. Then fire, the flames whooshing across the floor and the angry wave that has scoured this room becomes a desperate scramble of men fighting to escape, men leaping down the stairwell rolling over those still struggling upward to claim a shard of glory. Milsap is shoved and then rides another man’s back to the ground floor, someone stepping on his neck, then lifted and pulled to safety, hundreds of voices roaring in exaltation as white men pour out the bottom of the house and black smoke pours from the top.

Milsap doesn’t remember having grabbed the chunk of metal till he feels it cutting into the palm of his tightened fist. It is a rectangle of brass with a raised shape on one face, only a shape to most but to Milsap unmistakably a capital N when reversed in a newspaper headline. He jams it in his pocket and hurries back from the sudden wave of heat roaring out from the building, flames licking out from the smashed front window above now, nearly stumbling over the guts of the defenestrated printing machine.

They could have stripped the office of the equipment, he thinks, and given it to someone who would have used it responsibly. He learned his trade on an old four-cylinder press just like the one now busted at his feet, which Mr. Clawson himself had bought cheap then sold on credit to the Manly brothers. A pity to butcher the horses, he thinks, when the coachman is to blame.

The heat has driven them all to the west side of Seventh and the fire bells are sounding their alarm when Davey finds him in the throng. Tiny points of orange are reflected in the printer’s devil’s eyes.

“Manly wunt in there,” shouts the boy over the clanging of the bells and the cheers of their companions. “That bird done flew the coop.”

Milsap nods. His neck hurts where it was tromped on. “Then we’ve all got something to thank him for,” he says.

“Tis gggreat news from the islands,” says Gilhooley. “Victhry has bin wan at a pittance — the haughty Dago vanquished with barely a show.”

“Manila is ours, then?” queries Officer O’Malley, jiggling his keys.

“Fer the time bein it is, it is. The Stars and Stripes gallantly flappin oer the pallum trays, the downbaten Spaniard shipped home with his tail betwixt his legs. Whither we kape the place or not, that’s another tale altogither.”

“The Fillypeens—”

“Thousands of islands it is, from the size of the Auld Country down to some not bigger than Battry Park, each with its complymint of grateful salvages.”

“We’ve enough salvages already,” frowns the roundsman. “Or have ye nivver strolled through the Tinderloin on a Saturdy night?”

“It’s markets we want, Pat, or so says the powr behind the trone.”

“Mark Hanna himself, is it?”

“An appytite with legs and a mighty repository of balloon juice, but a jaynyus win it comes to the spondoolacs. Whin the President does a jig, it’s Hanna that’s pullin the sthrings.”

“Markets in Manila,” muses the officer. “If it’s exotic goods I’m afther I could easily stroll over to Chineytown—”

“We’re not to buy from thim,” explains the horse-follower. “They’re to buy from us. As well as the Chinamen and the Japanese and the whole gang of yella monkeys as they’ve got over there. Providin a positive outflow of resarces and a ginerous influx of the auld roly-poly.”

“And can they afford it at all?”

“We’re only discussing the chayper sart of goods, O’Malley, nothin you or I might purchase. Have ye seen the suit that’s hangin in Hymie Ziff’s store winda?”

“What would a nekkid salvage be wantin with a chape Jew suit?”

“Ye’d be surprised. I’ve bin readin up on it — did ye know that on sortin iv the islands the majoority is Cathlicts?”

“They’re all Cathlicts on Skelly Michael back home,” says O’Malley, “and a more salvage, poorly dressed lot ye’ve nivver seen.”

“The idee is,” Gilhooley continues, “to bring thim the fruits iv dimocracy and cappytilism first, which projuices a desire for the finer things in life, like shoes or newspapers or whiskey.”

The policeman appears distraught. “Is there no whiskey there at all?”

“None that I’ve heard of.”

“Me admiration for our byes in uniform incrases.”

“Think iv all thim barefoot Fillypeeny byes who could be out rushin the cans fer the workingmen or shinin the shoes of thim what has shoes—”

“Unimplymint is a turrible thing—”

“—but instead have naught to do but hang about and kick the cocoanut.”

“A turrible thing.”

“Don’t I know it meself? Think if these new automobiles was within the means iv any but the Asthors and the Vanderbilks — no more horses. And without horses what’s there left staming on the streets fer yers truly to shivvel off into a wagon?”

“So it’s democracy, is it? Will they be sindin Croker over?”

“Not the Tammany brand, that’ll come later. No, I belave it’s Jiffersonian dimocracy will be the first dose.”

“The lucky divvils.”

“It’s all part iv a natural progrission — first you had the concept of immynint domain, then it was mannyfist distiny, and now we’ve got binivilint assimilation, which leads, inivitably, to cappytalism. Plant the desire to improve yer lot and thin install the twelve-hour day.”

“How long is their days at the present?”

“Sunrise to sunset, and not a moment of it spent in gainful implymint. Mostly they run errands for the friars.”

The policeman winces in sympathy. “Franciscans, is it? Ah, the poor, sufferin brown bastards.”

“Aye, Franciscans, and iv the acquisitive variety.”

“Now, Franciscans aren’t the worst of the orders. They’ll go easy with the rod, is my experience. But yer Christian Brothers—”

“Sakes, set them byes on ’im and there wouldn’t be a Fillypeeny left standin.”

The copper ponders for a moment. “So — we kape the flag flutterin above, injuice thim to buy our chape suits, and in the course of time innerjuice the finer concepts iv patronage and quid pro quo.”

“Tis the very thing Senator Hanna advises.”

“A sound course of action.”

“Ah, but there’s a sorpint in the Garden.”

“Wherivver ye’ve got pallum trays there’s sure to be sorpints crawlin about.”

“This wan’s name is Aggynaldo.”

“An Eyetalian in the Fillypeens! And is he an arnychist as well?”

“He’s only a Fillypeeny insurrictionalist, is all. Wan iv their ginrals that was on our side agin the Spaniard, and now perhaps he isn’t innymore.”

“That quick, is it?”

“Imagine, if ye will, what the poor monkeys are thinkin — here they’ve bin fightin agin the Spaniard since shortly after the Flood, and in stames Admiral Dooley to knock the tar out iv the Dago’s flotilla—”

“Our byes to the rescue, jist like at the San Wan Hill—”

“Ah, but there the Cubing insurrictos had their own flag at the ready—”

“Many’s the time I’ve seen it, hung outside the hoonta office on New Street.”

“And the Fillypeenys might’ve had some sort of a banner waiting, fer all I know, but the race goes to the swift, or in this case to thim what’s got the Great White Flate floatin in the harbor set to bombard Manila with dinnymite. So there’s a bit iv a dustup around the fort — Murphy, the policy banker from Twelfth Street, says it was in the bag before a shot was fired, and he ought to know — and poor Aggynaldo and his stalwarth companions look up to see the Star-Spangled Banner itself wavin high over the walls.”

“Ye say the battle was not on the up-and-up?”

“D’ye know Finnegan that works on the gas lines?”

“He’s felt the hard ind iv me stick more than wonst.”

“And d’ye remimber last August when his missus set out afther him with a lead sash-weight in her hand—”

“And Finnegan run into the station hollerin bloody murther—”

“And him no great friend of the byes in blue—”

“He’d curse us to Hell as soon as look at us.”

“Aye, but at the moment he was in mortal peril from a far more turrible inimy. Can ye imagine fallin into the hands iv Big Annie Finnegan in all her fury?”

“A fate worst thin Death itself.”

“Well, thim Spanish Dons trapped in the fort in Manila was thinkin the same thoughts as Finnegan. Better their kaysters thrown on a quick boat back to auld Madrid than their noggins on a pike in Manila.”

“Which manes this Aggynaldo is in Big Annie’s boots.”

