He hadn’t fallen asleep yet when gunfire split the night: several bursts from submachine guns, with single shots from a pistol in between them. He wondered what that was all about. No, actually he didn’t wonder-he feared he knew. Had that farmer called the local sheriff or militia commander or whoever was in charge of the people with guns and said, “There’s an uppity nigger southbound from my place. Reckon you ought to take care of him”?

Deputies or Mexicans must have picked on the first Negro they saw heading south on that road. That black wasn’t Cassius, but they didn’t know or care-especially after he started shooting back at them. Cassius felt bad about snaring the other colored man in his troubles, and hoped the fellow got away.

If they were after me, they would’ve snagged me, he thought, shivering as he burrowed deeper into the sweet-smelling hay. If I didn’t notice that damn ofay looking all sly…

He woke up before sunrise, and got out of there before the farmer could come outside and discover him. Once he was back in the woods, he took off his clothes and made sure he brushed all the hay off of them. He didn’t want to look like somebody who had to sleep in a haystack, even if that was what he was-especially if that was what he was.

He heard gunfire again that afternoon: not just a little, the way he had the night before, but lots. Both sides had plenty of firepower and weren’t shy about using it. Now I know what war sounds like, Cassius thought, which only proved he’d never come anywhere near a real battlefield.

But this would do. He walked toward it, thinking-foolishly thinking-he would watch what was going on from a safe distance, as he might have watched a football game back in Augusta. Even the first bullet that came close enough for him to hear the crack! as it zipped past wasn’t enough to deter him. He got behind a pine tree and imagined he was safe.

Negro guerrillas held what had been a sharecropper village. Mexican soldiers were trying to push them out of it or kill them if they stayed inside. Hardly even noticing that he was doing it, Cassius leaned forward. This was more exciting than any football game he’d ever watched.

It stayed an exciting game till a Mexican took a bullet to the temple. The other side of his head exploded into red mush. His rifle fell from his hands as he crumpled to the ground. Even with that surely mortal wound, he didn’t die right away. He jerked and flopped and twitched, like a chicken that had just met the chopper.

Cassius gulped. He almost wished someone would shoot the Mexican again to make him hold still. No, this wasn’t a game, no matter what it looked like. People were really dying out there. When another bullet snapped past Cassius, he didn’t just flinch. He felt as if somebody’d jabbed an icy dagger into each kidney. This is what fear feels like, he thought.

And fear had an odor, too. He could smell it coming off of himself. He could probably smell it drifting over from the Mexican soldiers and their Negro foes. And smelling it only made him more afraid, at some level far below conscious thought.

He heard footfalls coming through the woods toward him. They made him afraid, too. They were all too likely to come from Francisco Jose’s men. And if the greasers spotted him, what would they do? They’d shoot him, that was what. He was a young Negro man. Of course they would think him an enemy.

And he was, even if he didn’t carry a Tredegar. His heart was with the embattled blacks in the little hamlet. Not only his heart, either. Before he knew what he was doing, he ran for those shacks as fast as he could go.

Bullets chewed up the ground under his feet. They cracked and whirred past his head. He didn’t know if the Mexicans or the Negroes were shooting at him. Both, probably. If the two sides weren’t so busy blazing away at each other, they might have paid him even more attention than they did, not that it was attention he was likely to live through.

He dove behind a crate, hoping everybody would forget about him. “Who the hell’re you?” one of the Negroes shouted at him.

“Name’s Cassius,” he answered, not that that told them much. “There’s soldiers in them trees I run out of.”

“Oh, yeah?” said the voice from behind him. “We can shift them fuckers, I reckon.”

They did, too. They had a couple of machine guns, and they didn’t seem short of ammunition for them. Shrieks from the woods said they’d scored at least a couple of hits. Nobody used the trees to outflank the hamlet, which the Mexicans had probably wanted to do.

Cassius lay very still behind the crate. The Mexicans seemed to forget he was there, which suited him fine. He didn’t want to remind them. After another half hour or so, the firing on both sides tapered off. “They’s goin’!” someone behind him shouted.

“Reckon you can come out now, whatever the hell your name was,” someone else added.

Wearily, Cassius got to his feet. A couple of Negro men with rifles in their hands showed themselves. One of them gestured to him. “Looks like you jus’ joined us,” the man said. He was short and wiry, with a knife scar pulling the left side of his mouth up into a permanent sneer. “Coulda had some trouble if them Mexicans got where they was goin’.”

“Looked that way to me,” Cassius said.

“You know anything about guns?” the scarfaced man asked.

“No, suh, but I reckon I can learn,” Cassius replied.

The older Negro nodded. “That’s a good answer. Now I got another question fo’ you: you take orders? Folks call me Gracchus.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I runs this outfit. You don’t like that, you hit the road. No hard feelin’s, but we don’t want nobody who’s out for hisself and not for all of us. The outfit gotta come first.”

“I’ll take orders,” Cassius said. “If you gave dumb ones, I reckon you’d be dead by now, not runnin’ things here.”

“Expect you’re right,” Gracchus said. “Well, my first order is, tell me about yourself. What’s your name again? Where you from?”

“I’m Cassius. I got out of Augusta when the ofays nabbed my folks.”

“How come they didn’t catch you, too?” Gracchus sounded coldly suspicious. Cassius wondered why. Then he realized the rebel leader might fear he was bait, and would betray the whole band when he saw the chance.

“They went to church,” he answered truthfully. “Me, I stayed home.”

Gracchus nodded again. “God didn’t help ’em much, did He?”

“You reckon there’s a God?” Cassius said. “I got a hard time believin’ any more. Either God likes ofays, or there ain’t none. I got to choose between a God that loves Jake Featherston an’ one that ain’t there, I know which way I go.”

For the first time since he shouted out his warning, Gracchus eyed him with something approaching approval. “Maybe you’s all right after all,” he said.

“Give me a rifle. Teach me what to do with it,” Cassius said. “Reckon I show you how all right I am.”