Scipio stood in line outside the Augusta, Georgia, city hall with more worry in his heart than he let his face show. The queue of black people stretched for blocks. Every so often, a white passing by would offer a jeer or a curse. Gray-clad policemen kept the whites from doing anything worse, if they'd intended to.
Bathsheba squeezed his hand. "Hope none o' them Freedom Party buckra come to raise a ruction."
He nodded. "Me, too." That was indeed one of the worries he was doing his best to conceal. As those worries went, though, it was only a small one.
Bathsheba cheerfully went on, "Passbooks won't be so bad. Did well enough with 'em before, an' I reckon we can again. Just a nuisance, is all."
"I hopes you's right," Scipio said. He had his doubts. The Freedom Party men in Congress were the ones who'd introduced the law tightening up the passbook system in the CSA, which had fallen to pieces during the Great War. He distrusted anything that had anything to do with the Freedom Party. But that worry wasn't at the top of his list, either.
The line slowly snaked forward, not toward the front entrance to the city hall—whites wouldn't have stood for blacks' impeding their progress that way—but toward a side door. Negroes newly issued passbooks went out the back way. Some of them came around to talk with friends still in line.
"Look like a police station in there," one of them said. "They got wanted posters up for every nigger ever spit on the sidewalk."
A couple of blacks, hearing that, suddenly found other things to do than stand in line just then. Scipio felt like finding something else to do, too. But, from what he read in the papers, he was more likely to get in trouble without a passbook later than he was to be recognized now. Maybe a poster with his name—his real name—on it would be hanging there with all the rest. Nobody in Georgia wanted him except Bathsheba, and he was glad she had him. Everything he'd done for the Congaree Socialist Republic had been over in South Carolina. He was perfectly happy to have people beating the bushes for him there; he never intended to set foot in the state again.
Up the worn stone steps leading to the side door he and Bathsheba went. "Glad we ain't doin' this in the summertime," he said. "We melt jus' as fas' as the ice under the fish over at Erasmus'place."
"For true," Bathsheba agreed. When they got inside, she looked along the hallway. "That fellow weren't lyin'. Who would have thought there was so many bad niggers in this here town?"
Scipio scanned the wanted posters. Sure as hell, there was a faded one with his name on it. The poster, though, bore no picture. He'd been photographed only a couple of times in his life, and those images had gone up in smoke when Marshlands burned. He'd never had any brushes with the police, as had the men and women whose photos adorned most of the fliers. On the other hand, if caught for his political crimes, he'd face the gallows or a firing squad.
At last, he came before a sour-faced white clerk. "Name?" the fellow asked.
"Xerxes," Scipio answered, and then had to spell it for the clerk, who'd started it with a Z instead of anX
Being corrected by a black man made the clerk's face even more sour, but he made the change. "Residence address?" he said, and Scipio gave him the address of the roominghouse over in the Terry. The clerk didn't have any trouble getting that down on paper. Then he asked, "Birthplace?"
"I were borned on a plantation over in South Carolina." Scipio hoped his sudden tension didn't show. He hadn't expected that question.
But the clerk only nodded. "You talk like it," he said, and wrote south Carolina on the passbook and on the form that would record its new owner. He asked about Scipio's age (on general principles, Scipio lied five years off it), his employer, and his employer's address. After taking all that down, he said, "State the time and reason your previous passbook was lost."
"Suh, it were 1916,1 reckons," Scipio said, "an' I were gettin' the hell out o' where I was at, on account of I didn't want to git kilt. Didn't take nothin' but de clothes on my back."
The clerk grunted. "Another patriotic nigger running away from the Reds," he said. "If I had a dime—a real silver dime, I mean—for every time I've heard that one the past couple days, I'd be a hell of a rich man." But he was just blowing off steam in general; he didn't seem to disbelieve Scipio in particular. When Scipio didn't flinch, the clerk grunted again. "Raise your right hand."
Scipio obeyed.
"Do you solemnly swear that the information you have given me in regard to this book is true and complete, so help you God?" the white man droned.
