The Center Cannot Hold

XII

Mary McGregor went about her chores with a certain somber joy. That had nothing to do with how hard things were on the Manitoba farm where she'd spent her whole life. It had a great deal to do with how hard the market crash had hit the United States. She hardly cared what happened to her, so long as the United States got hurt.

And, by all the signs, the occupiers did hurt. Fewer green-gray U.S. Army motorcars rattled along the road to Rosenfeld that ran past the edge of the farm. Fewer U.S. soldiers prowled the streets of the local market town. And the Rosenfeld Register, published these days by an upstart from Minnesota who used occupation propaganda as filler, kept on weeping about how hard a time people south of the border were having.

None of which made things on the farm any easier, only somewhat easier to bear. Things on the farm were desperately hard, and all the harder because Julia had married Kenneth Marble and gone off to live with him. She came back to visit fairly often, usually bringing Beth Marble, Kenneth's mother, with her, and Kenneth himself stopped by every so often for a burst of work for which a man's strength came in handy. Things weren't the same, though, and Mary and her own mother both knew it.

"One of these days before too long, you'll meet somebody, too," Maude McGregor said over supper after a long, wearing day out in the fields. "You'll meet somebody, get married yourself, and move away. I'll probably have to sell this place and move in with you or Julia."

"I wouldn't do that!" Mary exclaimed.

Her mother smiled. "Of course you would. You should. That's the way the world works. Young folks do what they need to do, and older ones ride along with it as best they can. I don't see how we'd go on if things worked any different."

"It doesn't seem right. It isn't right," Mary said-she'd had that passionate certainty for as long as she'd been alive. After a moment, she went on, "If I ever marry anybody"-and the thought had crossed her mind more and more often since she'd passed her twentieth birthday-"he ought to come and live here and help us work this place. Then our children could go right on working it, years and years from now."

"The trouble with that, you know, is that Julia and Kenneth, and their children when they have them, have an interest in this land, too," her mother said.

"Julia doesn't seem very interested," Mary said. "She went off without so much as a backwards glance."

"Julia doesn't seem very interested now," her mother replied. "How she'll feel about things ten or twenty years from now-or how her husband and her children will feel-well, how can anybody know for sure?"

Thinking about what things might be like ten or twenty years from now still didn't seem natural to Mary. She tried to imagine herself at forty, but no picture formed in her mind. That lay too far in the future to mean anything to her now. She wondered if Julia still felt the same way. Maybe not-with a husband at hand, she had to be looking forward to having children.

How children were begotten was no mystery to Mary, as it could be no mystery to anyone who'd grown up on a farm. Why anyone would want to have anything to do with the process was a different question. To let a man do that with her, to her… She shook her head. The mere idea was repulsive. But people did it. That was what being married was about. She knew that, too. If people didn't do it, after a while there wouldn't be any more people.

Sometimes that didn't seem such a bad idea.

Her mother went on, "A couple of knotholes have popped out of the wood in the barn. I want you to nail wood over them when you get the chance, so the inside will stay warmer in winter. The sooner you do it, the sooner we don't have to worry about it any more."

"I'll take care of it," Mary promised. "I've noticed 'em, too, especially the one that came out right behind that old wagon wheel."

"Yes, that's the biggest one," Maude McGregor agreed. "A good patch there will keep a lot of warm air from leaking out when the weather turns cold again-and it will."

"I know," Mary said. No one who'd lived in Manitoba any time from September to April could help knowing.

When she went out to the barn the next morning, she took care of the livestock first. That had to be done, and done every day. As soon as she'd finished, she went over to her father's work bench. She cut a square off a flat board, then grabbed the wood, a hammer, and some nails and went to get at the knot that had turned into a knothole.

It was right behind that wagon wheel. She had to put down the tools and the patch to wrestle the wheel out of the way. "Miserable thing," she muttered, or perhaps something a little stronger than that. Why the devil hadn't her father got rid of it? Come to that, why hadn't she or her mother in the years since her father died? She had no good answer except that there had always been more important things to do.

Once she'd shifted the wheel, she picked up the square of wood and the hammer and nails and advanced on the knothole. As she took the next to last step, she frowned. It didn't sound right-she'd never known that reverberation anywhere else in the barn. It didn't feel quite right underfoot, either. Ground had no business giving slightly, as it did here. It almost felt as if…

Mary bent down to look more closely at where she'd been standing. It just looked like dirt, with straw scattered over it. But when she scraped at it with her hand, she didn't have to dig far at all before her fingers found a board-undoubtedly, the board she'd trodden on after moving the broken wagon wheel.

What's that doing there? she wondered. Almost of their own accord, her fingers kept searching till they found the edge of the board. She pulled up. Dirt slid from the board as she raised it.

Under it was a sharp-edged hollow dug into the soil. And in that hollow… Mary's eyes got big and round. In that hollow rested sticks of dynamite and blasting caps and lengths of fuse and some highly specialized tools. "At last," she whispered. She'd finally found her father's bomb-making gear.

The first thing she imagined was going into Rosenfeld, as Arthur McGregor had done at the end of the Great War, and blowing as many Americans as she could sky-high. She didn't worry about getting caught. If it meant more revenge on the USA, she would gladly pay the price. The real problem was, she didn't know enough about explosives to make a bomb that had any real chance of doing what she wanted it to do.

I can learn, she thought. It can't be too hard. I just have to be careful. I'm sure I can figure it out without killing myself while I'm doing it.

"Thank you, Pa," Mary said. "I'm sorry you had to stop. I'm even sorrier you didn't get General Custer. But the fight's not done. The fight won't be done till Canada's free again."

She looked toward that old, broken wagon wheel. Suddenly, a wide smile flashed across her face. Now she understood why her father had never repaired it or got rid of it. It perfectly concealed his tools and explosives. Not one of the Yankee soldiers who'd searched this barn-and there had been a lot of them, for they'd suspected much more than they could ever prove-had thought to move it and see what lay underneath. She wouldn't have thought of it, either, if she hadn't had to shift the wheel for an altogether different reason.

She wondered if she could find anyone in the sputtering Canadian resistance movement who could teach her about making bombs. Then, almost as soon as the thought occurred to her, she shook her head. Her father had gone his own way in fighting the Americans, which meant no one had betrayed him. No one could betray him if no one knew what he was doing.

People told a bitter joke: when three people sit down to conspire, one is a fool and the other two American spies. That would have been funnier had it not held so painfully much truth. More than once, the Rosenfeld Register had exulted about plots that failed because one member or another gave them away to the Yankees.

Mary McGregor nodded to herself. Whatever I do, I'll do it alone. That's how Pa did it. He'd still be blowing them up if he hadn't had bad luck. It's my turn now. I'll be as careful as he was, or even more so. Nobody will give me away, and I won't give myself away, either.

Some people said even the big Canadian uprising of a few years before had been betrayed to the Americans before it broke out, that they'd been on the alert because of that. Mary had even heard some people with reputations as patriots had turned traitor because they'd fallen in love with invaders from the south.

