Blood and iron

"No wonder at all," Potter agreed. "Not that he's wrong about there being fools in the War Department: there are plenty. I was in intelligence; I worked with some and reported to others. But you need to take what Featherston says with a grain of salt about the size of Texas."

"He's got some good ideas about the niggers, though," Kimball said. "If they hadn't risen up, we'd still be fighting, by God." He didn't want a grain of salt, not one the size of Texas nor a tiny one, either. He wanted to believe. He wanted his country strong again, the sooner the better. He didn't care how.

Clarence Potter shook his head. "I doubt it," he said. "A good big man will lick a good little man-not all the time, but that's the way to bet. Once we didn't knock the USA out of the fight in a hurry-once it turned into a grapple-we were going to be in trouble. As I said, I was in intelligence. I know how much they outweighed us." Even with a good deal of whiskey in him, he was dispassionately analytical like a scholar.

Kimball cared for dispassionate analysis only when calculating a torpedo's track. Even then, it was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end was action-blowing up a ship. Feather-ston wanted action, too. "You know how I can find out more about this Freedom Party?" he asked.

"They've started up an office here in town, I think," Potter answered, distaste on his face. "Jake Featherston calls Richmond home, though, and I think the Party does, too "

"Thanks," Kimball said. "Do me a little poking around, I think." He signaled to the bartender. "Set 'em up again, pal."

Cinci

Every day when he left his house to start up the ramshackle truck he'd bought, his wife would say, "Be careful. Watch yourself."

"I will, Elizabeth," he would promise, not in any perfunctory way but with a deep and abiding sense that he was saying something important. He would crank the truck to noisy, shuddering life, climb into the cabin, put the machine in gear, and drive off to hustle as much in the way of hauling business as he could.

He wished he were inside one of the big, snarling White trucks the Army used to carry its supplies. He'd driven a White during the war, hauling goods that got shipped across the Ohio from Cinci

As he turned right onto Scott from out of the Negro district and drove up toward the wharves this morning, he kept a wary eye open. A good many U.S. soldiers in green-gray uniforms were on the streets. They also looked wary, and carried bayoneted Springfields, as if ready to start shooting or stabbing at any moment.

They needed to be wary, too. After more than fifty years in the Confederacy, Kentucky was one of the United States again. It was, however, like none of the other United States, in that a large part of the population remained unreconciled to the switch from Stars and Bars to Stars and Stripes.

The city hall had U.S. machine-gun nests around it. Somebody- odds were, a Confederate diehard-had taken a shot at the mayor a couple of weeks before. Cinci

Blue St. Andrew's crosses, some of them new, marked buildings and suggested the Confederate battle flag. Two horizontal red stripes with a white one between similarly suggested the Confederate national flag. Some of those were new, too. The diehards hadn't given up, not by a long chalk, i AIN'T NO YANKEE, someone had written beside one of those not-quite-flags.

New posters marred walls, too, some of them slapped over the pro-Confederate graffiti. The posters were solid red, with broken chains in black stretched across them. The Red uprising had not got so far among the Negroes of Kentucky as among their brethren still in Confederate-owned territory at its outbreak. But it had not been brutally suppressed here, either. Being a Red wasn't illegal in the USA, even if it was hazardous to a black man's health.

Red posters and blue crosses were both thick around the waterfront. Cinci

Both soldiers and police patrolled the wharves. Confederate policemen had commonly worn gray, like soldiers from the War of Secession. Now that Kentucky belonged to the USA, policemen-sometimes the same policemen-wore dark blue, as their grandfathers might have done had they fought for the Stars and Stripes.

And some policemen wore no uniforms at all. Some of the idlers, some of the roustabouts who strode up and down the piers and along the waterfront, were sure to belong to Luther Bliss' Kentucky State Police, an outfit that made Kentucky the only U.S. state with its own secret police force. Cinci

Roustabouts were hauling crates and barrels off a barge. Cinci

"Hello, Cinci

"Mr. Simmons, they'll go in there if I got to make one of 'em drive," Cinci

Simmons looked more discontented than ever. At last, he said, "Wouldn't pay it to any other nigger driving a raggedy old truck, that's for damn sure. But yeah, fifty cents a barrel. Bring me your receipts and I'll pay you off."

"Got yourself a deal, suh." Cinci

Conroy?" he asked. "Fat man, used to have hisself a store before it burned down?"

"Let me check." Simmons flipped papers. "Joseph Conroy, that's what it says. I don't know about the other part. How come?"

"Didn't know he was back in business, is all," Cinci

Simmons checked his papers again. "Corner of Emma and Bakewell, it says here. You know where that is? This ain't my town, you know."

"I know where it's at, yeah," Cinci

"Here you go." The steamboat clerk handed them to him. "That's the other reason I pay you like I would a white man, or almost: you read and write good, so things get done proper."