“He’s extraordinarily generous.” Morrell scowled; he’d never known this mix of elation and disappointment. When would he ever get away to the woods and the mountains again? “Sir, you’re right. It’s such an important position that, if you believe I’m the best man to fill it, I don’t see how I can possibly decline.”
“I was hoping you would say that, Colonel,” General Wood replied. “The more work we do on barrels while we’re holding the Confederate States down-holding them down as best we can, I should say-the further ahead of them we’ll be, and the harder the time they’ll have catching up with us.”
“Yes, sir,” Morrell said enthusiastically. “I’ve got some ideas I want to try. And if we get far enough ahead of them, maybe they’ll never be able to catch up again.”
“You’re reading my mind,” Leonard Wood said. “That’s just what I’m hoping for.” Solemnly, the two men shook hands.
Every train that pulled into St. Matthews, South Carolina, brought a few more soldiers home, some from Virginia, some from Tennessee, some from the distant battlefields west of the Mississippi. The men in beat-up butternut tunics and trousers got off the trains and looked around the station, looked around the slowly rebuilding town, in worn wonder, as if amazed even so much peace as St. Matthews provided was left in the world.
Anne Colleton saw a lot of the returning soldiers, for she spent much of her time at the station waiting for her brother to get off one of those trains: she didn’t trust Tom to wire ahead, letting her know he was coming. And, sure enough, one morning he stopped down from a passenger car looking about as battered, about as bewildered, as any other soldier Anne had seen.
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,” Anne said. “I wanted to surprise you, and I got what I wanted.” She kissed him on the cheek. Some of the whiskers in the scar that seamed it were coming in white.
“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,” Anne said. “There’s one more thing I want, and you can help me get it.”
“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,” Anne said quietly. “We hit the niggers a good lick not so long ago. One more good lick and they’re done, I think.”
“Wasn’t worrying about Reds,” Tom Colleton answered with an embarrassed chuckle. “I was worrying about damnyankees.” When they got back to her apartment, Anne poured him some whiskey, hoping to ease him. He drank it down, but still seemed nervous as a cat. Pointing at her, he asked, “What’s this other thing you want, Sis?”
“Another good lick against the Reds,” Anne said at once. “When we hit them from this side, they go deeper into the swamp, over by Gadsden. The militia on the other side of the Congaree are worthless. The Reds-Cassius and his pals, mind-whip them every time they bump together.”
“Get me another drink, will you?” Tom said, and Anne rose. While she was pouring, her brother went on, “How do I help you get it? I figure I do, or you wouldn’t have mentioned it to me.”
“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,” Anne answered. “You drive the niggers into them, and they finish off any you don’t get.”
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.”
Anne shook her head. “You have much more real combat experience than I do,” she answered, “and you’ll be leading men who won’t know so much about what I’ve done since the uprising, because they haven’t been here to see it. I’ll keep a lot of militiamen, too. They’re used to doing what I tell them, and it should rub off on the soldiers.”
“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.”
Anne got a glass of whiskey, too, but stared moodily at it instead of drinking right away. “The one thing I don’t have figured out is how to be sure we kill Cassius. He killed Jacob and he almost killed me-and he wrecked Marshlands. He’s kept the Reds a going concern since we drove them back into the swamp, and he knows the place better than anybody. If we don’t get him, we’ll only have to go back again later on.”
“Kill the head and the body dies,” Tom said. Anne nodded. She knocked back the whiskey. It snarled its way down her throat. Tom spoke with a certain grim anticipation: “Kill enough of the body and the head won’t live, either.”
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. Anne couldn’t help noting that with a touch of resentment when she thought of the cajolery she’d had to use to get the militiamen to go along with her ideas even though they’d had none of their own.
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. Anne vowed to worry about that later. For now, she hoped none of St. Matthews’ blacks was bringing the rebels in the swamp word of the move against them.
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,” Anne answered coolly. No one, she noted, laughed at the pair of three-inch guns that deployed behind the infantry. One veteran, in fact, respectfully tipped his tin hat to them, as to a couple of old friends.
Veterans and militiamen were still deploying when a brisk crackle of small-arms fire broke out to the north. Although Anne knew she’d chambered a round in her own Tredegar, she checked again to make sure the weapon was ready. The aeroplane flew in the direction of the shooting. A couple of minutes later, the militiamen at the field guns began banging away, presumably at instruction they got from the wireless telegraph the flying machine carried.