“He takes a smaller size,” corrects Gilhooley, “but the principle is the same. He goes to Admiral Dooley, does Aggy, and he says — in Spanish now, fer that’s what the eddycated wans spake, none of yer googoo lingo fer thim — he says, ‘Thanks fer yer help in the matter,’ he says, ‘and whin exactly will ye be pullin anchor?’ And the Admiral strokes those great white chop-warmers he wears and he says, ‘Ye’ll be informed whin inny consinsus has bin arrived at.’ Bein a polite way iv tellin the little monkey to bugger off. So it’s our byes with their kit and rifle versus the salvages with their bolo knives, waitin fer the other brogan to fall.”

“And will they lift a man’s tonsure, the Fillypeenys?”

“Worst than that — they’ve got torters and depprydations to make a red Injin blush fer shame.”

“There’s bows and arras involved?”

“Spears even, like your African headhunters use. Oh, it’s a primitive type of conflict they’ll be wagerin on thim islands, what the Royal British who’s fightin the Boors in Praetoria are callin gorilla war.”

“Gorillas, too! A turrible thing.” O’Malley ponders. “What exactly is a Boor, then? I’ve hoord iv the thing, but I don’t have me finger on it—”

“It’s a type of Dutchman,” says Gilhooley, “that’s gone wild on the African felt.”

“That’s a soberin thought, that is — a salvage Dutchman. The worst iv two wurrulds.”

“Spakin iv red Injins,” says Gilhooley, “me own opinion is that what’s needed over there is Ginral Miles, late iv the gggreat victhry of Sandago Cuba, him that injuiced Geronnymo and his haythen band to come back on the riservation. He’s the bye fer the job.”

“Aye,” the policeman nods, “he’d make short work iv this Aggy fella.” He taps his stick absently against the wheel of Gilhooley’s wagon, thinking. “So — whin the Fillypeenys have bin subjude, d’ye think we’ll have another star on the flag?”

“Not on yer life. The Fillypeeny himself is somethin between a Hottentot and a Chinaman — with none of the positive attrybutes iv ayther race, whatsoivver as those might be. Them islands is more likely to become a Turritory, like this Porta Reeky or Oklahoma. As such they injoy some of the bennyfits iv citizenship, but kape their noses out of trouble come Illiction Day.”

“It seems like a great deal iv bother to go to,” opines the lawman, “to sell a few chape suits.”

“Tis the white man’s burthen,” replies Gilhooley, bending once again to his task. “And we’ll all need to buck up and carry our portion iv it.”

There are roosters at the front. It has been quiet along the line all day, even with the Americans setting up their artillery on the heights across the river, quiet enough for General Ricarte and Colonel San Miguel to join Aguinaldo and the rest of the general staff in Malolos for a ball to celebrate the new Constitution.

“Keep a third at the outposts,” the colonel called down to Diosdado from his rented barouche. “But there’s no reason the rest of the boys can’t have some fun.” And then was gone.

So there are roosters in the long pit dug just behind the sentry posts, at least three sets of birds preparing to tear each other apart, and torches stuck below ground level to light their battles. Diosdado’s men crowd around, betting coins and cigarettes, using old lottery tickets as promissory notes, bantering about the relative merits of Cubans versus Jolos, feathery birds versus sinewy, orange versus black. Gambling has been outlawed by General Aguinaldo, of course, but like many of his orders this one seems to be understood in principle and ignored in practice. The boys at the outposts turn to call back their observations to those in the pit, feeling persecuted to have drawn sentry duty on this night of celebration, the war over and Manila beckoning from behind the American lines on the other side of the San Juan River.

“I’m holding the Death of all Chickens in my hands,” sings out the one they call Kalaw because of his big nose. “You bet against him, you bet against fate.” Kalaw holds his champion, a squirming bundle of rage, within inches of the beak of the other combatant still pegged to the trench floor while his friend, Joselito, yanks the bird’s tailfeathers to anger it even more.

Nicanor from Cavite squats behind the pegged gamecock. “My Butcher will cut him up,” he states calmly. “Anybody who doesn’t think so can show me their money, ba?”

Locsin, the chino from Botolan, is serving as the sentensyador, mentally recording bets shouted out by the soldiers crammed down in the pit or kneeling just above it. Kalaw’s bird, hackles up, whips its snakelike neck forward, beak snapping just short of Nicanor’s stocky half-breed. Nicanor pulls the cock back into his lap and his second, Corporal Pelaez, straps the razor-edged gaffs, still in their leather sheaths, onto its feet. Joselito is waving a cookpot from the mess at them.

“This is where your kawawa Butcher is going,” he taunts, “after we tenderize him a little!”

Diosdado pulls himself away from the fight and walks along the outposts, fully exposed to the other side. Providing an easy target and pretending not to care is part of being an officer. They had started a full hundred yards back from the river, like the Americans on the other side, but after San Miguel took over Third Zone both parties began to creep up, and now each is dug in at the foot of the bridge itself, more convenient for shouting drunken insults at each other. Diosdado has been pulled in to translate, standing with San Miguel at the center of the bridge to parley with the American officers, a volunteer general from the mountains of Colorado and a Colonel Stotsenberg.

“Encroachments,” the volunteer general stated in the direct, seemingly affectless American way, “will not be tolerated.”

Diosdado pauses to kick one of the boys who has fallen asleep face-down on his rifle.

“Wa—?”

“This isn’t a dream, soldier. What if the Americans decide to attack right now?”

The soldier looks over the lazy San Juan, the bridge paralleled by the water pipeline from El Depósito, as if the possibility has never occurred to him. Diosdado can smell that the soldier has already celebrated the Constitution.

“Then they will be very stupid.”

It is probably good, this confidence, this cockiness. Spirited. When Luna suggested digging trenches, one of the Caviteño generals retorted, in Spanish, that “true men fight with open breast.” Only Sargento Bayani seems to doubt that the Americans, most of them volunteers and soft from inactivity, will be no match if it comes to open hostilities.

“And what if General Luna were to appear and find you sleeping at your post?”

The private sobers visibly. “You speak the truth, Teniente. I will try to stay awake.”

Luna is the boogeyman, the aswang who all the officers use to frighten the troops when they don’t want to risk their own popularity. Luna has already sentenced two poor Manila boys to be executed for sneaking home while on sentry duty, has screamed at and slapped men of every rank below colonel. He is regarded as an Ilocano phantom, likely to materialize in three different places at once, implacable in his mania for discipline, fingers eagerly caressing his pearl-handled pistol. He is known as El Furioso, El Martillo de Dios, El Loco—

“Did you know,” the men whisper to each other as Luna struts past them, eyes searching for the next junior officer to be humiliated, “that his brother, the painter, murdered his own wife and mother-in-law? And got away with it?” The whole family are locos, go the stories, locos Ilocanos, and all you can do is hope that when he explodes you are somewhere else.

But Luna is the one who knew they should have taken Manila before the yanquis strolled in, no matter what the cost in lives.

Sargento Bayani sits on the slope of the riverbank at the end of the outposts, smoking, smiling his private smile. Diosdado stops by him to gaze across the water.

“You’re not interested in the sabong?”

Bayani shrugs. “I’ll have some stew tomorrow.” He jerks his head toward the American lines. “They had a busy day.”

Diosdado watched it all through his binoculars, reporting constantly on their progress till Capitán Grey y Formentos told him to leave him alone and put it in writing. Artillery positions dug and leveled and sandbagged, the pieces rolled into place, painstakingly sighted on the San Juan del Monte hill. If it starts in earnest it will be there — the Americans will try to capture the old Spanish blockhouses and push on to take El Depósito where Bonifacio’s uprising floundered not so many years ago. The powder magazine and the waterworks will be their objectives, and to take them they must pass straight over Diosdado’s celebrating patriots. It has been a week of incidents, escalating each day, insults called back and forth, rumors of American sentries taking liberties with Filipino women passing through their lines, stories of the Spanish garrison back in the Walled City acting more like conquerors on leave than prisoners, stray bullets winging in one direction or the other with greater frequency each night. But orders, from Aguinaldo himself, are to avoid engagement, to accommodate their “allies” wherever possible. To wait.

