Other young men arrived. By the time they settled in to eat at the polished mahogany table in the dining room, there were a dozen guests. Though they had all arrived dressed in suits and ties, before long they took off their jackets, rolled up their sleeves, and opened their collars. They drank liberally and ate with gusto. Seated at one end of the table, Sam noticed how erectly the men—except for Pastor Hoge—sat to their meal, practicing a kind of barracks discipline. They were rowdy and colorful in their language, cursing freely even in front of the reverend, but they never lost the bearing of soldiers. Sam liked them. He liked being here among them. They seemed to think he belonged.

Among these men, he could almost believe he was as brave as they thought he was.

Kenan sat at the head of the table, beaming. A stout colored woman named Hattie tended the sideboard, carrying out newly cooked dishes of quail, venison, and rabbit. Kenan joshed with her and she scolded him right back and they both laughed. She adored him, that was clear. Sam hadn’t felt this warm sense of exuberant well-being since the last time he’d drunk himself into jail.

“My boy writes me from Mexico,” Kenan said. “Building a hydroelectric dam down there, you know. Has the damnedest time finding reliable men.”

“Native labor,” somebody said.

Walker Taylor said, “Well, we routed the spigs from Cuba,” and winked at Sam. “We’re sweeping through the Philippines. I suppose we’ll be going into Guadalajara next.”

“About time.”

“Kipling had it right,” the Reverend Hoge said. “ Take up the White Man’s Burden—and reap his old reward.’ ”

Kenan finished the verse: “ ‘The blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard.’ ”

“Hear, hear.”

“The limeys didn’t have Gatling guns, did they? Maybe they’d have done better,” one of the young men said, and the others laughed.

Kenan glared at him. Sam was impressed by how suddenly, by his mere presence, he could take command.

“I just meant—”

“Never mind, son,” Kenan said, back to his avuncular self. Turning that meat grinder on men, he thought. He said, “In the old days, it was different. Man to man. When you aimed your gun at a man, well, it was different.”

Sam recalled the story he’d heard—Kenan taking a potshot at President Lincoln. Had any president ever died in battle? A lone man, the man sitting at the head of this table, had come within inches of ending the greatest American war in history. With a single shot. He might have been the most famous man in the world.

“Times are changing,” Walker Taylor observed. “The twentieth century will be the golden age of American technology. I can remember when we didn’t even have telephones in this town.”