She didn't want to believe that. She had trouble imagining any proper Canadian falling in love with a Yankee. The Americans had ravished the country. Wouldn't they be ravishing anyone in it who had anything to do with them? That was how it seemed to Mary. As far as she was concerned, nobody who'd betrayed the uprising deserved to live.

"Yes, that's what I'll do," she said, as if someone had suggested it to her. Getting rid of traitors was the best way she could think of to remind the whole country that going along with the occupation had a price.

She wanted to go out and start planting bombs that very morning. She knew some names. She was sure she could learn others without much trouble. But she checked herself. You were going to be careful, remember? After nodding, she patched the knothole that had led to her discovery. Then she carefully concealed the hole in the ground once more, replacing the board, covering it with dirt and straw, and putting the old wagon wheel back where it belonged. When she was done, she looked hard at the ground and did a little more smoothing. Satisfied at last, she nodded and went on to cover up the other knots that had come out of the planking.

"Took you long enough," her mother said when Mary came into the farmhouse. "I didn't think it was that hard a job."

"Sorry, Ma." Mary had known from the minute she lifted the edge of the board and saw what lay beneath it that she couldn't tell her mother about it. What would Maude McGregor do? Pitch a fit and tell her to leave the stuff alone. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name. She was also sure she wouldn't leave the stuff alone, no matter what her mother told her to do.

"Sorry?" Her mother shook her head. "Don't you think you have enough other things to take care of? What were you doing, playing with the chicks? You haven't done that since you were a little girl."

"I know, but I was looking at them, and they looked so cute-and they turn into stupid, boring old hens so fast. I wanted to have some fun with them while I could. They act so silly." Mary seized on the explanation with both hands. She didn't like to lie to her mother, but preferred that to telling the truth here.

"Can't afford to get sentimental about 'em," her mother said. "They'll go into the pot when they stop giving enough eggs to be worth their keep. Nothing like a good chicken stew on a cold winter night."

"I know that, too, Ma." Mary didn't want to say anything to stir her mother up or make her start asking questions. Agreeing with everything Maude McGregor said was also liable to make her mother wonder, but not in any dangerous way.

Or so Mary thought, till her mother asked, "Are you all right, dear?"

Mary thought that over. After a couple of seconds, she nodded. "I'm swell, Ma. I'm the best I've been for a long time, matter of fact." Her mother gave her a quizzical look, but not of the sort to make her worry. No, she didn't worry at all. Everything was going to be fine now. She could feel it.

T he Remembrance sailed west through the Straits of Florida, out of Nassau in the Bahamas-the formerly British Bahamas, surrendered to the USA after the Great War-bound for Puerto Limon on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. The sun stood tropically high in the sky. The day was hot and bright and perfect… perfect, that is, for almost everybody aboard the aeroplane carrier except Sam Carsten.

No matter how hot and muggy it got, Sam had to keep his cap on and to jam it down as far down over his eyes as he could. A lot of officers went around in their shirtsleeves. He didn't; he left on his white summer jacket, to protect his arms as well as he could.

His ears, his nose (especially his nose), and the backs of his hands were snowy white with zinc-oxide ointment. Even so, every square inch of flesh he exposed to the sun was red and peeling or blistered. He hated weather like this, hated it where most men reveled in it.

Like most men, Commander Martin van der Waal tanned readily. Oh, he'd burn if he did something stupid, but even that would only last till he stayed out enough to get his hide acclimated to the sun. The torpedo-defense specialist looked at Sam with wry sympathy. "You'd sooner be patrolling somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, wouldn't you?" he said.

"Now that you mention it, sir-yes," Carsten answered.

"Sorry about that," van der Waal said. "They've got somebody else keeping an eye on the Royal Navy up there. We get to show the flag in what used to be a Confederate lake."

"Not quite enough little specks of land in the Florida Straits to let the CSA claim this as territorial water and make us go the long way round," Sam said.

"We would have had to before the war," his superior said. "The Confederates thought they were little tin gods then. Now… Now I don't care if they build themselves a bridge from Key West to Habana. We'll sail right under it, by God, and thumb our noses as we go by."

"Yeah." Carsten smiled and nodded, liking the picture.

Down at the Remembrance 's stern, a sailor spun an aeroplane's prop. The engine roared to noisy life. With a push from the steam catapult, the machine taxied along the carrier's flight deck, descended for a split second as it went off the end, and then gained altitude and buzzed away. Another followed, and another, and another.

Sam said, "Of course it'll be unofficial when they look over what the Confederates are up to in south Florida and Cuba." He winked. "Of course it will."

Commander van der Waal chuckled. "Yeah, and rain makes applesauce."

But two could play at that game. Before long, a biplane came down from Florida and began flying lazy circles above the Remembrance. Not caring for the company, the aeroplane carrier's commander ordered a couple of fighting scouts aloft to look over the newcomer and, if need be, to warn him off. Sam happened to be going by the wireless shack when one of the U.S. pilots said, "The Confederate says he's just a civilian. His machine's got Confederate Citrus Company painted on the side. He's out for a stroll, you might say."

What the officer inside the wireless center said meant, Yeah, and rain makes applesauce, but was a good deal more pungently phrased. The officer went on, "Tell the son of a bitch he can goddamn well go strolling somewhere else, or maybe he'll go swimming instead."

"Yes, sir," the pilot answered. Carsten lingered in the corridor to hear what happened next. After half a minute or so, the pilot came back on the air: "Sir, he says if we want an international incident from shooting down an unarmed civilian pilot in international waters, we can have one."

The officer in the wireless center expended more bad language. At last, he said, "I'd better talk to the old man about that one." He might have wanted to order the Confederate aeroplane knocked out of the sky, but he didn't have the nerve to do it without approval from on high. Carsten wouldn't have, either.

Maybe the skipper of the Remembrance used some blue language of his own. Whether he did or not, that CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY aeroplane flew above the carrier for the next hour and a half. Nobody fired a shot at it. The pilot finally ran low on fuel or got bored or found some other reason to fly back off toward the north.

In the officers' galley at supper that evening, Sam said, "I bet they're developing that bastard's photographs right now."

"Probably," a lieutenant, junior grade, agreed. "Fat lot of good they can do with 'em, though. Maybe they've built a few submersibles without our noticing, and maybe than can keep 'em hidden from us, too-"

"Especially since the Socialists aren't spending the money on inspections that the Democrats did," a lieutenant commander put in.

"Yes, sir," the j.g. said. "But there's no way in hell they could build themselves an aeroplane carrier on the sly. That's too big a secret to keep. Besides, they haven't got the aeroplanes to put aboard it."

"We hope they don't," Sam said. "For all we know, they're all labeled Confederate Citrus Company right now."

That produced a few laughs and a few curses. The lieutenant commander said, "That machine had no guns. The pilots checked, first thing."

"Yes, sir," Sam said. "But how long would they need to convert the type to something they could use in combat?"

Nobody had anything resembling an answer for him. The lieutenant commander said, "That's something we ought to find out about. Maybe more of these fruit-company bastards will come look us over before too long. If they do, we'll look them over, too." He sighed. "I don't know how much good that will do us, not the way things are in Philadelphia these days, but we do have to make the effort."