“The Americans are going to vote,” Diosdado tells the sargento. “Back in their own congress. About what to do with us.”

“What to do with us,” Bayani repeats. He addresses Diosdado in Zambal, as always now, as if it is their private language. Diosdado has not garnered the nerve to order the sargento to speak Tagalog like the others.

“The bird that loses, the talunan,” says Bayani, “goes to the owner of the one that wins.”

“We’re not the losers — the Spanish are.”

“Is that right?” Bayani stares across the bridge, shakes his head. It is too dark to see any movement but there is a harmonica playing, laughter every now and then, shouted challenges and passwords from the river’s edge.

“The generals know more than we do.”

Diosdado hopes it is true as he says it. There has already been too much dissent above him, the Caviteños resenting Luna, the veterans of ’96 discounting the newcomers, each general a warlord threatening to pick up with his regional clan and march home if he isn’t deferred to, flattered, given his proper share of glory. And this only in Luzon. Hard to imagine controlling what develops in Negros, Cebu, Samar, controlling the crazy moros on the southern islands.

“Of course,” says Bayani. “The ilustrados always know what is best for us.”

He says the word in Spanish, with the slightest touch of contempt.

“It’s what I heard up in Malolos,” shrugs Diosdado, angry to be made to feel guilty about his education. “The American congress is meeting. Important men are said to support our cause.”

Bayani cocks his head and studies Diosdado’s face, making him feel as if he is being judged for something long past repair. “If you were a yanqui,” asks the sargento finally, “and you wanted your government to vote to take our country away from us — what would you want to happen here?”

Diosdado looks down along the outposts, looks to the men lit by the glow from the torches in the cockpit behind them. Most of the sentries have their backs to the river, talking softly with each other or calling to see how the cockfights are progressing.

“The Americans are not the Spanish,” he answers, hedging. “They don’t have the priests whispering in their ears—”

“I’d want a fight. I’d want some dead American boys to throw at the feet of these voters, these ones who will decide what to do with us.”

He is a simple tao, a peasant, Bayani, in manner of speech and appearance, but there is an understanding, a cunning—

“Yesterday the Americans fired every Filipino working behind the lines for them,” says the sargento, spitting into the darkness. “Today they point their cannons at us.”

There is a burst of laughter from the cockpit, then shouting and the squawking of birds. “If they attack tonight,” says Diosdado, indicating the sargento’s lit cigarette, “the first one they’ll shoot is the tanga sitting in front of his breastworks smoking.”

Bayani leans back on his elbows, relaxed. “Unless they hit the teniente standing up next to him in a white uniform.”

The uniform is impossible, a chore to keep clean at the front. Once a week he gives it to a girl who smuggles it past the yanquis into the Intramuros and brings it back the next morning, clean, starched, and smelling of woodsmoke.

“Maybe the vote will go our way.” Diosdado starts back down the line. The men should at least be facing in the right direction.

“You know, in the sabong, if you hold the birds back from each other too long,” Sargento Bayani calls after him, “they will burst and die.”

In the daytime it seems very little like there will be a war. The land on this side belongs to the Tuason family, the rice mostly harvested, a handful of their kasamas wandering over from Santol to compete with the flocks of maya birds, gleaning what has been dropped in the fields. The Englishman McLeod has a house on the hill above them, as do a couple of the Tuasons, and the carabao, untethered, pass their days dozing in the shade of the cane thickets and lumbering down to wallow at the edge of the San Juan.

“An orderly transition,” Diosdado says in his lectures to the men about not drinking on duty and taking more care with their firearms. “We can only hope these people will be as civil as the Spaniard when they decide to leave.”

In the pit, Kalaw and Nicanor hold their cocks head to head, the birds pecking furiously at each other, neck plumage bristling—

“A ra sartada!” cries the chino and the men let the cocks go and step back quickly, the birds smacking together in a flurry and shooting upward, squawking and clawing, feathers flying, the razor spurs unsheathed.

“Vaya, Destino!” call the men who have bet on Kalaw’s bird. “Cut him to pieces!”

“Get on him, Butcher!” call the others. “Don’t let him go!”

They are both well-bred, Diosdado notes, standing with his back to the pit but looking over his shoulder. Small heads, long thighs, necks like steel cable, one rusty and barrel-chested, the other sleek, gray with black stippling and now flecks of his own and the other bird’s blood.

“Take his eyes out!” cries Kalaw, crouching with his hands balled into fists, doing a little dance as he shadows the movements of the fight. “What’s wrong with you?”

The fowl leap and flap and peck and claw, chests heaving, blood spattering, their tiny eyes red and implacable in the torchlight, till both stagger back, exhausted.

“Break!” calls Locsin, and the men gather up their champions, Kalaw spitting water into his wounded bird’s face and cooing endearments, Nicanor taking Butcher’s comb into his mouth and sucking the fighting blood back into it as Private Ontoy hovers over both with his needle and thread in hand, ready to sew off a torn artery if needed.

“Ristos!” calls Locsin, who receives a good deal of teasing because he can’t pronounce his l’s, and the men again push their gamecocks’ faces together.

“Rucha!”

The renewed struggle is easier to follow than the opening brawl, both birds clamping on with their beaks and trying to pull the other down, Destino dragging a broken wing, Butcher blinded on one side, yanking at each other desperately and then resting as if by agreement, their tiny hearts visibly hammering in their bodies, feathers slick with blood and gaffed claws digging for purchase in the trench dirt. Diosdado hears fireworks coming from the east, his first thought that at least his men are not the ones out of control with their celebrating, and then a private whose name he has never learned falls into the pit, shot through the eye.

“They’re coming!” shouts Bayani from the river. “The americanos are coming!”

The fireworks are on top of them now, the air filled with angry wasps and the men scatter, most leaping down into the pit, some going for their weapons and the rest just going.

“To the front!” calls Diosdado, standing tall and feeling sick about it. “Everybody to the front! Cover the bridge!”

The birds, excited by the noise and the movement, break apart and begin to swipe at each other again and two more that were pegged waiting for the next fight are kicked loose in the scramble and go for each other and Diosdado finds himself stepping forward to the nearest outpost and pointing at the foot of the bridge as if his men don’t know by the muzzle flashes where the attack is coming from.

“There!” he shouts, over the whine of bullets and the hysterical squawking of gamecocks. “Concentrate your fire over there!”

There is no cover, he thinks, a tiny redoubt next to the bridge on the American side but then the exposed, low-railed bridge itself and the open water — they must be insane. They will be slaughtered, even at night. He turns to shout an order to Sargento Ramos, but for some reason Ramos is down on his hands and knees, crawling—

The soldier is young, not much more than a boy. Fit-looking in his uniform shirt and trousers, leggings wound tight over the calves, square-chinned under a battered campaign hat, but no Adonis. The rifle slipping from his stiffened fingers was at parade rest, butt on the dusty ground, no bayonet fixed to its barrel. There is a look of confusion on the young American’s face, of innocence betrayed, his lips parted in surprise, his lower back arched in where the kris has been thrust from behind. The Cartoonist has actually seen a kris, hung behind glass on a wall in a Boston museum, but has added a few extra serpentine curves for effect.

