In the boxes the men heard the water rise in the trench and looked out for cottonmouths. Theysquatted in muddy water, slept above it, peed in it. Paul D thought he was screaming; his mouthwas open and there was this loud throat-splitting sound — but it may have been somebody else.

　　Then he thought he was crying. Something was running down his cheeks. He lifted his hands towipe away the tears and saw dark brown slime. Above him rivulets of mud slid through the boardsof the roof. When it come down, he thought, gonna crush me like a tick bug. It happened so quickhe had no time to ponder. Somebody yanked the chain — once — hard enough to cross his legsand throw him into the mud. He never figured out how he knew — how anybody did — but he didknow — he did — and he took both hands and yanked the length of chain at his left, so the nextman would know too. The water was above his ankles, flowing over the wooden plank he slept on.

　　And then it wasn't water anymore. The ditch was caving in and mud oozed under and through thebars. They waited — each and every one of the forty-six. Not screaming, although some of themmust have fought like the devil not to. The mud was up to his thighs and he held on to the bars.

　　Then it came — another yank — from the left this time and less forceful than the first because ofthe mud it passed through.

　　It started like the chain-up but the difference was the power of the chain. One by one, from Hi Manback on down the line, they dove. Down through the mud under the bars, blind, groping. Some hadsense enough to wrap their heads in their shirts, cover their faces with rags, put on their shoes.

　　Others just plunged, simply ducked down and pushed out, fighting up, reaching for air. Some lostdirection and their neighbors, feeling the confused pull of the chain, snatched them around. Forone lost, all lost. The chain that held them would save all or none, and Hi Man was the Delivery.

　　They talked through that chain like Sam Morse and, Great God, they all came up. Like theunshriven dead, zombies on the loose, holding the chains in their hands, they trusted the rain andthe dark, yes, but mostly Hi Man and each other.

　　Past the sheds where the dogs lay in deep depression; past the two guard shacks, past the stable ofsleeping horses, past the hens whose bills were bolted into their feathers, they waded. The moondid not help because it wasn't there. The field was a marsh, the track a trough. All Georgia seemedto be sliding, melting away. Moss wiped their faces as they fought the live-oak branches thatblocked their way. Georgia took up all of Alabama and Mississippi then, so there was no state lineto cross and it wouldn't have mattered anyway. If they had known about it, they would haveavoided not only Alfred and the beautiful feldspar, but Savannah too and headed for the SeaIslands on the river that slid down from the Blue Ridge Mountains. But they didn't know.

　　Daylight came and they huddled in a copse of redbud trees. Night came and they scrambled up tohigher ground, praying the rain would go on shielding them and keeping folks at home. They werehoping for a shack, solitary, some distance from its big house, where a slave might be making ropeor heating potatoes at the grate. What they found was a camp of sick Cherokee for whom a rosewas named. Decimated but stubborn, they were among those who chose a fugitive life rather thanOklahoma. The illness that swept them now was reminiscent of the one that had killed half theirnumber two hundred years earlier. In between that calamity and this, they had visited George III in London, published a newspaper, made baskets, led Oglethorpe through forests, helped AndrewJackson fight Creek, cooked maize, drawn up a constitution, petitioned the King of Spain, beenexperimented on by Dartmouth, established asylums, wrote their language, resisted settlers, shotbear and translated scripture. All to no avail. Th............