By the next morning, though, they'd left the Straits and even Cuba behind. No more aeroplanes came out from the CSA to inspect them. Carsten was sure that didn't mean nobody was keeping an eye on them. Lots of little fishing boats, some Confederate, others Mexican, bobbed in the Gulf of Mexico. How many of them had wireless sets? How many of those sets were sending reports to, say, the Confederate Naval Academy at Mobile, or to New Orleans? He didn't know, but he had his suspicions.

He also had suspicions of another sort. Whenever he came up onto the flight deck, he kept staring out into the blue, blue waters of the Gulf. "What are you doing?" Commander van der Waal asked. "Looking for periscopes?"

"Yes, sir," Sam answered, altogether seriously.

Van der Waal stared. "Do you really think the Confederates would try to sink us?"

"No, sir," Sam said. "I think they'd have to be crazy to try that. But if they've got any submersibles, what better way to train their crews than by stalking a real, live aeroplane carrier?"

His superior pondered that, then nodded. "Good point, Carsten. Let's see what we can do about it. Maybe we ought to get some training in, too."

Before long, the Remembrance shut down her engines and drifted to a stop. Sam knew what that meant: she was giving her hydrophone operators the best chance she could to pick up the sounds of submarines moving on their electric engines somewhere under the sea.

What will we do if we hear one? Carsten wondered. The carrier couldn't start lobbing depth charges into the Gulf of Mexico. That would be an act of war, no less than if one of the hypothetical subs launched a torpedo at her. We could report it to Philadelphia. How much good would that do? Sam didn't know. But the Confederate States couldn't claim they had no submersibles if the Remembrance found one.

Or could they? Maybe they'd claim the boat belonged to the Empire of Mexico. Sam doubted the Mexicans could build such boats on their own, or man them if they did, but how could you know for sure? You couldn't. Subs under the sea were hard to find and even harder to identify; they didn't come with license plates, the way motorcars did.

Nobody ever officially said whether the hydrophone operators found anything. Sam did get a letter of commendation in his service jacket for "enhancing the Remembrance 's readiness against surprise attack." He drew his own conclusions from that. He also kept his mouth shut about them. Sometimes advertising you'd done something smart was a good idea. Sometimes it was anything but.

When they neared the Central American coast, a tiny gunboat flying the blue-and-white Costa Rican flag came out of Puerto Limon to greet the Remembrance. An officer at the bow hailed her through a megaphone. He looked just the way Sam had thought a Costa Rican would look, and spoke English with a Spanish accent. The gunboat, which might have been a toy alongside the aeroplane carrier, got out of the way in a hurry so the elephantine ship could advance.

Puerto Limon itself turned out to be very different from what Carsten had expected. He'd come to ports in Latin America before. He'd figured the people here would be like the officer: swarthy, most of them of mixed white and Indian blood, and Spanish-speaking. Instead, most of them turned out to be Negroes, and they used more English than Spanish. In their mouths, the language had a lilt that put him in mind of what he'd heard in the Bahamas.

A long line of black men carrying huge bunches of bananas came up the pier next to the one where the Remembrance tied up. They vanished into the hold of a freighter flying the Confederate flag, then emerged to go back down the pier lugging crates: whatever that freighter had been carrying here to exchange for the golden fruit (actually, the bananas going aboard were green; Sam supposed they would ripen on the way up to the CSA).

White sailors aboard the freighter stared over at the aeroplane carrier. To Commander van der Waal, Carsten remarked, "I wonder how many of those bastards were in the C.S. Navy during the war."

"More than a few, or I miss my guess," the other officer answered. "We've just given them some free intelligence." He shrugged. "That's the way it goes, sometimes."

The Costa Rican officer from the gunboat came aboard a few minutes later. His white uniform was more festooned with gold braid than that of the Remembrance 's skipper, but he introduced himself as Lieutenant Commander Garcia. That tickled Sam's funny bone. "I wonder what an admiral in the Costa Rican Navy looks like," he remarked.

"You probably can't see the cloth on his uniform at all, on account of the gold and the medals and such." Commander van der Waal's snicker had a nasty edge to it. "My little girl back in Providence likes to play dress-up the same way. Of course, she's got an excuse-she's only eight years old."

But Lieutenant Commander Garcia said all the right things: "We are pleased to see this great ship in our growing port. We hope it is a sign of friendship between your great republic and our own. Costa Rica and the United States have never been enemies. We do not believe we ever have to be."

Sam wondered whether the sailors aboard the Confederate freighter could hear Garcia's words, and how they liked them if they could. Hope you don't like 'em for beans, he thought.

W hen Abner Dowling went to the train station in Salt Lake City, a police officer patted him down before allowing him inside the building. Another cop, and a military policeman with him, went through Dowling's suitcase. "Sorry about this, sir," the MP said when he got to the bottom of Dowling's belongings. "I do apologize for the inconvenience."

"It's all right," Dowling answered. "Identity cards and uniforms can be faked-we've found that out the hard way. Now you know for a fact I won't be carrying contraband onto the train."

"Thank you for taking it so well, sir," the military policeman said.

"No point getting huffy about it," Dowling said. "You were going to search me any which way."

He was dead right about that. Everyone who left Utah was searched these days, whether at train stations or at checkpoints along the highways. Since assassinating General Pershing, Mormon diehards had set off bombs from San Francisco to Pittsburgh. They were suspected in a couple of murders of prominent men, too, and of bank robberies to finance their operations. And so…

And so lines into the railroad station were long and slow. Everyone was searched: men, women, children, even babies in flowing robes. At least once, somebody had tried to smuggle out explosives hidden under baby clothes. Dowling only hoped the diehards hadn't succeeded at that game before the U.S. occupiers got wise to it. Every suitcase got searched, too. Some, the ones suspected of false bottoms, also got X-rayed.

As Dowling took his seat in the fancy Pullman car, he marveled that any ordinary civilians at all got on in Utah. He muttered under his breath, a mutter uncomplimentary to the inhabitants of the state he helped rule. Utah had precious few ordinary civilians, and even fewer who were also Mormons. Up till General Pershing was killed, Dowling had dared believe otherwise. So had the administrators who'd been on the point of relaxing military occupation in Utah.

It could have become a state like any other, Dowling thought as the train began rolling east. They could have rebuilt the Temple, if they'd wanted to. But some damnfool hotheads made sure that wouldn't happen. I hope they're pleased with themselves. Utah won't get out from under the U.S. Army's thumb for the next ten years now.

He suspected the man who'd gunned down General Pershing-a man who'd never been caught-and his pals were pleased with themselves. Some people had a vested interest in trouble. If it looked as if calm threatened to break out, people like that would do anything they could to thwart it. And, as they'd shown, they could do plenty.

Colonel Dowling let out a loud, long sigh. He glanced toward the bed in his compartment. If he wanted to, he could take off his shoes-take off his uniform, for that matter-curl up there, and go to sleep. He didn't have to worry about Salt Lake City, or Utah as a whole, for the next several days.

Unless the Mormons have planted a bomb under the railroad tracks, he thought. He knew that wasn't likely. But he also knew it wasn't impossible.

He shook his head, angry at himself. I said I wasn't going to worry about it, and what do I do? Start worrying, that's what.