"Yes, suh," Scipio said.
Still droning, the clerk went on, 'The penalty for perjury in regard to this book may be fine or imprisonment or both, as a court of law may determine. Do you understand?'' Scipio nodded. The clerk looked miffed, perhaps at finding a black man who didn't need the word perjury explained to him. Thrusting the new passbook at Scipio, he said, "Keep this book in your possession at all times. It must be shown or surrendered on demand of any competent official. If you move or change jobs in Augusta, you must notify city hall or a police station within five days. You must have the proper stamp in the book before you travel outside Richmond County. Penalty for violating those provisions is also fine or imprisonment or both. Do you understand all that?"
"Yes, suh," Scipio repeated.
"All right, then," the clerk said, as if washing his hands of him. "Go down that hall and into one of the rooms on the left. Get yourself photographed. A copy of the photograph will be sent to you. It must go into your passbook, on the blank page opposite your personal information. If you do not receive it within two weeks, come back here to be photographed again. Next!'
Bathsheba, who'd gone to the clerk next to the one who'd dealt with Scipio, was waiting when he finished. Together, they went to get their pictures taken. The photography room was full of flash-powder smoke, as if soldiers with old-fashioned weapons had fought a battle in there.
Foomp! A photographer set off more flash powder. Scipio's eyes watered at the blast of light. "Do Jesus!" he exclaimed. A blowing green-purple spot danced at the center of his vision before slowly fading.
"That was just like lookin' into the sun," Bathsheba said as the two of them made their blinking way to the back door and out of the Augusta city hall.
"Sure enough was," Scipio said. He put the passbook in the pocket of his dungarees. If he couldn't leave the county without getting the book stamped, Confederate authorities were tightening up with a vengeance. And yet, oddly, that bothered him only a little. Now he had an official document to prove he was Xerxes of Augusta, Georgia. That made it much harder for Anne Colleton—or anyone else, but he worried most about Miss Anne—to accuse him of ever having been Scipio the bloodthirsty Red.
He spotted Aurelius in the line of men and women waiting to get passbooks, and waved to the waiter with whom he'd worked at John Oglethorpe's restaurant before the white man let him go. Aurelius waved back. "How you is?" Scipio called.
Aurelius waggled his hand back and forth. "Same as always." He looked from Scipio to Bathsheba and back again. "You look like you's doin' pretty good for yourself," he said with a smile.
"This here my intended," Scipio answered proudly. He introduced Bathsheba and Aurelius, then asked, "How Mistuh Oglethorpe doin'?"
"He don't change," Aurelius said. "Tough as rocks on the outside, sof' as butter underneath."
Scipio nodded. That described his former boss very well. He was about to say so when a shout from farther up Greene Street made him whip his head around. The shout was one he'd heard before: "Freedom!" It seemed to come from a great many throats.
All up and down the queue, Negroes looked at one another and up the street in alarm. No one with a dark skin thought of the Freedom Party with anything but dread. "Freedom!' That great shout was closer now. Scipio glanced at the policemen who'd been keeping the line orderly. He'd always seen the white police as a tool for keeping Negroes in their place. Now he hoped they could protect him and his people.
Past the line of Negroes came the Freedom Party marchers. Scipio stared at them in dismay: hundreds of men tramped along in disciplined ranks. They all wore white shirts and butternut pants. Many of them had steel helmets on their heads. The men in the first rank carried the Stars and Bars and Confederate battle flags. The men in the second rank bore white banners with freedom printed on them in angry red letters, and others that might have been Confederate battle flags save that they featured a red St. Andrew's cross on blue, not blue on red.
"Freedom!" the marchers roared again. Had they turned on the Negroes in line outside the city hall, the handful of policemen could not have hoped to stop them. But they just kept marching and shouting their one-word slogan. That showed discipline, too, and frightened Scipio almost as much as an attack would have done.
He looked from the marchers back to the police. Not only were the policemen outnumbered, they also seemed cowed by the Freedom Party's show of force. It was almost as if the marchers represented the Confederate government and the police were civilian spectators.
