"Look to be, sir," one of the men said after he'd clambered up to inspect McGregor's carpentry at close range. The other two soon called agreement.

"All right, Mr. McGregor," Hannebrink said, easygoing, in nothing like a hurry. "Say you used a pound or two of nails there. By what I hear, you bought more like twenty pounds. Where's the rest of 'em?"

"On my workbench here." McGregor pointed again. "Still in the box Henry Gibbon used for 'em."

Captain Hannebrink strode over. He picked up a couple of the nails. "New, all right," he said. "Still have that shine to 'em." He let them clank back in among their fellows, then picked up the box. He nodded again. "Heft is about right, figuring in what you would have used. Good enough, Mr. McGregor. Thank you."

"Want to tell me what this is all about?" McGregor asked.

"No." Without another word, Hannebrink and the U.S. soldiers left the barn, got into their motorcars, and drove back toward Rosenfeld. Maude started to say something. McGregor set a hand on her shoulder and shook his head. She took their daughters back into the house. He wondered if she'd ask him questions later. She didn't do that, either.

A day or two later, he had to go into town again himself. He stopped by the post office to see if Wilfred Rokeby had any stamps but those larcenous semipostals. Rokeby didn't, but he did have news: "The Knights are in more trouble with the Yanks," he said.

"What now?" McGregor asked. "Haven't been off the farm since I was here last, and nobody much comes and visits. People figure bad luck rubs off, seems like."

"Bomb in the roadway near their land killed the man who stepped on it last week, and three more besides," Rokeby answered. "Good many hurt, too. Yanks say they planted it because of their boy."

"Stupid to set a bomb by your own house," McGregor remarked, "but the Knights have never been long on brains, you ask me. Biddy's always going around gossiping about this and that, and Jack's no better. Anybody who runs on at the mouth that way, you have to figure there's no sense behind it."

"That's so." Rokeby nodded vigorously, but not vigorously enough to disturb the greased perfection of his hair. "They would even talk to the Americans now and then, people say, in spite of what happened to their boy."

"Really?" McGregor sucked on his pipe. "I have to tell you I hadn't heard that." Because he had to tell it to Rokeby didn't make it true. As he'd calculated, Captain Hannebrink had been so interested in those new nails that he hadn't thought buying new ones meant McGregor could get rid of old ones. And a farm was a big place. You could search it from now till doomsday and never find dynamite and fuse and blasting caps, even if they were there-which some of them, at any rate, weren't, not any more. Some of the Yankees blown to hell and gone, the runny-mouthed Knights in hot water-very hot water, he hoped-with the occupying authorities…Two revenges at once wasn't bad. "No, I hadn't heard that," McGregor repeated. "Too bad."

Nellie Semphroch set fresh coffee in front of the Confederate colonel. "I do thank you, ma'am," he said, courteous as the Rebs were most of the time. Once the words had passed his lips, though, he might have forgotten she existed. Turning back to the other officers at the table, he took up where he'd left off: "If we have to leave this town, we ought to treat it the way the Romans treated Carthage."

The classical allusion meant nothing to Nellie. The officers to whom he was speaking understood it, though. "Leave no stone atop another?" a lieutenant-colonel said.

Another colonel nodded. "We'll give the damnyankees a desert to come home to, not a capital. This place has been frowning down on the Confederacy as long as we've been independent."

"Too right it has," said the first colonel, the one to whom Nellie had given the new cup of coffee. "Let them rule from Philadelphia. Washington was a capital made before we saw how we were treated in that union."

"Tyrants they were, tyrants they are, tyrants they shall ever be," the second colonel agreed. "The White House, the Capitol, all the departments-dynamite them all, I say. The Yankees only maintained their presence here after the War of Secession to irk us."

Nellie glanced over toward Edna, hoping her daughter was listening as the Rebel officers calmly discussed the destruction of the capital of the United States. Edna, however, was casting sheep's eyes at Lieutenant Kincaid. Why should she care? Nellie thought bitterly. She's got a Rebel officer for a fiance.

The lieutenant-colonel said, "Too bad about the Washington Monument. No matter what we did with the rest of the town, I would have left that standing. Washington was a Virginian, after all."

"Fortunes of war," the colonel said. "Can't be helped-it was in the way of our barrage when the war started, and of the damnyankees' fire once we forced an entrance into the city."

"That sort of destruction is one thing," the lieutenant-colonel said. "But deliberately wrecking the monuments as we retire may cost us Yankee retribution elsewhere."

For a wonder, that made both colonels thoughtful. Before the war, the arrogant Rebs wouldn't have worried about how the USA might respond to anything they did. Now-Now Nellie had a hard time holding on to her polite mask. Now they'd learned better.

Edna got up and filled Nicholas Kincaid's coffee cup. She didn't charge him, which annoyed Nellie but about which she could say nothing. She didn't want Edna to marry the Confederate lieutenant-she didn't want Edna marrying any man-but she knew she couldn't do anything to stop it. She consoled herself by thinking that marrying Kincaid might get Edna out of Washington before the United States battered their way back into the city. Had Nellie had some way of escaping the bloodbath that likely lay ahead, she would have taken it.

She did have a way to escape the coffeehouse, if only for a little while. "I'm going across the street to see Mr. Jacobs," she said to Edna. "Take care of everybody while I'm gone, would you, dear?"

"All right, Ma," Edna said sulkily. She no doubt suspected that her mother wanted to keep her from spending so much time with Nicholas Kincaid. She was right, too, but she couldn't do anything about it.

The bell above Jacobs' door jangled when Nellie came in. The cobbler looked up from the boot he was resoling. "Why, hello, Nellie," he said, as if his fondest wish had just been realized. "How good to see you this morning."

"Good to see you, too, Hal," Nellie said, a little stiffly. She was still nervous about having let him kiss her once, and even more nervous about having liked it. But that didn't matter, or didn't matter much. Business was business, and wouldn't keep. "You remember how I told you not so long ago that the Rebs would do anything to try and hang onto Washington, on account of they reckoned it was their capital by rights, and not ours?"

"Yes, of course I remember that," Jacobs said, peering at her through his spectacles. Then he took them off, blinked a couple of times as he set them on the counter, and looked up at her again. He smiled. "That's better."

Nellie said, "I think they're starting to get the idea they can't keep Washington no matter what they do. The USA won't get it back in one piece, sounds like." She told the shoemaker what the Confederate officers had been discussing in the coffeehouse.

Jacobs clucked reproachfully. "This is foolish wickedness," he said. "No other word for it, Widow Sem-Nellie. I promise you, I will make certain it is known, if you happen to be the first to have heard of it. Your country owes you a great debt if we can use this knowledge to keep the CSA from carrying out such a vile scheme."

"That would be good, I guess," she said. "If they want to show they're grateful, they can keep from shelling this part of town when their guns get into range."