"Good night, Reggie," Harmon told him.

Bartlett left the drugstore. Light was draining out of the sky. At this season of the year, nightfall came earlier, perceptibly earlier, every day. Street lamps threw little puddles of light down at the feet of the poles they surmounted. With dusk, people hurried wherever they were going, wanting to get there before full darkness if they could.

A man Reggie recognized passed him under one of those street lamps. The fellow came into Harmon's drugstore every so often, and was an outspoken Freedom Party backer. Reggie didn't know whether he was a Freedom Party goon, but he looked as if he might have been.

To stay on the safe side, Reggie stuck his hand in the pocket in which he still carried a pistol. The Freedom Party man knew he didn't have any use for Jake Featherston. If the fellow also knew he'd been the one who helped aim Tom Brearley at Roger Kimball, all sorts of fireworks might go off.

Whatever the Freedom Party man knew, he kept walking. His head was down, his face somber and, Reggie thought, a little confiised. Was he looking for the certainty he'd known before Grady Calkins shot the president of the Confederate States, the certainty that Jake Featherston was on the way up and he himself would rise with his leader from whatever miserable job he held now? If he was, he wouldn't find it on the dark, dirty sidewalks of Richmond.

Posters on a board fence shouted HANG FEATHERSTON HIGHER THAN HAMAN! in big letters. Underneath, in much smaller type, they added, Radical Liberal Party of the Confederate States. They'd gone up less than a week after Wade Hampton V got shot, and no one, not even the men of the Freedom Party, had had the nerve to deface them or tear them down. Even the goons in white and butternut might have known some shame at being goons.

Back at his flat, Reggie took a chunk of leftover fried chicken out of the icebox and ate it cold with a couple of slices of bread and a bottle of beer to wash everything down. It was, he knew, a lazy man's supper, but he figured he had the right to be lazy once in a while if he felt like it.

After washing the dishes, he took out the new banknotes he'd got and looked at them. The one-dollar notes bore the image of Jefferson Davis, the five-dollar notes that of Stonewall Jackson: no doubt to remind people of the Stonewall, the five-dollar gold-piece hardly seen since the end of the war. Maybe, now that specie wasn't flowing out of the CSA as reparations, the government would start minting Stonewalls again.

Reggie walked into the bedroom and got out a banknote he'd kept from the last days before the currency reform: a $1,000,000,000 banknote. It might have been the equivalent of twenty-five or thirty cents of real money. It showed Jeb Stuart licking the Yankees during the Second Mexican War, and was every bit as well printed as the new banknotes, even if all the zeros necessarily made the design look crowded.

"A billion dollars," Reggie said softly. If only it had been worth more than a supper at a greasy spoon or a couple of shots of whiskey at a saloon with sawdust on the floor. But it hadn't; it was nothing more than a symbol of a whole country busy going down the drain. Reggie set it on the table by the sofa. "If I ever have kids," he said, "I'll show this to them. Maybe it will help them understand how hard times were after the war."

He shook his head. They wouldn't understand no matter what, any more than they would understand what life in the trenches was like. Experience brought understanding. Nothing else came close.

When he got to work the next morning, he glanced affectionately at the cash register. All of a sudden, its keys corresponded to prices once more. He didn't mentally have to multiply by thousands or millions or billions any more.

A customer came in and bought some aspirins. "That'll be fifteen cents," Bartlett said. The man pulled from his pocket a $1,000,000,000 banknote like the one Reggie had contemplated the night before. Reggie shook his head. "I'm sorry, sir, but I can't take this."

"Why not?" the man said. "It's still worth more'n fifteen cents, I reckon."

"Yes, sir," Bartlett said, "but all these old banknotes have been-what's the word?-demonetized, that's it. You can't spend 'em for anything. Suppose you took one to a bank and tried to get a billion real dollars for it?"

"I wouldn't do that," the fellow said. He no doubt meant it: he was just a petty chiseler, not a big one. There couldn't be anybody in the Confederate States who didn't know you couldn't use the old money any more, not even for small purchases. Grumbling, the customer put the preposterously inflated banknote back in his pocket and handed Reggie a real dollar instead.

Reggie rang up the sale and then anxiously checked the till; coins were coming back into circulation more slowly than notes. But he was able to make change, even if he had to use ten pennies to do it. "Here you are, sir."

"Thanks." The man put the little flat tin of tablets in his pocket along with the change. Jingling, he turned away. "See you again sometime. Freedom!"

No one had said that to Reggie for quite a while. He would happily have gone another fifty or a hundred years without hearing it again, too. He had to make himself hold still and not go after the customer to beat hell out of him. "Freedom to butcher anybody you don't like, you mean," he ground out, "even if it's the president of the CSA."

He waited for the man to come back hotly at him, whether with words or with fists. That was the Freedom Party's style, and had been since its beginnings in the black days after the war. But the man only tucked his chin down against his chest, as if he were walking into a cold, rainy wind, and hurried out of the drugstore.

At the back of the store, Jeremiah Harmon coughed. "Yeah, I know, boss: I'm not supposed to do things like that," Bartlett said. "I know it's bad for business. But when those white-and-butternut boys come in, I see red. I can't help it. And this one had his nerve, going' Freedom!' after what that Grady Calkins son of a bitch went and did."

"I didn't say anything, Reggie," Harmon answered. "As a matter of fact, I think I'm coming down with a cold." He coughed again. "I don't like to lose business, mind you, but I don't seek business from imbeciles, either. And any man who will call out 'Freedom!' with President Hampton still new in his grave is either an imbecile or whatever's one step down from there."

"A half-witted cur dog-a son of a bitch, like I said," Reggie suggested.

"It could be so," his boss said.

"When I was in the hospital after the damnyankees shot me and caught me, one of the other people in there was one of our nigger soldiers who'd lost a foot," Reggie said. "You ask me, he had more brains in that missing foot than the whole Freedom Party does in all its heads." He wondered how Rehoboam was doing down in Mississippi. Even if the black man had been a Red, he'd been a pretty good fellow, too.

Harmon chuckled. "Something to that, I shouldn't wonder. But now, if God is kind to us, the Freedom Party dealt itself a blow no one else could have given it, and one it won't get over."

"Amen," Reggie said with all his heart.

Cincinnatus Driver worked like a man possessed, unloading a truckload of filing cabinets he'd brought from the Des Moines railroad yards to the State Capitol on the other side of the river. It was, he admitted to himself, easier to work hard in Iowa in November than it had been in Kentucky in, say, July. But he would have put extra effort into things today even if it had been hotter and muggier than Kentucky ever got.

He finished faster than anyone would have imagined he could. Instead of racing back to the yard to see what other hauling work he could pick up-which was what he usually did when he finished a job-he used the time he'd saved to hurry back to the near northwest, to an Odd Fellows hall not far from his flat. He parked the truck on the street and hurried inside.