"Them bastards is bad trouble," Aurelius said, speaking in a low voice to make sure he gave the white men no excuse to do anything but march.
"Every time the Freedom Party do something mo' poor buckra join they than the time befo'," Scipio said. "That go on, they gwine end up runnin' this here country one fine day. What they do then?"
"Whatever they please," Bathsheba said. "They do whatever they please."
"Ain't nothin' we can do about it, anyways," Aurelius said.
Scipio suddenly felt the weight of the passbook in his pocket. It might have been the weight of a ball and chain. For the very first time, he truly sympathized with the Red uprising in which he'd played an unwilling part. This march was what Cassius and Cherry and the other Reds had feared the most.
But their uprising had helped spawn the Freedom Party— Scipio understood the dialectic and how it worked, even if he didn't think of it as revealed truth. And the black uprising had failed, as any black uprising was bound to do: too few blacks, too few weapons. What did that leave for Negroes in the CSA? Nothing he could see.
"We's trapped," he said, hoping Bathsheba or Aurelius would argue with him. Neither of them did, which worried him more than anything.
Sam Carsten slammed a shell into the breech of the five-inch gun he served aboard the USS Remembrance. "Fire!" Willie Moore shouted. Carsten jerked the lanyard. The cannon roared. The shell casing fell to the deck with a clang of brass on steel. One of the shell-jerkers behind Sam handed him a fresh round. Coughing a little from the cordite fumes, he reloaded the gun.
Moore peered out through the sponson's vision slit. "I think we've got to bring it down a couple hundred yards to drop it just where we want it," he said, and fiddled with the elevation screw to achieve the result he wanted. When he was satisfied, he nodded to Sam. "Give 'em another one."
"Right, Chief." Sam yanked the lanyard again. The gun bellowed. Carsten said, "Christ, by the time we're through with Belfast, there won't be anything left of it."
"Damn stubborn crazy micks," Moore said. "The ones who want to stay part of England, I mean, not the ones who aim to put all of Ireland into one country. They're damn stubborn crazy micks, too, but they're on our side."
Overhead, two aeroplanes roared off the deck of the Remembrance^ one on the other's heels. "They'll give the Belfasters something to think about," Sam said.
"That they will," the commander of the gun crew agreed. "No doubt about it." He peered through the slit again. "Sons of bitches!" he burst out. "The bastards are shooting back. One just splashed into the water a few hundred yards short of us."
One of the shell-jerkers, Joe Gilbert—like most in his slot, a big, muscular fellow—said, "Goddamn limeys must have smuggled in some more guns."
"Yeah," Carsten said. "And if we call 'em on it, they'll say they never did any such thing—their pet micks must've come up with the guns and the shells under a flat rock somewhere, or else made 'em themselves."
Officially, Britain recognized Ireland's independence. She'd had to; the United States and the German Empire had forced the concession from her. The Royal Navy never ventured into the Irish Sea to challenge the Remembrance or any other U.S., German, or Irish warship.
But hordes of small freighters and fishing boats smuggled arms and ammunition and sometimes fighting men into the loyalist northeastern part of Ireland. The British Foreign Office blandly denied knowing anything about that. However many ships stood between Ireland on the one hand and England and Scotland on the other, the gun runners always found gaps through which they could slip.
Willie Moore said, "The damn micks—our damn micks, I mean—had better start doing a better job of patrolling, that's all I've got to tell you. It's their goddamn country. If they can't hang on to it all by their lonesome, I can tell you we ain't gonna hang around forever to pull their chestnuts out of the fire." He adjusted the elevation screw again. "Let 'em have the next one now."
"Aye aye." Sam fired the five-inch gun again. He had to step smartly to keep the casing from landing on his toes.
