"See what you get for starting without me?" Martin said, drawing up a chair.

"Dad wants to throw in this game because he's losing," his sister said. But Sue's grin said she didn't mind throwing it in, either.

"My own flesh and blood insult me," Stephen Douglas Martin said. "If I'd told my father anything like that-"

"Gramps would have laughed his head off, and you know it," Martin said. He gathered the cards and fanned them in his hand. "Draw for first deal." He ended up dealing himself. After generously donating the ace of spades and a couple of hearts to his mother, who sat on his left (and receiving a similar load of trash from his sister, who sat on his right), he called, "All right, where's the deuce?"

Out came the two of clubs. As the hand was played, his father asked, "Did you get the whole world settled, there at the Socialist meeting hall?"

"Sure as heck did," Martin said cheerfully. "The revolution of the proletariat starts next Wednesday, seven o'clock in the morning sharp. You'd better step lively, Pop-you don't want to be late." He took a trick with the ace of diamonds, then led the ten of spades. "Let's see where the queen's hiding."

"Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer," his father said. As Chester's mother had done, he ducked the spade. So did Sue. Stephen Douglas Martin went on, "Do people want it to be that rabblerousing fool of a Debs again?"

"Some people do," Martin answered. "I think we'd have a better chance with somebody else." Since the ten of spades had failed to flush out the queen, he led the nine. "Maybe this'll make her show up."

His mother pained and set out the ace of spades. His father grinned and tucked the king under it. His sister grinned even wider and dropped the queen, sticking his mother with thirteen points she didn't want. "There you go, Ma," Sue said sweetly.

"Thank you so much," Louisa Martin said. She turned to her son. "When the revolution comes, will the queen only be worth one point, to make her equal with all the hearts in the deck?"

"Don't know about that one, Ma," Chester said. "I don't think there's a plank that talks about it in the Socialist Party platform."

"Is there a plank that explains why they think we need anybody but bully old Teddy?" Stephen Douglas Martin inquired.

"I can think of two," his son replied. "First one is, nobody's ever had three terms. If TR decides to run again, he shouldn't, either. And even if the Democrats run somebody else, they have to explain what we got for all the men who got killed and maimed during the war, and why they've been in the trusts' pocket ever since."

When he was around Albert Bauer, he sounded like a reactionary. When he was around his parents-who were, in his view of things, reactionaries-lie sounded as radical as Bauer did. The more he thought about that, the funnier it seemed.

The quitting whistle's scream cut through the din on the floor of the Sloss Works like a wedge splitting a stump. Jefferson Pink-ard leaned on his crowbar. "Another day done," he said. "Another million dollars."

He wasn't making a million dollars a day, but he was making better than a million a week. Next month, probably, he'd be up over a million a day. It didn't matter. What the CSA called money was only a joke, one that kept getting funnier as the banknotes sprouted more and more zeros. The bottom line was, he'd lived better before the war than he did now. That was so for almost everybody in the Confederate States.

"See you in the mornin', Mistuh Pinkard," Vespasian said.

"Yeah," Jeff answered. "See you." He didn't make his voice cold on purpose; it just came out that way. The more he went to Freedom Party meetings, the less he cared to work alongside a black man. Vespasian turned away and headed for the time clock to punch out without another word. Pinkard wasn't in the habit of bragging about going out on Freedom Party assault squadrons, but he wouldn't have been surprised had Vespasian known about it. Blacks had funny ways of finding out things like that.

Too damn bad, Jeff thought. Tired and sweaty, he headed toward the time clock himself.

Going into and out of the Sloss foundry, whites had always hung with whites and Negroes with Negroes. That hadn't changed. What had changed, lately, was how men from one group eyed those from the other. Blacks seemed warier than they had been during the war. Whites seemed less happy about having so many colored men around, doing jobs they wouldn't have been allowed to do before the war started. Pinkard understood that down to the ground. It was how he felt himself

He didn't stop sweating just because he'd stopped working for the day. Spring had come to Birmingham full of promises about what the summer would be like. If those promises weren't so many lies, summer would be hotter than hell, and twice as muggy. Summer in Birmingham was usually like that, so the promises probably held truth.

When he got close to home, Bedford Cunningham waved to him. Bedford was sitting on his own front porch, with a glass of something unlikely to be water on the rail in front of him. "Come on over after supper, Jeff," he called. "We'll hoist a few." He hoisted the one sitting on the rail.

"Can't tonight," Pinkard answered. "Got a meeting."

"Man alive." Cunningham shook his head, back and forth, back and forth. By the way he did it, that one on the rail wasn't the first he'd hoisted. "Never reckoned you'd dive into the Freedom Party like a turtle diving off a rock into a creek."

It was, when you got down to it, a pretty fair figure of speech. Jeff felt a lot happier swimming in the river of the Party than he did out on a rock by his lonesome. He said, "Maybe you ought to come along, give yourself somethin' to do besides gettin' lit up."

"I like getting lit up," Cunningham said. "What the hell better have I got to do, anyhow? Can't hardly work, not shy an arm. I'll vote Freedom, sure as hell I will, but I don't fancy sitting around and listening to people making speeches."

"It's not like that," Jeff protested, but Bedford Cunningham was hoisting his glass again. With a shrug, Pinkard went up the walk and into his own house.

"Hello, dear," Emily said. She tilted up her face for a kiss. He gave her one, rather a perfunctory job. She didn't try to improve it. "I know you got your meeting tonight," she went on when he let her go, "so supper'll be on the table for you in two shakes of a lamb's tail." She went back into the kitchen to dish it out. She didn't shake her own tail, as she would have not so long before.

Jeff paid no attention to the change. "Good thing you remembered," he told her. "Barney Stevens is back in town from Richmond, and he's going to let us know what those bastards in Congress are up to. I don't want to be late, not for that."

"You won't be," Emily promised, her voice floating out through the hall. "Come on and set yourself down."

He did, then shoveled chicken and dumplings into his face with the single-minded dedication a stoker might have shown in shoveling coal into a steam engine's firebox. Then, after bestowing another absentminded kiss on his wife, he headed over to the closest trolley stop for the ride to the livery stable where the Freedom Party still met.

He felt at home there, more even than he did in the cottage he'd shared with Emily since the days before the war. Almost all the men who'd joined the Party were veterans, as he was; they'd fought the damnyankees in Virginia, in Kentucky, in Arkansas, in Sequoyah, in Texas, in Sonora. And most of them had put on white shirts and butternut pants these past few months and gone charging forth to break up rival parties' rallies and to remind the blacks of Birmingham where in the scheme of things they belonged.

"Freedom!" he said every time he shook somebody's hand or slapped somebody else on the back. And men also reached out to clasp his hand and slap his back and hailed him with the one-word greeting that was also a battle cry. He might have been a Freemason or an Odd Fellow: everyone in the livery stable with him was his brother.