"Wet yo' whistle?" Cassius asked, and pointed to a jug of corn whiskey sitting up on the mantel.

Scipio started to shake his head, but found himself nodding instead. Cassius handed him the jug. He took a long pull. The raw, illegal whiskey ran down his throat like a river of fire and exploded in his belly.

The woman named Cherry said, "You he'p we learn dese prayers, Kip?" She handed him a paperbound book with an orange cover. The printing on that cover did indeed proclaim it a tract, just as the blue-covered book that had got him into this mess had said it was a hymnbook. You couldn't tell a book by its cover, though, not in Cassius' cottage you couldn't.

Island and a couple of other people did start to sing hymns, in case any body was snooping around outside. Under cover of their racket, Cassius sat down by Scipio at the rickety table in his cottage and bent over the book with the orange cover with him. The hunter's finger pointed out a passage. "Read dat," he said.

Obediently, Scipio's eyes went back and forth. Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital, he read. Capital is only the fruit of labour, and could never have existed if labour had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

"What you think o' that there?" Cassius asked.

"All fit in wid everything else," Scipio answered. "Sound like de trut'." He almost slipped out of the dialect of the Congaree; the words he'd just read did not fit in with that ignorant speech.

Cassius' finger -scarred, callused-found another place. "Now you read dat."

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing, Scipio read. With some, the word means for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and with the product of his labour. With others, the same word means for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labour. The fullness of time, I am convinced, will prove to the world which is the true definition of the word, and my earnest hope remains that the United States of America shall yet lead the way in the proving.

"Who write this?" Scipio asked. A lot of what he'd read here had the taste of being translated from a foreign language. Not this; it was simple and direct and powerful, English as it was meant to be written. One of the things he'd acquired serving Anne Colleton, and which he discovered he could not simply abandon, was a sense of style.

Cassius' eyes gleamed with amusement. "Same fellow write the other."

Scipio gave the hunter a dirty look. Cassius enjoyed leading him around by the nose, the same way he enjoyed all reversals and practical jokes. Cassius also enjoyed having an intellectual advantage on him. Scipio had never be lieved Cassius did much thinking at all. He hadn't even known the hunter could read. He'd turned out to be wrong. Cassius' thought was anything but wide-ranging, but in its track it ran deep.

Patiently, Scipio asked the next question. "And who that is? Not them Marx and Engels fellers, I bet."

Everybody looked at him. When your thought ran in a narrow track, and ran deep in that track, climbing up and peering over the edge became suspicious. These Reds despised the way all the white folks in the Confederate States thought alike. But if any of their own number presumed to deviate from their doctrine, he got in just as much trouble, maybe more.

"Why for you say dat?" Cherry demanded. She looked as if she wanted to drop Scipio in the Congaree swamp right then and there.

He wished he'd kept his mouth shut. He'd wished that a lot of times around these people. But, since he hadn't, he had to answer the question: "It ain't wrote like t'other stuff I read."

Cassius laughed. "Got we a perfesser here. But is he dat smart?" He shook his head. "No, or he know who do dat work." Unlike a lot of jokers, he knew when to cut a joke short, as he did now. "These words wrote by Abraham Lincoln."

" Lincoln? Do Jesus!" Scipio thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Should cipher that out my own self."

"He see the truth early on," Cassius said. "He say that first one while he president of the USA, an' de second one years after, in Montana Territory."

"Do Jesus!" Scipio said again, impressed. Lincoln had served only one term as president of the United States; he'd been unceremoniously booted out of office after the Confederacy broke away from the USA. But he hadn't left politics even then. He'd led most of the Republicans into union with the Socialist Party after the Second Mexican War. "No wonder he sound like one o' we."

Cassius nodded strong agreement. "Dat man be alive today, he wid we. He want ev'body equal. Only way to do dat, make de revolution. Cain't do it no ways else. Git de 'pressors off we, we do swell. Whole country do swell."

He and his revolutionary cohorts all nodded, like the preacher and the congregation in church on Sunday morning. Scipio made sure he nodded, too. If you didn't pay attention to the preacher, he gave you a hard time later. If you didn't pay attention to Cassius, he gave you a funeral.

Now he said, "Miss Anne, she talk wid any new strange white folks? They after our scent like hounds. We got to watch sharp."

"Nobody new I see," Scipio answered truthfully. Then he asked, "How they after we?" From the moment he'd first set eyes on the deadly words of The Communist Manifesto, he'd known what sort of game he was playing and what its likely outcome would be, but he didn't like Cassius reminding him of it.

The hunter -the Red-said, "They done cotched a few o' we: Army niggers get careless, talk too much where de white folks hear. Sometimes you catch one, he know de name o' 'nudder one, and he know two more names-"

That picture was clearer than any Marcel Duchamp had ever painted. Sci pio wanted to get up and run somewhere far away from Marshlands. As Anne Colleton's butler, he had a passbook that gave him more legal freedom of movement than any other Negro on the plantation. He wasn't very much afraid of the patrollers' catching up to him. But if he tried to disappear, it was all too likely Cassius' revolutionaries would hunt him down and dispose of him. He imagined Red cells in every group of blacks in the Confederacy. What one knew, all would know; whom one wanted dead, all would work to kill…

Cassius said, "De day don' wait much longer. De revolution happen, an' de revolution happen soon. We rise up, we get what dey hoi' back from we fo' so long. De white folks want de cotton, let de white folks grow de cotton an' grub it out o' de groun'. Dey don't 'sploit us no mo', never again."

Scipio did keep his mouth shut, though that meant biting down on the inside of his lip till he tasted blood. The white folks weren't going to sit around peaceable and quiet when the rebellion started. He'd tried saying that a few times, but nobody wanted to listen to him.

He wondered if he could get into the Empire of Mexico some kind of way, and never, ever come back.

Marching with a hangover was not Paul Mantarakis' idea of fun. It did, however, beat the stuffing out of going into a front-line trench to be shot at and shelled. He'd be doing that soon enough -much too soon to suit him. Any time between the current moment and forever would have been much too soon to suit him.

A couple of men away from Mantarakis, Gordon McSweeney tramped along singing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." McSweeney had a big bass voice and couldn't have carried a tune in a washtub. His booming false notes made Mantarakis' headache worse.

You couldn't just tell him to put a sock in it, though, however much you wanted to. If you did, you'd find yourself facing a couple of hundred pounds of angry, fanatical Scotsman. Guile was called for.