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"All right. Meanwhile-" Cinci

"You take care o' yourself, you hear?" Lucullus said.

"Do my best," Cinci

The barbecue cook waved that aside. "Ain't the time for nobody to be careful. Time to do what a man gotta do. If you ain't a man at a time like this, I don't reckon you is a man at all."

That gave Cinci

Cinci

"Hello, son," Seneca Driver said when Cinci

"Hello. How's Ma?" Cinci

"Well, she sleepin' right now." His father sounded relieved. Cinci

"They're all right." Cinci

"I ain't no hoodoo man. I ain't no Sherlock Holmes, neither," his father said. "You got barbecue sauce on your chin."

"Oh." Cinci

His father said, "Lucullus, he's a pretty smart nigger, same as his old man was. He got one trouble, though-he reckon he so smart, nobody can touch him. Ain't nobody that smart. He go

That sounded much more likely than Cinci

"Good. That's good." To his relief, his father didn't push it. He just sighed and said, "If Livia hadn't chose that one day to wander off…"

"Uh-huh." Cinci

"Ain't it the truth?" Seneca smiled a sweet, sad smile. "I's sorry you down here. Shouldn't oughta happen on account of our troubles."

"Do Jesus, Pa!" Cinci

"Leastways you ain't got that Luther Bliss bastard breathin' down your neck no more. That's somethin', anyhow," his father said.

"Yeah, somethin'." Cinci

"Still and all, I reckon you do better goin'to Lucullus' place'n down to the saloon," his father said.

"I'm all grown up, Pa." Now Cinci

"Temperance man?" Seneca Driver shook his head. "I ain't. I never was. Don't reckon I ever will be. But I tell you, too many people does too much listenin' at the saloons. Too many people does too much talkin', too, an' a lot of 'em ends up sorry afterwards."

Cinci

"All right, son. All right. I's glad you don't." His father raised a placating hand. "But I ain't wrong. Lucullus watch what goes on in his place for his sake. Some o' the niggers in them saloons, they watch what goes on for the gummint's sake." Cinci

No matter how many strings Colonel Irving Morrell pulled, he couldn't get sent to the Virginia front. From southern Ohio, he listened with growing dismay to the reports of a bogged-down U.S. offensive. He also listened to them with considerable sympathy. Why not, when he presided over a bogged-down offensive himself? If the War Department had given him enough barrels, he might have accomplished something with them. They hadn't; they'd taken. And he'd accomplished nothing.

"It's enough to drive a man to drink, Sergeant," he told Michael Pound. They hadn't moved from Caldwell. The front a few miles to the west hadn't moved, either. The only thing that had moved was the calendar, and it was not in the USA's favor. The longer the Confederates held their corridor through Ohio, the worse they squeezed the United States.

"Nobody would blame you if it did, sir," Pound answered.

"The War Department would," Morrell said dryly.

"Well, if those idiots in Philadelphia aren't a pack of nobodies, who is?" As usual, Pound sounded reasonable. If you already despised the powers that be, he could give you more reasons for doing so than you'd thought of yourself.

Morrell laughed. If he didn't laugh, he'd start swearing. He'd already done that a time or six. He didn't think doing it again would help. "You're thoroughly insubordinate, aren't you, Sergeant?"

"Who, me?" Pound might have been the picture of i

"Well, no," Morrell admitted.

"There you are, sir. As long as somebody shows he knows what he's doing, I don't have any trouble with him at all. Some numskull who thinks he's a little tin Jesus because he's got oak leaves on his shoulder straps, now…"

"You've taken that thought about as far as it ought to go," Morrell said. Pound had known that for himself, or he wouldn't have stopped where he did. Sometimes a reminder didn't hurt, though. Morrell's principal concern was with numskulls who thought they were big tin Jesuses because they had stars on their shoulder straps. They could do more damage than the ones Pound had named.

Shrugging, the gu

By the way he asked the question, he thought he and Morrell could take care of it personally. Morrell wished he thought the same thing. He said, "I'm going to do whatever my superiors tell me to. And you, Sergeant, you're going to do whatever your superiors tell you to. If you'd let me promote you, you wouldn't have so many superiors. Wouldn't you like that?"

"There'd still be too many," Pound said. The only way he would be happy, Morrell realized, was to have no superiors at all. In the military, that wasn't practical. Why not? Morrell wondered. Would he do so much worse than the people we have in charge now? The answer was bound to be yes, but the fact that Morrell could frame the question didn't speak well for what was going on back at the War Department.