The Center Cannot Hold

XIII

The alarm clock jangled, bouncing Jefferson Pinkard out of bed at what he reckoned an ungodly early hour. His shift at the Birmingham jail started an hour and a half earlier than he'd gone to the Sloss Works. He yawned, lurched into the bathroom of his downtown flat-one more thing he was getting used to after so long in company housing-brushed his teeth, lathered his face and slid a straight razor over his cheeks, and then went into the kitchen and made coffee and the inevitable bacon and eggs on the fancy, newfangled gas-burning stove in there.

Thus fortified, he got out of his nightshirt and into the gray jailer's uniform he'd worn since Caleb Briggs found out the Sloss Works had given him the boot. He planted his wide-brimmed hat on his head at a jaunty angle and looked at himself in the mirror. His reflection happily nodded approval at him. "I'm hot stuff, no two ways about it," he said, and that reflection did not presume to disagree.

He put his nightstick on his belt and headed out the door. He'd toted longer, heavier bludgeons while breaking up Whig rallies with his Freedom Party pals, but he supposed he understood why jailers didn't usually carry guns. If something went wrong, that would give prisoners deadly weapons, which was the last thing anybody wanted.

People got out of his way when he walked down the street in that uniform. He liked that. He'd never had it happen before, except when he was in the company of a lot of his pals, all of them in white shirts and butternut pants, all of them ready-even eager-for trouble. Now he strode along by himself, but men and women still made way for him. He lit a cigarette and blew out a cheerful cloud of smoke.

Birmingham City Jail was a squat red-brick building that looked like a fortress. As far as Jeff was concerned, it looked just the way it was supposed to. He tipped his hat to a policeman in an almost identical uniform coming out. "Mornin', Howard," he said. "Freedom!"

"Mornin', Jeff. Same to you," the cop answered. A lot of policemen in Birmingham belonged to the Freedom Party. Pinkard had seen some of them at meetings. Since becoming a jailer, he'd found out that a good many who didn't go to meetings or knock heads were members just the same. Some policemen felt they shouldn't flaunt their politics. But that didn't mean they had none.

Inside the city jail, Jeff stuck his card in a time clock just like the one at the Sloss Works except for being painted gray rather than black. He stuck his head into the cramped little office where he had a battered desk. "Mornin', Billy," he said to his night-shift counterpart, who was writing a report at an equally beat-up desk. "What's new for me?"

"Not a whole hell of a lot," Billy Fraser answered. He was about Jeff's age, and like him a veteran-precious few white men of their generation in the CSA hadn't gone to the front. "A couple of niggers in for drunk and disorderly, and one burglar who was the easiest collar you'd ever want-dumb asshole fell out a second-story window making his getaway and broke his ankle. Yell he let out woke up the whole goddamn block. They were beating on him pretty good. He was probably glad when the cops pulled the citizens off him and hauled him away."

"Don't reckon we have to worry about him bustin' out for a while," Pinkard said with a chuckle.

"Hell, no," Fraser said. "Like I told you, a quiet night."

Jeff nodded. "Anything else I need to know?"

"Don't reckon so," the other man answered. He threw the report in his Out basket and got to his feet. "Gonna head on home and catch me some shuteye. See you tomorrow. Freedom!"

"Freedom!" Pinkard echoed. "Get some rest. I don't expect the bastards we've got locked up are going anywhere much."

"They better not," Billy Fraser said. "That'd leave us some pretty tall explaining to do." He grabbed his hat-the twin of Jeff's-from the rack, stuck it on his head, and went out whistling "The Pennsylvania Rag," a tune that had been popular during the early days of the Great War, back when the CSA had held a large part of Pennsylvania.

The first thing Jefferson Pinkard did then was look at the report Fraser had written. It was meant for the warden, not for him, but he didn't care about that. He'd discovered Billy sometimes wrote things down that he forgot to say, things Jeff needed to know. Nothing like that was in there today, but you never could tell. When you were dealing with prisoners, you couldn't be too careful, either. If his experience in the Empire of Mexico had taught him anything, that was it.

After Jeff put the report back where he'd got it, he ambled down to the kitchen and snagged himself a cup of coffee. He snagged a roll, too. One of the colored cooks clucked reproachfully at that, but he was grinning while he did it, a grin that showed several gold teeth. Jeff grinned back. He had no trouble with Negroes, as long as they remembered who the boss was.

After he did that, he prowled through the whole jail, peering into every cell to see who was where. He couldn't take the prisoners out of the cells and line them up for roll call, the way he had down in Mexico. He'd had all the room in the world down there: he'd built his prison camp on the loneliest stretch of ground he could find. Things were different in Birmingham, but he wanted to know as much about what was going on as he could.