The wily Filipino is a bit of a problem. The feet are bare, the clothes the same peon’s rags he has used for the Mexicans the Chief hates so much and more recently for the noble Cuban insurrectos. The straw hat is equally ragged but less round, coming to a point suggestive of a cutting edge at the peak. Even the shade of the skin he has left relatively unaltered, a delicate cross-hatching to give shape to the exposed areas and suggest something between white and negroid. He hopes that if it pleases the Chief enough to be reprinted on Sunday the color-ink boys will render it a yellowish-tan, like a bilious weak tea. He’s done the features over several times before hitting on something that looks right, the cheekbones high and sharp, the eyes narrow, up-slanting razor slits, the mouth twisted in a cruel, treacherous grin as he drives the crooked blade through his victim’s spine. Only a slight exaggeration from the one photo published of their jefe Aguinaldo, who — though reputed to be of a Chinese-Malay mix — bears the angular, cunning stamp of the Jap.

Beneath the assassin’s feet, trodden into blood-soaked foreign soil, lies Old Glory.

The Cartoonist roughs in the caption, noting below it that he wants the heavy Gothic font they use for In Memoriam buys on the obit page, sober and declamatory at once—

THE THANKS OF A GRATEFUL NATION

They are waiting for him on the dock, notepads gaping like the mouths of baby magpies, insatiable. They are waiting for him everywhere these days, in the hallways, in the lobbies, in front of the hotels, on street corners and under lampposts, in gentlemen’s clubs and workingmen’s resorts, starved for quips, for observations, his every vocalization sandwiched between quotation marks and rehashed for the delectation of the reading public. Having sent his wife and daughter ahead, the Humorist nurses a cigar that has burned down to a stub, waiting, as the steward has requested, for the other passengers to absent themselves. No sense obstructing the disembarkation.

He has seen some of the caricatures occasioned by his political musings, forwarded to London by friends and accompanied by suitable proclamations of outrage. His favorite is the senile literary lion, toothless perhaps but still full-maned and regal compared to the bonneted schoolmarms they’ve made of Hoar, Carnegie, and poor, hapless William Jennings Bryan, his once voluminous bag these days nearly bereft of wind. The fellow at Punch had some sport with him after an interview sympathetic to the Boers, drawing him as a grimy, wild-haired Voortrekker shooting himself in the foot with a blunderbuss. There is a sort of glee in it, the illustrators attempting to outdo each other, attaching his physiognomy to a menagerie of outlandish creatures, both extant and mythical.

“All in good fun,” chortled the editor from Lloyd’s Weekly at the Travelers’ Club, though his countrymen slaughtered at Mafeking and Ladysmith might be excused for undervaluing the hilarity involved.

“Thank you very much, sir,” says the steward, appearing beside his deck chair. “I believe it will be all right now.”

The Humorist rises, lifts the tattered carpetbag he carries more as a prop than as a necessity, and descends the gangplank of the Minnehaha, flash powder fulminating with each step, to feed the Beast.

The New York Herald is there, and the Sun and the World and the Times and the Mail and Express and the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer and, for all he knows, a representative from the New Yorker Staats Zeitung.

“How does it feel to be on American soil?” The Sun.

“A good deal superior to being under it,” answers the Humorist, setting fire to a long black article and taking the first puff. “But then I’ve only just arrived.”

Chucklings of appreciation.

“What are your plans?”

“If I am drafted to serve as President, I will not shun the honor. Short of that I will settle for schnitzel and ale at Luchow’s.”

Knowing laughter. Winks. The World steps forward, features devoid of mirth.

“In regard to the statements attributed to you during your stay in London—”

“I found the Prince of Wales an admirable drinking companion and all-around good egg,” the Humorist interrupts, “and I shall defend that position with my life.”

More jollity, but the pack is on the scent now and won’t be shaken.

“I meant your reaction to the situation in China,” clarifies the newshound from the World.

“The Boxer is a patriot,” replies the Humorist, pausing for effect as pencils are jabbed into notebooks. “No less a patriot than you or I — and I am giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

The World man stiffens, not certain as to whether he has been insulted.

“He defends his land and his culture,” continues the Humorist, “barbaric though it may appear to our eye.”

The gauntlet hurled. The scribe from the Times picks it up.

“But the murder of Christians—”

“Should a handful of Celestials descend on the nether regions of your gashouse district and begin to proselytize for Confucius, they would be made equally short work of. The fate of the missionaries is lamentable, but they were well aware of, if not secretly titillated by, the risks involved.”

It is not that there is nothing left to lose. Yes, he can choose exile again, circling the globe with his stories and being well rewarded for it, can find an innovation equal to the damned compositor to squander his earnings on, can decorate the dining halls of Europe till they grow nauseous at the sight of him, but he longs to be home, in familiar surroundings with Olivia near her most trusted physician. These people can turn on him, decide there is no Humor left in the old man and hound him from their fervently patriotic shore. But he has seen too much, lived too long, to temper his opinions for the mollification of jingoes. He lays the carpetbag on the dock.

“And the Boers?” The representative from Mr. Hearst’s publication, goading him on.

“The British are in the wrong in South Africa,” states the Humorist, holding the cigar away from his face so the smoke cannot obscure his seriousness, “just as our own nation is wrong in the Philippines.”

The jasper from the Herald grins wolfishly. Pencils dance merrily on notebook paper.

The Tribune scoops up the banner. “Don’t you think that while our boys are in peril—”

The Humorist knows where this is heading and will not allow it to arrive. “I am an anti-Imperialist,” he states, raising his voice slightly. “Opposed, on principle, to the eagle sinking its talons into any other land.”

“We have had nothing but victories there.”

He is not yet clear of the dock and is already exhausted. These men have the bright, excited look of those whose experience of battle is the thunder of scareheads on the front pages of their journals, who look at carnage as a starving dog regards a beef shank dripping in a butcher’s window. It was the look on the faces of his young friends when reports of those early victories came down from the North, friends boasting, as they strutted off to enlist, of how fast and how far they would set the yankees running. It has been the young, covetous of their grandfathers’ fading glory, who have campaigned for the present war. His stomach slides up toward his gorge. He was content, happy even, on the leisurely voyage home, safe from the long reach of the telegraph, but now this queasiness, this sudden weight on terra firma. Land-sickness. Jingophobia.

“Our situation in those islands,” he says slowly, giving them time to write, “is an utter mess, a quagmire, from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extraction immensely greater—”

“Our flag has been raised,” declares the pedant from the World. “To lower it now would signal defeat.”

“Our flag, my young friend, must be wrenched from those shores before it is further sullied.”

Silence then, scratching of heads and pencils. This is not risible, this is not what they have gathered for, the return of the nation’s favorite wag with tales of European fatuity and American common sense. Then the stutterer from the Mail and Express, prudently mute up to this juncture, steps into the breach.

“So Mr. T-t-t-twain, w-w-what you are saying is that you are op-p-p-posed to w-w-war.”

The Humorist smiles, takes a lung-tickling pull on the cigar. “I could not have said it better myself. You have no doubt read in your own papers that Czar Nicholas of Russia declares he wants the entire world to disarm.” The Humorist gestures across the harbor with his stogie. “The Czar is ready to disarm.” He touches his chest with both hands. “I am ready to disarm.” His friend has arrived behind them with the hack, the Humorist recognizing the driver, a foul-breathed Fenian who excoriates his slat-ribbed nag in the Mother Tongue. “Collect the others and it shouldn’t be much of a task.”

The Humorist winks at them, lifts his carpetbag and hurries through another poofing barrage of flash powder to the open door of the cab. Only the opening salvo, he thinks, what the frogeaters would term an hors d’oeuvre. They will be back tomorrow, pencils sharpened, hungry for more.

