J efferson Pinkard shoveled a last forkful of ham and eggs into his mouth, then sprang to his feet. Emily, who'd already finished breakfast, was about to head out the door, and he didn't want to let her go without getting a kiss. Every time he took her in his arms, he felt like a brand new bridegroom. He knew how lucky he was, to have that feeling still after years of marriage.

All things considered, though, he'd had better kisses than the one he got this morning. "You all right, darlin'?" he asked his wife.

"I think so," she said. "Lately I'm just tired all the time. That's what it is, I reckon. They're workin' us hard. We got our quota kicked up again the other day -got to turn out more shells, make up for the ones the soldiers're shootin' at the damnyankees."

"Damnyankees," Pinkard muttered. The war had passed a year old now, no end in sight. "Who woulda thought they could fight like this here?" They stood in western Virginia, in Kentucky, in Sequoyah, in Texas, in Sonora. They were pushing Confederate forces out of Pennsylvania and Maryland, and giving the Canadians and British a hard time, too. "Ain't like it was in the last two wars."

Emily nodded, pecked him on the cheek, and hurried off to catch the trol ley. Her step didn't have the bounce to it he'd once taken for granted. She wasn't pink and perky, either, the way she had been; maybe working to fill the increased quota was what made her seem so wrung out, so sallow.

"God damn the war," Jeff said sincerely. He grabbed his dinner pail and headed for the Sloss works.

As they did every morning, Agrippa and Vespasian greeted him with polite respect. He accepted that as nothing less than his due. "Leonidas ain't got here yet," Vespasian told him.

"Why ain't I surprised?" Pinkard said scornfully. "You ever hear anything about Pericles?"

"No, suh," Vespasian said. "He still in the jailhouse. I dunno if they ever gonna let him out."

"Hope to Jesus they do," Jeff said. "That Leonidas, he don't have the brains God gave a possum. Hell, the two of you do better'n I do with him, on account of I got to carry all my own weight and about three quarters of his. I been yellin' for a replacement -an' I don't care if he's black or white, long as he ain't stupid-but no luck so far."

Vespasian and Agrippa looked at each other. Pinkard wondered if he'd offended them, calling Leonidas stupid. So much landed on Negroes in the Con federacy, they stuck together and defended their own whether their own deserved it or not. But, God damn it to hell, Leonidas was stupid. He would have been stupid if he were white. Hell, he would have been stupid if he were green.

Slowly, cautiously, Vespasian said, "Mistuh Pinkard, suh, this here would be a different place if mo' people cared about gettin' the job done an' less of 'em cared about who was doin' it." When Jeff didn't blow up at that remark, the black steelworker made another, even more wary, comment: "Not jus' a different place. A better place."

"Get your ass out of here. Go on, go home," Pinkard said. "You don't want those policemen throwin' you in the jug for sedition."

Vespasian took off, Agrippa right behind him. Pinkard looked after them with something as close to approval as he was likely to give two Negroes. They did their job, they didn't complain -much, they didn't try to rock the boat. What more could you want from people?

He looked around. Still no sign of Leonidas. He didn't miss him. A lot of ways, he was better off without him. Handling his shift by himself would leave him dog-tired when the closing whistle blew, but the world wouldn't end on account of that. Jeff knew what he was doing.

Leonidas came in about half an hour late. The floor foreman reamed him out about it as he started to work. When the fellow finally let him be, he shook his head and said, "Lord, I wish that man would shut hisself up. Got me a hangover, make my po' head ring like a bell."

Pinkard grunted. He'd done that -once in a great while. When your head already felt as if somebody were forging steel in there, going to a place where they really were forging steel wasn't high on the list of enjoyable things. Leonidas had been working here for only a couple of months, and this was a long way from the first time he'd strolled in a good deal the worse for wear. Stupid, Jeff thought again. Some people belonged in the cotton fields.

Leonidas got through the day without maiming either himself or Pinkard.

He managed partly by not doing much, but that didn't matter, since he never seemed to do much. Pinkard minded less than he would have with a more capable partner. The more Leonidas did, the more he was liable to foul up.

The quitting whistle made the young Negro jerk as if he'd sat on a nail. "Thank God, I can get out of here," he said, and proceeded to do just that, moving faster than he had out on the floor.

Pinkard followed more slowly. He was just as tired as he would have been had Leonidas stayed home with an ice bag or whatever his preferred hangover cure was. He hadn't had to do quite so much as he would have had Leonidas stayed home, but being careful for two was hard work.

When he got back to his house, he built up the fire in the stove, sliced a few potatoes, and set them to frying in lard in a black iron skillet likely made from metal worked at the Sloss foundry. They'd go nicely with the pork roast Emily had put in the oven over a low fire before she went off to work. It wasn't really cooking, he told himself, only a way to save time and have supper ready sooner.

Emily came in about twenty minutes after he did. "Smelled those potatoes outside, comin' up the walk," she said. "They always smell so good like that, give me some of my appetite back."

"You haven't hardly been eating enough to keep a bird alive," Pinkard said. He took the potatoes off the stove so they wouldn't burn while he was kissing his wife. He wondered if she was finally in a family way, only not far along enough to be sure. She was tired all the time, she hadn't been eating well, and he'd noticed at breakfast how sallow she was.

He took another look at her in the evening sunlight pouring through the kitchen window. She wasn't just sallow -her skin was downright yellow. "Honey, what the dickens is the matter with you?" he demanded, and heard the alarm clanging in his voice.

"What do you mean, what's the matter with me?" Emily said.

He held her hand up in a sunbeam. It looked all the more yellow against his own rough, red, scarred skin. "I mean you're only a couple steps this way from bein' the color of a baby chick, that's what."

"Oh, that," his wife answered. "I didn't even hardly notice. It happens to a lot of the girls who work around the smokeless powder like me. It does somethin' to your liver, blamed if I know what, but it makes you yellow that way. Like I say, some of the girls are almost lemon color."

"Does it get better?" Jeff demanded.

"Oh, yeah, it does," Emily said casually. "When somebody gets sick-not just yellow, I mean, but really sick-they move her to another section of the plant for a while, till she gets over it. We haven't had but a couple of people come down that bad."

"Oh." Pinkard was about to shout at her, to demand that she quit her job and come back home where she belonged. The words died unspoken. People got killed every year at the Sloss works, and had been getting killed there long before the war pushed everybody up into a higher gear. He remembered poor Sid Williamson. Emily and her comrades were making munitions for the CSA. The country depended on them, hardly less than it did on the courage and tenacity of the Confederate soldiers.

"It'll be all right, darlin'," Emily said. "Now why don't you go sit down? I'll finish doin' up the potatoes and bring you your supper."