"I be go to hell," Jake said softly. The rest of his men gaped at the major from Intelligence.

"It is a fact," Potter declared. "We shot four buck niggers yesterday- gave them blindfolds and cigars and tied them to posts and shot them dead. One thing this war has brought out is how deeply the rot has spread through the Confederate States. Half the niggers in government service and half the niggers back home, it seems, have been plotting against the white race and the Confederate government, and likely plotting against them for years. We will crush those plots if it means giving half our niggers blindfolds and cigars-if that is what we require, gentlemen, that is what we shall do, for the sake of our race and for the sake of our country."

"I have trouble imagining anything like that in this battery, sir," Featherston said. By the look in his eye, Major Clarence Potter had no trouble imagining almost any sort of trouble anywhere. Featherston continued, "Haven't had reports from the aeroplane pilots or the ground spotters that we're shootin' too many duds, anything like that. And besides"-he laughed ruefully-"it ain't like we got that many shells any which way, live or dud." He explained where he'd been, and why.

"We're investigating that particular scandal, too," Potter said in a tone of voice that did not bode well for whoever he and his cohorts decided was to blame. Featherston didn't know whether it was a scandal or not. The fellow back at the ammunition dump had a point, though Jake wouldn't have admitted it to him, not in a million years; you could shoot off shells a hell of a lot easier than you could make them.

"Red revolutionaries- in the Army?" Jethro Bixler sounded incredulous. "Those are the crazy people who throw bombs at senators, things like that."

"Not all of them are crazy, not even close," Potter said. "Life would be simpler if they were. A lot of them are as hard to spot as a rattler in dry leaves, and every bit as deadly. So, gentlemen- have you seen any Negroes acting in any way suspicious, any way at all?"

Jake glanced over toward the labourers and teamsters who were standing around watching the artillerymen chew the fat with this stranger. You couldn't tell anything from their faces, but then you never could. Jake's father had taught him that almost before he was out of short pants: overseers' lore, even though there weren't any overseers left, not in the old sense of the word, since manumission went through. He wouldn't have given long odds against the Negroes' knowing who Potter was: jungle telegraph, white men called it. He wondered what the blacks thought.

"Well?" the major snapped.

For close to half a minute, nobody said anything. Featherston understood that: even if the labourers and teamsters were imperfectly loyal, how was the battery supposed to function without them? If Major Potter arrested them, who, if anybody, would replace them? The saying about the devil you knew and the devil you didn't held true here.

Or it mostly held true. Jake said, "Captain Stuart's nigger, Pompey, he's… not uppity, but he thinks a good deal of himself, if you know what I mean."

"I do indeed know exactly what you mean, Sergeant," Potter said, his voice grim and predatory. Jake would not have liked to get in his way. But then even the iron-eyed intelligence officer hesitated. "Captain Stuart, you say? That would be Captain Jeb Stuart III, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, sir, sure would," Featherston agreed.

"Damnation," Major Potter muttered under his breath. "Well, we'll see what we can do about finding out what this buck Pompey knows, if he knows anything." He walked off, looking unhappy.

Jethro Bixler laughed softly. "Every time there's an election, everybody starts brayin' about how one white man, he's just as good as the next. Sounds mighty fine, don't it? Look what it's worth when you bump up against one of the big ones, though."

The crew of Featherston's gun nodded, all together. But then an ammunition wagon came doggedly forward over the muddy road. "This here First Richmond Howitzers?" called the driver, a white man. When the gun crew nodded again, the fellow said, "Why the devil didn't you say this here was Jeb Stuart's battery? Jeb Stuart III needs ammunition, by Jesus he gets it."

Featherston started to laugh. The rest of the gun crew joined in, uproariously. The driver first gaped and then started to get mad. For some reason, that only made Jake laugh harder. Every coin had two sides. If Pompey was plotting revolution, he'd be hard to get rid of, because Captain Stuart liked him and trusted him. But if the battery needed shells, shells the battery would have, because Captain Stuart commanded it.

"With a little luck," Jake said, "the good outweighs the bad."

Winter blew through Manitoba so that, when spring finally came, you wondered to find anything standing. Arthur McGregor thanked God that the Americans didn't come out to any of the farms very often. They were, from everything he'd seen and heard, holed up in towns and along railroad tracks. Not many of them had been ready for a winter like this one. He hoped they were a lot colder and more uncomfortable than he was.

"Serves 'em right," he said over supper one long early February night: salt pork from pigs he'd raised himself and bread baked from his own wheat. "They wanted to come up here and take away what's ours, did they? I wish they'd take our winter and ship it back to the USA with 'em, to some place that could use a hard one: Maryland, maybe, or- what was the name of that state of theirs?" Geography had never been his favourite subject in school, and he hadn't cracked a school book in more than half a lifetime.

His son Alexander was no great scholar, either, but his memory was fresher than Arthur's. " California?" he suggested.

"That's the one I meant," Arthur McGregor agreed.

"They say there are parts of that state where it doesn't snow for years and years at a time," Alexander said. "I can't hardly believe that."

"Well, Alexander, when did they tell you that you knew everything there was to know?" his mother asked, with just enough chuckle in her voice to take away the sting, the way medicine was sweetened to fight its bitter taste.

"Now, Maude," Arthur McGregor said, "I have trouble believing that, too." He'd lived in Manitoba since he was about ten years old, and in Ontario before that. Neither province went without snow for years at a time. From October through April, you counted yourself lucky if you went without snow for a week.

But, from the way the U.S. soldiers had trouble with the cold here, he thought it likely they were used to a much milder climate. If you started thinking the whole world was like the part of it where you lived, you were going to be wrong a lot of the time.

Maude got up and carried dishes to the kitchen. She was coming back for a second load when somebody knocked on the door. Maude froze; Arthur admired her for not dropping any of the dishes. Ice that had nothing to do with the weather ran up his back. The best he could hope for was that it was a neighbor in some kind of trouble. The worst… Sometimes, when the Americans ran short of supplies, they made up the lack by plundering the people whose land they'd invaded.

Alexander McGregor pointed to the cabinet where they'd hidden the rifle. Arthur McGregor shook his head. One gun against however many U.S. soldiers might have been out there wasn't betting odds.

The knock came again, louder, more insistent. Now Arthur thought about getting the gun. None of his neighbors would have knocked like that, which left American troops as the next best bet. But one against however many still looked grim. Slowly, he walked to the door. "Who's there?" he called without putting his hand on the latch.