A lieutenant clad in butternut spun on his heel and stomped away from the field telephone, muttering unsweet nothings under his breath. That meant it was Jake Featherston's turn to confront the marvel of the electrified age. To the corporal in charge of the care and feeding of the mechanical beast, he said, "Put me through to the main artillery dump, back toward Red Lion."

"I'll give it a shot," the corporal said, showing less than perfect faith in the gadget with which he'd been entrusted. He turned the crank and shouted into the mouthpiece: "Hello, Central?" When nobody shouted back at him, he muttered something that made what the lieutenant had said sound like an endearment. He cranked again. "Hello, Central, goddammit!"

Waiting for the connection-waiting to see if the corporal could make the connection- Featherston wished he'd sent a runner back to Red Lion. It was only a few miles southwest of Martinsville; the runner wouldn't have needed more than two hours- three at the outside- to make it there and back again.

But Captain Stuart was hell-bent for leather about using the very latest thing. Sometimes, Featherston admitted to himself, that was because the very latest thing was better than what had gone before. His battery of French-inspired three-inch guns certainly fell into that class. But sometimes the very latest thing was just newfangled confusion replacing old-fashioned stupidity- or, worse, replacing something that worked well even if it had been around for a long time.

"Hello, Central!" the corporal screamed. Featherston was about to give it up as a bad job and walk off- he could tell the captain he'd tried to use the phone, but it hadn't wanted to work- when the operator said, in reverent tones, "I'll be a son of a bitch." He turned to Jake. "Who'd you say you wanted to talk to again? Been so long, I plumb forgot."

"The main artillery dump," Jake answered, and the corporal relayed his words to the central switchboard. Now, if the wire between there and the ammunition dump wasn't broken, he might be able to save some time after all. But even when, as they sometimes did, Negro labourers buried phone lines as they laid them, shell hits would dig them up and break them. And water soaked through insulation, and…

But, to his amazement, after a couple of minutes, the corporal handed him the earpiece and said, "Go ahead."

"Main ammo dump?" he bawled into the mouthpiece; he'd had botched connections before, too, even when everything was supposed to be working perfectly. Sometimes you were better off sending Morse over the line.

But, now, a thin, scratchy voice sounded in the earpiece: "That's right. Who're you and what d'you need?"

"Jake Featherston, First Richmond Howitzers." Jake didn't say he was just a lowly sergeant. If the fellow on the other end of the line wanted to assume he was the battery commander, that was all right with him. It was better than all right, in fact, because he was more likely to be taken seriously that way. "We're giving the damnyankees on the other side of the Susquehanna tarnation, or we would be, 'cept we're mighty low on shells."

"Whole army's mighty low on shells," that disembodied voice answered. "We can maybe get you a few up there, but not a whole lot. Sorry." The soldier back in safe, comfortable Red Lion didn't sound sorry. As best Jake could make out over this infernal apparatus, he sounded bored. Saying no was a lot easier over a wire than face to face.

"The Yankees get time to consolidate, they're gonna hit us back hard," Featherston said. These past few weeks, every mile forward had been gained only by wading through blood. The Confederates stood on the Susquehanna. Featherston wondered if they'd ever stand on the Delaware.

The telephone reproduced a sigh. "Featherstitch or whatever your name is, I can't give you what I ain't got. Some of the shells we were supposed to be gettin', they went to Kentucky instead, for the big push there."

"We don't got enough to do two things both at once?" Jake demanded. "Jesus Christ, is this an army or a man who's too stupid to fart while he walks?"

That got him a chuckle as tinny as the sigh had been. "Makes you feel any better, First Richmond, the Yanks are as bad off as we 'uns. You can shoot off shells faster'n you can make 'em, and that's a fact."

"Yeah, but if the Yanks are short in Kentucky and full-up here 'stead o' the other way round, that doesn't do us a hell of a lot of good," Featherston said.

"Send you all I can, promise," the fellow back at the dump said.

"You better, you expect us to keep fightin' the war," Featherston told him. He hung the earpiece back on its hook with a crash, muttering, "Son of a bitch acts like they're his goddamn shells." The corporal in charge of the telephone, who'd undoubtedly heard language a lot worse than that, snickered. Still fuming, Jake headed off toward the guns.

If the dump didn't send enough shells forward, as seemed highly likely, Captain Stuart would have to do the calling next time. What was the point of carrying a famous name if you couldn't exploit it every now and then?

When Featherston got back to his battery, he discovered his men gathered around a major he'd never seen before: a major of infantry, for the single stars showing his rank were mounted on blue-faced collar tabs. "What's up?" Jake asked, which really meant, What the devil is the infantry doing sniffing around an artillery unit?

The major turned to him. The fellow wasn't very big and his face wasn't very tough, but Featherston' wouldn't have wanted any damnyankee with those hard, gray eyes staring at him over the sights of a Springfield. Almost without realizing he'd done it, he stiffened to attention and saluted.

Crisply, the major returned the salute. "Clarence Potter, Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence," he said. His voice was harsh and clipped and had a trace of a Yankee accent; Featherston wondered if he'd gone to college in the United States. Potter went on, "I am here to investigate a conspiracy threatening the security not only of this army but of the Confederate States of America."

"Jesus Christ!" Jake exclaimed, and then said, "Excuse me, sir, but I don't know anything about anything like that, and I'd be right surprised-I'd be more than right surprised-if anybody here does."

"That's what we were tellin' him, Sarge," Jethro Bixler said. The loader went on, "All we want to do- all any of us want to do- is tie a can to the damnyankees' tails and then get back to what we was doin' 'fore the damn war started."

"Sergeant, if your men are as good with their gunnery as they are at flapping their gums, the Confederate States are in good hands," Major Potter said. "If you'll listen, I'll tell you exactly why I'm here. What I want to know is, how far do you trust the niggers in this battery?"

"The niggers?" Featherston scratched his head. "Haven't hardly thought about the niggers. They do what we tell 'em, and that's that. You want to know the truth of it, most of the time I worry about the horses more. Something's wrong with a nigger, he can tell you what it is and where it hurts. With horses, you got to guess."

"That's how it is, all right," Bixler said, and the rest of the gun crew nodded agreement. Featherston relaxed. His best guess was that the intelligence unit had too much time on its hands and was running around making work for itself so it would look busy and important.

But Clarence Potter shook his head, as if reading Jake's mind. "That's what they want you to think," he said in a low voice. If he'd had long mustaches and twirled them, he would have looked as well as sounded like a stage villain. He went on, "We've broken up four cells of Red rebellion in the niggers of this army in the past two weeks. One of them was in another artillery battery. I won't name names, but we found out the niggers there were sabotaging shells so they wouldn't go off when they came down on the Yankees' heads."