The City eats horses. Dozens and dozens are floated over from New York in a day, more than a hundred when it is hot, they say. Some shot in the head by a horse doctor or one of the Cruelty people but mostly they just fell over in their traces and are unharnessed and left in the street till one of the wagons picks them up. If the shoes have been left on they get pulled off and tossed into the pile and sold back to the ferriers. Jubal yanks the hooks into the tendons just below the hocks on a big roan’s back legs so it can be winched down the slide, then pops the shoes off as fast as he can. It goes a lot faster when they’re dead.

The scrapers are next, running their quick blades over the body, razoring off manes and tails, separating the hair by color if it’s for brushes or not if it’s for plaster, and then the skinners step in slicing and tugging, tossing the heavy wet hides into a heap for the tanner’s boy to haul off in his wheelbarrow, a cloud of flies bursting apart with each new toss and then settling back on top. A man comes in to fog the whole floor three times a day but the flies always come back. The blood-smeared butchers come last, one on each side of the chute, hacking out the cuts they want and dropping them into steel carts, stripping one side of the skinned animal then digging in their meathooks to flip it over and do the other. What is left gets hauled up the ramp, unhooked, and slid into the enormous rendering vat. His first week on the Island Jubal was up there on the catwalk in the heat and the fumes and the smell, but he come on time every day and didn’t complain and didn’t fall in so they moved him to horseshoes and now they got a new colored man at the vat. It is mostly Polacks and Irish here, lots of them with the whole family working. Some of the Polacks speak American, and other ones, like old Woytak who skins the dogs and the raccoons and the fox that come in sometimes, talk old country or don’t talk at all. Mr. Tom says if Jubal does a good job and stays out of trouble on the Island a few more weeks maybe he will put him on a wagon.

His first day up from Wilmington he went to all the stables in the City, telling what he could do and asking for work. There were stables for four horses and stables for twenty and stables for more than a hundred that had three stories with wagons on the ground floor and the horses brought up a ramp to the second and their feed on the top. One place that was for trolley horses had five hundred stalls but the trolley gone electric now and near half of them were empty. Jubal asked and walked and asked and walked, teamsters on the street happy to tell him where to try, but there was no work till he come to the West Side stable for P. White’s Sons and they said they would start him out on Barren Island.

The horses on the streets of the City are all blinkered, as close to blind as you can do and still get them to work. The people don’t look to the sides much either, staring a tunnel down the street and hurrying through it. Wherever he went that first day he was in the way of something, and both times he tried to sit down a police appeared to eyeball him to his feet again. There is places in Wilmington where you got to state your business if you’re colored, but there is also a dozen white men Jubal could say he hauled for, who would stand for him as a honest worker with a feel for the animals.

The room he stays in now is not so big and belongs to P. White’s Sons, like all the other rooms and houses on Barren Island. They built the school and the firehouse and the little grocery and probly own the two saloons that he’s never seen any colored in. Rent comes out of his pay, double for the first week. A small steamer boat, the Fannie McKane, travels over to a place called Canarsie and back two times a day and once for church on Sunday. He hasn’t gone back over yet, his credit good on the Island but nowhere else. They cook garbage here too, at a plant on the other side of the pier, but it pays just the same and there’s no chance to get on a wagon. There is a neighborhood or two in the City where colored live, even some from Carolina, but this is the job for now and if you work here you got to live here.

Halecki steps past pushing a train of carts full of tankage that will be dried and sold for fertilizer. They don’t waste a thing, P. White’s Sons, and the next passel of horses bound for the City will come up grazing on grass grown on their grandaddy’s bones. Some of the horses come in you can tell they broke a leg or got hit by another carriage, but mostly they are old and gray-muzzled and just been worked out. Jubal hooks carcasses and pops horseshoes till one of the Irish who do errands, little Darby, runs up to say there is a load coming in.

Jubal is the only one suppose to come off the line. It is chilly, his breath showing white and the winter wind blowing strong when he steps out of the building, blowing black smoke from the huge brick chimney over to Rockaway and lifting some of the smell away with it. It is not so bad as he worried, kind of a old-coffee thickness in the air that never goes away, and he is used to it by now. A steam tug pushes a scow piled with carcasses across Dead Horse Bay to the pier, the dark hides nearly hidden by a blanket of feeding gulls. Most every carcass Jubal handles is missing at least one eye and he’s come to hate the birds.

No telling how they bring the horses out when the river finally ices over.

Smitty and Pops are waiting with their wagons by the wharf crane, both with a blinkered four-in-hand team. Uncle Wicklow taught him to handle a big team like that when he was in livery for Mr. Sprunt, and once Jubal got to work six mules rolling a house from Queen Street to Market. A mule won’t let you kill him with work, but horses — these ones coming in on the scow probly just got pushed past what they could do, too heavy, too steep, too fast. Driver got to make up for the sense that a horse don’t have, and Jubal has always had a feel for them. Once when they were little and times was hard Mama bought some horsemeat from Honniker and cooked it in a stew. Mama could make a sump-digger’s boot taste good, but Jubal couldn’t touch a bite and Royal laughed at him and ate the whole mess.

“Jubal think he know who this stew is,” he said. “Know the name of every horse in town.”

The gulls stir some when the scow bangs against the pilings and Jubal hops down to tie her up. He kicks at one of the birds that stays too close when he climbs onto the pile of carcasses.

“Got room for you in that renderin tank.”

Hruba who operates the crane sends the tackle down and Jubal gets busy, muscling the first cold body around with his gaff while old Inkspot fixes lines in place and sets the hardware. Inkspot is drunk whenever he’s not working but still moves quick, hopping around the jumble of bodies and legs like a flea, tapping where he wants Jubal to lift, trussing the animal to be lifted. He sits back on the rump of a Cleveland bay and jerks his thumb up at Hruba.

“You got im!”

Half the gulls are still on the pile and half are flapping in the air, looking for an opening. The winch chain rattles till it goes taut and the hooked horse is hoisted straight up, eyeless head flopping to one side, then swung over Smitty’s wagon bed and cranked down. Smitty got his whole team in feedbags for the loading — it could be sacks of concrete coming down for all they know. Some horses will shy at a corpse, but they can be trained around it. Jubal drove Mr. Rivers the undertaker’s matched black Tennessee Walkers for a spell, wearing a top hat that was a mite too big for him, and never had to use an overchuck on them, the horses raising their heads up proud the minute they saw the hearse rolled out. Except for the Phenix fire pumper, that was the finest team in Wilmington, stepping high, pulling even, standing tall. Dignified.

Jubal knows how old a horse is from twenty paces, can feel its legs and tell you is it a lead or a swing or a wheelhorse, can tell you how it’s been hitched and how much it can pull, can riff his fingers in the coat and let you know what kind of feed it’s lacking. But these ones don’t tell much of a story, just dead weight to gaff till old Inky has got the lines fixed and then you move on to the next. Uncle Wick owns a little patch out on the way to Winnabow and sometimes he move an old horse off a team and onto a single-pull and then one day when it isn’t good for even that he put it out on that patch, lets it feed and sleep all day and go rheumy-eyed and ski-footed. Might be four or five of them old horses out there at any time that Uncle say weren’t to be rode.

“That hoss done carry his share of the world,” he would say if Jubal or Royal would ask could they climb up. “Leave him rest now.”

Smitty’s wagon fills and he pulls the feed bags off and puts the bits back in and clucks the team back toward the rendering plant, steam showing out their noses, a few gulls resettling on top. Smitty is good, can dock that rig backward into the loading slot first try every time. Used to run them eight-up for a moving company, he says, till it was bought by a bigger company that wanted all white horses and all white drivers.

Jubal gaffs a broke-legged pony and rolls it back for Inkspot. The pony has been shot in the head and has a pinto hide, which the skinners always put away special. Be on somebody’s easy chair in no time. Jubal looks over to Brooklyn while the old man kneels by the pony with lines in hand. It is part of Greater New York now, part of the City. Word is that the colored man’s future is up here, even if won’t nobody look you straight in the eye.

