Ringing things up wasn't so easy. The cash register, a sturdy and massive chunk of gilded ironmongery, dated from before the Great War. It was a fancier machine than most of that vintage, and could handle a five-dollar purchase with the push of but one key. Had Reggie had to do all the pushing he needed to ring up something that cost $ 17,000,000-and a lot of things did this week, give or take a couple of million-he would have been banging that five-dollar key from now till doomsday.

Everyone wanted to talk politics, too. Women couldn't vote, but that didn't stop them from having opinions and being vociferous about them. "Isn't Mr. Featherston the handsomest man you ever saw in your life?" asked a lady buying a tube of cream for her piles.

"No, ma'am," Reggie answered. In the back of the drugstore, Jeremiah Harmon raised his head. He didn't want to lose customers, regardless of Reggie's own politics and opinions. Reggie thought fast. "Handsomest man I ever saw was my father," he told the woman. "Pity I don't take after him."

She laughed. Bartlett's boss relaxed. Reggie felt some small triumph. Even if he'd sugarcoated what he said, he hadn't had to take it back.

He tried to gauge the shape of the election from conversations with customers. That wouldn't prove anything, and he knew it. He kept trying anyhow. From what he saw and heard, Jake Featherston had a lot of support. So did Wade Hampton V Only a few people admitted to backing Ainsworth Layne and the Radical Liberals. Reggie hadn't expected anything different. He was disappointed just the same.

When six o'clock rolled around, he said, "Boss, I think I'm going to get myself some supper somewhere and then head over to the Richmond Examiner. I reckon they'll be posting returns all night long."

"I expect they will," Harmon answered. "While you're there, do try to recall you're supposed to come in to work tomorrow." The druggist's voice was dry; he had a pretty good idea that Reggie was liable to be up late.

Supper was greasy fried chicken and greasier fried potatoes, washed down with coffee that had been perking all day. Reggie's stomach told him in no uncertain terms what it thought of being assaulted in that fashion. He ignored it, shoved a few banknotes with a lot of zeros on them across the counter at the cook, and hurried on down Broad Street to the Examinees offices, which were only a few blocks from Capitol Square.

Like the Whig and the Sentinel and the other Richmond papers-like papers across the CSA-the Examiner was in the habit of setting up enormous blackboards on election night and changing returns as the telegraph brought in new ones. When Reggie got there, the blackboards remained pristine: the polls were still open throughout the country. Because of that, only a few people stood around in front of the offices. Reggie got an excellent spot. He knew he might have to defend it with elbows as the night wore along, but that was part of the game, too.

A man came up, loudly unhappy that all the saloons were closed on election day. "Bunch of damn foolishness," he said. "Fools we've got running this year, we need to get drunk before we can stand to vote for any of 'em " By his vehemence, he might already have found liquid sustenance somewhere.

At half past seven, a fellow in shirtsleeves and green celluloid visor came out with a sheaf of telegrams in his hand. He started putting numbers from states on the eastern seaboard in their appropriate boxes. Earliest returns showed Hampton ahead in South Carolina and Virginia, Jake Featherston in North Carolina and Florida, and the Radical Liberals-Reggie clapped his hands-in Cuba. The numbers meant hardly more than the blanks they replaced. He was glad to have them anyhow.

More numbers went up as the hour got later. Hardly any of them made the people who awaited them very happy. The Examiner leaned toward the Radical Liberals, and it soon became abundantly clear that, whatever else happened, Ainsworth Layne would not be the next president of the Confederate States.

That would have disappointed Reggie more had he thought going in that Layne enjoyed any great chance of winning. The Radical Liberals always did best on the fringes of the Confederacy; they were liable to win Sonora and Chihuahua, too, when results finally trickled out of the mountains and deserts of the far Southwest.

But the real battle would be decided between Texas and Virginia. Returns also came in slowly from the Confederate heartland. They hadn't seemed so slow during the last Congressional election, nor the one before that. Bartlett had been in no position to evaluate how fast the returns for the last presidential election came in, not in November 1915 he hadn't. Back in 1909, he hadn't cared; he hadn't been old enough to vote then.

"Hate to say it, but I'm pulling for Wade Hampton," a man about his own age said not far away. "I've voted Radical Liberal ever since I turned twenty-one, and I'd get into screaming fights with Whigs. But you look around at what the other choice is-" The fellow shivered melodramatically.

"I voted for Layne," Reggie said. "I'm not sorry I did, either. I'm just sorry more people didn't."

Off in the distance, somebody shouted, "Freedom!" But the Freedom Party muscle boys did not wade into the crowd outside the Examiner building. They would have paid for any attack they made; Reggie was sure he wasn't the only Radical Liberal packing a revolver in case of trouble from goons.

More and more numbers went up. By midnight or so, they started to blur for Reggie. Strong coffee at supper or not, he couldn't hold his eyes open any more. Things weren't decided, but he headed back toward his flat anyway. He was glad the election remained up in the air. Only when he'd got very close to home did he realize he should have been sorry Jake Featherston hadn't been knocked out five minutes after the polls closed.

Jake Featherston yawned so wide, his jaw cracked like a knuckle. He hadn't been so tired since the battles of the Great War. It was half past four Wednesday morning, and he'd been up since first light Tuesday. He'd voted early, posed for photographers outside the polling place, and then headed here to the Spottswood Hotel at the corner of Eighth and Main to see what he would see. He'd wanted the Ford Hotel, right across the street from Capitol Square, but the Whigs had booked it first.

He looked down at the glass of whiskey in his hand. Yawning again, he realized he might not have felt so battered if he hadn't kept that glass full through the night. He shrugged. Too late to worry about it now. He wasn't in the habit of looking back at things he'd done, anyway.

Somebody knocked on the door to his room. He opened it. As he'd expected, there stood Ferdinand Koenig, his backer when the Freedom Party was tiny and raw, his vice-presidential candidate now that the Party was a power in the land… but not quite enough of a power. Koenig held the latest batch of telegrams in his left hand. His face might have been a doctor's coming out of a sickroom just before the end.

"It's over, Jake," he said-like Roger Kimball and only a handful of others, he talked straight no matter how bad the news was. "Our goose is cooked. We won't win it this time."

Featherston noticed he was still holding that whiskey. He gulped it down, then hurled the glass against the wall. Shards sprayed every which way, like fragments from a bursting shell. "Son of a bitch," he snarled. "Son of a bitch! I really reckoned we might pull it off."

"We scared 'em," Koenig said. "By God, we scared 'em. You Ye still outpolling Ainsworth Layne. We took Florida. We took Tennessee. We took Texas. We've got-"

"We've got nothing," Jake said flatly. "God damn it to fucking hell, we've got nothing. During the war, we killed a million Yankees. Didn't do us one damn bit of good. We lost. I didn't want to scare Wade Hampton the goddamn Fifth. I wanted to whip the Whigs out of office like the cur dogs they are."