Only a smattering of applause answered him. No more than a handful of people understood what he was talking about. But Jefferson Pinkard was one of those few. He beat his palms together till they were red and sore. That was what he wanted-the whole country like a Freedom Party rally. What could be better? Nothing he could think of.

The way things looked, the whole country wouldn't be able to think of anything better, either. That seemed very fine indeed to Jeff.

S omething tickled Anne Colleton's memory when she checked into the Excelsior Hotel in Charleston. It tickled harder when she got into her room. The tickling wasn't of the pleasant sort. After she looked around the room, she realized why. Roger Kimball had tried to rape her here, almost ten years ago now. She'd given him a knee between his legs, aimed a pistol at him, and sent him on his way. In short order, he was dead, shot by that woman from Boston.

Anne sighed. Kimball had been loyal to Jake Featherston come hell or high water. Anne was loyal to nobody but herself, not like that. She'd thought Featherston was a loser, and she'd broken her ties to the Freedom Party. That was the biggest reason she and Roger had broken up, the biggest reason she hadn't given herself to him, the biggest reason he'd tried to take her by force.

And now here she was, back in Charleston, back in the Freedom Party. She tasted the irony there. Had Roger been right all along? Anne shook her head. She didn't care to admit that, even to herself. After she'd walked away from Featherston, the country had changed. That was what had brought her back.

Still, she granted herself the luxury of another sigh. It was too bad. She'd never found anybody who could match Roger Kimball in bed.

A glance in the mirror on the dresser told her she probably never would. A good start on a double chin, lines on her face no powder could hide, the harshness of dye to hold gray at bay… She wasn't a young beauty any more. Now she had to get her way with brains, which wasn't so easy and took longer.

"What can't be cured…" she said, and deliberately turned away from the mirror. The only alternative to getting older was not getting older. The Yankees had gassed her younger brother, Jacob. They'd gassed him, and the Negroes on the Marshlands plantation had murdered him in the uprising of 1915. He'd never had a chance. She'd taken some revenge on them after the war. More still waited. She'd never disagreed with the Freedom Party about that.

She unpacked her own suitcase. Once upon a time, she'd have had a colored maid to do it for her. The last one she'd had came much too close to murdering her in the long aftermath of the uprising. No more.

Once everything was put away, she went downstairs. A man sitting on an overstuffed chair in the lobby, a chair whose upholstery had seen better days, got to his feet and took off his hat. "Evening, Miss Colleton!" he said. "Freedom!"

"Good evening, Mr. Henderson," Anne answered. A beat slower than she should have, she added, "Freedom!" herself. The Party greeting still struck her as foolish. But she'd made the bargain, and she had to go through with it.

"Hope you had a pleasant drive down," James Henderson said. He held out his hand. She briskly shook it. His eyes widened slightly. He hadn't expected so firm a grip. He was a few years younger than Anne- everyone is a few years younger than I am these days, she thought unhappily-lean as a lath, with a face so bony, it might have come off the label of an iodine bottle. He wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart on his lapel.

"It was all right," Anne said. "Some people drive for the sport of it. I drive to get where I'm going."

"Sensible," Henderson said. Men said that to her a lot these days, as they'd once said, Beautiful. She missed the other. This would have to do. Beauty didn't last. Brains did. She'd realized that a long time ago. She'd had brains even then, though men had done their best not to notice. Henderson went on, "Shall we eat some supper? We can talk then, and figure out where to go from there."

"All right," Anne said. Not so many years earlier, he would have wanted to go back to her room and take her to bed. Now he probably didn't. That made doing business simpler. Most of the time, she appreciated it because it did. Every once in a while, she found herself pining for days gone by.

"Hotel restaurant suit you, or would you rather go somewhere else?" Henderson was doing his best to be polite. A fair number of Freedom Party men either didn't bother or didn't know how.

"The hotel restaurant is fine," she answered.

She ordered crab cakes; she took advantage of Charleston seafood whenever she came down to the coast. Henderson chose fried chicken. They both ordered cocktails. The colored waiter who took their orders went back to the kitchen without writing them down; odds were he couldn't write. James Henderson's eyes followed him. "Wonder where he was in 1915, and what he did."

"He looks too young to have done anything much," Anne said. "Of course, you never can tell."

"Sure can't." Henderson scowled. He needed a visible effort to draw himself back to the business at hand. "Let's talk about Congress and the Legislature."

"Right," Anne said briskly. Henderson might be skinny enough to dive through a soda straw without hitting the sides, but he came to the point. She liked that. She went on, "We can figure that Jake Featherston is probably going to win this state."

"Doesn't mean we won't campaign for him here," Henderson said.

"No, of course not," Anne agreed. "We don't want any nasty surprises. But the rest of the ticket has to run well, too. Freedom Party Congressmen will help Jake get his laws through. The state legislators need to back us, too-and they're the ones who choose C.S. Senators. We're still weak in the Senate, because we didn't start getting a lot of people elected to state legislatures till 1929."

James Henderson nodded. He began to say something more, but the waiter came back with drinks, and then with dinner. The fellow started to give Anne the chicken; she pointed to her companion to show where it should go. "Sorry, ma'am," the colored man said. He set things right, then withdrew.

Henderson looked around to make sure he was out of earshot before resuming. "Can't trust 'em," the Freedom Party man said. Anne couldn't quarrel with him there. Henderson continued, "Anything they hear, the Rad Libs know tomorrow and the Whigs the day after."

Anne wasn't so sure about that, but didn't care to argue with it, either. All she said was, "They know they have to try to stop us any way they can. They know, but I don't think they can do it."

"Have to make sure they don't. We have to make sure any way we need to." Henderson let her draw her own pictures.

She had no trouble doing just that. "We don't want to go too far," she said. "If we do, it'll only hurt us, cost us votes. The average law-abiding Confederate has to think we're the right answer, not the wrong one. We've shot ourselves in the foot before when we pushed too hard. We need to pick our spots."

The skeletal man across the table from her nodded. "See who's really dangerous," he said, and bared a lot of teeth in a grin. "Won't be so dangerous once we run over 'em with barrels a few times."

Anne thought that was a figure of speech. She wasn't quite sure, though, and didn't care to ask. Theoretically, the armistice with the USA banned barrels from the CSA. The government had never admitted to having any-nor could it, without risking Yankee wrath. If a couple of them should suddenly clatter down a street with Freedom Party men inside… If that happened, Anne wouldn't have been astonished.

She said, "Looks to me like we're thinking along the same lines, Mr. Henderson… Do you want to get some more chicken?" He'd reduced half a bird to bones in nothing flat.