And now, on the morning after, he was suffering on account of it. His skin was the color and texture of old parchment. Red tracked the yellowish whites of his eyes the way railroads were starting to track the plains of Atlantis east of the Green Ridge Mountains (only a few reached across them; the southwest was the USA's forgotten quarter). His hands shook. His breath stank of stale rum and of the coffee he'd poured down to try to counter the stuff's effects. His uncombed hair stood up in several directions at once.

He looked at Frederick with a certain rough sympathy on his face. The Negro felt at least as bad as the white man. But what Frederick knew was fear for the future, not regret for the past.

"Well, son," Henry Barford rasped, "I am afraid you are fucked."

"I'm afraid so, too, Master Henry," Frederick agreed mournfully. He was a year or two older than the man who owned him, but that had nothing to do with the way they addressed each other. The brute fact of ownership made all the difference there.

"Matter of fact," Barford continued, "I am afraid you fucked yourself."

"Don't I know it!" Frederick said. "That God-damned floorboard! Take oath on a stack of Bibles piled to the ceiling, sir, I didn't know the end had come up."

"I believe you," Henry Barford said. "If I didn't believe you, you'd be dead by now-or more likely sold to a swamp-clearing outfit, so as I could get a little cash back on your miserable carcass, anyways."

Frederick gulped. Slaves in that kind of labor gang never lasted long. The men who ran the gangs bought them cheap, from owners who had good reason for not wanting them any more. They fed them little and worked them from dawn to dusk and beyond. If that didn't kill them off, the ague or yellow fever or a flux of the bowels likely would. And even if those failed, the swamps were full of crocodiles and poisonous snakes and other things nobody in his right mind wanted to meet.