“You just don’t stop movin, is what,” old Inkspot told him the first night in the room they share, his breath sharp with whiskey. “You stop movin, black or white, you gets throwed in the pot.”

How many horses there must be over there, for this many to come in dead every day? Every one of them horses need caring for, feeding, somebody who know how to work them. It only makes sense. This the place for me, Jubal thinks as the pony is hoisted and swings upside down next to him for a moment. I just got in on the wrong end of it.

The armbands are supposed to make it all right, but you never know in El Paso. Royal is holding the reins, Junior never much with a wagon team, as they roll along Second, white folks’ brick houses to the left and Mexican baked adobe to the right. They are both wearing the armbands and strapped with pistols, usually forbidden, but this is a provost detail. Royal keeps his eyes straight ahead, glad it’s noon and most everybody is inside.

“We’ll be back in the thick of it in no time,” says Junior beside him, rubbernecking around like a tourist. “The Philippines, China—”

“You don’t know that.”

Junior has been on him all week to reenlist, their hitch officially over tomorrow and lots of the boys who come in with them at Missoula saying they’re going to hang it up.

“It stands to reason.” Junior holds tight to the seat as Royal turns the team left on Campbell. “We’re experienced, disciplined—”

“Don’t want to shoot them people any more than I wanted to shoot a Spanish.”

“We don’t get to choose our enemies, Royal.”

“If you’re not in the damn Army you do.”

“It will be more like police work by the time we get there. Maintaining order—”

“Don’t care for that neither.”

Junior scowls. “Suppose you were to accept discharge. What would you do?”

Royal has been trying not to think of this. He shrugs. “Go back to Wilmington.”

It is a sore point between them, Junior bragging after every letter he gets about how good his people are making it up in New York, like they never lost a step, while Royal, who gets no mail at all, doesn’t call out the lie. If he even says the name Wilmington, Junior gets all tight and says that’s over, that the colored man’s future all up North now.

Or in the regulars.

“What I’ve heard,” says Junior, turning his head away, “is they even told Mr. Sprunt he can’t hire colored anymore.”

All Royal knows, from the other Wilmington men in the unit, is that his mother wasn’t hurt and Jubal took off and hasn’t been back. It was Junior who told him Dorsey Love is dead and Jessie gone up to a better life in New York.

“Set me there with one dozen of these wildass colored regulars,” said Coop when he heard, Coop who used to be Clarence Rice at home and didn’t come back from leave last night, “and they be a mess of redneck crackers floating in that Cape Fear River.”

Royal pulls the wagon off the street, hitching the pair in the shade of the alleyway next to the jail. He and Junior straighten their uniforms out, set their hats, and step inside.

The deputy leans back in a swivel chair behind a scarred-up desk, chewing tobacco and spitting the juice into a coffee cup in his hand while an electric fan blows air on his face. Another man, an Easterner by his dress, sits across from him writing in a notebook.

“We don’t use it so much as the old days,” the deputy is saying, “but we keep the hinges oiled. I’ll show it to you in a minute, up on the third tier of the tank.”

“And is it usual to have multiple executions?” asks the dude, who must be a reporter.

“Hell, there probly been a double-header before this,” chuckles the deputy. “But not since I been here in El Paso.”

“Excuse me, Deputy—” Junior starts, and the white man just holds his hand out and keeps talking.

“The thing is, we had Flores set to go, and we been trying to get old Geronimo Parra back here to stretch ever since he kilt Charlie Fusselman in a shootout up in the Franklins near ten years ago.”

Junior steps forward and places the folded order in the deputy’s hand. The white man does not look up, and Junior takes two military steps back to stand by Royal again, not quite at attention.

“But Parra slipped under the border, then got caught rustling over in the Territory and ended up coolin his heels in the Santa Fe lockup.”

The deputy glances at the paper.

“Cristy!” he shouts, then spits a big gob of black liquid into the coffee mug.

The newsman never stops scribbling. “You tried to extradite?”

“They wouldn’t stand for it. Only our Captain Hughes, who’s from the same Marfa outfit of Rangers that Charlie Fusselman come from, has been on Parra’s trail all these years and that old boy don’t quit. He runs into Pat Garrett in a saloon—”

“Garrett who killed William Bonney?”

“The very same, still a Territory lawman. Garrett says how they’d do anything to get holt of this bad character name of Agnew, spose to be hiding out in Texas, and proposes a swap.”

“An exchange of prisoners.”

“Agnew wasn’t a prisoner yet,” grins the deputy, teeth flecked black with tobacco. “But with a chance to bring Geronimo Parra home to justice, Captain Hughes jumped on his pony and went looking. Caught Agnew working as a ranch hand on the Big Bend, and we had our deal with the Territory.”

A jailer in a blue uniform appears, the deputy waving the colonel’s paper at him.

“Bring that nigger trooper out.”

Sergeant Jacks, who grew up in this town, has warned them all about dealing with Texans, the white ones, told them scare stories about John Wesley Hardin and lynch law and the Rangers, especially the Rangers, who are death on Mexicans and not much fonder of colored. The colored and Chinese here live in the Mex section, Chihuahua, and there’s even supposed to be a couple of the old black Seminole scouts left over in Juarez. Royal has come in on leave with the others a dozen times, tequila making quick work of him.

“Cristy there,” says the deputy, nodding after the jailer as he leaves, “was one of them got stabbed by our desperadoes.”

“They had knives in jail?” the reporter’s bowler sits on the desktop beside him. He writes with a pen that doesn’t need to be dipped in ink over and over.

“Made them some daggers. When boys are gonna make the drop, you got to let them say farewell to their families, which with a Mex is half the damn county. And they go in for all that hugging, even the men. Abrazos. Don’t know how you spell that—”

Royal is used to white men not looking at him, pretending not to see him, but with the uniform on it is more of an insult. He is just a private, “lower than muleshit” as Too Tall would say, but still—

“Some one of these folks slipped some fence wire to them that they twisted into shape and sharpened on the wall blocks that night. Next day, there’s thousands outside, mostly Mex, fillin the streets, up on the rooftops, like they gonna see us do our business inside here. The hour arrives and we open the cells, and they both jump out — Parra and this Antonio Flores who’s already stabbed to death some little señorita over in Smelterville who’d turned him down one too many times. Flores commences to jabbin my buddy Ed Bryant in the gut with this wire contraption while Parra goes after Cristy there and Officer Ten Eyck who was the first ones in. Took a half dozen of us to pull them frog-stickers away and get the cuffs on. The Mexicans call handcuffs esposas,” winks the deputy. “The same word as wife.”

But the uniform, thinks Royal, is something. Enough, maybe, if you break no laws and stay south of Second, east of Santa Fe Street, to keep a cracker deputy off of you. He wasn’t much back in Wilmington, just another nigger millhand, and from what they tell of the white folks’ takeover he be even less now. At least in the regulars it’s always clear where you stand — look on a man’s arm and you know how tight your asshole got to squeeze.

“None of the wounds were fatal?” asks the writer.

The deputy grins, spits into his mug. “You can’t hurt a Texan with no fence-wire dagger,” he says. “Nothin but chicken scratches. We sent Flores up first, and he wasn’t too pleased about it, from what I could tell with the hood over his head. Made a good loud snap when he run out of rope, didn’t need no doctor to know the job was done right. With Parra, well — Geronimo put on some weight in the Santa Fe hoosegow, and with his drop it popped that vein in your neck, blood pourin out from under the hood and all over the floor, and when Captain Hughes pulled it off the man’s head was just barely holding up his body by one little strap of tendon.”

“Oh my,” says the Easterner, laying his pen down.

The deputy spits. “He needed killin.”

Royal sees someone coming down the corridor toward them, a colored man in a regular’s uniform, with the jailer Cristy behind him.