Joe Gilbert passed him another shell. He was bending to load it into the breech when a shell from the shore slammed into the sponson. That he was bending saved his life. Most of the shell's force was spent in penetrating the armor that protected the sponson, but a fragment gutted Willie Moore as if he were a muskie pulled from a Minnesota lake. Another one hissed over Sam's head and into Gilbert's neck. The shell-jerker fell without a sound, his head almost severed from his body. Moore screamed and screamed and screamed.
Sam could look out through the hole the shell had torn and see the ocean and, beyond it, burning Belfast. He wasted only a tiny fraction of a second on that. What to do when the sponson got hit had been drilled into him during more than ten years in the Navy. No fire—he checked that first. Inside the sponson, it was just bare metal, with no paint to burn. That didn't always help, but it had this time. The ammunition wouldn't go up.
Next, check the gun crew. Joe Gilbert was beyond help. Blood dripped from Sam's shoes when he picked up his feet. Calvin Wesley, the other shell-hauler, hadn't been scratched. He gaped at Gilbert's twitching corpse as if he'd never seen one before. He was a veteran—everybody aboard the Remembrance was a veteran—so that was hard to imagine, but maybe it was so.
Willie Moore kept shrieking. One glance at what the shell had done told Sam all he needed to know. He opened the aid kit on the wall of the sponson; a shell fragment had scarred the thick metal right beside it. From the kit, he drew two syringes of morphine. One might have been enough, but he wanted to make sure.
He stooped beside Moore. "Here, Chief, I'll take care of you." He gave the gunner's mate all the morphine in both syringes. After a very little while, Moore fell silent.
"That's too much;' Wesley said. "It'll kill him."
"That's the idea," Sam said. He watched Moore's chest. It stopped moving. Like a man waking up from a bad dream, Cars-ten shook himself. "Come on, God damn it. We've got this gun to fight. You know how to load, right?"
"I better," Wesley answered. "I seen you guys do it often enough."
"All right, then. You load and fire, and I'll aim the damn gun." Sam had seen that done often enough, too, and practiced it himself when he got the chance during drills. The hit had torn the left side of the sponson too badly for the gun to track all the way in that direction. Otherwise, though, he was still in business. "Fire!"
Calvin Wesley sent on its way the shell Sam had been loading when they were struck. He was setting the next round into the breech when someone out in the passage pounded on the dogged hatch. A shout came through the thick steel: "Anybody alive in there?"
"Fire!" Sam said, and the gun roared. That should have answered the question, but the pounding went on. He nodded to Wesley. "Undog it."
"Aye aye." The shell-jerker obeyed.
Half a dozen men spilled into the sponson, Commander Grady among them. "Two dead, sir," Carsten said crisply, "but we can still use the gun."
"So I gather." Grady looked at the bodies. His rabbity features stayed expressionless; he'd seen his share of bodies before. After a moment's thought, he nodded briskly. "All right, Carsten, this is your gun for the time being. I'll get you shell-heavers. We'll clean up this mess and get on with the job."
Another shell from the shore splashed into the Irish Sea, close enough to the Remembrance to send some water through the hole the hit had made in the sponson's armor. Sam said, "Sir, if we can use a couple of aeroplanes to shoot up that gun and its crew, our life will get easier."
Even as he spoke, one of the Wright fighting scouts buzzed off the deck of the aeroplane carrier, followed a moment later by another and then another. Commander Grady said, "You aren't the only one with that idea, you see."
"Never figured I would be," Sam answered, not altogether truthfully. All his time in the Navy had taught him that officers often had trouble seeing things that should have been obvious.
Grady pointed to two of the ratings with him. "Drinkwater, you and Jorgenson stay here and jerk shells. Carsten, can Wesley cut the mustard as a loader?"
"Sir, if we fired with a two-man crew, we'll sure as hell do a lot better with four," Sam answered. Calvin Wesley shot him a grateful glance. Loader would be a step up for Wesley, as crew chief was a step up for Sam. Sam wished he hadn't earned it like this, but, as was the Navy way, nobody paid any attention to what he wished.
Grady pointed to the dead meat that had been Willie Moore and Joe Gilbert. "Get these bodies out of here," he ordered the men he hadn't appointed to the gun crew. "We've already spent too much time here."
