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punch the ticket on that farmhouse, we’ll send Gordon up to see what he can do. Only disadvantage is, it’s a short-range weapon.”
    “I will bring it close enough to the farmhouse to be used,” McSweeney promised. Whatever the thing was, he sounded quiveringly eager to use it. Mantarakis had no idea what the Mormons felt about Gordon McSweeney, or even whether they knew he existed among the multitude of soldiers in the U.S. force. He knew McSweeney scared him to death.
    Ever so warily, he peered up over the parapet. The rebels’ line was taking quite a pounding; through dust and smoke, it looked as if several large bites were gone from the farmhouse. Maybe it would be easy this time. It had been, once or twice. Some of the other times, though…
    He would have liked to see the artillery go on for days, for weeks, killing all the Mormons without any need for the infantry to do their work. But, for one thing, there wasn’t enough ammunition for a bombardment like that, not on a secondary front like Utah. And, for another, he’d seen fighting the Confederates that even the longest, most savage barrages didn’t kill all or even most of the enemy soldiers at whom they were aimed.
    After an hour or so, the guns fell silent. Captain Schneider blew a whistle. Up out of the trenches swarmed his company and several others. “Come on!” Mantarakis called to the men of his squad. “We don’t want to spend a lot of time in between the lines where they can shoot us down. We want to get right in there with ’em.”
    The ground was chewed up from previous failed assaults on the Mormon position, and chewed worse by short rounds from the latest shelling. None, for once, seemed to have come down on the U.S. trenches, which Paul reckoned a small miracle. He dashed past stinking corpses and pieces of corpses, some still in green-gray often stained black with old blood. Flies rose in buzzing clouds.
    Sure enough, some of the Mormon defenders remained alive and angry at the world, or at least at that portion of the United States Army attacking them. All along their line, flames showed riflemen shooting at the soldiers in green-gray heading their way. Somewhere not far from Paul, a man took a bullet and began shrieking for his mother.
    And, sure enough, the machine gun in the adobe farmhouse started up, too. As he dove headlong into a shell crater, Mantarakis was convinced the racket a machine gun made was the most hateful noise in the world.
    He looked toward the farmhouse. He and however many men still survived from his squad had come well past the high-water mark of earlier U.S. attacks. He was, he thought, within a hundred yards of that infernal device hammering out death up ahead. He was also damned if he knew how he was going to be able to get any nearer than that.
    Somebody thudded down into the crater beside him: Gordon McSweeney. “I have to get closer,” the dour Scotsman said. “Twenty yards is best, though thirty may do: one for each piece of silver Judas took.”
    Mantarakis sighed. He too knew they had to take out that machine gun. If McSweeney had a way—“I’ll go left. You go right a few seconds later. We’ll keep moving till you’re close enough.”
Or until you get killed—or until I do
. He wished he could take out his worry beads and work them.
    They weren’t the only soldiers pushing up toward the adobe. The Mormons in there had even less idea than Paul did of what the strange contraption on McSweeney’s back was. Working his way to within twenty yards of the machine gun was slow and dangerous work, but he managed.
    To Mantarakis’ horror, McSweeney stood up in the hole where he’d sheltered. He aimed the nozzle end of the hose he carried at the machine gun’s firing slit. Before the gun could cut him down, a spurt of flame burst from the nozzle, played over the front of the farmhouse, and went right through the narrow slit at the crew serving the machine gun.
    Paul heard the lyingly cheerful sound