The wind was blowing from the field. Dowling’s nose wrinkled. So did Jethro Gwynn’s. “Maybe we don’t need to go any further,” the mayor of Snyder said.

“Shut up,” Major Toricelli said, his voice hard and flat.

“I think we’ll keep going,” Dowling said. “We’re almost there anyhow, eh, Clancy?” He gave Gwynn a sour stare. “Clancy and I have been here before. Have you, Mr. Mayor?”

“No!” Gwynn said. “Christ, no!”

“I wonder why not,” Dowling said. Jethro Gwynn didn’t answer. Nothing was the best thing he could have said, but it wasn’t nearly good enough. The command car passed through a barbed-wire gate a barrel might have flattened. To the driver, Dowling added, “Stop by the closest trench-the open one.”

“Yes, sir,” Clancy said, and he did.

“Well, let’s get out of here and have a look around, shall we?” Dowling descended from the command car. He waited for the mayor to join him. Plainly, the mayor didn’t want to. Just as plainly, the savage expressions the U.S. soldiers wore told him he had no choice. Looking as glum as a man possibly could, he got down, too. Major Toricelli followed him.

“Come over here, God damn you.” Toricelli shoved him toward that trench, which hadn’t been covered over like the rest. “Take a good look. Then tell me you didn’t know what the hell Camp Determination was up to.”

“Please…” Jethro Gwynn said, but nobody wanted to listen to him. Feet dragging in the dirt, he scuffled his way forward.

Even in October, curtains of flies buzzed above the trench. Crows and ravens and vultures flew away as the men approached, but they didn’t go far. The rations were too good for them to want to leave. The stench was overpowering, unbelievable; it seemed thick enough to make the air resistive to motion. Dowling knew it would cling to his uniform, his skin, his hair. He also knew he would have to bathe several times to get rid of it.

“Go on,” he said harshly. “Take a good look.”

Gwynn gulped. How many Negroes-men, women, children-lay in this trench, all bloated and stinking and flyblown and pecked by scavenger birds? Thousands, surely. The trench was long and deep and about two-thirds full. Had the Confederates not pulled out of Camp Determination and blown the place up, they would have filled the trench with corpses and then scraped out another trench, closer to the entrance, and started in on that one, too. They’d set this up very efficiently.

“Well?” Dowling said. “What do you think, Mr. Gwynn? How do you like it?”

“I had no idea,” the mayor of Snyder gasped, and then he leaned forward and threw up. He was neat about it; he missed his shoes. Wheezing, coughing, spitting, he went on, “Honest to God, I didn’t.”

“You lying sack of shit.” Dowling pointed to the closed trench beyond this open one, and then to the next closed trench, and then to the next and the next. “What did you think they were doing here? Running a hospital?”

“I didn’t ask any questions,” Gwynn said. “I didn’t want to know.”

“That sounds a little more like the truth, anyway-not much, but a little,” Major Toricelli said.

“Not enough,” Dowling said. “Nowhere close to enough. Come on. Let’s go back to the command car.”

“Can we head back to town?” the mayor asked eagerly.

“Not yet, Charlie,” Dowling said. After they got in, he told Clancy, “Go on all the way up to the first trench.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said.

Again, Jethro Gwynn didn’t want to get out. This time, Major Toricelli gave him a shove. “We had to look at this, asshole,” he said. “You damn well can, too.”

Bulldozers had scraped off the dirt from part of the first trench. The bodies in there were a couple of years old. They were mostly bones, with rotting clothes and bits of skin and hair here and there. Halloween in hell might have looked like this.

“They’ve been doing it ever since this camp opened up, for the last two years or so. How many bodies are here all told, do you think?” Dowling said. “And you have the brass to try and tell me you didn’t know what was going on? God, what a shitty excuse for a liar you are.”

“What a shitty excuse for a human being,” Toricelli said.

Gwynn puked again. He didn’t try denying things any more, though. Maybe that was progress.

“And do you know what the best part is?” Major Toricelli said. “Once your smokes here were dead, the guards had people who went into their mouths with pliers or whatever the hell and yanked out all their gold fillings. Waste not, want not, I guess.”

Gwynn looked revolted in a new and different way. “You’re making that up. Nobody would do such a thing.”

“It’s the God’s truth, Mr. Gwynn.” Abner Dowling held up his right hand as if taking an oath. “So help me. We had Graves Registration people put on gas masks and look at the bodies up close. They didn’t find any dental gold. None-not a crown, not a filling, not a bridge. Nothing. What they did find was lots of dead colored people with teeth yanked out or teeth broken to get the gold from them. And how do you like that?”

Had Gwynn looked any greener, Dowling would have been tempted to mow him. The mayor of Snyder said, “I swear on my mother’s name, General, and by our Lord Jesus Christ, I never knew nothin’ about that. Nothin’. Pulling teeth? That’s…just sick.” He bent over and retched some more. This time, he had nothing in his stomach to bring up.

The dry heaves were nasty. Dowling watched without sympathy till Gwynn’s spasm finally ended. “So you really did know they were killing off Negroes at the camp, then?” he said.

“Well, I had a pretty good notion they were,” Jethro Gwynn admitted in a ragged whisper. “I didn’t ask any questions, though. None of my business, I reckoned.”

“You passed by on the other side of the road, like the priest in the Good Book,” Dowling said in a voice like iron.

By then, Gwynn was in no shape to quarrel. “I guess maybe I did.”

“I’ve got one more question for you. Then I’ll take you back to town,” Dowling said. “Why don’t you like grubbing gold out of Negroes’ mouths once they’re dead? They don’t need it any more then. Isn’t killing ’em what’s really wrong?”

“You know, I never looked at it that way,” the mayor of Snyder said seriously. “I mean, they’re just a pack of rebels and troublemakers. But this…” He gulped. “It’s different when you see it with your own eyes.”

“You liked the idea. You didn’t want to know what it meant, that’s all. Or have you got the nerve to tell me I’m wrong?” Dowling asked.

“No, that’s a fact, a true fact,” Gwynn said. “You think about gettin’ rid of niggers and you think, Hell, country’d be better off without ’em. You don’t reckon they’re-people, or anything.”

“Well, what the hell are they, then?” Dowling demanded. When Jethro Gwynn didn’t answer the question, he did it himself: “They’re dead, that’s what. And I bet the worst of ’em has a better hope of heaven than you do, Mr. Gwynn. Come on, damn you.” He shoved the mayor of Snyder toward the command car.

Gwynn didn’t say anything as Clancy drove him back to town. The U.S. soldier let him off in front of his real-estate agency. The mayor fled inside and slammed the door behind him, as if that would keep Dowling and his men from coming back.

Having shown Jethro Gwynn what Camp Determination was all about, Dowling grabbed Snyder’s leading (and only) banker, two attorneys, an accountant, and a doctor. With a happy-for him, anyhow-afterthought, he also grabbed their wives. He took them out to the camp together in a deuce-and-a-half. They all denied they’d had any idea what it was doing.

“I thought you might say that,” he told them.

The truck driver drove them to the mass graves. They turned pale even before the stink started filling the back of the truck. All but one of them vomited at the first trench. Two women fainted. So did one of the lawyers. The doctor passed out when he heard about taking dental gold from the corpses.