"No, I ain't gonna hit you. Just get your worthless asses out of the ditch and follow me back to the quarters. Colonel Jamison is gonna flat shit his britches," he said and he laughed. he carouched down to pull a woman up by her hand.

Then he stiffened, his nostrols swelling with air, as though the odor of a dangerous animal had suddenly wrapped itself around him. He rose from his crouch, turning, hoisting the lantern above his head, and stared straight into the face of Jean-Jacques LaRose.

Abigail watched the next events take place as though she were caught in a dream from which she could not wake. Olin Mayfield's expression shaped and reshaped itself, as though he could not decide whether to grin or to scowl. Then he gripped the heavy Colt revolver on his hip and pulled it halfway from his holster, his lip curling up from his teeth, perhaps, Abigail thought, in imitation of an illustration he had seen on the cover of a dime novel.

The knife Jean-Jacques carried in his right hand was made from a wagon spring, a quarter-inch thick, reheated and beveled down to an edge that was sharp enough to shave with, mounted inside an oak handle with a brass guard. He thrust the blade through Olin Mayfield's throat and extracted it just as fast.

Mayfield's mouth opened in dismay as the blood drained out of his head and face and spilled down his chest. Then he slumped to his knees, his head tilted on his shoulder, as though the trees and sweet potato fields and the empty wagons in the rows had become unfairly torn loose from their fastenings and set adrift in the sky.

His lantern bounced to the bottom of the coulee and hissed in the stream but continued to burn. Then the entire band of escaping slaves bolted for the shoreline and the gangplank that led onto Jean-Jacques' boat.

Abigail was at the end of the line as it moved past Olin Mayfield. He lay on his side, his mouth pursed open, at eye level with her, his hands on his throat. When she looked at the twitch in his cheek and the solitary tear in one eye and the froth on his bottom lip she knew he was still alive, unable to speak or to fully comprehend what had happened to him.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

She gathered the infant she was carrying closer to her and dashed after the others.

AN hour later the rain stopped and the sky cleared and Abigail stood in the darkness of the pilothouse and looked out on the vast moonlit emptiness of the river and the black-green border of trees on the banks and the stump fires that smelled like burning garbage. She wondered if any sort of moral victory was possible in human affairs or if addressing and confronting evil only empowered it and produced casualties of a different kind.

The slaves had at first been terrified at the slaying of the paddy roller, but once they were in a new and seemingly secure environment, hidden inside the cargo hold or under the canvas on deck, the fear went out of their faces and they began to laugh and joke among themselves. Abigail had found herself laughing with them; then one man in the hold found a splintered piece of wood from a packing crate and hacked at the air with it, pretending he was executing Olin Mayfield. Everyone clapped their hands.

What had her father said? "We will do many things in the service of justice. But shedding blood isn't one of them." She drew a ragged breath and shut her eyes and saw again the scene in the coulee. What a mockery she had made of her father's admonition.

"You still t'inking about that man back there?" Jean-Jacques said. A palpable aura of rum and dried sweat and tobacco smoke rose from his skin and clothes.

"Yes, I am," she replied.

"He made his choice. He got what he deserved. Look out yonder. We got a lot more serious t'ings to deal wit'," he said.

They had just made a bend in the river and should have been churning past the Confederate encampment, unchallenged, on their way to New Orleans, with nothing to fear until they approached the Union ironclads anchored in the river north of the city. Instead, a ship-of-war with twin stacks was anchored close to the shore, and soldiers with rifles moved in silhouette across the lighted windows. A pair of wheeled cannons had been moved into a firing position on a bluff above the river and all the undergrowth and willows chopped down in front of the barrels. Abigail heard an anchor chain on the Confederate boat clanking upward through an iron scupper. Jean-Jacques wiped his mouth with his hand. "Maybe I can run it. But we gonna take some balls t'rew the starboard side," he said.

"Turn in to shore," she said.

"That don't sound like a good idea."

"Get everyone down below," she said.

"There ain't room," she said.

"You have to make some."

She pulled up her dress and lifted the bottom of her petticoat in both hands and began to tear at it. The petticoat was pale yellow in color and sewn with lace on the edges. Jean-Jacques stared at her, his face contorted.

"I ain't having no parts in this," he said.

"Get Flower to help you. Please do what I say."

He frowned and rubbed the stubble on his jaw.

"Leave me your knife," she said.

"My knife?"

This time she didn't speak. She fixed her eyes on his and let her anger well into her face.

He called one of his boat mates to take the wheel and went out on the deck and opened a hatch in front of the pilothouse. One by one the black people who were hidden under the canvas crawled on their hands and knees to the ladder and dropped down into the heat of the boiler room.

Abigail ripped a large piece out of her petticoat, and knelt on the floor with Jean-Jacques' knife and cut the cloth in a square the size of a ship's flag. Then she tied two strips from the trimmings onto the corners and went to the stern. She pulled down the Confederate flag from its staff and replaced it with the piece from her petticoat.

Jean-Jacques came back into the pilothouse and steered his boat out of the channel, into dead water, cutting the engines just as the Confederates came alongside.

"What we doing, Miss Abigail?" he asked. He watched two soldiers latch a boat hook onto his gunnel and throw a boarding plank across it.

She patted her hand on top of his. He waited for her to answer his question.

"Miss Abigail?" he said.

But she only touched her finger to her lips.

Then he glanced at the tops of his shoes and his heart sank.

A major, a sergeant and three enlisted men dropped down onto the deck. Jean-Jacques went outside to meet them, his smile as natural as glazed ceramic.

"Had a bad storm up there. It's cleared up all right, though," he said.

The faces of the soldiers held no expression. Their eyes swept the decks, the pilothouse, the canvas stretched across the front of the boat. But one of them was not acting like the others, Jean-Jacques noted. The sergeant, who was unshaved and wore his kepi low on his brow, was looking directly into Jean-Jacques' face.

"You see any Yanks north of here?" the major asked.

"No, suh," Jean-Jacques said.

The major lit a lantern and held it up at eye level. He was a stout, be-whiskered man, his jowls flecked with tiny red and blue veins. A gray cord, with two acorns on it, was tied around the crown of his hat.

"You'll find them for sure if you keep going south," he said.

"I give a damn, me," Jean-Jacques said.

"They can confiscate your vessel," the major said.

"What they gonna do, they gonna do."

"What's your cargo?" the major asked.

Before Jean-Jacques could answer Abigail stepped out in front of him.

"You didn't see our yellow warning?" she said.

"Pardon?" the officer said.

"We have yellow jack on board," she said.

"Yellow fever?" the major said.

"We're taking a group of infected Negroes to a quarantine and treatment station outside New Orleans. I have a pass from the Sanitary Commission if you'd like to see it."