He heard footsteps coming up from the south. He wore a pistol on his hip, in case Yankee infantry somehow God forbid got close enough to his gun for him to need a personal weapon. He hadn’t drawn it till trouble broke out among the Negroes. Now-Now he was a long way from the only artilleryman to have a weapon ready. “Who goes there?” he demanded.
“This Battery C, First Richmond Howitzers?” Whoever owned the voice, he sounded crisp and decisive. He also sounded white. Featherston knew that didn’t necessarily mean anything, though. He’d known plenty of Negroes who could put on white accents. But this voice…He scratched his head. He thought he’d heard it before.
“You’re in the right place,” he answered. “Advance and be recognized.” He didn’t take his hand off the pistol.
Into the firelight came a small, spruce major and a bedraggled Negro. Jake and the rest of the men in the gun crew scrambled to their feet and stood at attention. The major’s pale eyes flashed; a hawk might have wished for such a piercing gaze. Those pale eyes fixed on Jake. “I know you. You’re Sergeant Featherston.” The fellow spoke with assurance.
“Yes, sir,” Featherston said. He had met this officer before. “Major Potter, isn’t it, sir?”
“That’s right. Clarence Potter, Intelligence, Army of Northern Virginia.” None too gently, he shoved the Negro up close to the fire. “And since you were here when I last visited the battery, perhaps you will be good enough to confirm for me that this ragged scoundrel”-he shoved the Negro again-“is in fact Pompey, former body servant to your commander, Captain Stuart. Captain Jeb Stuart III, that is.” He spoke the battery commander’s full name with a certain savage relish.
Everybody in the gun crew stared at the Negro. Jake could make a pretty good guess as to what the men were thinking. He was thinking a lot of the same things himself. But Potter hadn’t asked the question of anyone save him. He had to look closely to be certain, then said, “Yes, sir, that’s Pompey. He’s usually a lot neater and cleaner than he is now, that’s all.”
“He’s been living a little harder lately than he’s used to, poor darling.” Potter spoke with flaying sarcasm. He pointed to Will Cooper. “You. Private. Go find Captain Stuart and bring him here, wherever he is and whatever he’s doing. I don’t care if he’s got some woman in bed with him-tell him to take it out, get dressed, and get his ass down here.”
“Yes, sir,” Cooper said, and disappeared.
Pompey spoke up: “I never done nothin’ bad to you, did I, Marse Jake?” His voice didn’t have the mincing lilt it had carried when he served as Captain Stuart’s man. He’d put on airs then, as if he were something special himself because of who his master was.
Before Featherston could answer, Potter’s voice cracked like a whiplash: “You keep your mouth shut until I tell you to speak.” Pompey nodded, which Jake thought wise. The major was not the sort of man to disobey, most especially not if you were in his power.
Will Cooper came back with Captain Stuart a few minutes later. The captain bore a strong resemblance to his famous father and even more famous grandfather, except that, instead of their full beards, he wore a mustache and a little tuft of hair under his lower lip, giving him the look of a seventeenth-century French soldier of fortune.
“Captain,” Major Potter said, as he had to Jake Featherston, “is this nigger here your man Pompey?”
“Yes, he’s my servant,” Stuart replied after a moment; he’d needed a second look to be certain, too. “What is the meaning of-?”
“Shut up, Captain Stuart,” Potter interrupted, as harshly as he had when Pompey spoke without his leave. Jake’s eyes widened. Nobody had ever addressed Jeb Stuart III that way in his presence. Jeb Stuart, Jr., wore wreathed stars on his collar tabs and was a mighty power in the War Department down in Richmond. But Potter sounded utterly sure of himself: “I’ll ask the questions around here.”
“Now see here, Major,” Stuart said. “I don’t care for your tone.”
“I don’t give a damn, Stuart,” Clarence Potter returned. “I was trying to sniff out Red subversion among the niggers attached to this army last year-last year, Stuart. And I got information that your nigger Pompey wasn’t to be trusted, and I wanted to interrogate him properly. Do you remember that?”
“I did nothing wrong,” Stuart said stiffly. But he looked like a man who had just taken a painful wound and was trying to see if he could still stand up.
“No, eh?” The major from Intelligence knocked him down with contemptuous ease. “You didn’t talk to your daddy the general? You didn’t have me overruled and the investigation quashed? You know better than that, I know better than that-and the War Department knows better than that, too.”
Till now, Jake had never seen Captain Stuart at a loss. Whatever else you said about him, he fought his guns as aggressively as any man would like, and showed a contempt for the dangers of the battlefield any hero of the War of Secession would have envied. But he’d never been threatened with loss of status and influence, only death or mutilation. Those latter two might have been easier to face.
“Major, I think you misunderstood-” he began.
“I misunderstood nothing, Captain,” Potter said coldly. “I was trying to do my duty, and you prevented that. If you’d been right, you’d have gotten away with it. But this nigger was taken in arms with a band of Red rebels, and every sign is that he wasn’t just a fighter. He was a leader in this conspiracy, and had been for a long time. If I’d questioned him last year-but no, you wouldn’t let that happen.” Potter’s headshake was a masterpiece of mockery.
“Pompey?” Stuart shook his head, too, but in amazement. “I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.”
“Frankly, Captain, I don’t give a damn,” Potter said. “If I had my way, I’d bust you down to private, give you a rifle, and let you die gloriously charging a Yankee machine gun. Can’t have everything, I suppose, no matter how much damage your damn-fool know-it-all attitude cost your country. But your free ride to the top is gone, Stuart, and that’s a fact. If you drop dead at ninety-nine and stay in the Army all that time, you’ll be buried a captain.”
Silence stretched. Into it, Pompey said, “Marse Jeb, I-”
“Shut up,” Potter told him. “Get moving.” He shoved the Negro on his way. Jeb Stuart III stared after them. Jake Featherston studied his battery commander. He didn’t quite know what he thought. With Stuart under a cloud, life was liable to get harder for everybody: the captain’s name had been one to conjure with when it came to keeping shells in supply and such. On the other hand, as an overseer’s son Jake wasn’t sorry to watch an aristocrat taken down a peg. More chances for me, he thought, and vowed to make the most of them.
The USS Dakota steamed over the beautiful deep-blue waters of the Pacific, somewhere south and west of the Sandwich Islands. Sam Carsten was delighted to have the battleship back in fighting trim once more; she had been laid up in a Honolulu dry-dock for months, taking repairs after an unfortunate encounter with a Japanese torpedo.
Carsten admired the deep blue sea. He admired the even bluer sky. He heartily approved of the tropic breezes that kept it from seeming as hot as it really was. The sun that shone brightly down from that blue, blue sky…
Try as he would, he couldn’t make himself admire the sun. He was very, very fair, with golden hair, blue eyes, and a pink skin that turned red in any weather and would not turn tan for love nor money. When he was serving in San Francisco, he’d thought himself one step this side of heaven, heaven being defined as Seattle. Honolulu, however pretty it was, made a closer approximation to hell. He’d smeared every sort of lotion known to pharmacist’s mate and Chinese apothecary on his hide. None had done the least bit of good.