His eyes blazed. Roger Kimball was impressed in spite of himself, more impressed than he'd thought he would be. He'd known how Featherston could sway crowds. He'd been swayed in a crowd himself. He'd expected the force of the Freedom Party leader's personality to be less in a personal meeting like this. If anything, though, it was greater. With all his heart, he wanted to believe everything Jake Featherston said.

Kimball had to gather himself before he could say, "You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. The War Department could do the country some good, once the dead wood got cleared out."

"Yeah, likely tell," Featherston jeered. "Best thing that could happen to the War Department would be blowing it to hell and gone. And anybody who says anything different is just as big a traitor as the lying dogs in there."

"That's shit," Kimball said without raising his voice. Featherston's eyes opened very wide. Kimball grinned; he got the idea nobody had spoken that way to Featherston in quite a while. Grinning still, he went on, "Without the War Department, for instance, how are we going to get decent barrels built? You'd best believe the damnyankees are working to make theirs tougher, same as they are with aeroplanes. Don't you reckon we ought to do the same?"

"Barrels. Stinking barrels," Featherston muttered under his breath. He'd stopped jeering. Now he watched Kimball as a man might watch a rattlesnake in the shocked instant after its tail began to buzz. No, he hadn't had a supporter talk back to him for a while. It threw him off stride, left him startled and confused. But he rallied quickly. "Well, yes, Christ knows we'll need new barrels when we fight the USA again. But where the hell are they? Are we working on them? Not that I've ever heard, and I've got ears in all sorts of funny places. We've got people- mercenaries-using some old ones down south of the border, but new ones? Forget it. Proves what I told you, doesn't it?- pack of damn traitors in the War Department."

When we fight the USA again. Featherston's calm acceptance of the next war took Kimball's breath away, or rather made it come fast and hard, as if Anne Colleton had greeted him in the doorway naked. He wanted that next war, too. He hadn't wanted to give up on the last one, but he'd had no choice. Seeing how much Featherston longed for it made him forget their disagreement of a moment before.

When he didn't answer back right away, the sparkle returned to Featherston's eye. The Freedom Party leader said, "Reckon you were just sticking up for the officers in Richmond, seeing as you were one yourself."

"Screw the officers in Richmond," Kimball said evenly. "Yes, I was an officer. I fucking earned being an officer when I won an appointment at the Naval Academy in Mobile off a lousy little Arkansas farm. I earned my way through the Academy, too, and I earned every promotion I got once the war started. And if you don't like that, Sarge"-he laced Featherston's chosen title with scorn-"you can go to hell."

He thought he'd have a fight on his hands then and there. He wasn't sure he could win it, either; Jake Featherston had the hard, rangy look of a man who'd cause more than his share of trouble in a brawl. But Featherston surprised him by throwing back his head and laughing. "All right, you were an officer, but you ain't one of those blue-blooded little goddamn pukes like Jeb Stuart III, that worthless sack of horse manure."

"Blue-blooded? Me? Not likely." Kimball laughed, too. "After my pa died, I walked behind the ass end of a mule till I figured out I didn't want to do that for a living any more. I'll tell you something else, too: it didn't take me real long to figure that out, either."

"Don't reckon it would have," Featherston said. "All right, Kimball, you were an officer, but you were my kind of officer. When I'm president, reckon I can find you a place up in Richmond, if you want it."

When I'm president. He said that as calmly as he'd said, When we fight the USA again. He said it as surely, too. His confidence made Kimball gasp again. A little hoarsely, the ex-submersible skipper said, "So you are going to run next year?"

"Hell, yes, I'll run," Featherston answered. "I won't win. The people here aren't ready yet to do the hard things that need doing. But when I run, when I tell 'em what we'll have to do, that'll help make 'em ready. You know what I'm saying, Kimball? The road needs building before I can run my motorcar down it."

"Yeah, I know what you're saying." Kimball knew he sounded abstracted. He couldn't help it. He'd thought about guiding Jake Featherston the way a rider guided a horse. After half an hour's conversation with Featherston, that seemed laughable, absurd, preposterous-he couldn't find a word strong enough. The leader of the Freedom Party knew where he wanted to go, knew with a certainty that made the hair stand up on the back of Kimball's neck. Whether he would get there was another question, but he knew where the road went.

Far more cautiously than he'd spoken before, Kimball said, "I'm not the only officer you could use, you know. You shouldn't be down on all of us. Take Clarence Potter, for instance. He-"

Featherston cut him off with a sharp chopping gesture. "You and him are pals. I remember that. But I haven't got any real use for him. There's no fire in the man; he thinks too damn much. It's not the fellow who thinks like a professor who gets a pile of ordinary working folks all het up. It's somebody who thinks like them. It's somebody who talks like them. He'd just piss and moan about that, on account of he can't do it himself."

Recalling Potter's Yale-flavored, Yankee-sounding accent and his relentless precision, Kimball found himself nodding. He said, "I bet you would have had more use for him, though, if he'd come over to the Party right away."

"Hell and blazes, of course I would," Featherston said. "But I can see him now, lookin' down his nose, peerin' over the tops of his spectacles"-he gave a viciously excellent impression of a man doing just that-"and reckoning I was nothing but a damn fool. Maybe he knows better nowadays, but maybe it's too late."

Kimball didn't say anything at all. Featherston's judgment of Clarence Potter was close to his own. Clarence was a fine fellow-Kimball wouldn't have gone so far in denigrating him as Featherston had-but he did think too much for his own good.

"We're on the way up," Featherston said. "We're on the way up, and nobody's going to stop us. Now that I'm here, I'm damn glad I came down to Charleston. I can use you, Kimball. You're a hungry bastard, just like me. There aren't enough of us, you know what I'm saying?"

"I sure do." Kimball stuck out his hand. Featherston clasped it. They clung to each other for a moment, locked in the alliance of the mutually useful. The president of the Confederate States, Kimball reflected, was eligible for only one six-year term. If Jake Featherston did win the job, who would take it after him? Roger Kimball hadn't known any such ambition before, but he did now.