He looked out the window. An aeroplane flew past, also heading east but easily outpacing the train. It was one of those new three-motored machines that could carry freight or passengers. Suddenly, Dowling wondered what sort of precautions people were taking at landing fields. A bomb aboard an aeroplane would surely kill everybody on it. Muttering again, this time a sharp curse, he scribbled a note to himself. Maybe the Mormons hadn't thought of trying to bomb aeroplanes, the way they assuredly had thought of bombing trains. Maybe they wouldn't. But maybe they would, too. He wanted to stay one step ahead of them if he could.

When lunchtime came, he made his way back to the dining car. He was about to dig into a big plate of spare ribs when a clever-looking woman with reddish hair going gray came up to his table and said, "Mind if I join you, Colonel Dowling?"

"I suppose not." He frowned; she looked familiar, but he couldn't place the face. "You're…"

"Ophelia Clemens," she said crisply, holding out her hand man-fashion. "We met in Winnipeg, if you'll remember."

"Good God, yes!" Dowling exclaimed as he shook it. "I'm not likely to forget that!" She'd come to occupied Canada to interview General Custer, and she'd just escaped being blown to bits with him-and with Dowling-when Arthur McGregor planted a bomb in the steakhouse where Custer ate lunch. "How are you, Miss Clemens?"

"Tolerable well, thanks," the newspaperwoman answered. "Are you also heading to Washington for General Custer's funeral?"

Dowling nodded. "Yes, I am. I would have gone anyway, but Mrs. Custer also sent me a telegram asking me to be there, which I thought was very kind and gracious of her."

"Do you have any comments on the general's passing?"

"It's the end of an era," Dowling said automatically. That he knew it was a cliche made it no less true. He went on, "He was an officer in the War of Secession. He was a hero in the Second Mexican War. He was a hero-probably the hero-of the Great War." Even though he broke orders to do it. Even though he almost got himself court-martialed-and me with him. "And he was a hero all over again, when he was coming home to retire, when he threw back the bomb that Canadian tossed at him." Every word of that was true, too. Dowling knew he would have died if General Custer hadn't stubbornly, irrationally-correctly-believed McGregor was the man who'd been out to kill him. He added, "He lived to ninety, too. That's a good run for anybody."

"It certainly is." Ophelia Clemens took out a notebook and scrawled in it. A waiter came by. She gave him her order, then turned back to Dowling. "May I ask you something, Colonel?"

"Go ahead," Dowling replied. "What kind of answer you get depends on what kind of question it is."

"It always does," she agreed. "Here's what I want to know: Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer always told different stories about what happened during the Second Mexican War. They're both dead now. You can't hurt either one of them with a straight answer. Do you know who had it right?"

"Do I know for a fact?" Abner Dowling remembered the quarrel he'd listened to in Nashville in 1917, right at the end of the Great War. Roosevelt and Custer had almost come to blows then, though one was in late middle years and the other already an old man. Dowling knew what his opinion was, but that wasn't what Miss Clemens had asked. "Ma'am, I wasn't there. I was a little boy during the Second Mexican War. Even if I had been there, odds are I wouldn't have heard exactly what orders were given, or by whom."

Ophelia Clemens gave him a sour nod. "I was afraid you were going to say that. I even talked to a couple of the surviving machine gunners-Gatling gunners, they called themselves-but they don't know or don't remember who did what when."

"We'll probably never know, not for certain," Dowling said.

"What do you think?" The newspaperwoman poised her pencil over the notebook, ready to take down whatever pearls of wisdom he gave her.

"Not for publication," he answered at once. The pencil withdrew. He still didn't say what he thought. Instead, he added, "Not even as 'a highly placed source' or anything like that."

The look she sent him this time was even more sour. "All right," she said at last. "You don't make things easy, do you?"

"Ma'am, Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer are dead, but you won't find a senior officer who doesn't have strong views about both of them," Dowling said.

Ophelia Clemens nodded again. That did seem to make sense to her. "I promise," she said solemnly. "And in case you're wondering, I don't break promises like that. If I did, no one would trust me when I made them."

Dowling believed her. She was, from everything he'd seen in Winnipeg and here on the train, a straight shooter. She probably had to be, to get ahead in a normally masculine business like reporting. He remembered she'd told him and Custer her father had been a newspaperman, too. Dowling said, "Strictly off the record, I'd bet on Teddy Roosevelt."

"I thought as much," she said. "Custer was nothing but a phony and a blowhard, wasn't he?"

"Strictly off the record," Dowling repeated, "he was a humbug and a blowhard. But if you say he was nothing but a humbug and a blowhard, you're wrong. He always went straight after what he wanted, and he went after it as hard as he could. When he was right-and he was, sometimes-that made him one of the most effective people the world has ever seen. The rest may be true, but don't forget that part of him."

Ophelia Clemens considered that. In the end, a little reluctantly, she nodded. "Yes, I suppose you have something. People need to judge a man by what he did, not just by the way he acted."

"Custer did a lot," Dowling said. "No two ways about that." He might have managed more, he might have managed better, if he hadn't become a self-parody in his later years. But what he had done would be remembered as long as the United States endured.

Dowling told Custer stories all the way from Salt Lake City to Washington, D.C., some on the record, some off. Ophelia Clemens wrote down what she could and either laughed or rolled her eyes at the rest. Dowling was sorry they went their separate ways after the train rolled into Union Station.

He paid his respects to Libbie Custer, who sat beside the general's body where it lay in state in the Capitol. "Hello, Colonel," Custer's widow said. "We had a fine run, Autie and I. I don't know what in heaven's name I'll do without him."

"I think you'll manage," Dowling said, on the whole truthfully. He'd always reckoned Mrs. Custer the brains of the outfit.

"I suppose I could," she said now. "But what's the point? I spent the past sixty-five years taking care of the general. Now that he's gone, what am I supposed to do with myself? I haven't much time left, either, you know."

With no answer for that-how could he contradict an obvious truth? — Dowling murmured, "I'm sorry," and made his escape.

He marched in the mourners' procession behind Custer's flag-draped coffin. The general's funeral was modeled on Teddy Roosevelt's; Dowling found it strangely fitting that the two men, longtime rivals in life, should be equals in death. The only difference he could see was that no foreign dignitaries came to say their farewells to General Custer.

A bespectacled man hoisted a boy onto his shoulders. In the funereal hush, his words carried: "Look, Armstrong. There goes the man you're named for."

Custer's final wishes-or maybe they were Libbie's wishes-were that his remains be buried at Arlington, across the Potomac from Washington in what was now West Virginia. He would spend eternity with Teddy Roosevelt, and Robert E. Lee, presumably, would spend it gnashing his teeth at having not one but two U.S. heroes take their final rest on his old estate.

"Well, to hell with Robert E. Lee," Dowling muttered, and he felt sure both Custer and Roosevelt would have agreed with him.

F lora Blackford had spent years speaking in front of crowds of workers. A women's club in Philadelphia wasn't the same thing. Speaking as First Lady in front of organizations like this wasn't even like speaking in the House of Representatives. There'd been plenty of cut-and-thrust in the House. Here, Flora had to be polite whether she wanted to or not.

