“I should get home. It’s already much later—”

“Yes, I know. But tell me, what was your reason for going out on the river?”

“Reason? I didn’t have any reason.” Hugh dragged me over there and gave me a pistol, he thought. “It was an assignment. I had no idea.”

Kenan nodded, his face florid with liquor. His moustache bristled silver. “Yes, of course. I should have realized.”

Sam recalled Frank Manly’s livid face glaring up at him.

“It’s a strange thing,” Kenan went on. “People—civilians—think of military men as bloodthirsty killers. Craving battle, mayhem. Can’t wait for it all to start, they think.”

He stopped talking and focused his red eyes on Sam. Sam felt trapped: what was he expected to say? What did Kenan want to hear?

Kenan had drunk quite a lot, more than he had intended. It was Mary’s being away, rattling around this empty house all day. The dream. “But we know better. We’ve been there, eh?”

“Right,” Sam said.

Kenan smiled, realizing how drunk he must be to be badgering the poor fellow like this. Thing was, Jenks reminded him of his own boy. Not in his appearance—Bill Junior was far more handsome—but in his manner, how he paid attention to things. How he looked awhile, saw what was what and who was who, before he made up his mind. Most men nowadays didn’t pay any damned attention. They were born with all the right answers. Never bothered to ask the questions. As the century came to a close, it seemed to Kenan, the world was spinning faster and faster. It was hard to keep up. Hard not to lose your head. Hard not to go along with the machine men.

When the century turned—what would happen then? Would it just spin out of control and unravel? The tombstone in his dream had read 1903. Not possible.

He needed his own boy with him now. His time was running out. He didn’t believe in dreams. Hysterical women with too-tight corsets were the ones who had morbid dreams, fretting over the melodrama. But he believed in this dream. The next century didn’t belong to him. He wanted to do things right from now on, not make any more mistakes. He wanted to hand things over to his boy in good order, but he was afraid the order was coming apart. Gettysburg didn’t matter anymore. Whether Pickett did or didn’t charge. In the next war, it would just be machines anyway.

Why hadn’t he made that shot at Fort Stevens? Of all the shots of his life—the turkeys he had won, the deer he had dropped, the pickets and artillery spotters he had picked off—why had he missed that single shot?

The most famous shot of his life—a miss.