I hope they do, Cassius thought. Dear God, I hope they do. Cherry knew him for the cold heart, for the weak spirit, he was. She knew he had no true revolutionary fire in his belly, knew and despised him for it. If Anne Colleton caught her, Scipio would do nothing but rejoice.
In one pocket of his tattered dungarees, he had a letter addressed to Anne Colleton in St. Matthews. Getting hold of paper and pencil hadn’t been too hard. Even laying his hands on an envelope hadn’t been too hard. Finding a postage stamp, though…
Finally, he’d seen a dice game where one of the raiders was tearing stamps off a sheet a few at a time to cover his losses. Scipio had had almost no money in his own pockets, but he got down on one knee as fast as he could. Luck was with him; he’d rolled a seven his first try out and then made his point-it was four, which made it tougher-so that, before long, several small, red portraits of James Longstreet took up residence alongside his pocket change. One of them was on the envelope now.
Cassius said, “We’s gwine up to hit Gadsden a lick tonight. We ain’t done no fightin’ no’ th o’ the Congaree in a while. Them fat white bastards up there, they reckons they’s safe from de force o’ revolutionary justice. I aims to show they that they is mistooken.”
“You goes up there, you draws the militia up there after you,” Scipio said. “Not so many white sojers around Marshlands after dat. Cherry, she can dig all she like.”
“I knows it,” Cassius said. “Cain’t be helped.” He was by no means enamored of Cherry or her search for the treasure both he and Scipio were convinced did not exist. Then Cassius turned his gaze on Scipio. He still had a hunter’s eyes-or maybe they were sniper’s eyes. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to say anything. His expression spoke more plainly than words. Yes, you’ve got a rifle in your hands, it declared. You don’t dare use it against me or any of the other revolutionary fighters here. You’d have only one shot sent in the wrong direction, and then you’d be mine-because you and I both know that if that one shot is at me, you’ll miss. And I won’t.
Scipio sighed. He’d always been a halfhearted Red at best. He wasn’t even that any more. He was a man trapped in a nightmare with enemies on all sides and no way out. He saw no way to take Cassius with him when he fell, as he surely would fall. He did have hopes of bringing down Cherry-or, if Cherry got extraordinarily lucky, of bringing down Miss Anne. But Cassius? Cassius was a force of nature.
The force of nature joined Scipio and a couple of other men in a battered rowboat and glided north through the swamps of the Congaree. Several other boats followed. Cassius knew the ways through the maze of twisting channels. Starlight was all he needed. Each of the other boats carried at least one man who knew the swamps almost as well.
Something floated by overhead. Scipio’s blood ran cold. The part of his mind that the Colletons had spared no trouble or expense to educate insisted it was only an owl. The part of him that had grown up in one of those clapboard cabins a world away from the Marshlands mansion by which they sat said it was something worse, something ghostly, something that would lure them all into the heart of the swamp and never let them escape.
Then it hooted, and he felt foolish. More often than not, the educated part of his mind did have some notion of what it was talking about. But the other part was older, with roots that went down deeper. Education ruled his brain. His belly, his heart, his balls? No.
“Do Jesus!” one of the oarsmen said, his voice a shaky whisper. “I reckoned that were one o’ they bad hants, the kind that don’t never let you come out o’the swamp no more.” Scipio hadn’t been the only one frightened, then.
Cassius said, “Ain’t no hant can stand up against dialectical materialism.” His new beliefs had overpowered the older ones. Almost, Scipio envied him for that. Almost. Cassius’ new beliefs had overpowered his good judgment, too, and these tattered remnants of the Congaree Socialist Republic the Reds had hoped to establish were the proof of that.
Cassius did not, would not, see defeat, only a setback on the inevitable road to revolution. He could no more deny that inevitability than a devout Christian could the inevitability of the Second Coming.
Trees and bushes began to thin out as the boats full of Reds neared the edge of the swamp. Ahead, across fields once full of tobacco and cotton and rice that now held mostly weeds, the lights of Gadsden shone: a few houses bright with electricity, more showing the softer, yellower light of burning gas. Most of the houses showed no lights at all; most people, like most people all over the world, had to get up and go to work in the morning.
Cassius waved. The men at the oars brought the rowboat up against the bank of the creek that fed into the Congaree. It grounded softly on mud. The other boats came up alongside. Black men with rifles clambered out of them. “Let’s go, comrades,” Cassius said in a low but penetrating voice. “Time fo’ de buckra to learn some more o’de price de ’pressors pay.”
He left one man behind to guard the boats. Scipio wished he could have been that man, but knew better than to show it. The revolutionaries did not trust him enough to let him out of their sight. Cassius might have, but he did not try to override the opinion of the others. Since they were right and he wrong, that was as well for their cause, if not for Scipio’s.
A motorcar chugged along the road toward town. The driver never saw Cassius and his men, for he led them along paths he knew through the overgrown fields. They went past a couple of mansions, both dark and silent and deserted. Few great landowners around the Congaree dared live among the dozens of Negro servants and field hands needed to make a plantation and mansion live, not these days they didn’t.
Militiamen-the too old and the too young-stumped along the streets of Gadsden. One of them was rash enough to carry a kerosene lantern. Cassius let out a soft chuckle. “Look at that damnfool buckra goin’ roun’ like he a night watchman sayin’, ‘Twelve o’clock, an’ all’s well!’ It ain’t no twelve o’clock, an’ it ain’t well, neither.”
He raised his Tredegar to his shoulder in one fluid motion, aimed, and fired. The militiaman dropped the lantern with a shriek. The burning puddle of kerosene set fire to the boards of the sidewalk.
Another militiaman fired at the sound of Cassius’ shot, and perhaps at the muzzle flash. His bullet didn’t come close. Three Negroes fired at the flash from his rifle. He screamed, too; one of those rounds must have struck home. “Come on!” Cassius said. He advanced on Gadsden in long, loping, ground-eating strides.
Black shadows in the black night, the Reds ran after him. Scipio panted along with the rest, doing his best to keep up. The factory work he’d done had hardened him. He wasn’t the swiftest here, nor anywhere close to it, but he wasn’t the slowest, either.
A bell began clanging in the center of town: probably a fire alarm turned to a new purpose. Here and there, lights came on in upper stories as people got ready to come out and fight or simply tried to find out what was going on. The raiders fired whenever those lights gave them targets. More screams rose.
Slower than it should have came a cry that made sense: “Niggers! It’s the Red niggers!”
Militiamen and whoever else could lay hands on a rifle or shotgun or pistol started banging away, sometimes at the Negroes who ran through the streets but as often at one another. The townsfolk had not been raided for a while, and so did not put up the kind of energetic, organized defense the whites of St. Matthews, for instance, might have shown.
Scipio darted along Market Street toward the corner of Williams. A white-bearded militiaman dashed from Williams out onto Market just as Scipio got to the corner. They both stared in horror. Scipio shot first, before the old man’s rifle had quite come to bear on him. The militiaman fired as he fell. The bullet cracked past Scipio’s head.