"I'm sure you'll agree that we can return to prosperity, and that we will return to prosperity," she told the plump, prosperous women. Even if it was noncontroversial, it was also a campaign speech, with the 193 °Congressional election just around the corner. "The worst is over. From where we are now, we can only go up."

The women applauded. She'd told them what they wanted to hear, what they wanted to believe. She wanted to believe it herself. She'd wanted to believe it ever since the stock market crashed right after her husband became president. She'd wanted to, but believing got harder every day.

"We were the party of prosperity through the 1920s," she insisted. "We don't deserve to be labeled the party of depression."

Even though the women applauded again, Flora knew more than a little depression herself. Her husband had done what only twenty-nine men had done before him-he'd become president. And what had it got him? Only curses and the blame for the worst collapse the United States had known since the bad times after the Confederate States broke away in the War of Secession.

She got through the speech. She'd learned all about getting through speeches despite a heavy heart when she'd had to stand up in Congress after her brother David lost a leg in the Great War. She had to do a good job here. The coming election would be the first chance voters had to say anything about the Blackford administration and the Socialist Party since things went sour.

What would they say when they got the chance? Nothing good, she feared. The Socialists, naturally, had taken credit for everything that had gone right in their first two terms, Upton Sinclair's terms, in Powel House, regardless of whether they'd caused it. Political parties did that. How could they keep from getting the blame for everything that was going wrong now? The Democrats-even the remnants of the Republicans-were certainly doing their best to pin that blame on the party of Marx and Lincoln and Debs.

After the speech, after the coffee and cakes and polite talk that followed, she went back to the presidential residence. Traveling by chauffeured limousine to the Powel House struck her as expensive and wasteful, to say nothing of being the very opposite of egalitarian. But against entrenched presidential custom the Socialists had struggled in vain. The limousine waited for Flora outside the women's club-waited for her and whisked her away.

When she got back to Powel House, she found her husband studying a bill. "Is that the new relief authorization from Congress?" she asked.

Hosea Blackford nodded. "That's what it is," he said. "I'm going to sign it, too-even makework is better than no work at all, and no work at all is what too many people have these days. But it feels like putting a bandage on a man who's just been shot through the heart. How much good is it going to do?"

He'd been president for only a little more than a year and a half. The pressure of the job, though, had aged him more in that time than all the years he'd spent as vice president. His hair was thinner and grayer, his face more wrinkled and more weary-looking; his clothes hung on him like sacks, for he'd lost weight, too.

Would he look this way if things hadn't gone wrong? Flora wondered. Guilt gnawed at her. She'd encouraged Hosea to run for president. If she hadn't, the country would be blaming someone else for its troubles now. Shantytowns inhabited by men who'd lost their homes wouldn't be called Blackfordburghs. Comics wouldn't tell jokes about him on the vaudeville stage and over the wireless.

Then he said, "It's a good thing I've got this job instead of Calvin Coolidge. If he were sitting here, he'd veto this bill and all the others like it. Things would be a lot worse then-I'm sure of it. We have hungry people now-we'd have starving people then. The class struggle would go straight to the streets."

Tears stung her eyes. She said, "I was just thinking I never should have put you through all this."

"You didn't put me through it," he answered. "I did it myself. I wanted it, too, you know. And, in spite of everything, I think I'm a better man for the job than Coolidge would have been."

"The country doesn't deserve you," Flora said.

"Oh? Are you saying it does deserve Coolidge?" her husband asked with a wry grin. "I'm not sure even Massachusetts deserves him."

"That's not what I meant, and you know it," Flora said with some asperity.

"Maybe not, sweetheart, but it's what you said," Hosea Blackford answered. Even that wry grin had trouble staying on his face. "If only something we tried would do some real good for the country, so people would believe we had hope."

"Things would be a lot worse without the relief programs and the dole," Flora insisted. "We'd have men out selling apples on street corners to try to stay alive."

"We might as well, even now," her husband said. "I haven't seen the country so gloomy since… since before the Great War."

Flora knew what a hard time he had bringing that out. The Socialists still looked at the war in terms of the lives it had squandered, the lives it had wrecked, the ruin it had wrought. They didn't usually talk about the triumph it had been, as Democrats were in the habit of doing. But before the war, the USA, caught between the CSA and Canada, with England and France always ready to pounce, had a downtrodden feel. Enemies had ganged up on the United States twice. The fear those enemies might do it again had filled the country-and, perhaps, with reason.

No more. Now the United States had their place in the sun. No one had a bigger place, either. Only the Empire of Germany came close. The Kaiser's monarchy was a rival, yes, but not the deadly foes the Confederacy and her allies had seemed in the old days, the days before they were beaten at last.

And, from 1917 to 1929, under Theodore Roosevelt and then under Upton Sinclair, the United States had walked tall, had walked proud. After half a century of furtive skulking, the United States had strutted. But now this. Nobody in all the world was strutting these days. Everyone was trying to figure out how to fix what had gone wrong. No one, though, was having much luck.

"What are we going to do?" Flora asked.

"You mean, besides take a drubbing at the polls next Tuesday?" her husband asked in turn. "I don't know, dear. I really don't, and I wish to heaven I did. If I knew what to do, I'd be doing it. You can bet on that." He drummed his fingers on the desk. "Blackfordburghs." He spoke the word as if it were a curse. And so, in a way, it was: a curse on him, and a curse on the party he headed.

"Maybe it won't be so bad," Flora said. "People aren't stupid. The Democrats can't mystify everybody. What's happened the past year and a half isn't our fault, isn't your fault. It would have happened if Coolidge were president, too. It would be worse then-you said so yourself."

"That's logical. That's rational," Hosea Blackford said. "Politics, unfortunately, is neither. People won't think about what might have been. They'll think about what really happened. And they'll say, 'You were there. It damn well is your fault, and you've got to pay for it.' " He pointed to himself.

Flora wanted to tell him he was worrying about nothing. She couldn't. He was worrying about something all too real, and she knew it. She did walk over and give him a hug. "There," she said. "And Joshua loves you, too."

"That's all good," Blackford said. "That's all wonderful, as a matter of fact. In my personal life, I'm as happy and lucky as a man could be. But none of it will buy the Socialists a single extra vote when voting day rolls around."

He was right. Flora wished she could tell him he was wrong. He would only have laughed had she tried, though. He knew better. So did she.

Waiting for the election was like waiting for an old, sick loved one to die. Day followed day without much apparent change, but then, suddenly and somehow unexpectedly, the moment came at last. People went to the polls. Blackford's name wasn't on the ballot, but the election would be a judgment on him even so. He couldn't even vote for his party, nor could Flora; neither of them officially resided in Philadelphia.

Hosea Blackford could have gone over to Socialist Party headquarters to learn of voters' decision-or rather, decisions, for every race here, unlike in a presidential election, was individual, unique to its area. But he stayed in Powel House instead. Once more, custom triumphed.

Plenty of wireless sets and telegraph clickers brought in the news. And, from the very beginning, it was as bad as Flora and he had feared it would be. If anything, it was worse. Socialist after Socialist went down to defeat. Even the fellow who'd followed Flora to Congress in the Eleventh Ward in New York City found himself in deep trouble against a Democratic candidate of no particular luster.