“We let the gory details out to the Mex crowd right away,” says the deputy, raising his voice and turning his head slightly toward Royal and Junior. “See, what we got here in El Paso is just a colony, handful of decent white folks sandwiched between thousands of them bean-eatin sonsabitches on both sides of the Rio.” He looks Royal in the eye for the first time. “Now and then you got to make a display.”

The prisoner is Cooper, barefoot and without his hat.

“Get him out of town,” says the deputy to Junior. “And tell your colonel to keep better track of his niggers.”

This is not the first time Tondo has burned. Twice while he was at the Ateneo the chapel bells rang and the Manila firemen stumbled over each other and the British sent their shiny wagon into the streets and the sky was alive with floating embers all through the night. Diosdado ducks low and zigzags through the maze of nipa huts, thrusting the torch to anything not already ablaze. Men and women and children scatter before him, barefoot, carrying whatever they value most and searching for a pathway through the flames. The plan is to move from east to west, advance runners warning the people and the next wave firing their homes, driving everyone before them to the sea. But the wind has shifted several times, torch-men have run ahead of the ones crying the alarm and there are screams now, lifting above the crackle and roar of the conflagration, screams of fear and more hysterical screams that Diosdado doesn’t want to think about and bamboo timbers exploding like rifle shots and the pop-pop-pop of real rifles to the east as their snipers engage the first of the Americans to respond. He has to backtrack quickly as a nipa hut ahead erupts into flame, a burning dog squealing as it scampers out, tail on fire, the rush of heat like a blow to the side of his face and there is panic in the firelit eyes of the scattering people, panic in their shouts to each other and the pop-pop-pop closer now with what must be every chapel bell in Manila ringing at once. The local firemen are out there somewhere and the British, no doubt, never miss a chance to show off their new steam pumper, and the Americans with whatever equipment they’ve loaded off their great ships — but when Tondo burns it burns to the ground.

A small boy is staggering under the weight of the plaster statue of Saint Joseph he carries on his shoulder, trying to escape but driven back from a wall of heat in each direction. Diosdado shouts and the boy whirls, sees the torch in his hand and backs away from him, terrified, before turning to disappear into the thick black smoke rolling in from the west.

Diosdado edges away from the smoke and tries to gasp a clean breath, the scorched air searing his lungs, worrying that his clothes and hair, despite their dousing before the raid, will burst into flame. He is trapped. The burning is only a diversion, meant to draw some of the Americans away from Binondo before General Luna’s attack on their northernmost lines. It is the last hope, more desperate even than the defense at Caloocan when the enemy first pushed north from the river, Diosdado’s company among four thousand dug in by the chapel and the Chinese cemetery, lying in the muck of the rice fields with the American artillery raining down from La Loma and the Gatling gun tearing the sod off the ditches and the yanqui infantry advancing like a murderous flood tide as the colonels flapped and postured and squawked at each order from Luna saying Aguinaldo, Aguinaldo was the supremo and they would obey only him while their men fought bravely, desperately, uselessly and the railhead and the five locomotives with all their cars sitting on the tracks were lost.

Diosdado tries to strip his uniform tunic off but the buttons are too hot to touch. Luna insisted the officers keep them on for the raid—“So they know we are not tulisanes,” he said, “not a rabble of bandits but the Army of the Filipino Republic, saviors of the nation.” Saviors, Diosdado thinks as the shifting curtains of flame drive him one way and then another, of the very people whose homes we have put to the torch. He is afraid, more afraid than he was on the night the fight with the Americans started, buried in the wet earth as the shells burst above him, or at Caloocan trying to keep his face toward the enemy as he stumbled backward over the paddies, firing his pistol methodically till his ammunition was all gone, the huge Americans in their blue uniforms pausing only to chop and hack with rifle butt and bayonet at the wounded men he’d left behind, Diosdado finally turning and running to catch the ones still living and gather them back into some kind of coherent unit.

The Lake of Fire. Every story Padre Inocencio terrified them with in the primario ended with the Lake of Fire and the agonies of the sinners cast into it, their shrieks of anguish unheard in Paradise, their flesh rendered from their bodies, limbs twisted with spasms of pain, bones blackened and cracking in the molten inferno but not dying, no, doomed to endless torment. Once he held Diosdado’s hand over a candle flame till the skin of his palm blistered, reciting the litany of tortures reserved for the damned and holding a scapular with the image of a woman engulfed in flames close to his face. “Imagine this pain a thousand times hotter, all over your body,” he hissed into the little boy’s ear. “Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, without hope, without release. This is Eternal Damnation.”

Burning to death has always been his worst fear, the nightmare that wrenches him awake in a sweat. Diosdado drops his torch. The leather of his holster feels like it is melting, the metal butt of his pistol like a sizzling griddle as he forces his hand closed around it. I will not say a prayer, Diosdado thinks, cocking it. And if there is a Hell, Padre Inocencio will be there to greet me.

He is lifting the pistol toward his head when Sergeant Bayani emerges from the black smoke, a torch in each hand, eyes gleaming with flame, a lunatic smile lighting up his face. There is vino on his breath as he shouts over the crackling of the nipa and the screams and the bells tolling everywhere and the rifle fire on all sides now, Bayani who threw Diosdado unconscious over his shoulder on the first night of the war with the yanquis and carried him halfway to Malolos, who was waiting for Diosdado with the survivors of the rout at Caloocan, dug in and ready to resist again, on the outskirts of Tinajeros, Bayani who the men say is insane and invincible, the anting anting sewn beneath the skin just over his heart protecting him from evil thoughts and enemy bullets.

“This is one baryo,” he shouts gleefully, “that the Americans will not get to destroy. Sígame, hermano!”

Bayani hurls his torches into the hottest part of the fire blowing toward them, then turns and strides again into the black smoke. Diosdado fights the urge to shout an order to him, any order, before holstering his pistol and hurrying after.

He holds his breath and runs till they fall out of the smoke, coughing, eyes streaming with tears, into what is left of the mercado. Only charred bamboo uprights are left where the stalls once stood — shops gutted and roofless, a pile of cocoanuts blackened and cracked and oozing, chickens crisped in a cage no longer hanging, bundles dropped by the fleeing residents burst open and littering the street. Diosdado has been to Tondo only once when it wasn’t burning, a long drunken night in a rented calesa with Scipio and Hilario Ibañez from Santo Tomás, Hilario who wanted to achieve in epic verse what Dr. Rizal had in prose, improvising stanzas about the true soul of the nation residing in this hodgepodge of narrow, blighted streets along the fetid Canal de la Reina as its residents sullenly spit and muttered and moved aside to let their carriage pass. Bayani seems to know it, though, leading Diosdado at a trot through the smoldering maze till they reach the swampland to the north of the colonia, flattening themselves in the cogon grass to let a platoon of fire-addled yanquis, volunteers by their uniform, hustle by. They catch their breath, then struggle wordlessly through the bamboo thickets and mires and tangling brush, fat embers blown over their heads and settling in the tops of the cabonegro palms to glow like fireflies. They hear noises to the left, Bayani pausing to call in Tagalog and answered with a curse. It is Kalaw and Rafi Agapito, blackened with soot, and the four of them continue for an hour before anyone speaks.

“Did you see any of the others?” Diosdado asks when they stop to rest, Bayani scouting ahead.

“Once or twice in the fire,” says Kalaw. “There were so many people running. And I saw the sargento.” He lowers his voice as if Bayani might be near. “He was in front of a liquor warehouse he set fire to.”

“Drinking.”

Kalaw shrugs. “It would be a sin to let it all go to waste.”

“I saw Ninong Carangal get shot.” Agapito has a sandal off, poking at his bleeding foot. The bamboo poles towering over their heads knock together in the early-morning breeze, and there is distant gunfire. “He ran out with an ax to cut the fire hose and the Americans saw him and shot him dead.”

