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restrained himself from reaching out to grab somebody.
    Reverend Fullerton aimed the rifle at an imaginary foe, and the captain laughed, loud and hollow, the stage laugh of a bad actor.
    "Easy there, Leo. The lady doesn't want to watch you win back the South." Williams stepped around the campfire and clapped Fullerton on the back with a little too much force for mere conviviality.
    "Are you interested in history?" Leo Fullerton asked Anna in the manner that lets one know a reply in the negative will be construed as proof of idiocy.
    She was saved from answering by Ian. "What brings you to these parts?" He forced a change of subject. "Down for the pilgrimage?" Other than Mecca, Anna wasn't aware of much in the pilgrim line.
    "I'm the new district ranger on this part of the Trace," she told them.
    Abruptly the weather changed, a cold wind blew down from the northward of their opinion. Like comic thieves caught suddenly when the lights are switched on, the three of them froze in tableau.
    Anna got a whole lot wearier. "Taco," she hollered and the dog rose obligingly from where he'd flopped in front of one of the tents.
    "I'd better get to my unpacking. Thanks for the coffee." The psychic equivalent of a nudge passed through the faux soldiers, and they came back to life, Anna departed in a flurry of "Sure you won't have another cuppa,"
    "A lady ranger, huh?" and "Welcome to Mississippi. "The tone was too cheery, covering up forbad manners.
    Or something else she was totally in the dark about.
    She took the shortest route back to the road between two Dodge Ram pickup trucks. Plastered on the bumper of one of them was the familiar shape of the rebel flag, Across it was written: HERITAGE, NOT HATE.
    As she and Taco walked across the apron of well-worn grass to the asphalt road, a small utility vehicle, a sort of glorified golf cart with the forest-green stripe of the National Park Service on its side, puttered around the bend. "Frank, meet your new boss," Ian McIntire hollered, and trotted down the gentle incline to wave the machine and its pilot over. Normalcy had returned, The Civil War re-enactors were again at case. Anna didn't know if they'd quickly acclimatized to the appalling phenomenon of a female district ranger or, and this grated on her overtaxed nerves, decided a lady cop was bound to be sufficiently inept that whatever bad struck them dumb at the mention of her avocation was considered safe once again.
    A wiry man pushing sixty, Frank had thick red hair devoid of so much as a spattering of gray. He climbed out of the car wearing the familiar relaxed green and gray of an NPS maintenance uniform. The inside of both arms from elbow to wrist were crosshatched with deep scars, as if he'd held onto a bobcat who did not wish to be held onto.
    Anna introduced herself, and Frank shook bands gingerly. "So you're it," be said as he pulled off his green ball cap and mopped sweat from his face and neck with a wad of paper towels he'd stashed in his hip pocket.
    "You sure got your work cut out for you. I'm not saying anything against anybody, but there hasn't been a whole beck of a lot done around here for a month of Sundays."
    "You look like you're working hard," Anna said politely. "Yeah, well, I ain't law enforcement," Frank countered. The rift that often existed between the two disciplines was evidently fairly pronounced on the Trace.
    "All I can tell you is I been trying to raise Randy and Barth for the past ten minutes. Either they got their radios off of they're playin' possum somewhere."
    "Mat's the problem?" Anna asked because she had to. Being "the boss" put her in a double bind. As law enforcement, one didn't have the luxury of letting things slide, of looking the other way and letting someone else handle whatever it was needed handling. Now, as a supervisor, she had the added onus of being obliged to look as if she actually cared.
    "Dispatch's had half a dozen calls about an obstruction on the road just this side of Big