"Good luck," said David Hamburger, who was seventeen and was raising a downy mustache that made him look younger rather than older.

"Get lots of Rebs or Canucks-wherever they send you," said Isaac, who was two years younger. Neither of them was yet eligible for conscription. As with a lot of young men, too, they still thought of war as adventure. The black-bordered casualty lists meant nothing to them.

Yossel answered Sophie, not them: "I volunteered to help the United States get back what they lost: what they had taken away from them. I volunteered because the Confederates and the English and the French deserve to be put down for what they have done to us-and because they are all allies of the Russians." No Lithuanian Jew was likely to think kind thoughts of Czar Nicholas and his regime.

"You've fallen victim to the capitalists' propaganda," Flora exclaimed. Everyone turned to look at her. "Don't you see?" she said. "Workers get nothing from this war, nothing but suffering and death. The ones who make the money are the factory owners and the munitions merchants. Don't listen to their lies, Yossel."

"I am in the United States," Yossel said stiffly. "Now I can be of the United States, too. This is my country. I will fight for it. And now, even if I wanted to, I could not withdraw my enlistment. But I do not want to."

Sophie started to cry. So did her mother. After a moment, so did Esther. Isaac and David both shouted angrily at Flora. Her father, Benjamin Hamburger, stood silent, puffing on his pipe. He didn't usually vote Socialist, but he came closer than the rest of the family to sympathizing with the Party's goals.

Yossel went back to explaining why he'd enlisted, but no one, save possibly Flora's father, was listening to him. Flora, desperate to get away, wished she'd stayed out on the fire escape. No one heeded her warnings. No one would-till too late, she feared.

A long with the rest of Captain Lincoln's command, Corporal Stephen Ramsay rode out of Jennings, Sequoyah, on horseback to repel U.S. raiders. "Wouldn't think the damnyankees'd get the idea so quick," he said mournfully. It had rained the night before, and the horses were kicking up a lot of mud. Everybody would be filthy by the time the company got back into Jennings -everybody who was alive.

Lincoln said, "They're money-grubbing bastards, the Yankees. A chance to grab the oil south of the Cimarron 'd look good to 'em. Then they can ship it over to the Huns, to burn Belgian babies with."

"Good luck to anybody shippin' anything on the Atlantic," Ramsay said. "Best I can tell, it's like a cavalry campaign a whole ocean wide."

Lincoln chuckled at that, though Ramsay had meant it seriously. Warships and liners and freighters and submarines from the CSA and the USA and England and France and Germany were scurrying all over the ocean, and shooting at one another whenever they knocked heads.

Ramsay added, "This here is better country for fightin' than the regular prairie or the ocean. If we can't hold the Yanks the far side of the river, we ain't gonna hold 'em anywheres."

"I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, Corporal," Captain Lincoln said. The territory between the Cimarron and the Arkansas, which came together about twenty miles east of Jennings, was rough and rugged: wooded hills and gullies took over for prairie. There were caves in the hills, if you knew where to find them. Outlaws and robbers had infested the area for years, because just about all the people who could find them after they'd fled from their crimes were either friends or relations.

"One other thing," Ramsay said. "They ain't gonna get one o' those armored automobiles through here. You try and run a motorcar in this kind of landscape and it'll fall to pieces before you've gone ten miles."

"Damn good thing, too," the company commander said, to which Ram say could only nod. A lot of the men with them in the company were new recruits. Confederate raids into Kansas hadn't lasted long; the damnyankees had the initiative now, pushing down into Sequoyah and threatening the oil fields that gave the Confederacy so much of its petroleum.

The U.S. troopers were not better soldiers than their Confederate counterparts; anyone who claimed they were would have got himself pounded by any cavalryman in butternut who happened to hear. But what Ramsay and Lincoln had feared from the time of their first encounter was a reality: the U.S. cavalry usually advanced with armored cars bolstering the horsemen. Confederate armored automobiles, by contrast, were often promised, seldom seen. In open country, protected, mobile machine guns were deadly all out of proportion to their numbers.

Ramsay chuckled reminiscently as an exception to that rule came to mind. "Remember when we had that battery of field artillery with us, up near the border with the Yankees? We made 'em pay that day, by Jesus."

"Sure did," Captain Lincoln agreed. "Sure do. Pretty damn fine to have guns to outrange those damn cars-and to blow one of 'em to hell and gone when you hit it."

"Yes, sir," Ramsay said enthusiastically. The quick-firing three-inch field guns had hit two armored cars, setting them ablaze and making their fellows scuttle on back toward Kansas. They'd also started a grass fire that had slowed up the advance of the U.S. horsemen, who weren't nearly so eager to go forward without their mechanical buddies, anyhow.

But there weren't enough batteries of field artillery to go around, and the Yankees kept coming. Even if they weren't very good at what they did, enough mediocre soldiers were eventually liable to wear down a smaller force of good ones. And now parts of Sequoyah lay in U.S. hands.

Ramsay's horse stumbled. What passed for roads here in these badlands were pretty miserable even when they were dry. When they were wet, puddles disguised potholes deep enough to break an animal's leg-sometimes, it seemed, deep enough to drown an animal.

He sharply jerked the horse's head up. The beast let out an indignant squeal of complaint, but it didn't fall. Ramsay knew everything there was to know about complaining-he was a soldier, after all. He'd heard better, from men and horses.

The damp, muddy road wound round the edge of some bare-branched scrub oaks and opened out into a valley wider than most. A couple of farms took up most of the horizontal land and some that wasn't: the sheep grazing on a hillside would have done better if their right legs had been shorter than their left. Smoke curled up from the chimneys of both wooden farmhouses: cabins might have been a better word for them.

A woman wearing a kerchief, a man's flannel shirt, and a long calico dress was tossing corn to some scrawny chickens between one farmhouse and the barn. As the cavalry company drew nearer, Ramsay saw she was a half-breed, or maybe a full-blooded Indian. Sequoyah held more Indians than the rest of the Confederacy put together, and had even elected a couple of Indian congressmen and a senator.

Seeing soldiers approaching, the woman grabbed a shotgun that was leaning up against a stump. It wouldn't have done her much good, not against a cavalry company, but Ramsay admired her spirit. After a moment, the woman lowered the barrel of the shotgun, though she didn't let go of it. "You're Confederates, ain't you?" she said, her words not just uneducated but also flavored with an odd accent: she was Indian, sure enough.

"Yes, we're Confederates," Captain Lincoln answered gravely, brushing the brim of his hat with a forefinger. He pointed to the flag the standard bearer carried. "See for yourself, ma'am."

The woman peered at it, peered at him, and then nodded. She turned the barrel of the shotgun away from the troopers, using it to point north and west. "Yankees in them woods. Leastways, they was there last night. Seen their fires. Don't know how many-less'n you, reckon. Go over there and kill 'em."