"What are we going to do?" Flora wailed as the magnitude of the Socialist disaster grew plain.

"No. The question is, what will the new Congress do?" her husband said glumly. He answered his own question: "Odds are, the Democrats won't do much, and they won't let us do much, either. They think we've done too much already, and that we're part of the problem."

"They don't know what they're talking about," Flora snapped.

"Well, I happen to agree with you, you know," Hosea Blackford said. "The voters, unfortunately, look to have other ideas."

"How can they do this to us?" Flora didn't try to hide her bitterness.

"I'm sure the Democrats felt the same way ten years ago, when we first came to power," her husband said.

That struck her as cold consolation. "But we're right," she said. "They were wrong."

He managed another of those wry smiles. "Remember your dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Now the antithesis gets its turn for a while, and we see what comes of that."

"Nothing good," Flora predicted darkly. The irony was that she'd always been a much more ideological Socialist than Hosea. His chiding her on basic Party doctrine stung, as he'd no doubt meant it to. She went on, "We have to keep them from doing nothing, the way you say they want to-and of course you're dead right about that. We have to. Maybe we can get a halfway worthwhile synthesis out of that."

"We're going to lose the House," Hosea said. "I don't think there's any doubt about it. The Senate… well, that depends on how some of the races in the Far West go. If we're lucky, there may be enough Socialists and Republicans to go with a handful of progressive Democrats and let us do some useful things. We'll see, that's all."

He sounded as if he looked forward to the challenge. That wasn't how Flora felt about it. As far as she was concerned, the faithless people had betrayed the Party. She'd always been on the barricades, throwing stones at the oppressors. Now, by their votes, the people thought the Socialists were among the oppressors. That hurt. It hurt a lot, and she knew she would be a long time getting over it.

C larence Potter tried to remember the name of the Englishman who'd written a novel about a man who'd invented a machine that let him travel through time. He hadn't altogether liked the book-parts of it struck him as a Socialist tract about the divisions between capital and labor-but he couldn't deny that it had more than its share of arresting images. The mere idea of a time-traveling machine was one.

On New Year's Eve, 1930, as the year was poised to pass away and usher in 1931, Potter felt as if not just he but all of Charleston were caught in the grip of a time-traveling machine and hurled back almost a decade into the past. The Freedom Party had laid on an enormous rally to mark the changing of the year, and had succeeded, he feared, beyond its wildest dreams.

A strident sea of humanity filled Hampton Park to hear Jake Featherston, who'd come down from Richmond to speak. Dozens of searchlights stabbed up into the sky, creating columns of silvery radiance that seemed to transform the park into an enormous public building. Blocks of Freedom Party bully boys in their white shirts and butternut trousers, along with veterans from the Tin Hats-who wore uniforms even more closely resembling those of the Confederate Army-stood out amid the swarms of ordinary Charlestonians who'd come to the outskirts of the city.

More bully boys in white and butternut, these carrying long truncheons, formed a perimeter around the crowd. The searchlights spread just enough light around to let Potter see how very ready for a brawl they looked.

He touched Braxton Donovan's arm. "We can't try to break this up, not with the men we've got here," he said urgently. "They'll slaughter us."

Donovan grimaced, but then reluctantly nodded. "Just our luck," he said. "We try to take a leaf out of the Freedom Party's book, and it doesn't work." They'd brought along seventy-five, maybe even a hundred, stalwart young Whigs armed with a motley assortment of street-fighting weapons. The force would have been plenty to disrupt any ordinary Freedom Party gathering. Attacking this one… Potter shook his head. He would sooner have sent infantrymen charging uphill against machine-gun nests and massed artillery.

Disgust in his voice, he said, "Featherston even has the luck of the weather." A December night in Charleston could easily have been rainy, could have been freezing, could even have seen snow-though that was unlikely. But the thermometer stood in the upper forties, with a million stars in the sky trying to fight their way through the searchlight beams. The moon and, even lower in the east, Jupiter blazed bright.

"So what do we do now?" Donovan asked. "Just send the boys home? Go on home ourselves? That stinks, you want to know what I think."

"Getting massacred stinks worse," Potter answered. "You can go or stay, whichever you want. They can go or stay, whichever they want. Me, I'll hang around and hear what that Featherston bastard has to say."

"You thinking of going over to the Freedom Party?" Donovan asked. "You blocked me when I tried to read Anne Colleton out of the Whigs, and now she's back in bed with dear old Jake. Fat lot of good you did us."

"I was wrong," Potter said with a scowl. "You're lucky-you've never been wrong in all your born days, have you?" He still missed Anne. His mind kept exploring how things between them had soured, as a man's tongue will explore the empty socket that recently held a tooth.

Admitting he was wrong disconcerted Donovan. The lawyer probably didn't hear it happen often enough to know what to do when it did. "All right, all right," he said gruffly. "Let's forget about it, then."

"I wish I could," Potter said. The other Whig didn't know what to make of that, either. Too bad, Potter thought.

A white-shirted Freedom Party man came up to them. "You fellas want to move along now," he said, almost indulgently-he knew he had strength on his side.

Potter looked at him. "What we want to do is kick your damn teeth down your throat," he growled.

"Watch your mouth," the Freedom Party man said, indulgent no more. "We can squash y'all flat like a cockroach-and just what you deserve. If I give a yell-"

"If you give a yell, you're a dead man," Clarence Potter promised. "Your side might win the fight afterwards, but you won't be around to enjoy it. I promise."

The man in white shirt and butternut trousers scowled at him. He stared back, no expression at all on his face. The Freedom Party hooligan was the first to look away. A moment later, he spun and stalked off. "You told him," Braxton Donovan said, as if Potter and the Whigs had won some sort of victory.

"He's going to come back with enough men to squash us flat," Potter said. "Go on home, and take the boys with you. We'll get other chances. I'm going to hang around."

"You're crazy," Braxton Donovan declared.

"No, it's just that I was in intelligence during the war. I want to know what the enemy is up to," Potter replied with a shrug. "Or maybe I am crazy. You never can tell."

As the Whigs' outnumbered toughs headed away from Hampton Park and back toward downtown Charleston, Potter mingled with the Freedom Party men and women still streaming in to hear Featherston speak. That mingling came just in time, too. The fellow he'd faced down returned with a lot of men at his back. He looked around and laughed when he didn't see Potter or any of the other Whigs.

They were leaving anyway, you son of a bitch, Potter thought, and now I've found my way inside.

By their clothes, most of the men who wanted to hear Jake Featherston were farmers and laborers-most, but far from all. Potter saw druggists and shopkeepers and businessmen and even a few who looked like professional men. Not all the men were Great War veterans, either. More than Potter had expected looked too young to have fought in the war. That surprised and dismayed him. The women coming in-perhaps a third of the audience-likewise came from all social groups, with the emphasis on the lower middle class.

