Walk in Hell

Most of the fences had been knocked flat. Two of the four big cotton warehouses were only burnt-out wreckage. Some of the live oaks still stood, but the artillery bombardment before the assault on the town had put paid to most of them. It would be a hundred years before saplings grew into trees that could match the ones now ruined.

A

A gray-haired white man in an old-fashioned gray uniform shifted a plug of tobacco from one ill-shaven cheek to the other and held up a hand, ordering her to stop. "What the-blazes you doin'here, lady?" he demanded. "Don't you know there's still all kinds o' bandits and crazy niggers ru

"What am I doing here?" A

By the way this fellow stared at the sheet of paper, he couldn't read. That she had it, though, impressed him into standing aside. "If'n they say it's all right, reckon it is," he said, touching the brim of his forage cap. "But you want to be careful out there."

"I intend to be careful," A

"Oh. Yes, ma'am. Sorry, ma'am." Where her grimy appearance and this beat-up motorcar hadn't convinced the militiaman she was a person of quality, her ma

The road from St. Matthews to Marshlands was not so heavily cratered as the highway up to town had been. By the time the rebels abandoned St. Matthews, they'd pretty much abandoned organized resistance against Confederate forces, too. But that thought had hardly crossed her mind before she heard a couple of brisk spatters of gunfire from the north, the direction of the Congaree swamps. Not all the Reds, it seemed, had given up.

Woods blocked any view of Marshlands from the road till not long before a traveler needed to turn onto the lane leading up to the mansion. I am ready for anything, A

Coughing and wheezing, the Ford passed the last trees. There, familiar as the mole she carried on one wrist, was the opening into that winding lane. Just before you turned, you looked along the lane and you saw…

"Hell," she said quietly. She'd been hoping the place had survived, but it looked like a skeleton with most of the flesh rotted away. Altogether against her will, tears blurred her eyes. "Jacob," she whispered. If Marshlands had burned, her brother must have burned with it.

By contrast, the Negro cottages off to one side of the great house looked exactly as they had before the Red uprising began. A couple of men were out hoeing in their gardens; a couple of women were feeding chickens; a whole raft of pickani

After a little while, her eyes left the vicinity of the mansion and traveled out to the cotton fields. Her teeth closed hard on the soft flesh inside her lower lip. If anyone had done anything with the cotton since she'd left for Charleston all those months before, she would have been astonished. Was that what the Red revolution had been about-the freedom not to work? Her face twisted into an expression half sneer, half snarl.

If the rest of the plantations in what had been the Congaree Socialist Republic looked the same way, a lot of planters were bankrupt, busted, flat. She wasn't; she'd invested wisely ever since Marshlands came into her hands. Most people, though, couldn't see past their noses. And, speaking of seeing…

One of the men in the garden plots had spotted her. He dropped his hoe and pointed, calling out to the rest. One after another, heads swung in her direction. Other than that, none of the Negroes moved. That in itself chilled her. Before the uprising, they would have come ru

For a moment, she was especially glad of the Tredegar on the seat beside her. Then, all at once, she wasn't. How much good would it do her? What kind of arsenal did the Negroes have hidden in those cabins? She'd prided herself on knowing her laborers well. She hadn't known them at all. Maybe the Army men had been right when they thought her crazy to come here by herself.

A woman walked slowly toward her. It was, she realized after too long, Julia, who had been her body servant. The young woman, instead of a maid's shirtwaist and black dress, wore homespun made gaudy with bits of probably stolen finery. She was also several months pregnant.

The only reason A

"So you's come back, Miss A

"Yes, I'm back." A

"Things, they ain't the same no mo'," Julia said. Had truer words ever been spoken, A

Almost as one equal to another, she asked, "And what did you do in the uprising, Julia? What did the niggers here do?"

"Nothin'," Julia said. "We stay here, we mind we bidness." But now she didn't meet A

A

Julia thought for most of a minute, then nodded. "Miss A

George Enos had felt constricted on the Mississippi. He was used to the broad reaches of the Atlantic, to looking around from his perch on deck and seeing nothing but the endless ocean in all directions. Next to the Atlantic, any river, even the Father of Waters, seemed hardly more than an irrigation ditch.

And the Cumberland was considerably narrower than the Mississippi. These days, he and his fellow deck hands aboard the Punishment wore Army helmets painted Navy blue. This stretch of the river was supposed to be pretty clear of snipers, but nobody with the brains God gave a haddock felt like betting his life on it.

Before the Punishment headed up the Cumberland, Navy ironworkers had installed protection around the deck machine guns, too. Little by little, the war heading toward two years old, they were figuring out that this riverine fighting had rules of its own. George was glad of that, but wondered what the devil had taken them so long.

As far as he could tell, the Rebs had got the idea from the begi

"Near as I can tell, that's right," Wayne Pitchess answered, his Co