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had come to mean so much to him. Whatever the reason, though, she was gone. The Party remained. This was such family as he had left.
      Party members crowded the floor. The hay bales on which men had once sat weren’t there any more.
      Folding chairs replaced them. Their odor, though, and that of horses, still lingered in the building. The smells had probably soaked into the pine boards of the wall.
      Jeff found a seat near the rostrum at the front. He shook hands with several men sitting close by.
      “Freedom!” they said. Pinkard had to be careful to whom he used the Party greeting at the Sloss Works.
      Whigs and especially Radical Liberals had no use for it.
      Caleb Briggs, the Freedom Party leader in Birmingham, ascended to the rostrum and stood behind the podium, waiting for everyone’s attention. The short, scrawny dentist looked very crisp, the next thing to military, even if he’d never be handsome. Party men who’d been standing around chatting slipped into their seats like schoolboys fearing the paddle.
      “Freedom!” Briggs said.
      “Freedom!” the members chorused, Jefferson Pinkard’s shout one among many.
      “I can’t hear you.” Briggs might have been a preacher heating up his congregation.
        “Freedom!”  they shouted again, louder—but not loud enough to suit Caleb Briggs, who cupped a hand behind his ear to show he still couldn’t hear. “FREEDOM!”  they roared. Pinkard’s throat felt raw after that.
      “Better,” the leader allowed. Jeff heard him through ringing ears, almost as if after an artillery bombardment. Briggs took a sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his white shirt. “I have a couple of important announcements tonight,” he said. “First one is, we’ll be looking for an assault squad to hit a Whig rally Saturday afternoon.” A host of hands shot into the air. Briggs grinned. “See me after the meeting. You need to know there’ll be cops there, and they’re taking a nastier line with us after the unfortunate incident.” That was what the Party called President Hampton’s assassination.
      “I’ll go,” Pinkard muttered. “By God, I want to go.” He hadn’t been a brawler before he got conscripted, but he was now.
      “Second thing,” Briggs said briskly. “The damnyankees are backing the Popular Revolutionaries in the civil war down in the Empire of Mexico. Goddamn lickspittle Richmond government isn’t doing anything about that but fussing. We need to do more. The Party’s looking to raise a regiment of volunteers for the Emperor, to show the greasers how it’s supposed to be done. If you’re interested in that , see me after the meeting, too.”
      Jeff kept fidgeting in his seat through the rest of Briggs’ presentation, and the rest of the meeting, too.
      Not even the patriotic songs and the ones from the trenches held his interest. He swarmed forward as soon as he got the chance. “I want to volunteer for both,” he said.
      “All right, Pinkard,” Caleb Briggs replied. “Can’t say I’m surprised.” He knew about Emily. “I don’t make any promises on the filibuster into the Mexican Empire, but the other . . . we’ll find a way to get you over by city hall.”
      And they did. Pinkard worked a half day on Saturday. As soon as he got off, he hurried to the trolley and went downtown. He gathered with the other Freedom Party men at a little diner one of them owned.
      There he changed from his overalls into the white shirt and butternut trousers he carried in a denim duffel bag. There, too, he picked up a stout wooden bludgeon—two and a half feet of ash wood, so newly turned on the lathe it smelled of sawdust.
      Along with the other Freedom Party men, he hurried up Seventh Avenue North toward the city hall.
      They naturally fell into column and fell into step. People scrambled off the sidewalk to get out of their way. Jeff made a horrible face at a little pickaninny. The boy wailed in fright