"I ain't run away, jailer man," said a Negro named Ajax, who was doing a year for beating up another man whom he'd caught using loaded dice. The victim was also black. Had he been white, Ajax would have faced a lot more time behind bars. "I's still here. You don't got to check on me every mornin'."

"Morning I don't check on you is probably the morning you'll try some damnfool thing or other," Pinkard answered. "More I check, harder it is for me to get a nasty surprise."

Ajax reproachfully clicked his tongue between his teeth. "You ain't no fun a-tall," he said.

"You wanted fun, you shoulda thought twice about pounding on that other nigger," Jeff said.

"That cheatin' son of a bitch won ten dollars o' my money with them goddamn dice," Ajax exclaimed, nothing but indignation in his voice. "I see him when I gits out o' here, I kick his shiftless ass again, teach him not to try none o' that shit no more." If jail was supposed to rehabilitate, it wasn't working with the aggrieved Ajax.

But Jeff didn't think jail was supposed to rehabilitate. Like the other jailers he was getting to know, he thought it was supposed to keep people who belonged there inside till it was time to let them out again. He didn't worry his head about who belonged and who didn't, either. Figuring that out wasn't his job. As far as he was concerned, if somebody ended up in the Birmingham City Jail, he damn well belonged there.

By the time his rounds ended, the trusties were going through the corridors serving breakfast to the other prisoners. Jeff didn't like that, either. He thought using trusties begged for trouble, because they were so likely to be anything but. But the jail didn't have the money to hire enough guards to do everything inside that needed doing, and so trusties took care of a lot of work. He scowled at them as he headed back to his office. How much contraband did they smuggle in? They knew. Nobody else did.

He was halfway through a circuit of the jail before lunch when one of the corridor guards waved to him and called, "Hold on there. Warden wants to see you in his office right away."

"Does he?" Jeff said uselessly. The guard nodded, as if to affirm he hadn't been kidding. "What the hell does he think I did?" Pinkard muttered. The guard didn't hear that. A prisoner did, and leered at Jeff. As far as the former steelworker knew, the boss wanted to see you only when you were in trouble. Still cursing under his breath, he walked to the warden's office.

Ewell McDonald had all to himself more space than Jeff and the other assistant jailers put together. He was a beefy man in his early sixties, with his silver hair greased down and with a bushy gray mustache he'd probably worn since it was dark and stylish back in the 1890s. He heaved himself out of his swivel chair and stuck out a well-manicured hand for Jeff to shake. "Sit down, Pinkard, sit down," he boomed, sounding more like a politician on the stump than anything else. "Sit down and make yourself comfortable."

"Uh, thank you kindly, sir," Jeff replied, wondering when and how and why McDonald was going to lower the boom on him. "What can I do for you?" Might as well make it short and sweet, he thought.

Instead of answering right away, McDonald reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. Pinkard's eyes widened slightly, or more than slightly. Alabama was a dry state, though there were ways around that. He knew as much. He didn't expect the warden of the Birmingham City Jail to know it, or at least to show he knew it to a man he was going to bawl out. But Ewell McDonald yanked out the cork, swigged, and then passed the bottle across the wide expanse of his desk to Jeff. "Here you go, Pinkard," he said. "Have a snort."

"Thank you kindly," Pinkard said again. He knew he sounded bewildered, but couldn't help it. After he drank, he whistled appreciatively. That was real whiskey, not something cooked up in a hurry over an illegal still. He hadn't drunk anything so tasty in quite a while. He passed the bottle back, more worried than ever. McDonald wouldn't waste that kind of whiskey on him if he were in only a little trouble.

But the warden beamed at him. "You know, Pinkard, when I hired you, I reckoned I was stuck with you on account of Freedom Party business," he said. "Happens sometimes; nothing you can do but make the best of it. But I'll be goddamned if you ain't pulled your weight and then some. You weren't lyin' 'bout that prison-camp business down in Mexico, were you?"

"Lying, sir?" Pinkard shook his head. "Hell, no. I did all that stuff."

"I guess maybe you did," McDonald said. "I wouldn't have bet on it when I took you on, I'll tell you that. But you've worked out fine. Hell, son, you're doing better than some of the fellows who've been here ten years." He grabbed the whiskey bottle and tilted it back for another knock.

"Thank you very much, sir," Jeff said, more than a little dazedly. He'd thought the same thing himself, but he'd never dreamt the warden would come out and say so. "Thank you very much. I've learned a hell of a lot here, too. Down in Mexico, I was making it up as I went along. You-all really know what you're doing."

