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own. “Book sand corn!”
    Then he died.
    “You got him, all right,” Captain Bolt informed me.
    I resisted the urge to give him and his men a lecture on firing by night when unsure of their target. It would have been ungracious, under the circumstances. After all, they had freed me from a tomb. And no harm had been done. Except to the negro.
    “Wouldn’t want to be on your bad side, no, I wouldn’t. Swear to God,” the captain told me. “Let’s us get out of here, all right? Get you back to where you can get rid of them stinking clothes. Boys can take care of the nigger. Shooting at white men like that. And us wearing Union blue, down here to save ’em. Swear to God, they’re every one of them crazy.”
    He moved toward the gate. But I did not follow him. There remained an aspect of matters that made no sense.
    Unless he is a mighty fool, a fellow with a rifle fires it before he uses the weapon as a club.
    “Bring the lantern closer, you,” I told one of the privates.
    “He still alive?” Captain Bolt asked, turning back to the pack of us, impatient. He lacked the dutiful nature an officer must display and doubtless longed to return to his cakes and ale. For all I owed the fellow, I could not like him. But plenty such there were in the Union Army. Men whom war had overtaken as they counted sacks of flour or curried mules. Men who lacked the urgency for soldiering. They filled our ranks, but barely filled their uniforms.
    “No, Captain. Dead he is. As dead as a salted cod. Still, he may have something left to tell me.”
    First, I inspected his weapon. It was a proper rifle, one of our own, manufactured in Springfield, Massachusetts. But it was, as I had suspected, empty of ball and innocent of a cap.
    Yet, the fellow had only fired once. All of the other rounds had come from behind me.
    “Hold the lantern just there,” I pointed.
    The dead man’s pockets were sopping with gore, but I found what I thought likely: Nothing at all. Unless I count a pair of copper coins and a queer sort of charm.
    “Guess he’s not going to tell you much, after all,” Captain Bolt said.
    I nearly contradicted the fellow, but caught myself in time. There is often a good deal to be said for not saying a good deal. And I had learned a curious thing, indeed. The negro assassin had only possessed a single round for his rifle. Nor had he carried additional powder or caps.
    I did not believe his poverty was the reason. The rifle was fine and new. Someone had given it to him. But they had not seen fit to arm him with more than one bullet.
    It made no sense. Unless his employers believed that his marksmanship rivaled a tiger-hunter’s. And why on earth hadhe failed to run away after that first shot? He must have been given lunatic orders without the power to refuse them.
    Of course, that happens in armies all the time. But one expects better judgement of assassins.
    What had his employers meant to achieve? If they wanted me dead, why not give the fellow more bullets? Or why not leave me buried in that vault and be done with the matter? Why seal me up, then send our soldiers a message likely to save me?
    I use the word “employers” because I could not see why such a fellow would bear me a grudge that spurred him to a killing. Nor should he have known about my living burial. He had been sent by master puppeteers who knew more than I had the wit to ask.
    I felt as baffled as Lazarus must have been when he rose from the dead.
    All such matters would have to wait. The captain was correct that my clothes were stinking. And my tooth was nagging again.
    “No,” I agreed with Captain Bolt, “the fellow had nothing to say to me. It is right you were. And now I think I might do with a proper wash.”

THREE

    A MIRACLE OF THE MODERN AGE, THE BATHS IN THE cellar of the St. Charles Hotel welcomed a fellow with roiling, boiling water straight from the tap. The mighty edifice shook from top to bottom when the engine ran below and the rumbling