As the sailors dragged the corpses out of the sponson, Sam took what had been Willie Moore's spot. The chief of a gun crew had an advantage denied the rest of the men—he could see out whenever he chose: through the vision slit, through the range-finder, and now through the hole that would, when time allowed, no doubt have a steel plate welded over it.
Sam peered southwest, toward the shore half a dozen miles away. The fighting scouts the Remembrance had launched were buzzing around something. A flash told Carsten it was the gun that had fired on his ship. The shell fell astern of the aeroplane carrier.
He twisted the calibration screw on the rangefinder and read out the exact distance to the target: 10,350 yards. Willie Moore had known without having to think how far to elevate the gun for a hit at that distance. Sam didn't. He glanced at a yellowing sheet of paper above the vision slit: a range table. Checking the elevation, he saw the gun was a little low, and adjusted it. Then he traversed it ever so slightly to the left.
"Fire!r he shouted. He'd given the order before, with only Calvin Wesley in the sponson with him, but it seemed more official now. If he fought the gun well, it might be his to keep.
Wesley let out a yelp as the shell casing just missed mashing his instep. But when one of the new shell-heavers handed him the next round, he slammed it home in good style.
"You want to mind your feet," Sam said, traversing the gun a little farther on its track. "You can spend some time on crutches if you don't." He turned the screw another quarter of a revolution. "Fire!"
He spied another flash in the same instant as his own gun spoke. The shell the pro-British rebels launched was a near miss. At the range at which he was fighting, he could not tell whether he'd hit or missed. But the gun on the shore did not fire again. Either his shell had silenced it, one from a different five-incher had done the trick, or the aeroplanes from the Remembrance had exterminated the crew.
He didn't waste time worrying over which was so. As long as the Irish rebels couldn't hurt the Remembrance any more, he was free to go back to what his gun had been doing before the ship came under fire: pounding Belfast to bits. Sooner or later, the rebels would figure out they couldn't win the war against their more numerous opponents—and against the might of Germany and the United States. If they needed help figuring that out, he would gladly lend a hand.
The shell-heavers were just hired muscle, big men with strong backs. Calvin Wesley did his new job well enough, though Sam knew he'd done it better himself. He shrugged. Willie Moore would have handled the gun better than he was doing it. Experience counted.
"Only one way to get it," he muttered, and set about the business of acquiring as much as he could.
Roger Kimball's heart thumped with anticipation as he knocked on the hotel-room door. He'd met Anne Colleton this way whenever she'd let him. Once, she'd opened the door and greeted him naked as the day she was born. Her imagination knew no bounds. Neither did his own appetites.
With a slight squeak, the door opened. The figure in the doorway was not naked. It was not Anne Colleton, either. Kimball's heart kept pounding just the same. Vengeance was an appetite. too, as Anne would have agreed in a flash. "Welcome to Charleston, Mr. Featherston," Kimball said.
"Thank you kindly, Commander Kimball," Jake Featherston answered. The words were polite enough, but he didn't sound kindly, not even a little bit. And he bore down on Kimball's title in a way that was anything but admiring. But, after he stood aside to let Kimball come in, his tone warmed a little: "I hear tell I've got you to thank for whispering my name into Miss Colleton's ear. It's done the Party good, and I won't say anything different."
That was probably why he'd agreed to see Kimball. Did he recall the dismissive telegram he'd sent down to Charleston? He must have; he had the look of a man who remembered everything. Kimball didn't intend to bring it up if Featherston didn't As for whispering Featherston's name into Anne Colleton's ear . . . well, mentioning it on the telephone was one thing, but when Anne let him get close enough to whisper in her ear, he had other things to say.
"Want a drink?" Featherston asked. When Kimball nodded, the leader of the Freedom Party pulled a bottle out of a cabinet and poured two medium-sized belts. After handing Kimball one glass, he raised the other high. "To revenge!"