Potter pushed forward as far as he could. Even so, the rostrum from which Featherston would speak remained halfway across the park from him, and seemed tiny as a toy. Everyone exclaimed as searchlights, swinging toward the podium, picked out a face behind it. But that wasn't Jake Featherston's lean visage, which Potter knew all too well. Whoever that was, pinned in the glow of the bright lights, he'd never missed a meal and was nobody Potter recognized. Some of the people around Potter grumbled, too.

Then the plump stranger introduced himself as one of the new Freedom Party Congressmen South Carolina had sent up to Richmond in the election of 1929. That was plenty to win him a round of applause from the Party faithful. Clarence Potter had to join it to keep something dreadful from happening to him. He felt like washing his hands the first chance he got.

"And now," the Congressman boomed, "it gives me tremendous pleasure to have the privilege of presenting to you all the leader of our great Freedom Party, Mr. Jaaake Featherston!"

The roar of applause and cheers that went up stunned Potter's ears. He opened his mouth, but silently. He didn't have to shout, and keeping his mouth open helped protect his ears. Featherston, an old artilleryman, likely knew that trick himself.

Through the shouts and clapping from the crowd came disciplined yells from the men in white shirts and butternut trousers: "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" Little by little, more and more people joined that chant, so it began to drown out the noise all around: "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" The two-syllable word felt as heavy and regular as a heartbeat.

Jake Featherston let the chant build to a deafening crescendo, then raised both hands above his head. Still disciplined, the blocks of goons fell silent at once. Without their steadying influence, the cries faded away after perhaps fifteen seconds.

Into the ringing quiet that followed, Featherston said, "It's always good to come to Charleston, on account of this here is where the Confederate States of America were born." He couldn't miss getting applause with that line. He couldn't-and he didn't. Again, Clarence Potter had to clap along with everybody else to keep from standing out. He hated that, but saw no way around it.

Featherston went on, "They say showing's better than telling, and I guess they're right. We've been telling people what's wrong with the Confederate States for more than ten years now, and not enough folks wanted to listen. Now the Whigs have gone and shown we were right all along, and all of a sudden everybody's paying attention to us. I wish to heaven it didn't have to happen like this, I truly do, but here we are just the same."

To Clarence Potter, staunch Whig, it wasn't much of a joke, but people around him laughed. Featherston said, "I'm warning people right now, it's not a good idea to think about the Freedom Party like we're just another bunch of politicians."

Cries of, "No!" and, "Hell, no!" and, "Better not!" rang from the crowd. Featherston let them spread through Hampton Park, then raised his hands again. This time, silence fell at once.

Into it, he said, "We are the Confederacy's destiny. We are the Confederacy's future. We're giving our dear country a faith and a will again. We have to concentrate all our strength on action, revolutionary action. Because we're going that way, we're gathering into our ranks every last member of the Confederate people who still has energy and nerve-that's you, folks, and I'm glad of it!"

People were even more eager to applaud themselves than they were to applaud Jake Featherston. Again, Potter had to clap, too. As he did, he reluctantly nodded. He's shrewder than he used to be, he thought. He doesn't just think of himself any more. But that wasn't right. No, he lets people think he's thinking about them. Inside, he's still the same cold-blooded snake he always was.

"Burton Mitchel wants to cozy up to the United States. The USA saved his bacon once," Featherston shouted. "But the United States can't save his bacon this time around, on account of they haven't got any bacon of their own. And even if they did, do y'all want to be the USA's tagalong little brother from now till the end of time?"

Some people shouted, "No!" Others shouted things a good deal more incendiary. Potter would never have said anything like that where ladies might hear. But then, not ten feet away from him, a woman who looked like a schoolteacher yelled something that would have made a sergeant, a twenty-year veteran, blush.

"We've got us a duty: a duty to be strong," Jake Featherston declared. "We've got us a duty to stand up to the United States just as soon as we can. And to do that, we've got us a duty to put our own house in order. We've got us a duty to put people back to work. We've got us a duty to make sure they don't go hungry. We've got us a duty to keep the niggers in their place, and not to let them steal work from white folks. And we've got us a duty to remember what the Confederate States of America are all about. And folks, what we're about is-"

"Freedom!" The great roar staggered Potter.

"Y'all remember that," Featherston said. "Remember it every single day. When you see the liars and the cheats getting together, don't let 'em get away with it. Smash 'em up! How can you have freedom when the rich folks want to take it away from you?"

Does he see the irony there? Potter wondered. Does he see it and not care, or does it go right by him? As the crowd roared, as Jake Featherston wished them a happy New Year and exhorted them to vote for the Party in November, Potter wondered which of those possibilities frightened him worse.

W hen Jake Featherston came through South Carolina on his speaking tour, Anne Colleton tried to see him. She tried, and she failed. Featherston wouldn't talk to her; a flunky told her he wasn't available.

She fumed for days afterwards. She wasn't used to getting brushed off. Her habit, in fact, was to brush off others. Featherston annoyed her enough to make her wonder if she shouldn't stay a Whig after all. In the end, what made her decide she had to swallow her pride was the thought that staying a Whig meant admitting Clarence Potter had been right all along. If he had, why had she broken up with him over their political differences? Staying a Whig would mean swallowing her pride, too, and swallowing it in front of an old lover. She preferred making up with Jake Featherston to that.

After the papers announced Featherston's return to Richmond, she sent a telegram to Freedom Party headquarters: SHALL I COME NORTH TO TALK THINGS OVER?

The answer, at least, returned promptly: COME AHEAD. CONVINCE FERD KOENIG. THEN WE'LL SEE. FEATHERSTON.

Anne said something extremely unladylike as she crumpled up the telegram and threw it in the trash. Having to talk with anyone except Jake Featherston himself was galling. But Ferdinand Koenig wasn't a flunky, or not precisely a flunky. He'd been in the Freedom Party even longer than Featherston had, and had twice been his running mate on the Party ticket. The main difference between him and Jake was that he wasn't colorful.

And so, swallowing her pride again, Anne wired, ARRIVE NEXT TUESDAY. LOOKING FORWARD TO MEETING MR. KOENIG.

As she usually did when coming up to Richmond, she booked a room in Ford's Hotel, just north of Capitol Square. The room she got gave her a fine view of the square. In happier times, it would have been a peaceful, restful, patriotic view. She could have looked out on the grass and on the splendid statues of George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston.

She could still see the statues. Tents and shanties swallowed almost all the winter-brown grass. Men walked aimlessly from one to another, some smoking, some sipping from whiskey bottles. Here and there, women hung out laundry on lines that ran from tents to trees. Children ran this way and that.

Columbia and Charleston had shantytowns, too. Even St. Matthews had a little one. But Anne had never seen any to match Richmond's. The capital of the Confederate States was a great city. When things went wrong, they went wrong more visibly here than anywhere else.

She asked the house detective, "How bad are things? Will my clothes and suitcases still be in my room when I get back?"

"Likely so, ma'am," he answered. "We work hard at keeping the trash out of the hotel. We had some trouble with that when things first went sour, but we don't let it happen any more. It's just a matter of taking pains."

Giving pains, too, she thought. The house dick was about six feet three, with shoulders wide as a barn door. He wasn't visibly armed, but she was sure he had brass knucks or a blackjack stashed where he could get at them in a hurry. She wouldn't have wanted to run into him if he found her anywhere she wasn't supposed to be.