"Some of the time, maybe," McDonald said. "But I like the way you prowl the cells. I like that a lot. Nothing's going to happen unless you know about it first, is it?"

"Well, I hope not," Pinkard answered. "You can never be sure, but I hope not."

"Long as you know you can never be sure, you won't do too bad." The warden pushed the bottle across the desk again. "Go ahead. You've earned it."

"Don't mind if I do." As Ewell McDonald had, Jeff took a long pull at the bottle. Smooth fire ran down his throat. "Ahh! That's mighty fine," he said, and then laughed. "Prisoners'll smell it on my breath and say I've been drinking on the job."

McDonald laughed, too. "They don't like it, you tell 'em they can take it up with the warden." He corked the whiskey bottle and stuck it back in his drawer. "However you did it, I'm glad you found your way here. You're goddamn good at this business, you hear what I'm telling you?"

"Thanks," Jeff said once more. Yes, he did feel dazed, and not just on account of unaccustomed morning slugs of whiskey. How long had he been at the Sloss Works without ever hearing anybody tell him anything like that? Too long, he thought as he got to his feet. Much too damn long.

I n the summertime, heat and humidity could make Augusta close to unbearable, especially for Negroes in the crowded quarters of the Terry. When Scipio got the chance, he liked to bring his family up to Allen Park and relax in the fresh air under the shade of the trees that grew thickly there. He and Bathsheba and the children would lie on the grass on a Sunday afternoon and watch people with more energy-and, he was convinced, less sense-play volleyball or throw around a football.

Allen Park was in the white part of town, but close enough to the Terry that Negroes often used it. Scipio would gladly have gone to a park inside the Terry, but nobody'd bothered leaving any open space for a park there. He wasn't surprised. How could he have been, when he'd lived in the Confederate States all his life? Whites got whatever they needed and whatever they wanted. If anything happened to be left over after that, Negroes got it. If nothing happened to be left over, well, too bad.

That was how whites saw things, anyhow. And then they'd been shocked when blacks rose up against them in Red revolt during the Great War. Scipio had thought that a damnfool idea, because he'd been all too sure the revolts would fail-as they had. Nothing made the whites fight hard like seeing their privileges threatened. But fearing failure didn't mean Scipio hadn't understood the impulse to hit back as hard as his own people could.

One lazy July Sunday, after finishing a picnic lunch, Bathsheba pointed to a sheet of paper stuck to the trunk of an oak not far away. "What's that say, Xerxes?" she asked.

Scipio took his alias for granted. He also took being asked such questions for granted: Bathsheba couldn't read or write. "I goes and looks," he answered, climbing to his feet. Full of fried chicken and yams, he ambled slowly over to the tree, read the paper, and came back to sit down on the grass again.

"Well?" his wife asked.

"Well?" Antoinette echoed. She was six now, which astounded Scipio every time he thought about it. And Cassius-named, though Scipio had never said so, for the Red rebel in the swamps of the Congaree River-was already three, which astonished him even more.

But he shook his head. "Ain't so well," he said; the thick patois of the Congaree made him sound more ignorant than Bathsheba, whose accent was milder. "Big Freedom Party rally here two weeks from now."

The corners of Bathsheba's wide, generous mouth turned down. "You're right," she said. "That ain't so good. That ain't no good at all. Thought them people was all over and done with, but now they're back."

"Now they's back," Scipio echoed somberly. "Times is hard. De buckra, dey's scared. When dey's scared, dey starts yellin', 'Freedom!' "

"If they want it so bad, how come they don't want to let us have none?" Bathsheba asked.

"Dey does dat, who dey gots to t'ink day's better'n?" Scipio didn't hide his bitterness.

"Ought to tear that sheet o' paper down," Bathsheba said.

"Do Jesus, no!" Scipio exclaimed. "Anybody see me do dat, my life ain't worth a penny. An' dey's bound to be plenty more o' they papers. Don't put up no notice like dat in jus' de one place. Tearin' it down don't do no good."

She didn't argue with him, but she didn't look as if she agreed with him, either. When they walked back to their flat, Scipio saw more Freedom Party notices. He wondered how he'd missed them coming up to Allen Park. Maybe he hadn't wanted to see them, and so had turned his eye aside.

He'd expected to pay no attention to the rally. What else was a Negro supposed to do with anything pertaining to Confederate politics, especially with a part of Confederate politics of which he disapproved? But this rally, very much in the frightening Freedom Party style of ten years before, refused to let Augusta's Negroes ignore it. For one thing, it was enormous. Scipio didn't know exactly how many white men thronged to it, but he could hear great roars of, "Freedom!" coming from the park again and again, though it was blocks away from his family's apartment building.

