Breakthroughs

A

He looked even more bewildered when she threw herself into his arms. “What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded. “I wanted to surprise you.”

“Didn’t work this time,” A

“You generally do,” Tom said after a moment, with more of an edge to his voice than would have been there before the war. Then he sighed and shrugged. “We-the CSA, I mean-generally got what we wanted, too. Not this time.”

“Come back to my rooms with me,” A

“Can I?” Her brother shrugged again. “I’ll come with you, though. Why not? With Marshlands burned, I haven’t got anywhere else to stay.”

He walked through the streets of St. Matthews with his shoulders slumped but his eyes darting now here, now there, ever alert, waiting and watching for shooting to start. “It’s not that bad,” A

“Wasn’t worrying about Reds,” Tom Colleton answered with an embarrassed chuckle. “I was worrying about damnyankees.” When they got back to her apartment, A

“Another good lick against the Reds,” A

“Get me another drink, will you?” Tom said, and A

“Why, Lieutenant Colonel Colleton, of course you do,” she said, handing him the drink. “And it’s because you’re Lieutenant Colonel Colleton that you do. I want you to recruit as many veterans as you can, arm them, and take most of them across to the north side of the Congaree. Don’t you think they’d be able to clean out the nest of Reds that’s been in the swamp the past year and a half?”

“If they can’t, the Confederate States are in even more trouble than I reckoned they were.” Whiskey hadn’t fuzzed Tom’s wits; he asked, “What happens to the soldiers I don’t take over to Gadsden?”

“They stay on this side of the swamp,” A

Tom considered, then slowly nodded. “And who commands the stay-at-homes?”

“I do,” his sister told him.

She waited for him to pitch a fit. He didn’t. “Odds are you’d be better at the job than any man I can think of,” he said slowly. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the post you just assigned me?-driving, I mean, instead of catching.”

A

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” Tom raised his glass. “Have one yourself, Sis. Seems to me you’ve earned it.”

A

“Kill the head and the body dies,” Tom said. A

He went about recruiting with both skill and persistence he wouldn’t have shown before he’d joined the Army. Nor did he have any trouble gathering followers. The ex-soldiers hardly seemed to think of themselves as ex-; they obeyed his orders as readily as they would have done if still serving under the Stars and Bars. A

A few Negro soldiers came back to St. Matthews, too. Tom Colleton did not recruit them-who could guess which of them had fought for the Congaree Socialist Republic? No one quite knew what to make of them or how to behave toward them. A

She and the militia and some of Tom’s recruits headed in the direction of Marshlands (and the swamps beyond) as ostentatiously as they could, hoping to draw as much attention to themselves as they could. Once at the edge of the ruined cotton fields, the veterans automatically began to entrench. She didn’t argue; in such matters, she was willing to assume they knew what they were doing.

Some of them laughed at the beat-up old aeroplane buzzing above the swamp. “Jesus, I wish the damnyankees had been flying crates like that,” a sergeant said.

“If the other side hasn’t got any aeroplanes, ours doesn’t have to be up to date,” A

Veterans and militiamen were still deploying when a brisk crackle of small-arms fire broke out to the north. Although A

Perhaps fifteen minutes after that, a couple of ragged Negroes, a man and a woman, emerged from the swamp a few hundred yards from A

Before long, another pair of Negroes, both men this time, came trotting south as if they had not a care in the world. The veterans and militiamen let them approach to near point-blank range before shooting them down. A savage smile stretched across A

“Come on, Cassius,” she crooned quietly. “Come on.” Some of the Negro rebels in the swamp, seeing the last bastion of the Congaree Socialist Republic crumbling, would fight to the death defending it. Having known Cassius all her life (not so well as she’d thought she did, but even so), she did not believe he would be one of them. His eye was always on the main chance. As long as he lived, he would figure, the revolution lived, too. That held an unpleasant amount of truth. He would try to escape.