Kimball stepped on someone. When she cried out, he realized her sex. He refrained from kicking her while she was down. Thus far his chivalry ran: thus far and no further. Swinging his club, he pressed on toward the platform.

Through the red heat of battle, he wondered what he and the rest of the Freedom Party men ought to do if they actually got there. Pull Layne off it and stomp him to death? A lot of the stalwarts would want to do that. Even with his blood up, Kimball didn't think it would help the Party. Some people would cheer. More would be horrified.

When the shooting started, it sounded like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Roger Kimball didn't know whether a stalwart or a man in the crowd first pulled out a pistol, aimed it at somebody he didn't like, and squeezed the trigger. No sooner did one gun come out, though, than a dozen or more on each side were barking and spitting furious tongues of fire.

What had been chaos turned to a panicked stampede. All the people in the crowd tried to get away from the Freedom Party men-and from the gunfire-as fast as they could. If they trampled wives, husbands, children… then they did, and they'd worry about it later. The only thing they worried about now was escape.

"Let us have peace!" Ainsworth Layne cried, but there was no peace.

Kimball saw a Freedom Party man taking aim at Layne. "No, dammit!" he shouted, and whacked the revolver out of the stalwart's hand with his club. The fellow snarled at him. He snarled back. "We've got to get out of here!" he yelled. "We've done what we came to do, but every cop in Charleston's going to be heading this way now. Time to go home, boys."

He thought the stalwarts might be able to take on the whole Charleston police force and have some chance of winning. He didn't want to find out, though. If the Freedom Party won here, the governor would have to call out the militia. Either the citizen-soldiers would slaughter the stalwarts or they'd mutiny and go over to them, in which case South Carolina would have a revolution on its hands less than a month before the election.

Jake Featherston would kill him if that happened. It was no figure of speech, and Kimball knew as much. "Out!" he yelled again. "Away! We've done what we came for!" Discipline held. The Freedom Party men began streaming out of Hampton Park. Even they forgot about Ainsworth Layne.

November 8 dawned chilly and drizzly in Richmond. Reggie Bartlett got out of bed half an hour earlier than he usually would have, so he could vote before going to work at Harmon's drugstore. Yawning in spite of the muddy coffee he'd made, he went downstairs and out into the nasty weather. It wasn't raining quite hard enough for an umbrella. He pulled his hat down and his coat collar up and muttered curses every time a raindrop trickled along the back of his neck.

A big Confederate flag flew in front of the house that served as his polling place. A couple of policemen stood in front of the polling place, too. He'd seen cops on election duty before. They'd always looked bored. Not this pair. Each of them had a hand on his pistol. After the riots that had ripped through the CSA in the weeks leading up to election day, Bartlett couldn't blame them.

"Freedom! Freedom!'" Four or five men in white shirts and butternut trousers chanted the word over and over again. They held placards with Jake Featherston's name on them, and stood as close to the polling place as the hundred-foot no-electioneering limit allowed. The cops watched them as if they were enemy soldiers.

So did Reggie Bartlett. He carried a snub-nosed.38 revolver in his trouser pocket these days. A jury might have acquitted the Freedom Party goons who'd burned down Tom Brearley's house around him, but Reggie knew-along with the rest of the world-who'd done what, and why. He'd signed his name on the letter that introduced Brearley to Tom Colleton. That presumably meant the Freedom Party knew it. No one had yet tried to do anything to him on account of it. If anyone did try, Reggie was determined he'd regret it.

As he walked past the policemen, they gave him a careful once-over. He nodded to them both and went inside. The voting officials waiting in the parlor all looked like veterans of the War of Secession. Reggie nodded to them, too; the next young voting official he saw would be the first.

They satisfied themselves that he was who he said he was and could vote in that precinct. Then one of them, a fellow with splendid white mustaches and a hook where his left hand should have been, gave Bartlett a ballot and said, "Use any vacant voting booth, sir."

Reggie had to wait a couple of minutes, for none of the booths was open. A lot of men were doing their civic duty before heading for work. At last, a fellow in overalls came out of a booth. He nodded to Bartlett and said "Freedom!" in a friendly way. The voting officials glared at him. So did Reggie. The man didn't even notice.

In the voting booth, Bartlett stared down at the names of the candidates as if they'd lost their meaning. That didn't last long, though. As soon as he saw Featherston's name, he wanted to line through it. Hampton or Layne? he wondered. Wade Hampton surely had the better chance against the Freedom Party, but he liked Ainsworth Layne's ideas better.

In the end, he cast defiant ballots for Layne and the rest of the Radical Liberal ticket. If Jake Featherston took Virginia by one vote, he'd feel bad about it. Otherwise, he'd lose no sleep.

He came out of the voting booth and handed his ballot to the old man with the hook. The precinct official folded it and stuffed it into the ballot box. "Mr. Bartlett has voted," he intoned, a response as ingrained and ritualistic as any in church. Secular communion done, Reggie left the polling place and hurried to the drugstore.

"Good morning," Jeremiah Harmon said as he came in. "You vote?" He waited for Reggie to nod, then asked, "Have any trouble?"

"Not really," Reggie answered. "Some of those Freedom Party so-and-so's were making noise outside the polling place, but that's all they were doing. I think the cops out front would have shot them if they'd tried anything worse, and I think they'd have enjoyed doing it, too. How about you?"

"About the same," the druggist said. "I wonder if Feather-ston's boys aren't shooting themselves in the foot with all these shenanigans, I truly do. If they make everyone but a few fanatics afraid of them, they won't elect anybody, let alone the president of the Confederate States."

"Here's hoping you're right," Bartlett said, and then, "You don't mind my asking, boss, who'd you vote for?"

"Wade Hampton," Harmon answered evenly. "He's about as exciting as watching paint dry-^you don't need to tell me that. But if anybody's going to come out on top of Featherston, he's the man to do it. Layne's a lost cause. He's never been the same since that brawl down in South Carolina, and his party hasn't, either." He raised a gray eyebrow. "I suppose you're going to tell me you voted for him."

"I sure did," Reggie said with a wry chuckle. "Why should I worry about lost causes? I live in the Confederate States, don't I?"

"That's funny." Harmon actually laughed a little, which he rarely did. "It'd be even funnier if it weren't so true."

"We'll find out tonight-or tomorrow or the next day, I suppose-just how funny it is," Reggie said. "If Jake Featherston gets elected, the joke's on us."

"And isn't that the sad and sorry truth?" his boss replied. "Whoever wins, though, the work has to get done. What do you say we do it? After all, if we don't make a few million dollars today, we'll have to beg for our suppers."

That would have been funnier if it weren't so true, too. Reggie dusted the shelves with a long-handled feather duster. He put out fresh bottles and boxes and tins to replace the ones customers had bought. He kept track of the prescriptions Harmon compounded, and set them under the counter to await the arrival of the people for whom the druggist made them. When customers came in, he rang up their purchases and made change.