Her vehemence made little chills run up Ramsay's back. One thing you could rely on: the Indians in the state of Sequoyah were loyal to Richmond. The government of the United States had made them pack up and leave their original homelands back east for this country. Since the War of Secession, though, the Confederacy had treated them with forbearance, and that was paying off now.

"Whereabouts exactly were they?" Captain Lincoln asked, getting down off his horse and standing beside the woman. A chicken walked over and pecked at the brass buckle of his boot-maybe the stupid bird thought it was a grain of corn.

The woman pointed again. "Halfway up this here side of that hill-you see it? Ain't seen 'em move out since. Maybe they still there."

Ramsay doubted that, but you never could tell. Maybe they'd decided to wait out the bad weather-even though it wasn't raining now-or maybe they were waiting for reinforcements to come up before they started pushing south again. Any which way, the company would have to ride on up there and find out what was going on.

Captain Lincoln touched his hat again. "Thank you, ma'am. Don't want to ride into trouble blind, you know."

"You just keep them damnyankees from tramplin' our garden and stealin' our critters," the woman said, as if such petty thievery were the only reason U.S. soldiers were in Sequoyah now. She probably thought that; Ramsay wondered if she'd been off this farm since she was married.

As if the thought had gone straight from his head to Captain Lincoln's, the company commander's voice suddenly got hard and suspicious as he demanded, "Where's your husband at?"

The farm woman spat, right between his feet. "Where the hell you think he's at?" she snapped. "He got drug into the Army, and I jus' hope to Jesus he come home again."

"Sorry, ma'am," Lincoln said, colour rising in his face. A couple of the troopers snickered. One of them was in Ramsay's squad. He'd rake Parker over the coals later on; couldn't let discipline go to pot. The captain was saying, "Hope he comes home, too. Hope we all do, when this war is over." He swung back up into the saddle and waved to the company. "Let's go find those damnyankees."

They rode in loose order, with plenty of scouts forward and more out on either flank. This whole country was made for bushwhacking. And then, up ahead, they heard a brisk crackle of gunfire. "Somebody else done found 'em for us," Ramsay yelled. "Now we go in there and clean 'em out."

As the Confederates rode toward the shooting, a machine gun started hammering away. "That's Yankees, all right," Lincoln said. "God knows the outlaws have plenty of rifles, but they don't have any of those."

A winding little track led through the scrub oaks toward the fighting. Lincoln dismounted his men and sent them through the woods on foot, using them like dragoons rather than true cavalry. Ramsay heartily approved- galloping up that path was asking to be massacred.

Before long, the dismounted troopers ran into Yankee pickets. Whoever was commanding the U.S. forces was doing the same thing with them as Lincoln was with the Confederates: they might have ridden to get to the fight, but they were making it on foot.

They also seemed to be outnumbered, and had to give ground again and again to keep from being outflanked and cut off. What with the thick undergrowth, you couldn't see much. If anything moved, you took a shot at it. And when you moved, people you couldn't spot shot at you. Getting a taste of what infantry did for a living, Ramsay discovered he didn't much care for it.

Eventually, the crew for the company machine gun managed to lug both it and its mount through the woods and started spraying the Yankee positions with damn near as many bullets as the rest of the company put out all together. Ramsay waited for the U.S. troopers to move their own Maxim gun away from wherever they'd had it before and try to neutralize the Confederate weapon, but they didn't. Instead, here and there among the oaks, white flags started going up.

"Ease off, you Rebs!" somebody yelled. "You got us."

Firing slowly died away. "All right, Yanks, come out," Captain Lincoln called. The U.S. troopers obeyed, hands high over their heads. Nobody shot them down. This wasn't like the skirmish up in Kansas, the one by the railroad track. This one had been fair all the way-no armored automobiles to mess up the odds.

There were, all told, maybe twenty-five U.S. soldiers. Their leader, a fellow with a Kaiser Bill mustache that had lost a good deal of its waxed perfection, wore the single silver bars of a first lieutenant. "We have some wounded back there," he said, pointing in the direction from which he'd come.

"We'll take care of them," Captain Lincoln promised, and told off a detachment to lead the Yankee prisoners back toward the road.

"A good haul," Stephen Ramsay said, standing up and emerging from cover. "We'll pick up that machine gun and as much ammunition as they have left for it, and then somebody'll shoot it back at 'em till all the cartridges are gone."

Captain Lincoln gathered him up by eye. "Come on, Corporal," he said. "Let's go see who we rescued there."

Ramsay followed him through what had been the U.S. position. He was curious about that himself; he hadn't known any other Confederate cavalry was operating in this neck of the woods. He didn't know everything there was to know, though; he would have been the first-well, maybe the second-to admit as much.

From out of some woods that looked impenetrable, a voice called a sharp warning: "Don't come no further! We got you covered six different ways."

Captain Lincoln stopped. So did Ramsay, right behind him. "Who are you?" Lincoln asked; it hadn't sounded like a Yankee holdout.

A hoarse laugh answered him. "Ain't none of your damn business who we are and who we ain't," the unseen man said. "You jus' go on home, Captain; we ain't got a quarrel with you now, even if mebbe we used to."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ramsay muttered.

He hadn't meant anyone, even Lincoln, to hear him, but his ears were ringing from the fire fight, and he spoke louder than he'd intended. "Means we wouldn't've mixed it up with them damnyankees if we hadn't thought they was you."

"Outlaws!" Captain Lincoln exclaimed.

"Yeah, and now we got a nice new Maxim gun to play with, too, you want to come in after us. You want to fight the USA, fine. Leave us the hell alone."

"What do we do, sir?" Ramsay asked.

"I think we leave them the hell alone, Corporal," Lincoln said loudly. "We're not the police and we're not the sheriffs. We owe these people one, too. They let us know where the Yankees were, and a machine gun's too heavy to lug around to robberies." He turned his back and started away. Nobody shot at him, or at Ramsay.

"Hell of a thing," Ramsay said when they were back among their comrades, and then, "We could take 'em."

"Oh, no doubt," Lincoln agreed. "But that's not our mission. We're having enough trouble with what is." Ramsay thought that over and decided the captain was right.

Sam Carsten wished he were someplace else. He'd had that feeling before, but never so bad. If he got noticed "This is what I get for volunteering," he muttered under his breath as the ugly freighter pulled away from Kapalama Basin, around Sand Island, and west over Keehi Lagoon toward the entrance to Pearl Harbor. "Cap'n" Kidde could have told him as much. Hell, Kidde had told him as much-after it was too late for him to do anything about it. But the gunner's mate hadn't been standing next to him when the captain of the Dakota asked for volunteers for a dangerous mission, and so his hand had shot up along with everybody else's. He hadn't particularly expected to be picked, but here he was.