Before she even knew she was doing it, she started to cry. So much already lost in this war. And she thought about Joshua’s latest letter. She’d lost so much-and she still had so much to lose.

Jefferson Pinkard thought Humble, Texas, was mighty well named. It lay twenty miles north of Houston, and was about the size of Snyder-three or four thousand people. For a while after the turn of the century, Humble might have been Proud: they struck oil there, and a lot of people got rich. Then the mad inflation after the Great War wiped out everybody’s money, rich and poor alike, and after that the wells started running dry. Some of them still pumped, but they weren’t making anybody rich these days. Lumber from the pine woods around the town helped business keep going.

Humble would just about do, Jeff decided. He’d looked at a lot of small towns in southeastern Texas, and this one seemed best suited to his purposes. A railroad ran through it; building a spur off the main line would be easy. Local sheriffs and Mexican soldiers had already cleaned most of the Negroes out of the area. If he had to build a new camp here, he could do that.

He’d rather have stayed in Snyder, but that wouldn’t fly much longer. Who would have thought the United States cared enough about Negroes to try to keep the Confederates from getting rid of them? What business of the damnyankees was it? If they wanted to let their blacks live, they could do that. But they didn’t like them well enough to let more from the CSA come over their border.

Jeff could see advantages to starting over. He could do things the right way from the beginning. The bathhouses that weren’t would go up as an organic part of the camp, not as add-ons. He could build a proper crematorium here, get rid of the bodies once and for all, instead of dumping them into trenches. Yes, it could work.

It would disrupt routine, though. To a camp commandant, routine was a precious thing. Routine meant the camp was operating the way it was supposed to. When routine broke down, that was when you had trouble.

Of course, if you looked at it another way, routine at Camp Determination had already broken down. Damnyankee bombing raids and the U.S. Eleventh Army’s drive toward Snyder had ruined it. How could you run a proper camp when you weren’t sure how much population you needed to reduce from one day to the next? How could you when you didn’t know whether soldiers in green-gray would start shelling you soon? That hadn’t happened yet, but Jeff knew it could.

When he talked to the mayor of Humble about running up a camp outside of town, that worthy said, “You’ll use local lumber, won’t you? You’ll use local labor?”

“Well, sure,” Jeff answered. “As much as I can, anyways.”

“Sounds good, General,” the mayor said, eyeing the wreathed stars on either side of the collar on Jeff’s uniform. Pinkard didn’t explain about Freedom Party ranks-life was too short. The mayor went on, “Once you get this place built, reckon you’ll want to keep some local boys on as guards? And some of the older fellas who maybe got hurt the last time around or maybe aren’t up to marching twenty-five miles a day?” The mayor himself, with a big belly, a bald head, and a bushy white mustache, fell into that last group.

“I’ll do what I can,” Jeff said. “If they’ve got what it takes, I’ll use ’em.”

The mayor beamed. He thought Pinkard had made a promise. Jeff beamed, too. He knew damn well he hadn’t. The mayor stuck out his pudgy hand. “Sounds like we got ourselves a deal,” he said.

“I hope so,” Jeff said, shaking on it. “Still have to clear things with Richmond, too, you understand.” If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything.

But the mayor did. “Well, sure, General. That’s how things work nowadays, isn’t it?” he said. “You want to use my telephone?” He seemed proud to have one on his desk.

“I sure as hell do,” Pinkard answered. He slid the telephone over to his side of the desk, but didn’t pick up the handset or dial the long-distance operator till the mayor ate humble pie and scurried out of his own office. Then Jeff listened to the inevitable clicks and pops on the line as his call went through. And then he listened to the voice of Ferdinand Koenig’s secretary, which was sultry enough to fit into any man’s wet dream.

“Oh, yes, sir,” she purred. “I’m sure he’ll speak to you. Hold on, please.”

“I thank you kindly.” It wasn’t even that Jeff was a week and several hundred miles away from his wife. Edith could have been standing beside him and he would have been extra polite to a woman with a voice like that.

“Koenig here.” The Attorney General of the CSA, by contrast, sounded like a raspy old bullfrog. But he had Jake Featherston’s ear, so he didn’t need to be sexy. “You find what you were looking for, Pinkard?”

“Reckon I did, sir. I’m in a little town called Humble, up north of Houston. Got a railroad line, and a spur to a new camp’d be easy to build. Mayor’s damn near wetting his pants, he wants it in his back yard so bad.”

“Humble, you say? Hang on. Let me look at a map.” There was a pause while Koenig rustled papers; Jeff listened to him do it. He came back on the line. “All right-I found it. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Yankee bombers’d have a devil of a time getting there from anywhere, wouldn’t they?”

“If they wouldn’t, sir, we are really and truly fucked,” Pinkard replied.

A cold silence followed. Then the Attorney General said, “You want to watch your mouth. I’ve said that before, haven’t I?”

“Yeah, I reckon you have.” Jeff wasn’t eager to kowtow to a voice on the line from Richmond, no matter how important that voice’s owner was. “But wasn’t I telling you the truth?” He used Jake Featherston’s catchphrase with sour relish. “Things don’t look so good right now, do they?”

“Maybe not, but we’ll lick the damnyankees yet. You just see if we don’t.” Ferd Koenig sounded absolutely confident.

“Hope like hell you’re right, sir.” Jeff meant that. “Can we talk about this Humble place some more?” The biggest advantage he saw to closing down Camp Determination was purely personal: it would let him get his family the hell out of Snyder without looking as if they were running away. They’d come through every Yankee bombing raid so far, but how long could they stay lucky? Long enough, he hoped.

He wondered if Koenig felt like raking him over the coals some more, but the Attorney General backed off. “Yeah, let’s do that,” he said. “Reckon it’ll suit.”

“All right, then. Next question is, how do we get it built? I used niggers to run up Camp Determination, but I don’t figure that’d work this time around. Can I get me a team of Army engineers, or are they all busy over in Tennessee and Georgia?” That Jeff could mention the Army’s being busy in Georgia said how badly things were going.

Ferd Koenig didn’t hesitate. “You’ll have ’em,” he promised. “Population reduction is a priority, by God. We’ll take care of this, and in jig time, too. You get ready to finish what you’ve got going on at Camp Determination, and we’ll run up the camp by Humble. Plans’ll be about the same as the ones you used before, right?”

“Yes, sir, except we’ll want the bathhouses built in instead of tacked on, if you know what I mean,” Pinkard said. “And I’d like a crematorium alongside, too. More ground in use around here-not so much room for dozers to scrape out the big old trenches we’d need.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Ferd Koenig said. “We’ve got ’em in place at a couple of other camps. Design’s already taken care of, so all we’ve got to do is run up another one.”

“That sounds good. I thought so, but I wasn’t sure,” Jeff said.

“Let me write it down so I make sure I have it straight.” Koenig did, then read it back. “That about cover things?”

Jeff thought before he answered. If he’d forgotten something, getting it fixed after the engineers left wouldn’t be so easy. But he couldn’t think of anything-and then he did. “Mayor here wants to make sure you hire locals for some of the work.”