A portly, middle-aged man eating pheasant looked up from his meal and said, "Don't I know you from somewhere?"

With a small thrill of horror, Scipio realized the man had danced attendance upon Anne Colleton at Marshlands before the war. Had his own past come back to haunt him after all these years? He shook his head and put on his thickest accent to answer, "Ah don' reckon so, suh."

The customer shrugged. "You must be right. The boy I knew spoke better than I do myself."

Boy. Even then, Scipio had been in his thirties. Whites in the CSA refused to take Negroes seriously. He supposed that was why the Red uprising during the war had got as far as it had. Not even clever whites like Miss Anne had imagined Negroes could conceive of grievances serious enough to make them take up arms for redress.

All that went through his head in a flash. To reassure the white man-he was Tony Somebody, and Anne Colleton had thought him a pompous ass-he said, "Ah talks lahk I talks, suh. Dis heah de onliest way Ah knows how." He wondered if he could speak like an educated white man any more. Or would that dialect of English have disappeared from his tongue like a foreign language seldom used?

"All right. Never mind," the customer said, and went back to his pheasant. When he walked out, he left a fifty-cent tip, as if to apologize for bothering Scipio. Noblesse oblige, Scipio thought, and made the silver coin disappear. These days, there were men desperate enough to kill for half a dollar.

It was after ten when the Huntsman's Lodge closed. Scipio worried less about being on the street in black tie and tails than he had during the day. Fewer whites would be out there to see him than during the day-and, with Augusta's bad street lighting, whoever was there wouldn't be able to get that good a look at him anyhow.

But as soon as he opened the door, he closed it again in a hurry and ducked back into the restaurant. "What's the matter with you, Xerxes?" demanded his manager, a skinny, energetic young white man named Jerry Dover. "Go on home. Get the hell out of here."

"Marse Jerry, I reckons I waits a while," Scipio answered. "Dem Freedom Party white folks"-he almost said buckra, but caught himself before using that word in front of a white-"is marchin' down de street. Don't want them seein' me, you don't mind too much."

He had no idea what Dover's politics were. Talking politics with a white man could only be futile and dangerous. But whatever else Dover might have been, he was no fool. The other three colored waiters in the place showed no eagerness to leave. "All right," the manager said. "Don't worry about it. Stay as long as you need to. Sooner or later, those folks out there'll be done, and then y'all can go on about your business."

But, staring out through the small panes of glass set into the door of the Huntsman's Lodge at eye level, Scipio wondered if Jerry Dover knew what he was talking about. Block after well-organized block of men and women-mostly men-paraded past on Marbury Street. Some carried Confederate flags. Some carried Freedom Party flags. Some carried torches, to make the rest easier to see and the gathering as a whole more impressive.

A lot of the men marched in step. Most of the ones who did wore the white shirts and butternut trousers of Freedom Party stalwarts. Some few of the disciplined marchers, though, were in what was almost but not quite Confederate uniform. They carried Tredegars whose bayonets gleamed bloody in the torchlight.

"Feather ston! Feather ston! Feather ston!" The endless chant came close to making Scipio long for the old cry of, Freedom! That had been a frustrated shout, the cry of men who didn't fully understand what they wanted or how to go about getting it. This… This promised trouble right around the corner, and said just what kind of trouble it was, too.

And the parade went on and on and on. Scipio wouldn't have believed that Augusta held so many people, let alone that it held so many Freedom Party backers. Jake Featherston wasn't in town. Neither was Willy Knight. These people had nothing special to lure them out of their houses. But they came. Maybe that was the scariest thing of all.

At last, after half an hour, the procession ended. Jerry Dover hadn't gone outside, either. He had pushed Scipio and the other blacks out of the way a few times to look at things for himself. "Well, well, well," he said when it was over and the raucous cries of Featherston! at last ebbed away. "I always wondered, but now I know. Those bastards really are crazy."

Scipio and the other waiters exchanged glances. Dover didn't need to say that. What white man in the CSA needed to make Negroes like him? The question was so ridiculous, it might not even have occurred to Scipio without the goad of something as massive as the Freedom Party procession.

The sheer scope of it got through to Dover, too. He spoke again: "Crazy or not, though, there's a hell of a lot of 'em, ain't there? Don't see how they're going to lose the election. Wish to God I did." He made pushing motions at the waiters. "They're gone. You can disappear, too."

Searchlights blazed from Allen Park, not far off to the west. With the door open, the rhythmic shouting of Jake Featherston's name grew louder and more frightening. Scipio scuttled back toward the Terry, a black dust mote adrift on that dreadful sea of sound.

J efferson Pinkard came to the Freedom Party meeting in his jailer's uniform. No time to go back to his apartment and put on the usual white shirt and butternut trousers, not if he wanted to be sure of having a place to sit down when he got to the old livery stable. Party meetings had never been so crowded. He saw faces he hadn't seen for years, and he saw plenty of faces he'd never seen before-more at every meeting, it seemed.

Now people want to hop on the train-when it looks like it's just about to get to the station, he thought, eyeing with no small scorn the strangers who suddenly called themselves Freedom Party men. He'd been with the Party train every inch of the way, through ups and downs and derailments. Hell, he'd been at the Alabama State Fairgrounds out at the west end of town when Grady Calkins murdered President Hampton. He hadn't given up even then, even when things looked blackest.

He sent the Johnny-come-latelies another sour stare. Would they have stuck with Jake Featherston when the going got rough? Not likely, not most of them. They were here because they wanted to ride a winner's coattails, not because they believed. You could use people like that, but could you ever really trust them? He had his doubts.

Caleb Briggs strode briskly up onto the rostrum. He had a microphone up there these days, to help his gas-ruined voice fill the meeting hall despite the buzz from the big crowd. In the row behind Pinkard, a man who'd been in the party for a while explained to a couple of new fish who Briggs was. Jeff muttered something incredulous under his breath. Didn't they know anything? Evidently not.

Behind the dentist who headed up the Freedom Party in Birmingham stood Confederate and Party flags. He crisply saluted each of them in turn, then stepped up to that microphone and said, "Freedom!"

"Freedom!" The roar from the crowd made Pinkard's head spin. The new Party men were good for something, anyhow-they had big mouths.

Briggs' smile showed white teeth. "Good to see y'all here," he rasped, "old friends and new." A few of the longtime Freedom Party men, Jeff among them, laughed softly. Caleb knew what was what, same as anybody else who'd seen the light a while ago. Smiling still, Briggs went on, "A month to go, boys, and then we get to the Promised Land. We've been in the wilderness a long time now, but we're almost there."

Pinkard whooped. "Freedom!" he shouted, as if he were a Negro responding to a preacher's sermon. He wasn't the only one, either. Far from it.