He almost hoped he would have to try to seize power by force. Storming the War Department would be as sweet as marching into Philadelphia would have been during the Great War.

"Once we're in, however we're in, we'll make everything legal," Koenig said. "If you're in, you make the rules, and that's just what we'll do."

Knight managed a sheepish smile, as if realizing he'd shown weakness. "You don't think small, do you, Jake?"

"Never have. Never will," Featherston replied. "As long as you can imagine something, you can make it real. That's what the Freedom Party's all about. We know the Confederate States can be great again. We know we can pay back all the bastards who held us while the damnyankees sucker-punched us. We can do it, and we're gonna do it. Right?"

"Right!" Willy Knight said. Jake was watching him. He seemed as hearty as he should have. Maybe he'd just had cold feet for a moment. Featherston shrugged. How much did it really matter? As vice president, all Willy'd do was make speeches, and Jake intended to make sure of what was in them before they came out of the handsome puppet's mouth. Knight still hadn't figured out he'd been condemned to oblivion. That only proved he wasn't so smart as he thought he was.

Jake and Ferdinand Koenig looked at each other. Koenig nodded, ever so slightly. The more he'd thought about it, the more he'd liked escaping the worthless number-two slot and being promised one where he could actually do things. Featherston had plans for the attorney general's office. Once I'm elected…

Three days later, he took another step toward the Gray House in Richmond. When he strode up onto the speakers' platform at the Memorial Auditorium to accept the Freedom Party nomination, the roar from the assembled delegates left his ears as stunned and battered as any artillery barrage ever had. The klieg lights blazing on him put the sun to shame. A thicket of microphones in front of him amplified his voice for the delegates, for people listening on the wireless web, and for the newsreels that would soon show his image all over the Confederate States.

"Hello, friends," Jake said to all the millions who would see and listen to him. "You know me. You know what I stand for. I've been up here in front of you before. I'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you-"

"The truth!" the Freedom Party men bellowed.

Featherston nodded. "That's right. I'm here to tell you the truth. I've been doing that for a long time now. I think you're finally ready to listen. The truth is, this country needs to put people-white people, decent people-back to work, and we will. The truth is, this country needs to put the niggers who stabbed us in the back in their place, and we will. The truth is, Kentucky and Sequoyah and that joke the USA calls Houston still belong to the Confederate States. We ought to get 'em back-and we will."

He had to stop then; the applause was too loud and too long to let him continue. When at last it ebbed, he went on, "The truth is, the Whigs have had seventy years to run this country, and they've run it into the ground. Somebody else needs to do it, and do it right- and we will." Another great roar. He held up his hands. Silence fell, completely and at once. Into it, he said, "If you like the way things have gone the past few years, vote Whig. But if you want to tell those people what you really think of 'em, vote-"

"Freedom!" That cry outdid all that had gone before. And then the delegates began to chant, "Feather ston! Feather ston! Feather ston !" Jake stood tall on the platform, waving to the crowd, waving to the country, glorying in what he had and reaching out for what he wanted.

B ouncing around South Carolina, from Charleston to Columbia to Greenville and to the smaller towns in between, Anne Colleton felt more than a little like a table-tennis ball. When she got out of her Birmingham in St. Matthews, her brother greeted her with, "Hello. Didn't I know you once upon a time?"

"Funny, Tom," she answered, meaning anything but. "Very funny. For God's sake, fix me a drink." Her own flat looked unfamiliar to her. Maybe her brother hadn't been joking after all.

He mixed whiskey and a little water for her and plopped in a couple of ice cubes. After he'd made himself a drink, too, he said, "Well, you've got Jake Featherston, and it looks like he's going to win. Are you happy?"

"You bet I am." She would have said more, but a long pull at the whiskey came first. "Thank you. That's a lifesaver."

"I ought to go places with a little cask around my neck, like those St. Bernard dogs in the Alps," Tom Colleton said.

"I'd be glad to see you, that's for sure." Anne took another sip. "Yes, I'm happy. I've waited for this day ever since the end of the war, even though I didn't know what I was waiting for at first."

"You walked away from Featherston once," Tom said.

"I made a mistake," Anne said. "Aren't you glad you never made a mistake in all your born days?"

"Now that you mention it, yes." Tom was irrepressible. Anne snorted. Her brother went on, "I'll tell you one mistake I didn't make: once I got out of politics, I didn't get back in."

"You wouldn't have talked that way before you got married," Anne said. It made you soft, was what she meant. To anyone else, she would have said that, said it without a moment's hesitation. With Tom, she hesitated.

He understood what she meant whether she said it or not. With a shrug, he answered, "Maybe you wouldn't talk the way you talk if you had. Nothing to cure the fire in your belly like a little boy."

"Maybe," Anne said tonelessly. Some small part of her wished she had settled down with Roger Kimball or Clarence Potter or that Texas oil man or one of her other lovers. A husband, a child to carry on after her… Those weren't the worst things in the world. But they weren't for her, and never would be. "I'm on my own, Tom. Too late to change it now."

Her brother eyed her. "And heaven help anybody who gets in your way?" he said.

Anne nodded. "Of course."

"What happens if Featherston decides you're in his way?"

She wished he hadn't asked that particular question. For a long time, she'd been a big fish in the small pond of South Carolina politics, and not the smallest fish in the much bigger pond of Confederate politics. Going from the Whigs to the Freedom Party, back to the Whigs and now back to Freedom had cut her influence down to size. So had getting older, as she was all too ruefully aware.

What if Jake Featherston decided she was in the way? What if President Jake Featherston decided she was in the way? She saw only one answer, and gave it to her brother: "In that case, I'd better move, don't you think?"

"You say that? You?" Tom looked and sounded as if he couldn't believe his ears. "You don't move for anybody."

"If it's a question of move or get squashed, I'll move," Anne said. "And Jake has more clout than I do. Jake has more clout than anybody does." She spoke with a certain somber pride. She might have been saying, Yeah, I got licked, but the fellow who licked me was the toughest one of the bunch. She shook her head. Might have? No. She was saying exactly that.

Tom shook his head, too, in wonder. "What's going to happen to the country, if a fellow who can make you pull in your horns starts running things?"

"We'll all go in the same direction, and it'll be the right direction," Anne said. "We've owed a lot of debts for a long time. Don't you want to pay them back? I know I do."

"Well, yes, but not if I have to go bust to do it."

"We won't," Anne said positively. "He'll do what needs doing, instead of fumbling around the way Burton Mitchel has ever since things went sour."

"Maybe. I hope so," her brother said. "Hell, I'll probably even vote for him myself. But that's all I intend to do. You can go running around the state if you want to. Me, I'll stay home and tend my garden."