Blood and iron

He had all the confidence in the world, that was certain. Tom remarked, "You're not ru

Featherston shook his head. "That's right-I'm not. Don't want to sit there, for one thing, on account of I can't stand too many who're already in. And for another, I want to be able to go where I want to go when I want to go there. If I had to stay in Richmond too much of the time, I wouldn't be able to do that. So, no, I'm not going to the dance."

"You're going to stay on the sidelines and call the tune," A

"You might put it that way," Jake Featherston agreed. He had a pretty good poker face, but it wasn't perfect. A

She also realized Featherston was no fool. Not ru

"What tune are you going to call?" she asked.

"I already told you," he answered. "I don't hide anything I aim to do; I just come right out and say it." An alarm whistle went off in A

"What do you propose to do about the black men who got the vote by fighting in the Army?" Tom Colleton asked.

"Most of 'em don't deserve it," Featherston said at once. "Most of'em ran instead of fighting. I was there. I saw 'em do it. I fired into 'em, too, to make 'em more afraid of me than they were of the damnyankees."

"Some did run," Tom agreed. "I saw that myself. Toward the end of the war, I saw white troops break and run, too." He waited. Slowly, Featherston nodded, looking unhappy about having to do it. Tom went on, "I saw some niggers fight pretty well. They're the ones I'm talking about. How do you take their vote away?"

"Wouldn't be hard, once we got around to it," Featherston replied with breathtaking and, A

"What do we do if the United States try to stop us from getting strong again?" A

"We walk small as long as we have to," Featherston said. "I hate it, but I don't know what else to tell you. We build up our strength every chance we get, though, and before too long we get to tell the damnyankees to leave us alone unless they want a sock in the nose."

That made sense to A

Featherston answered, "That's about right, Miss Colleton." He eyed her again. Did he guess the calculation she was making? She wouldn't have been surprised.

Her gaze flicked over to Tom. That did surprise her; she rarely relied on anyone to help her decide. Her brother shrugged, ever so slightly. He was leaving it up to her. He did that more often than not. She wished he wouldn't have, not here. Featherston waited. He had more patience than she would have thought.

He had more of quite a few things than she'd thought. She wasn't easy to impress, but he'd impressed her. She said, "I think we're traveling in the same direction, Mr. Featherston. I suspect you could use some help along the road, too."

"We sure could," he said. "We sure could. When I joined the Freedom Party, it operated out of a cigar box. We're better off than that now, but not a whole lot." Contempt washed over him, as if poured from a bucket. "Most rich folks don't dare change what made 'em rich. They'll go on sucking up to the Whigs and the Radical Liberals while the country goes down the drain. Always good to find somebody who zigs when most folks zag."

He couldn't have paid her a compliment she appreciated more if he'd tried for a week. "I think I may be able to help some," she said. "How much depends on any number of things."

Featherston got to his feet, as if getting up on the stump. "Put those niggers back in the fields where they belong!" His voice filled the apartment with a raspy thunder that didn't enter it when he was speaking in ordinary tones. That took A

Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling stared out across the prairie from General Custer's third-story offices in Wi

"It is, isn't it?" Custer agreed. "You can see forever, or if you can't, it certainly seems as though you can. Makes you think God pressed an iron to the countryside hereabouts, doesn't it?"

"Yes, sir." Dowling nodded. "Although, from what I've read, it wasn't an iron at all. It was a great whacking sheet of ice that pressed the land down flat and didn't pull back or melt or whatever it did till not so very long ago."

"I can believe that." Custer shivered melodramatically. "By the way the weather felt when we got to this place, I'd say the glacier had been gone about a day and a half-two days, tops."

Dowling laughed. Custer rarely joked. Here, he might well have been kidding on the square. During several days that winter, the temperature never had managed to creep above zero, nor even get very close to it. There was a word for a place more than three hundred miles north of Mi

But people lived here. Before the war, something like 150,000 of them had lived here. In Abner Dowling's considered opinion, they'd been out of their minds. Oh, from May to September the weather was good enough, but that left a lot of time out of the bargain.

Nowhere near so many people were left in Wi

One of the reasons Dowling could see so far was that the building housing Custer's headquarters was one of the few in town to come through the war intact. Had it ever had any taller neighbors, they were rubble now. Nothing got in the way of the view.

A lot of the new houses that were starting to go up in Wi