Dowling cocked his head, as though a beam of light had just lit up the inside of his skull. “Oh, I get it! You’ve got your own blessed plans! And you don’t want us poor-bockers fucking it all up!” He grinned, showing broken front teeth.

Walker Taylor said, “Ride away. Now.”

Dowling grinned. Then he noticed that Walker Taylor had his hand wrapped around the grip of a .45-caliber Colt, hidden under the flap of his jacket. He heard a wet click as Taylor let the hammer down and shoved the revolver back into his waistband. “Just so you know,” Walker Taylor said, practically whispering. “There’s nothing we’re not prepared to do.”

Dowling jerked upright in his saddle and whistled a clear, piercing note. “The nigger’s gone to New Jersey!” he shouted. “We told him we’d drive him out, and we did! Leave these darkies to their supper!”

The mob began to bleed away by twos and threes. Dowling saluted Walker Taylor, still grinning, and then galloped up Seventh Street, scattering those on foot before him like barnyard chickens. He had some drinking to do. Things were turning out better than he could have hoped.

From the second floor of Free Love Hall, Alex Manly peered out cautiously onto the dispersing mob. Beside him, back against the wall, hunkered his brother Frank, a Winchester rifle cradled across his knees. Saffron King James was fetching them glasses of lemonade. She moved toward them from the stairs across the room, crouching, quiet as a breeze, careful to keep her silhouette out of the window.

“See what I mean about white reporters?” Frank said. “They out to nail your ass to the barn.” He was angry—nobody ever took him seriously until it was too late. Especially Alex. Frank had rallied the other men just in time, or they might all be swinging from lampposts. “When things settle down, I be hunting a Sam Jenks for my trophy wall.”

Saffron slid to the floor next to the men while they gulped lemonade. They’d been up here in the heat for two hours.

“Now you’re talking Tom Miller’s trash,” Alex said. “We only need one like that.”

“We best not be here next time they come.”

“Next time?”

“Bank on it, brother.”

“Why do you think they stopped at the last minute like that?”

Frank finished his drink and clunked the glass down on the floor next to his leg. “Didn’t like the odds, I guess. Who knows what’s on whitefolks’ minds? Maybe nothing. Maybe just a hum like a ‘lectric turbine.”

The white mob had all but disappeared, the stragglers hurrying not to be left behind. The Negro men around the building relaxed and joshed. Some drifted home.

Alex Manly watched one figure emerge from the cover of a board fence and stand watching up Seventh Street after the retreating Red Shirts. He was a tall, lean man dressed in a gray suit. In the yellow lamplight, his face and hands fairly glowed. “Who is that fellow? Don’t believe I’ve ever seen him around here before.”