Blood and iron

Whitson said, "If you like, Miss Colleton, I can recommend a new broker for you. I know several very able men who-"

A

Whitson bit his lip. "I deserve that."

"Maybe you'll have better luck in times to come. I hope you do," A

"Very well." Whitson sighed as he handed them to her. "I should have been listening to your investment advice, not the other way round. The world has turned upside down since the end of the war."

"Since the begi

She didn't wait for an answer, but swept the papers into her valise and left the broker's office. As she turned around to close the door, she saw him staring after her. She let out a tiny sigh. Whitson was going to be one of the ones who stayed on the bottom for a long time.

His office stood only a few blocks away from the Capitol. A

"God damn you, Cassius," she muttered. The former chief hunter at Marshlands had proved a far more stubborn and resourceful foe than she'd imagined any Negro could. She'd underestimated the blacks at Marshlands time and again, underestimated them and let them fool her.

"It won't happen again," she muttered as she hurled the valise into the back seat of her beat-up Ford. Before the Negro uprising, she'd driven a powerful Vauxhall. When the revolt broke out, she'd driven it up from Charleston toward Marshlands. South of the front-the Negroes of what they called the Congaree Socialist Republic had been able to hold a regular front for a while-a militia officer had confiscated the Vauxhall for use against the black rebels. She'd never seen it again. She wondered how many bullet holes scarred the fine coachwork these days.

After cranking the Ford's engine to rough, noisy life, she climbed in and drove south down the Robert E. Lee Highway, from which she would eventually turn left to get to St. Matthews. She was about thirty miles away from home: a little more than an hour, if she didn't have a puncture or a breakdown. If she did, the time might double, or it might go up by some much larger factor.

What struck her as she rattled along in the decrepit motorcar was how still and empty the countryside felt. Cotton and tobacco should have been ripening in the fields, and Negro laborers should have been tending both crops. Here and there, they were. But so many fields were a rank tangle of weeds and vines and shrubs, with no one even trying to bring in a crop on them.

It wasn't the way it had been. It would never again be the way it had been. Tears stung her eyes, so that she had to slow down till they cleared-not that the Ford could go very fast anyhow. The cotton fields at Marshlands looked like this these days.

Colletons had thrived on the plantation since the end of the eighteenth century. Even so, she was ever more tempted to cut her losses on it, quit paying the exorbitant taxes, and let the state of South Carolina take it off her hands. As far as she was concerned, the state of South Carolina was welcome to it.

The Lee Highway crossed the Congaree on a steel suspension bridge. The Red rebels had damaged the bridge, but hadn't managed to destroy it. Well before she came to the river and the swamps to either side of it, A

If bandits were lurking there, they gave no sign. She spotted a couple of pickani

In the end, she drove on. She felt bad about it afterwards, but one person could do only so much. If the old man was moving guns or explosives, what was she supposed to do with him? Arrest him? Driving with one hand on the wheel and one on the pistol didn't appeal to her. Shoot him on the spot? That did appeal to her, powerfully, but it wasn't so simple as it would have been before the war, either. She would certainly have to go to court about it, which wouldn't have been certain at all before 1914. The number of Negro veterans enrolled on the South Carolina voting lists remained tiny. The uprising during the war, though, showed how dangerous ignoring Negro opinion could be.

When she got into St. Matthews, she smiled. Several women on the street were wearing trousers. She'd started that fashion herself, getting Aaron Rosenblum the tailor to make her several pairs so she could go into the swamps to fight the Reds in clothing more convenient than an ankle-length skirt. These women didn't wear pants because they intended to hunt Reds. They wore them because one of the most prominent women in Calhoun County did.

Tom Colleton chuckled when she remarked on that. "I had noticed it myself, as a matter of fact," he said. "Gives a whole new kick to watching a pretty girl."

"Does it?" A

"I never said it was," her brother answered. "That doesn't make what I did say any less true, though." While A

"All things considered, we're doing well-as well as we can be, anyhow." With a certain amount of malicious pleasure, she added, "We're doing a lot better than clever Mr. Whitson," and explained how he'd gone bankrupt.

"So the broker's broke, is he?" Tom said.

A

"I can laugh when somebody else falls on his face in the mud," Tom told her. "Laughing when I'm down there myself is harder. Laughing when the whole country's down there is hardest of all. I still don't know how we're going to get back on our feet, Sis."

"Neither do I, not with the damnyankees standing over us with a club," A