Morrell, though, was more weathered, his face lined and tanned, though he was only in his mid-twenties. He wore his sandy hair cropped close to his head, as field officers commonly did. He felt like a field officer. He'd been a field officer: he'd almost lost a leg in the U.S. invasion of Confederate Sonora, and then, after a long recuperation, he'd led a battalion in eastern Kentucky. What he'd done there had impressed his division commander enough to get him sent to Philadelphia.

Intellectually, he knew what a plum this was. It didn't altogether fill him with joy, though. He wanted to be out in the forest or the mountains or tramping through the desert-somewhere away from the city and close to the foe.

"Come on, let's get moving," he said now, and hurried ahead of Abell to get a good look at the Liberty Bell. His thigh pained him when he sped up like that, and would probably go on paining him the rest of his life. He ignored it. You could let something like that rule you, or you could rule it. Morrell did not aim to let anything keep him from doing what he wanted to do.

"It's been here a long time, Major," Abell said. "It's going to be here for a long time yet."

"Yes, but I'm not going to be here for a long time," Morrell answered. When he'd learned enough, or so the promise had gone, they'd promote him and send him back to the field to command a unit bigger than a battalion. "I want to fight with guns, not with maps and dividers and a telegraph clicker."

He looked back over his shoulder as he said that, just in time to catch the sidelong glance Abell gave him. The captain, like most General Staff officers, preferred fighting the war at a distance and in the abstract to the reality of mud and bad food and wounds and terror. Battle always seemed so much cleaner, so much neater, when it was red and blue lines on a chart.

Then such thoughts left Morrell's mind as, with a good many other soldiers, he crowded round the emblem of freedom for the United States. The surface of the bell was surprisingly rough, testimony to the imperfect skill of the founders who had cast it. Around the crown ran the words from Leviticus that had given the bell its name: Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.