McGregor had been too worried about his daughter even to think about what might have blown up out there. Now he looked, too. Sure enough, the wood-and-brick building that had housed Rosenfeld's weekly newspaper was nothing but a ruin now, and beginning to burn. If the fire engines didn't get here in a tearing hurry, that whole block was liable to go up in smoke, and maybe this one, too, if the wind blew sparks across the street.

In the street lay U.S. soldiers, some down and writhing, some down and still. A couple of horses were down, too, screaming like women in torment. An officer went up to them and quickly put them out of their torment with his pistol. McGregor thought well of him for that; he would have done the same.

In that spirit, he set Mary down and went out of the general store to see if he could do anything for the wounded U.S. soldiers. They were the enemy, yes, but watching anybody suffer wasn't easy. One of them had a leg bent at an un natural angle. McGregor knew how to set broken bones.

He never got the chance. The officer who'd shot the two horses swung up his pistol and aimed it at McGregor's head. "Don't move, Canuck," he snapped. "You'll be hostage number one. We'll take twenty of you bastards, and if the bomber doesn't give himself up, we'll line you up against a wall and teach you a lesson you'll remember the rest of your life." He laughed.

McGregor froze. He'd known the Yankees did things like that, but he'd never imagined it could happen to him.

Mary came flying out of the general store. "Don't you point a gun at my pa!" she screamed at the officer. McGregor grabbed her before she could hurl herself against the American. He had to move to do that, but the man didn't fire.

Henry Gibbon came out of the store, too. "Have a heart, Crane," he said to the U.S. officer. "Arthur McGregor's no bomber, and he doesn't live in town, so he doesn't make much of a hostage, neither. Only reason he came in is that today's his little girl's seventh birthday." He pointed to Mary.

The U.S. officer-Crane-scowled-but after a moment he lowered the pistol. "All right," he said to McGregor. "Get the hell out of here."

McGregor's legs felt loose and light with fear and relief, so he seemed to be floating above the ground, not walking on it. He steered Mary toward the side street on which he'd left the wagon.

"But I didn't get my birthday presents!" she said, and started to cry.

"Oh, yes, you did," he told her.

"No, I didn't!" she said. "Not anything, not even one peppermint drop."

"Oh, yes, you did," he repeated, so emphatically that she looked up in puzzled curiosity. He pointed to himself. "Do you know what you got? You got to keep me."

She kept on crying. He wasn't a doll or a ball or a top or a peppermint drop. He didn't care. He was alive, and he was going to stay that way a while longer.

Jefferson Pinkard got to the foundry floor at the Sloss works a few minutes early, as he usually did. Vespasian and Agrippa, the two Negroes who'd taken over the night shift, nodded and said, "Mornin', Mistuh Pinkard," together.

"Mornin'," Pinkard said. Both blacks had proved themselves solid workers, worthy of being talked with almost as if they were white men. He looked around. "Where's Pericles at? He's usually in here before I am."

After a pause, Vespasian said, "He ain't corain' in today, Mistuh Pinkard."

"Oh?" Jeff said. "He sick?" Pericles and Vespasian were kin or in-laws or something of the sort; he couldn't quite remember what. Just because you talked with black men didn't mean you had to keep track of every little thing about them.

Vespasian shook his head. "No, suh, he ain't sick," he answered. He sounded tired unto death, not just because of the night's work but also from a lifetime's worth of weariness. A moment later, the words dragging out of him one by one, he went on, "No, suh, like I say, he ain't sick. He in de jailhouse."

"In the jailhouse? Pericles?" That caught Pinkard by surprise. "What the devil did he do? Get drunk and go after somebody with a busted bottle?" That didn't sound like Pericles, a sober-sided young buck if ever there was one.

And Vespasian shook his head again. "No, suh. He do somethin' like that, we can fix it. He in de jailhouse for -sedition." He whispered the word, pronouncing it with exaggerated care.

"Sedition?" Now Jefferson Pinkard frankly stared. Vespasian was right, he thought. You could fix a charge of brawling against a black man easily enough -provided he hadn't hit a white, of course. If he was a good worker, a couple of words from his boss to the police or the judge would get him off with a small fine, maybe just a lecture about keeping his nose clean. But sedition-that was another ball of wax.

Neither Vespasian nor Agrippa said much more about it. They waited till it was time for them to go off shift, then left in a hurry. Pinkard didn't suppose he could blame them. When one of your own got into trouble, you didn't spend a lot of time talking about that trouble with an outsider.

He had to start his shift by his lonesome, which left him too busy to think about anything else. About half an hour into the shift, a colored fellow who introduced himself as Leonidas joined him. Jeff hoped to high heaven Leonidas wouldn't take Pericles' place for good. He was strong enough, but he wasn't very smart, and he didn't remember from one minute to the next what Pinkard had told him. Jeff kept him from getting hurt or from messing up the job at least half a dozen times that morning. It was more nerve-racking than doing everything by himself would have been, because he never knew ahead of time when or how Leonidas would go wrong, and had to stay on his toes every second.

When the lunch whistle blew, Pinkard sighed with relief-half an hour when he wouldn't have to worry. "See you at one, suh," Leonidas said, taking his dinner bucket and heading off to eat with other Negroes.

"Yeah," Pinkard said. He wondered if Leonidas could find some way to kill himself when he wasn't anywhere near the foundry floor. He wouldn't have been a bit surprised: the Negro was an accident waiting to happen, and probably could happen any old place.

Pinkard opened his own dinner pail. He had a chunk of cornbread and a couple of pieces of roasted chicken in there: leftovers from the night before. He'd just started to eat when a couple of middle-aged fellows in gray police uniforms came up to him. "You Jefferson Davis Pinkard?" asked the one who wore a matching gray mustache.

"That's me," Jeff said with his mouth full. He chewed, swallowed, and then asked more clearly, "Who're you?"

"I'm Bob Mulcahy," the policeman with the mustache answered. He pointed to his clean-shaven partner. "This here's Bill Fitzcolville. We're looking into the matter of a nigger named Pericles. Hear tell he's been working alongside you a while."

"That's a fact," Pinkard agreed, and took another bite of chicken. They weren't going to hold things up on the floor because he was talking with po lice. If he didn't feed his face, he'd have to go hungry till suppertime.

"This Pericles, he been a troublemaker, uppity, anything like that?" Mul cahy asked.

"Not hardly." Pinkard shook his head. "Didn't cotton to the notion of workin' with a nigger, not even a little bit, I tell you. But it ain't worked out too bad. He does his job -did his job, I guess I oughta say. This nigger Leonidas, buck they gave me instead of him, he ain't fit to carry guts to a bear, doesn't look like. But Pericles, he pulled his weight."

Fitzcolville scribbled down his words in a notebook. Mulcahy shifted a good-sized chaw of tobacco from right cheek to left, then asked. "This nigger Pericles, he a smart fellow or a dumb one?"