He said, "I'll leave it at that, then. I do thank you kindly for hearing me out. Next train north doesn't come in till tomorrow, does it?"

"No," Tom Colleton said. "St. Matthews isn't the big city. You'll have seen that for yourself, I reckon. If you want to come along with me, we'll see whether the hotel has an empty room." He snorted. "Let's see if the hotel has any rooms that aren't empty besides the one you'll be in. Come on."

As soon as her brother took Tom Brearley out of the flat, Anne tried to get a telephone connection through to Richmond. She didn't want to put anything down in writing, which eliminated both the telegraph and a letter. Telegraphers weren't supposed to pay any attention to what they sent, but they did, or they could. Letters could go astray, too.

And so could telephone connections. "Sorry, ma'am," the operator reported. "Don't look like you can get there from here today." She laughed at her own wit.

Anne didn't. Anne was not-was emphatically not-amused. She snarled something wordless but potent and hung up the telephone with a crash. She hoped it rattled the operator's teeth. Who could guess where the trouble lay? Storms knocking down wires? Squirrels gnawing through insulation and shorting out the line? Anything was possible-anything except getting through to Richmond.

Her brother came in a couple of minutes later. "Well, what do you think of Kimball now?" he asked.

"The same as before," Anne answered, to Tom's evident disappointment. "Like I told that fellow, if I'd been in the Bonefish, I'd have torpedoed that destroyer, too."

"My fire-eating sister," Tom said, more admiringly than not.

"That's right," Anne said. "That's exactly right. And anybody who forgets it for even a minute will be sorry the rest of his livelong days."

Cincinnatus Driver looked back at the house in which he'd lived his whole married life. He looked around at the Covington, Kentucky, neighborhood in which he'd lived his whole life. There was a last time for everything, and this was it.

He cranked the engine. The shabby old Duryea truck thundered into life. It didn't give half the trouble it usually did, as if it too were glad to shake the dust of Kentucky from its tires. Cincinnatus hurried back to the cab.

There sat Elizabeth, Achilles on her lap. "We ready?" Cincinnatus asked as he slid in behind the wheel. In one way, it was a foolish question: everything they owned and aimed to take along was behind them in the bed of the truck. In another way, though, it was the question, and Cincinnatus knew it. He still didn't know whether he and his family were ready to abandon everything they'd ever known in the hope for a better life.

Ready or not, they were going to do it. Elizabeth nodded. Achilles yelled "Ready!" at the top of his lungs. Cincinnatus put the truck in gear. He waited for the engine to die or for something else dreadful to happen. Nothing did. Smooth as if it were ten years newer, the Duryea began to roll.

As Cincinnatus turned out of Covington's colored district and onto Greenup, Elizabeth said, "I do wish your ma and pa decided to come along with us."

"I do, too," he answered. "But they're set in their ways, like folks can get. I ain't gonna worry about it much. Once we find a place, you wait and see if they don't come after us "

"Maybe they will," his wife said. "I hope they do. Won't be so lonesome if they do, that's for sure."

"Yeah." If Cincinnatus had let his hands drive the truck for him, he would have gone on to the waterfront. He'd been heading there, walking or taking the trolley or driving the truck, since the early days of the war. But he wasn't going to head there any more. Instead, he took the suspension bridge north across the Ohio River and over into Cincinnati.

"The United States," Elizabeth said softly.

Cincinnatus nodded. Oh, Kentucky was one of the United States these days, but in many ways Kentucky still seemed as it had when it belonged to the Confederacy. That was the biggest reason Cincinnatus had decided to better his luck and his family's elsewhere. He wasn't going to wait around holding his breath till he got the vote and other privileges whites in Kentucky took for granted.

Back in the days before the war, he'd spent a lot of time looking across the Ohio. Negroes didn't have it easy in the USA. He knew that. Had he not known it, he would have got his nose rubbed in it during the war. A lot of men down from the United States thought they had to act like slave drivers to get any kind of work out of Negroes. But not all of them did, and laws restricting what blacks could do were milder in the USA than in the CSA: he didn't have to worry about a passbook any more, for instance.

One reason for such mildness, of course, was that blacks were far thinner on the ground in the United States than in the Confederate States. That did worry Cincinnatus. He'd always spent most of his time among his own kind. That would be much harder now. Covington hadn't had a huge colored community, but what would he do in a town with only a handful of blacks?

Down off the bridge, down into Cincinnati, went the truck. The waterfront on the northern bank of the Ohio didn't look much different from the one with which Cincinnatus was so familiar. But Elizabeth noted one difference right away: "Look at all the white folks doin' roustabouts' work. Wouldn't never seen nothin' like that in Covington. Wouldn't never see nothin' like that nowhere in the CSA. White folks doin' nigger work?" She shook her head.

"This here's what I been tellin' you, honey," Cincinnatus said. "Ain't no such thing as nigger work in the USA, or not hardly. Ain't enough niggers to do all the dirty work that needs doin', so the white folks have to lend a hand. A lot of 'em is foreigners, I hear tell, but not all of'em, I don't reckon."

"What's a foreigner, Pa?" Achilles asked.

"Somebody who's in a country he wasn't born in," Cincinnatus replied.

His son thought about that, then asked, "How do you tell a foreigner from somebody who ain't?"

"A lot of times, on account of he'll talk funny-they don't talk English in a lot of them foreign places," Cincinnatus said. By that standard, though, a foreigner's son, somebody who went to school in the USA, would turn into an American indistinguishable from any other. If Achilles ended up as educated and eloquent as Teddy Roosevelt, he still wouldn't be an American indistinguishable from any other. That struck Cincinnatus as unfair.

He shrugged. It was unfair, no two ways about it. His hope was that Achilles would find things less unfair elsewhere in the USA than in Kentucky.

People were looking at him: people on the sidewalk, people in motorcars, even a couple of men who stopped painting a sign to stare. They were all white. Cincinnati had some Negroes; Cin-cinnatus knew as much. But he saw none on the streets. That was a change, a jolting change, from the way things were back in Covington, over on the other side of the river.

A fat, red-faced policeman held up his hand. Cincinnatus stopped in front of him, as he should have done. He was very pleased at how well the spavined old Duryea was behaving. He'd spent a lot of time getting the truck into the best shape he could, but the only thing that would really have cured its multifarious ills was a new truck, and he knew it.

The expression of distaste on the cop's face was broad enough for him and the truck both. The fellow jerked a thumb toward the curb. "Pull over that wagon," he said in gutturally accented English. "I will with you speak."

"Is he a foreigner, Pa?" Achilles asked excitedly. "He talks funny, like you said."

"Reckon he might be," Cincinnatus answered. "They do say Cincinnati's chock full of Germans."

"Real live Germans?" Achilles' eyes were enormous. The USA's European allies were folk to conjure with, just as Frenchmen had been in the CSA… until the war came, and France lost.