When she waited on the street for a taxi, though, beggars hurried across Capitol Street to try to pry money out of her. She knew that, if she gave anything to anybody, none of them would ever leave her at peace. Closing the motorcar door on them was a relief.

"Where to, ma'am?" the cabby asked.

"Freedom Party headquarters," Anne answered. She wondered if she would have to give him the address.

As things turned out, she didn't. The driver nodded. "Take you right over there. It ain't far at all. I'm thinking about voting that way myself come November, matter of fact."

Alert guards armed with bayoneted Tredegars stood outside the headquarters. They wore what was almost but not quite Confederate Army uniform. Their clothes weren't quite the same as what the Tin Hats put on. These men looked somehow more menacing than most members of the big veterans' outfit. Anne didn't know whether that was the cut of their uniforms or the expressions on their faces. Some of each, she thought.

"You're Mrs. Colleton, come to see Mr. Koenig?" one of them asked.

Anne shook her head. "I'm Miss Colleton, and you'd better remember it."

"Sorry," the disconcerted guard muttered, and passed her on into the building.

She had to ask two more people how to find Ferdinand Koenig's office, which struck her as inefficient. When at last she got there, a pretty secretary led her inside. Koenig looked like a man who'd done time in the trenches. He had fierce eyebrows, a jutting jaw, and a rumbling baritone voice. "Good to see you again, Miss Colleton," he said. "It's been a few years, hasn't it? Sit down. Make yourself at home. Tell me why you've decided the Freedom Party isn't such a bad thing after all."

He looked like a bruiser. He didn't sound like one, though. He'd been Jake Featherston's right-hand man for a long time now. That almost certainly meant he could think as well as break heads. Anne said, "When I left the Party, you were still tainted by what Grady Calkins did. Our politics have never been that far apart, whether I was formally with you or not."

"You're saying you're a fair-weather friend. You'll back us if we look like winners and dump us if we don't," Koenig said. "Question is, in that case, why should we want to have anything to do with you?"

"Because we're going the same way. Because I can help you get there. You'll know what I did in South Carolina. When I wasn't with you, I was trying to bring the Whigs more into line with what you've been saying all along."

Ferdinand Koenig paused to light a cigarette. After blowing out a cloud of smoke, he said, "And you were doing us a favor by this, you say?"

"No, I don't think so, and that isn't what I said," Anne answered. "But I think I was doing the country a favor. That's what this is really all about, isn't it? — what happens to the Confederate States, I mean."

Another cloud of smoke rose from Koenig. "That's… some of what this is about," he said at last. "The rest of it is, why should we trust you now? You walked away once, walked away and left us in the lurch. Who says you won't do it again?"

"No one at all, if I don't happen to like the way you're going," Anne said. "But as long as we're heading in the same direction, wouldn't you rather have me on your side than against you?"

"Maybe," he answered. "Maybe not, too." His eyes measured her. She didn't care for that gaze; Koenig might have been looking at her over the sights of a rifle. "You don't pull any punches, though, do you?"

"I try not to," Anne said. "Getting straight to the point saves time."

"Maybe," Koenig said again. He didn't say anything more till he'd finished the cigarette and stubbed it out in an brass ashtray made from the base of a shell casing. Then he went on, "You talk a good game, I will say that for you. I'm not going to tell you yes or no. I'm going to pass you on to the Sarge. He'll make up his mind, and we'll go on from there. How does that sound?"

"I came to Richmond to see him," Anne answered.

Ferdinand Koenig shook his head. "No, you came up here to see me, remember? Now you've passed the first test, so you get to see him. See the difference?"

"Yes," Anne said, though she'd always assumed she would pass it.

"Well, come on, then." Koenig heaved his bulk out of the chair. He led her down the hall, up a flight of stairs, along the corresponding hall on the next floor up, and into an office. The secretary there wasn't decorative; she was, in fact, severely plain. That probably meant she was very good at what she did. Koenig nodded to her. "Morning, Lulu. Here's Miss Colleton, to see the boss."

Lulu gave Anne the once-over. She sniffed, as if to say, What can you do? Anne bristled. The secretary took no notice of that at all. With a small sigh, she said, "Go right in, Miss Collins. He'll be expecting you." She wasn't the sort who'd get names wrong by accident. That meant she'd done it on purpose. Anne bristled all over again, and again got nothing resembling a rise from Lulu.

When she walked into Jake Featherston's office, the leader of the Freedom Party rose and leaned across the desk to shake her hand. He wasn't handsome. Still, those strong, bony features and the energy that sparked from him made mere handsomeness seem insipid. Anne had had that thought before. "Sit down," he said, waving her to a chair. "Sit down and tell me why I should pay any attention to you after you went and left us when we needed you bad."

He hadn't forgotten. Anne doubted he ever forgot anything that went against him. They weren't so far apart there. She answered, "Two reasons: my money and my brains."

He frowned. "If you had any brains, you never would've walked out on us in the first place."

"No." Anne shook her head. "I back winners. If you think you looked like a winner after Calkins killed President Hampton, you're not as smart as you think you are. But times are hard again, and in hard times the Freedom Party shines. So… here I am."

How many people gave him such straight talk? Not many, Anne suspected. What would he do when he heard it? Get angry? Yes, by the slow flush that mounted to his cheeks and by the way his eyes flashed. But he held it in, saying, "You're a cool one, aren't you? You're telling me straight out you'd walk away again if you saw us in trouble."

"No," Anne replied. "What I'm telling you is, this time I expect you to win."

"And you want to come along for the ride," Featherston said.

"Of course I do," Anne answered. "Sooner or later, we're going to have some things to say to the United States. If you don't think I want to be part of that, you don't know me at all. And I can help. At your rallies, you're still using tricks I figured out for you ten years ago, and you know it."

"You spent the last few years trying to teach the Whigs new tricks," he said.

"Yes, and they're old dogs-they couldn't learn them," Anne answered. "They've been in power too long. They can't learn anything any more. That's why they've got to go."

"They're dogs, all right, the sons of-" Featherston caught himself. "Well, I have plans for them, too. You'd best believe that. Way they've stomped on the people of the Confederate States… You're dead right they've got to go, Miss Colleton. And I aim to get rid of 'em."

Anne wondered how he meant that. Literally? She knew he was ruthless. Was he that ruthless? Maybe. She wouldn't have been astonished, but even the most ruthless man faced a formidable barrier of law. Anne nodded to herself. Here, that kind of barrier might not be bad at all.

"You come back in, you'll follow the Party line?" Jake Featherston asked.

You'll do as I say? was what he meant. Anne had never been one to do as anybody said. But if she said no, she'd have no place in the Freedom Party, not now, not ever. That was ever so clear. This is why you came to Richmond, she reminded herself. Do you want to go home empty-handed? Part of her said she did. She ignored it. Nodding to Featherston, she said, "Yes, I'll do that."

He didn't warn her-no, You'd better, or anything like that. "Good," he said. "We've got a deal." He didn't ask for her soul, either. But why would he? She'd just handed it to him.