"Whole powerful lot o' white folks is gone to be sojers," Cassius pointed out. "But they still got to have they shells to shoot, o' the damnyankees kick they butts. Nigger kin do the job, nigger gonna get the job. They don' pay he like he was white folks, so the factory bosses, they happy, an' Jonah, he happy, too, 'cause they do pay more'n he make here. An' Letty, she gwine try an' fin' work at one of they textile plants takin' care o' the cotton after it picked 'stead o' befo'."

"Mought do that my own self," said one of Cassius' friends, a big man called Island for no reason Scipio had ever been able to learn. "Mo' money fo' less work sound right good."

"Mo' money, yeah," Cassius said. "Less work?" He snorted. "When you ever know white folks give mo' money 'cep' fo' mo' work, an' heaps o' times not then, neither."

Island thought about that, then nodded. But he said, "Hard to think o' anything bein' mo' work'n growin' cotton."

Scipio, who knew how lucky he was to have escaped the fields, also nodded. Plenty of field hands would think the same way; he was sure of that. Jonah and Letitia wouldn't be the only ones to head off the plantation for the factory. He was sure of that, too. And how would the mistress like it? Not much, he figured. Could she do anything about it? He wasn't sure about that. She was a power, but not the only one in the state, not by a long shot.

Marshlands, though, wasn't the state. Here, for those who remained here, her word was still law. Scipio said, "Mistress want a couple gobblers for she dinner party tomorrow night. Kin you get 'em, Cass?"

"Reckon I kin," the hunter answered. His eyes, cool and confident, flicked to the shotgun above the mantel. "Yeah, reckon I kin."

Scipio's eyes also went to the gun and the mantel. On the length of pine wood sat a pamphlet or little book, upside down and open. "What this?" Scipio asked, and reached for it, expecting to find a religious tract. And sure enough, the bright blue paper cover said,

, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1912.

Idly, he picked it up, wondering what hymn Cassius, who'd never struck him as pious, was learning. At that same moment, Island slammed the door to the cottage shut. Scipio hardly noticed. He was staring down at the page to which the pamphlet had been opened. The printing was as bad and smudgy as he'd expected. The words were anything but what he'd expected: Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the…

He noticed how quiet it had grown inside the cottage. He looked up from the page and saw Cassius and Island and the rest of the people who'd been in there with him, and how they were all staring at him. He didn't like what he saw in their eyes. Those intent looks frightened him even more than the book he held in his hands, and that wasn't easy.

"Do Jesus!" he said softly. "The mistress find out you got this, she not gwine whip you. She gwine hang you. Ain't gonna bother with no law, ain't gonna bother with no cou't. Niggers what spread revolutionary propaganda"-he brought out those two words in his educated voice, as he'd never imagined saying them in the dialect he'd been born speaking-"they gots to die."

"We knows," Cassius said, just as softly. "So they kills we fast 'stead of slow. So what? White folks, they in this big war. They ain't got time to pay no attention to we, we who is doin' they work fo' they. One fine day, they ain't 'spectin' it nohow, the revolution come. It a whole new world then."

"Come the revolution," one of the women- Cherry, her name wassaid with a longing croon in her voice, the way a lot of women sounded in the clapboard Baptist church of a Sunday morning, praying for Jesus' second coming. "Come the revolution, this here gwine be a different country, it sho' will."

Something glittered in Island 's hand- a knife. Scipio watched it with horrified fascination. He gathered himself to fight, knowing how bad his chances were. Island glanced over at Cassius. "We got to shut he up. He a house nigger, tell everything he know to the mistress."

Somehow- perhaps by magic- Cassius had produced a knife, too. Al most meditatively, he said, "Kip here, he have the chance to do me wrong plenty times. He never do it oncet, not even. He even take the blame hisself when huntin' go bad. Maybe he keep a secret here, too. Kip, what you think o' that book you holdin'?"

"I think niggers rise up against white folks, we get licked," Scipio answered truthfully. "I think I wish I wasn't so curious." How long had Karl Marx been here at Marshlands? The mistress didn't have the first notion Red revolution was simmering under her nose. Scipio hadn't the first notion, either. What was that white poet's line? Ignorance is bliss, that was it. That white folks had known what he was talking about.

Cassius said, "Mos' times, sho', we get licked. Ain't so many guns away from the border, now. Ain't so many white folks to tote 'em, neither. We rise up, they gonna use they army 'gainst we? Damnyankees tromp they into the mud, they try that." He wasn't arguing; he'd already made up his mind, and might have been a preacher talking about the Gospel. His gaze sharpened. "Now, tell me true, Kip- you gwine say about this to the mistress?"

"Not a word," Scipio declared. He thought about adding some strong oath to that, but in the end held his tongue. It was likelier to make Cassius and the others think he was lying than to make them believe him.

"I still say we stick he," Island said.

But Cassius shook his head. "I don' think he talk. He pay if he do, on account of we ain't the onliest ones here, an' he don' know who all we is. An' mistress, she don' know 'bout, she don' care 'bout no revolution. All she care about them crazy paintings, look like 'splosion in a shingle factory. She don' sniff roun', way some masters do. She start changin' she mind 'bout that, Kip, he tell us. Ain't that so, Kip?"

"That so," Scipio agreed through dry lips. Too much had happened too fast today. Having President Wilson come to Marshlands was a surprise. Knowing Karl Marx had come to Marshlands was a shock. Finding out Marx had come to Marshlands had almost proved deadly.

But he would live. His legs swayed under him in reaction and relief. Then he realized how he would be living from here on out. Playing both ends against the middle didn't begin to describe it. A phrase a preacher had used a few weeks before fit better. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: that was how he felt, all right.

Corporal Chester Martin paused behind an oak to spy out the ground ahead. Somewhere not far ahead was the Confederate strongpoint his squad had been sent out to find. In this miserable country, they were liable to find it by blundering onto it, in which case none of them would be able to bring the news back to the artillery so the boys with the red piping on their hats could give it a good walloping.

"I think God had His mind on something else when He was making this part of Virginia," he muttered under his breath.

One of his privates sprawled beneath a bush close enough to let him hear that mutter. Roger Hodges chuckled, almost inaudibly. "You ought to know better'n that," he answered in an upcountry twang that said he'd been born not far away. "God ain't had nothin' to do with it. This here part of the world is the Devil's business, and no mistake."

"Won't get any arguments from me," Martin answered. "Nothin' but up-and-down mountains and trees and brush and little creeks that don't go anywhere. The couple-three farms we found, they look like they're right out of Daniel Boone. And the people talk even funnier than you do, Roger. Hell of a place to try and fight a war, that's all I got to say."