Another story listed men known to be prisoners of war, and gave their kin instructions on how to send them packages. "All parcels are subject to search," it warned. "Any found containing contraband of any description will result in the addressee's forfeiting all rights to receive future parcels."

That blunt warning took McGregor to the columns of small print that covered the broader world. And there, most of all, that world might have turned upside down with the arrival of the Americans. Suddenly Germany became the trusted ally, England and France the hated foes. The German failure in front of Paris was glossed over as a small setback, and much made of the victory the Kaiser's forces had won over Russians poking their noses into eastern Prussia.

As far as the Register was concerned, the United States could do no wrong, though each story did bear the disclaimer, furnished by the American Military Information Bureau. If you believed what you read, the Yanks were in Winnipeg, in Toronto, and bombarding Montreal and Quebec City, to say nothing of the triumphs they'd won against the Confederacy and the victories their Atlantic Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet had gained over the Royal Navy and its French and Confederate allies.

McGregor set the Register back on the counter. "What do you think of all this?" he asked Henry Gibbon.

The storekeeper paused before he spoke. "Well, the paper it's on is pretty thin now," he said at last. "That makes it better for wipin' your ass than it used to be."

McGregor stared at him, then chuckled, down deep in his throat. "I don't expect the American Military Information Board'd like that answer, Henry."

"Give me a penny and I'll care a cent's worth," Gibbon answered. This time, both men laughed.

"Come on, you damn nigger, shake a leg!" the lieutenant shouted, a silver bar gleaming on each shoulder strap. "You think we've got all day to unload this stuff? Get your lazy, stinking black ass in gear, or you'll be sorry you were ever born, and you can take that to the bank."

"I'm comin', sir, fast as I can," Cincinnatus answered. He walked onto the barge, threw a hundred-pound sack of corn onto his shoulder, and carried it to the waiting motor truck. The truck rocked on its springs as he tossed the sack on top of the others already in the cargo bed.

"Faster, dammit!" the lieutenant screamed, setting a hand on the grip of his pistol. He clapped the other hand to his forehead, and almost knocked the green-gray cap off his head. "Jesus Christ, no wonder the stinking Rebs go on about niggers the way they do."

Cincinnatus would have liked to see the lieutenant haul as much as he was hauling, or even half as much. The noisy little peckerwood ofay'd fall over dead. But he had the gun, and he had the rest of the U.S. Army behind him, and so Cincinnatus didn't see that he had much choice about doing what he was told.

He had no great love for the whites for whom he'd laboured here in Covington. They'd told the truth about one thing, though: he didn't get better treatment now that the United States was running the town than he had when the Stars and Bars flew here. Some ways, things were worse. The whites who lived in Covington-Tom Kennedy came to mind-dealt with Negroes every day and were used to them. A lot of the soldiers from the United States -this buckra lieutenant surely among them-had never set eyes on a black man before they invaded the Confederacy. They treated Negroes like mules, or maybe like steam engines.

Another grunt, another sack of grain on his shoulder, another walk to the truck. The lieutenant shouted at him every inch of the way. No, you didn't cuss a steam engine the way that fellow cussed Cincinnatus. The Negro couldn't figure out whether the U.S. soldier blamed him for being black or for being the reason the South had broken away from the United States. He didn't think the lieutenant knew, or cared. The man could abuse him with impunity, and he did.

"Once we win here, we'll ship all you nigger bastards back to Africa," he said, sounding ready, willing, and able to pilot the boat himself.

Sensibly, Cincinnatus kept his mouth shut. Even if he hadn't had a lot of schooling, though, he could do arithmetic better than that damnfool lieutenant. There were something like ten million Negroes in the Confederate States. That made for a lot of boat trips back and forth across the ocean. For that matter, the USA hadn't shipped its own Negroes back to Africa. If they weren't there any more, whom would the white folks have left to despise?

At last, the back of the truck was full. Cincinnatus picked up a galvanized bucket, drank some water, and poured the rest over his head. The lieutenant glowered at him, but let him do it. Maybe he'd convinced the fellow he really was working.

A white man, a U.S. soldier, drove away in the truck. "I could do that, suh," Cincinnatus told the lieutenant. "You could use your boys for nothin' but fightin' then."

"No," the lieutenant barked, and Cincinnatus shut up again. If the damnyankee wanted to be stupid, that was his lookout.

But the damnyankees weren't stupid, not in everything, and you were in trouble if you didn't remember that. The railroad bridge and the highway bridge over the Ohio had crashed into the water as soon as the war started, blown up by Confederate sappers to keep U.S. troops from using them. The Yankee bombardment had done a lot of damage to the Covington docks and, when invasion looked imminent, the Confederates had done a lot more, again to keep the United States from gaining a military advantage. When Cincinnatus came out of the storm cellar of his house after the Confederate army retreated southward and the artillery fire tapered off, he was horrified at the devastation all around.

Things still looked like hell. The fires were out, yes, but every third build ing, or so it seemed, was either wrecked or had a hole bitten out of it. You didn't want to walk down the street without shoes; you'd slice your feet to ribbons on the knife-sharp shards of glass that sparkled like diamonds in the sun and were sometimes drifted inches deep.

None of that had kept U.S. forces from exploiting Covington once they'd seized it. Not one but two railroad bridges and one for wagons and trucks came down from Ohio now; they were pontoon bridges that blocked the river to water traffic, but the damnyankees didn't seem to care about that. And the docks had got back in working order faster than Cincinnatus had imagined possible. Barges and ferries-anything that would float-worked alongside the bridges in moving men and materiel down toward the fighting. The U.S. Army engineers knew what they were doing, no two ways about that.

Cincinnatus sighed. If the damnyankees had done as well dealing with the people of Covington as they had with transportation into and out of the place, everybody would have been better off. Nobody, though, had taught them the first thing about how to engineer human beings, and they weren't good at it. This damn lieutenant was a case in point.

He screamed at Cincinnatus and the rest of the Negroes doing stevedore work on the docks from the minute they got there to the minute they left. And he didn't just hate Negroes; whenever he had to deal with the white Southerner, he was every bit as bad.

When the owner of a livery stable complained about having had some horses requisitioned without getting paid for them, the lieutenant told him, "What you need isn't money or horses; it's the horsewhip, nothing else but. You damned traitor, you're dealing with the United States of America now, not your Rebel government. You'd better walk small or you'll be sorry. We're back now, and we're going to stay, and if you don't like it, you can jump in the river for all I care."