“Tonight. Soon as it gets full dark.”

“What about the others?”

“They don’t want the others.”

Alex stood dumbly, looking down the alley at the new day. The world seemed suddenly narrow, constricted, seemed to lead inevitably to a place he didn’t want to go. Had he been so foolish to think he could change things? How had all his choices, all the grand possibilities he had dreamed, disappeared so quickly?

“Don’t go out today, brother,” Frank said.

“I have to vote.”

Frank spat. “They’re going to stuff the ballot boxes anyhow—and they’ll be laying for you, you show your face.”

Alex knew he was right. His vote wouldn’t count—none of their votes would. The whole thing was already cooked. He was surprised to learn that he wasn’t up to a symbolic act of courage—a grand gesture. He had always assumed he would be. Now, he had nothing, not even his good opinion of himself.

“Get inside. There’s riders all over town. I don’t want no brother of mine to wind up with his head stuck on a pole. They might remember he has kin.” Frank steered Alex through the back door of Free Love Hall and locked it behind them.

Before it was fully light, Mike Dowling assembled his Red Shirts behind the post office and led them at a walk past the Orton Hotel on Front Street, then around the corner onto Market, heading away from the river. The horses walked with their heads up, nostrils steaming, nickering nervously.

Off to the right, they passed the Gothic tower of St. James Church, crowned with cypress pinnacles, built to stand the weather. They paraded past the Temple of Israel, a Moorish-style oddity dedicated for its Jewish congregation in 1876 with a speech by Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell.

Half a block farther on, to the left, members of the Wilmington Light Infantry and the Wilmington Naval Reserves were already forming up on the lawn facing the street. The milling soldiers watched Dowling’s men with curiosity. A few of them waved. The Red Shirts did not wave back. Their faces were set. They were on a mission. They were past fooling around. Some of the horses balked at the sight of so many uniforms and tossed their heads. Their riders slapped the horses’ necks reassuringly and half-stood in the stirrups to gentle them. The column was quiet except for the murmuring of rider to horse, the creak of stiff saddles, the jingle of harnesses.

Now, Dowling urged his little sorrel horse into a trot, and the column followed suit. He barely noticed the fortresslike First Baptist Church at the corner of Fifth Street.

At Seventh Street, a lone rider waited for them in the middle of the intersection—Hugh MacRae.

“Whoa, boys,” Dowling called, reining up.