Not U. S. Grant, though. Not the storekeeper. He had a head for numbers. He knew you could add up the numbers and the outcome would be plain as a baseball score. The numbers told a true story. And the War had become a war of numbers—how many dead and wounded, how many deserters, how many cases of yellow fever, how many muskets, cartridges, uniforms, horses. How many you had, how many the enemy had. How to reduce his numbers faster than he reduced yours. In the end, the only issue was efficiency.

Hand on the crank, Kenan swiveled the cool gun.

Efficiency.

The rotating drum, ten barrels strapped into a wheel and geared to the hand crank, was the key to its efficiency: as the barrels revolved, one was loaded, another fired, and another ejected its spent shell. Each barrel fired only once in ten shots, so it never got hot enough to melt.

Grant had used the old six-barreled Gatling guns against massed Confederate infantry at Petersburg and Richmond. Kenan had heard their stuttering fire above the yells and musket volleys, above even the artillery. Plain slaughter, men charging into that.

Only 250 rounds per minute, those obsolete Gatlings.

At San Juan Hill, Teddy Roosevelt’s young lieutenants had turned the thing into an offensive weapon. They mounted the guns on light two-wheeled carriages and rushed them forward along with the general charge, stopping long enough to fire a magazine or two, then advancing again. He had talked to Rough Riders who had been there. The spigs had been blasted out of fortified trenches, killed behind wooden barricades thick as railroad ties. The Rough Riders said they’d never seen anything like it.

Kenan stood in the wagon feeling the sure, deadly weight of the gun, wondering if his dream would return tonight.

In the dream, he had been standing in this wagon exactly the way he was now. Two spirited horses were hitched in the doubletree, reins held tight by a groom in blue. Nobody else was in the wagon with him. It was parked in the middle of a street he didn’t recognize—run-down shiplap houses, unpainted shotgun shacks, board fences with gaps like missing teeth.

Up the street surged a din of voices, but he could see no one. The light was very bad—a cloudy light that dimmed and flared, as if fires were being struck and damped. He squinted into the gloom. The voices grew louder, sounded closer—the low, menacing groundswell of a mob. Still, he could see no one.

He leaned over his Gatling gun, wondering—in the dream—where the troops were: Walker Taylor, the State Guards, the Naval Reserves, the Light Infantry.