"To revenge!" Kimball echoed. That was a toast to which he'd always drink. He took a long pull at the whiskey. Warmth spread from his middle. "Ahh! Thanks. That's fine stuff."
"Not bad, not bad." Jake Featherston pointed to a chair. "Set yourself down, Kimball, and tell me what's on your mind."
"I'll do that." Kimball sat, crossed his legs, and balanced the whiskey glass on his higher knee. Featherston seemed as direct in his private dealings as he was on the stump. Kimball approved; nobody diffident ever commanded a submersible. "I want to know how serious you are about going after the high mucky-mucks in the War Department."
"I've never been more serious about anything in my life." If Featherston was lying, he was damn good at it. "They made a hash of the war, and they don't want to own up to it." Something else joined the anger that filled his narrow features, something Kimball needed a moment to recognize: calculation. "Besides, if the Freedom Party Congressmen keep asking for hearings and the Whigs and the Radical Liberals keep turning us down, who looks good and who looks bad?"
Slowly, Kimball nodded. "Isn't that pretty?" he said. "It keeps the Party's name in the papers, too, same as the passbook bill did."
"That's right." The calculation left Featherston's face. The anger stayed. Kimball got the idea that the anger never left. "Niggers haven't gotten half of what they deserve, not yet they haven't. And even the nigger-loving Congressmen up in Richmond now won't stop us from giving it to 'em."
"Bully." Roger Kimball's voice was savage. "When the uprising started, they kept my boat, the Bonefish, from going out on patrol against the damnyankees. Instead, I had to sail up the Pee Dee and pretend I was a river gunboat so I could fight the stinking Reds."
"I knew they were going to rise up," Featherston said. "I knew they were going to try and kick the white race right in the balls. And when I tried to warn people, what did I get? What did the goddamn War Department give me? A pat on the head, that's what. A pat on the head and a set of stripes on my sleeve they might as well have tattooed on my arm, on account of I wouldn't get 'em off till Judgment Day. That's what I got for being right."
His eyes blazed. Roger Kimball was impressed in spite of himself, more impressed than he'd thought he would be. He'd known how Featherston could sway crowds. He'd been swayed in a crowd himself. He'd expected the force of the Freedom Party leader's personality to be less in a personal meeting like this. If anything, though, it was greater. With all his heart, he wanted to believe everything Jake Featherston said.
Kimball had to gather himself before he could say, "You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. The War Department could do the country some good, once the dead wood got cleared out."
"Yeah, likely tell," Featherston jeered. "Best thing that could happen to the War Department would be blowing it to hell and gone. And anybody who says anything different is just as big a traitor as the lying dogs in there."
"That's shit," Kimball said without raising his voice. Featherston's eyes opened very wide. Kimball grinned; he got the idea nobody had spoken that way to Featherston in quite a while. Grinning still, he went on, "Without the War Department, for instance, how are we going to get decent barrels built? You'd best believe the damnyankees are working to make theirs tougher, same as they are with aeroplanes. Don't you reckon we ought to do the same?"
"Barrels. Stinking barrels," Featherston muttered under his breath. He'd stopped jeering. Now he watched Kimball as a man might watch a rattlesnake in the shocked instant after its tail began to buzz. No, he hadn't had a supporter talk back to him for a while. It threw him off stride, left him startled and confused. But he rallied quickly. "Well, yes, Christ knows we'll need new barrels when we fight the USA again. But where the hell are they? Are we working on them? Not that I've ever heard, and I've got ears in all sorts of funny places. We've got people— mercenaries—using some old ones down south of the border, but new ones? Forget it. Proves what I told you, doesn't it?— pack of damn traitors in the War Department."
When we fight the USA again. Featherston's calm acceptance of the next war took Kimball's breath away, or rather made it come fast and hard, as if Anne Colleton had greeted him in the doorway naked. He wanted that next war, too. He hadn't wanted to give up on the last one, but he'd had no choice. Seeing how much Featherston longed for it made him forget their disagreement of a moment before.
