Spartacus looked at him. Jonathan Moss thought another quick way to end up dead was by pushing the Negro too far. Spartacus didn’t take kindly to listening to whites. But Cantarella had the certainty that went with knowing what he was doing. He wasn’t trying to show Spartacus up, just to give good advice. And he wasn’t much inclined to back down himself.

Muttering to himself, Spartacus looked along the road toward Plains. “Reckon mebbe you’s right,” he said unwillingly. “We done stuck ’em pretty good, an’ that’ll have to do.” He raised his voice to a shout: “Let’s git! Time to move out!”

The Negroes and their white advisers streamed away from the ambush. Moss didn’t see how Spartacus could have wanted much more. He wondered if the Mexicans would push hard after the guerrillas again, or if one introduction like this would show them that wasn’t a good idea.

When he asked Nick Cantarella, the infantry officer only shrugged. “Have to find out,” he said. “Pretty plain they never saw combat before. Whether they can’t stand up to it or whether they figure they’ve got something to prove now-well, we’ll see before long, I figure.”

“Guerrillas did well,” Moss remarked.

“Yeah.” Cantarella looked around, then spoke in a low voice: “Wouldn’t’ve thought the spooks had it in ’em. But if your ass is on the line, I guess you do what you gotta do, no matter who you are.”

“We just did,” Moss said. Nick Cantarella blinked, then nodded.

Scipio was almost too far gone to notice when the train stopped. The Negro and his wife and daughter were scooped up in Augusta, Georgia, a week earlier-he thought it was a week, but he could have been off by a day or two either way.

Along with so many others from the Terry-Augusta’s colored district-they were herded into a boxcar and the door locked from the outside. It was too crowded in there to sit down, let alone to lie down. Scipio wasn’t off his feet for a minute in all that time, however long it was. He couldn’t make it to the honey buckets that were the only sanitary facilities, so he fouled himself when he couldn’t hold it any more. He wasn’t the only one-far from it.