Sargento Bayani reappears and squats by them, his manner completely sober now, calculating. “Our battalion is just ahead at Balintawak, but there’s trouble.”

“Yanquis?” asks Agapito, wincing as he pulls his sandal back on.

“Worse. Filipinos.”

They step out of the bamboo forest to find four companies of Caviteños seated on the ground by the side of the road, disarmed and under guard, while Colonel Román tries to convince General Luna it is a poor idea to fire a bullet into the skull of their capitán.

“He’ll be punished, he’ll be made an example,” says Paco Román, his long criollo face tight with apprehension, speaking as calmly as possible. “But not here, General, please. Not now.”

Luna’s men, rifles leveled at the Caviteños on four sides, look more frightened than the sitting troops. Diosdado and his survivors halt a few yards away, Kalaw and Rafi Agapito looking from officer to officer with anxious incomprehension as the Ilocano general and the kneeling capitán argue in Spanish.

“There is a gap in our line of attack,” says Luna, spitting his words. “I need to reinforce it.”

“My men will go nowhere unless I lead them,” says Capitán Janolino, so Spanish-looking his friends call him Pedrong Kastila, his voice strained but his gaze steady.

“I’ll have them all shot!”

“Whatever you do,” says Janolino, “it is not as my commanding officer.”

There is a battle raging to the west of them, rifle fire steady and deep from the Springfields of the yanquis, higher and more ragged from the British Mitfords and captured Mausers of their own troops, and suddenly the whistle of shells overhead and the solid whump! as they reach their killing ground in the Binondo cemetery.

Luna gives the capitán’s head a final shove with his pistol and then lowers it to his side. Luna stood firm throughout the day at Caloocan, exposed to the murderous fire, running forward to protect the wounded till they could be carried away, coolly sighting and firing his pistol as if it was one of his target-shooting exhibitions. It was thrilling to fight beside such a leader, and then, as the church was shelled to ruins and the rice fields plowed with explosions and the yanqui horde advanced, it was suicidal — General Luna determined to fight to his death and expecting the same of the men around him.

“Take a company,” he barks to Colonel Román, “and march these traitors to Malolos.”

He turns then, and there is fury in his eyes as he discovers the torch-men.

“Who are you people?”

Diosdado salutes. “Incendiary squad, mi general. One dead, seven unaccounted for.”

“Tondo?”

“Tondo is burning. Santa Cruz and San Nicolas are burning.”

“There are two hundred of our people entrenched by the bridge, waiting for the yanquis,” adds Sergeant Bayani. “And all the chinos have gone to hide in their embassy.”

Luna grunts. Behind him one hundred forty scowling Caviteños are rousted to their feet and herded into formation.

“Grab a weapon and join us,” orders the general, jerking his head toward the stacks of rifles Janolino’s companies are leaving behind. “There are plenty to choose from.”

The officer walks rather casually before the others. He doesn’t look Spanish. They march out of the trees, parallel to the abandoned building, till the Spaniard gestures and the prisoners, four of them, are halted and told to face the stone wall. The prisoners are all dark-skinned men, in motley combinations of clothing. Insurgents. The officer draws his sword as the firing squad, four soldiers, fix their man in place with a hand on the left shoulder, then step back five paces. The officer runs across in front of them and stands parallel to their row, then brings his sword down. A crackling volley from the four rifles — smoke fills the air, and the insurgents drop to the ground.

Harry looks over to Mr. Heise, who nods and steps away from the Beast.

“You can get up now!” Harry calls, and the sprawled insurgents roll slowly to their knees, grinning at each other and at their executioners.

“That’s it for today,” says Mr. Heise to Harry. “We can pull the film back at the shop.”

Harry signals to a pair of the colored boys and they come trotting over from the wall, swatting dust off their clothes.

“I hold my breaf just like you tole me to,” says Zeke, smiling.

“You looked perfect, all of you.” Harry nods to the wagon. “Time to pack the instrument up.”

He supervises as the boys lift the heavy camera on the carry-boards they have rigged up and stagger back to hoist it onto the wagon bed. Stempl back at the shop is the one who started calling it the Beast, though never if the Wizard is close enough to read their lips. No wonder that Paley’s mission to Cuba was a fiasco. With the camera weighing as much and requiring far more maintenance than a field-artillery piece he managed only a few shots of swimming mules and one scene of a very small horse suffering under the enormous General Shafter before rain fouled the apparatus and tropical disease forced his return.

“My people see this, they gone get a start,” says Zeke, still excited by his acting debut. “Aint noner them ever been in no photograph, movin or not.”

The movement, of course, is an illusion. Inside the Beast there are cylinders that move in concert with other cylinders, celluloid coated with chemicals cranked on a spool and held in its groove by a claw mechanism, and passed, hopefully at a consistent rate, in front of an aperture that allows a finite flash of light to hit it before being wound back into darkness. The image borne by that light and captured in the chemicals is only a photograph, as still as any other. But rolled in succession with the other photographs caught on the strip of film, the human eye is fooled—

“They gone think this real? I mean the other people who don’t know me that sees it?”

Harry helps guide the body of the Beast as they slide it forward on the wagon bed.

“That depends on who displays it,” he says. “We’ll send this out as a facsimile, but as to how it is presented in the halls—” he spreads his arms. “It looked very real.”

“That’s what I was thinkin,” says Zeke, securing a rope around the camera body. “They was just a second there, before the man yell ‘Fire!’ where I got to feelin they might be real bullets in them rifles.” He touches his chest. “Made my heart skip a beat.”

“You were very convincing.”

Zeke nudges the other boy with his elbow, winks. “Skeeter here done wet his nappies when they shoot.”

It is not so different in principal from the Gatling gun, Harry thinks, though one device makes itself repeatedly vulnerable while the other deals out lead with precision. At the moment of the execution volley he had been struck by the notion that if Heise’s arm were quicker, four cranks per second perhaps, or the instrument driven by a dynamo with sufficient speed, one could capture motion faster than the capacity of the human eye. One could slow down time itself. The bullets could be seen in their deadly trajectory, the instant of their penetration into the skulls of the insurgents — but of course that would give away the illusion. There were no bullets, only the wadding from blank cartridges, and there was no smashing of bones, no spilling of brains.

When the equipment is secured Harry joins Mr. Heise and Mr. White in the coach to take them back to the shop. The old stone house, windows missing, overgrown with creepers, is quickly left behind them.

“The Spanish-atrocity theme is wearing a bit thin,” says Mr. White. “Given the turn of events.”

Before this the only view they’ve let Harry take part in was Did Somebody Say Watermelon?, and that had been done in the Black Maria with Skeeter and another of the boys from today.

“One of them moved,” says Mr. Heise. “One of our insurrectos. After he was shot.”

“The throes of death.”

“He looked at the camera before he did it.”

“We’ll cut it short. The view is over when they hit the ground. No use in being morbid about it.”

They ride silently through the Jersey woodlands. There might be some great use, thinks Harry, in being morbid. If they’d been able to mount the Beast on some sort of runner or sled apparatus and push it forward to see the bodies of the executed men more closely at the end, or if the camera were not such a behemoth and could be thrown over the shoulder and transported, like a Kodak on a tripod, as easily as a rifle, think of what Paley, or perhaps an operator less portly, might have captured at Las Guasimas or Kettle Hill or in this new Philippine nightmare that Niles has gotten himself embroiled in. Harry thinks again of the image of a bullet leaving a rifle and followed directly to the spot between the eyes of its victim, a handsome Southerner with a constant smirk of self-love on his countenance—

The ladies could not bear to view such a thing, of course, but ladies are not the advocates or perpetrators of war, and cannot be expected to be its aficionados.