When he didn't answer back right away, the sparkle returned to Featherston's eye. The Freedom Party leader said, "Reckon you were just sticking up for the officers in Richmond, seeing as you were one yourself."
"Screw the officers in Richmond," Kimball said evenly. "Yes, I was an officer. I fucking earned being an officer when I won an appointment at the Naval Academy in Mobile off a lousy little Arkansas farm. I earned my way through the Academy, too, and I earned every promotion I got once the war started. And if you don't like that, Sarge"—he laced Featherston's chosen title with scorn—"you can go to hell."
He thought he'd have a fight on his hands then and there. He wasn't sure he could win it, either; Jake Featherston had the hard, rangy look of a man who'd cause more than his share of trouble in a brawl. But Featherston surprised him by throwing back his head and laughing. "All right, you were an officer, but you ain't one of those blue-blooded little goddamn pukes like Jeb Stuart III, that worthless sack of horse manure."
"Blue-blooded? Me? Not likely." Kimball laughed, too. "After my pa died, I walked behind the ass end of a mule till I figured out I didn't want to do that for a living any more. I'll tell you something else, too: it didn't take me real long to figure that out, either."
"Don't reckon it would have," Featherston said. "All right, Kimball, you were an officer, but you were my kind of officer. When I'm president, reckon I can find you a place up in Richmond, if you want it."
When I'm president. He said that as calmly as he'd said, When we fight the USA again. He said it as surely, too. His confidence made Kimball gasp again. A little hoarsely, the ex-submersible skipper said, "So you are going to run next year?"
"Hell, yes, I'll run," Featherston answered. "I won't win. The people here aren't ready yet to do the hard things that need doing. But when I run, when I tell 'em what we'll have to do, that'll help make 'em ready. You know what I'm saying, Kimball? The road needs building before I can run my motorcar down it."
"Yeah, I know what you're saying." Kimball knew he sounded abstracted. He couldn't help it. He'd thought about guiding Jake Featherston the way a rider guided a horse. After half an hour's conversation with Featherston, that seemed laughable, absurd, preposterous—he couldn't find a word strong enough. The leader of the Freedom Party knew where he wanted to go, knew with a certainty that made the hair stand up on the back of Kimball's neck. Whether he would get there was another question, but he knew where the road went.
Far more cautiously than he'd spoken before, Kimball said, "I'm not the only officer you could use, you know. You shouldn't be down on all of us. Take Clarence Potter, for instance. He—"
Featherston cut him off with a sharp chopping gesture. "You and him are pals. I remember that. But I haven't got any real use for him. There's no fire in the man; he thinks too damn much. It's not the fellow who thinks like a professor who gets a pile of ordinary working folks all het up. It's somebody who thinks like them. It's somebody who talks like them. He'd just piss and moan about that, on account of he can't do it himself."
Recalling Potter's Yale-flavored, Yankee-sounding accent and his relentless precision, Kimball found himself nodding. He said, "I bet you would have had more use for him, though, if he'd come over to the Party right away."
"Hell and blazes, of course I would," Featherston said. "But I can see him now, lookin' down his nose, peerin' over the tops of his spectacles"—he gave a viciously excellent impression of a man doing just that—"and reckoning I was nothing but a damn fool. Maybe he knows better nowadays, but maybe it's too late."
Kimball didn't say anything at all. Featherston's judgment of Clarence Potter was close to his own. Clarence was a fine fellow—Kimball wouldn't have gone so far in denigrating him as Featherston had—but he did think too much for his own good.
"We're on the way up," Featherston said. "We're on the way up, and nobody's going to stop us. Now that I'm here, I'm damn glad I came down to Charleston. I can use you, Kimball. You're a hungry bastard, just like me. There aren't enough of us, you know what I'm saying?"
"I sure do." Kimball stuck out his hand. Featherston clasped it. They clung to each other for a moment, locked in the alliance of the mutually useful. The president of the Confederate States, Kimball reflected, was eligible for only one six-year term. If Jake Featherston did win the job, who would take it after him? Roger Kimball hadn't known any such ambition before, but he did now.