"Why they yellin' like that, Pa?" Antoinette asked.

Scipio wished he knew what he was supposed to tell her. "On account o' dey don't like what de gummint doin'," he answered at last.

She could have left it there. Scipio wished she would have left it there. Instead, with a child's persistence, she asked the inevitable child's question: "Why?"

"They're some o' the buckra what have it in for black folks," Bathsheba said when Scipio hesitated. That satisfied their daughter. No Negro, no matter how young, could help knowing plenty of whites in the Confederate States had it in for blacks.

If any Negro from Augusta hadn't known it, the ralliers did their best to drive it home. They swarmed out of the park and into the Terry, shouting, "Freedom!" all the while. A few policemen came with the long, sinewy column, but more to observe it than to check it. Had the Freedom Party men turned on the police, they could have got rid of them in moments and then rampaged through the Terry altogether out of control.

They could have, but they didn't. Scipio didn't even think they beat anybody up. They just marched and yelled and marched and yelled. In a way, that was a relief. In another way, it left Scipio all the more terrified, not least because of the discipline it showed. It was sending a message: this is what our people do when we tell them to do this. If we tell them to do something else… Scipio shivered at what the Freedom Party might do then. And would that handful of policemen try to stop them? Could they if they tried? Neither struck him as likely.

He made a point of getting to Erasmus' fish store and restaurant early the next morning. He still didn't get there as early as his boss. "Mornin', Xerxes," Erasmus said when Scipio came through the door. "How you is?"

"I been better," Scipio answered. "Buckra march underneath my window yesterday. Don't like that none, not even a li'l bit."

Erasmus nodded gloomily. "They go past my front door, too," he said. "No, I don't like that none, neither. They scared. When they scared, they do somethin' stupid."

"Do somethin' big an' stupid," Scipio agreed. "Burn down de Terry, maybe. De po lice, dey don't stop 'em if dey tries."

"Reckon not," Erasmus agreed. "Reckon the po lice do try-they ain't all bad men. Reckon they try, but I don't reckon they kin do much, neither."

"Where dat leave we?" Scipio answered his own question: "In trouble, dat where."

Erasmus looked at him. "You's a black man in the CSA," he said. "You think you ain't been in trouble since the day you was born?"

"I was borned in slavery days, same as you," Scipio said. "I knows all about dat kind o' trouble. But de Freedom Party, dey worse'n usual."

He waited to see whether Erasmus would try to argue with him. If his boss did, he intended to argue right back. But Erasmus slowly nodded. "Reckon you's right. Didn't used to think so. I reckoned them crazy buckra'd find somethin' new to git all hot an' bothered about. They been around for more'n ten years now, though. Don't reckon they's goin' noplace."

"Wish they would-wish dey go far away an' never come back no more," Scipio said. "They gwine win plenty o' new seats in the 'lection come fall, too."

"God's will," Erasmus said. "We is a sinful lot, and the good Lord, He make us pay."

Before Scipio could think about it, he shook his head. "I don't care none how sinful we is," he said. "De Lord can't hate we enough to give we what de Freedom Party want to give we." Would he have had such thoughts before he got mixed up with the Red Negroes who'd led the uprising in 1915? He didn't know for certain, but had his doubts.

"The Lord do what He want to do, not what we wants Him to do," Erasmus said. "Blessed be the name o' the Lord."

"Lord help he what help hisself," Scipio replied. "De Freedom Party git stronger, I reckon maybe niggers gots to help theyselves." Was he really saying that? After watching from the inside the destruction of the Congaree Socialist Republic, could he really be saying that? He could. He was.

"We rise up against the buckra again, we lose again. You knows it, too." Erasmus sounded very sure.

And Scipio did know it, too. Blacks in the CSA couldn't hope to beat whites. He'd thought as much before the rising of 1915, and he'd proved right. On the other hand… "De Freedom Party git stronger, we lose if we don't rise up, too."

Erasmus didn't answer him. Maybe that meant there was no answer. He hoped it didn't, but feared it did.

Three days later, he got an answer of sorts. After finishing at Erasmus', he went into the white part of Augusta to visit a couple of toy stores that had a better selection-and better prices-than any in the Terry. Coming home with something new and amusing-it didn't have to be very big or very fancy-was a good way to delight his children. Having been childless for so long, Scipio found he took enormous delight in making them happy now that he had them.

He found a doll for Antoinette, one that closed its eyes when it lay down. It was, of course, white, with golden hair and blue eyes. He'd never seen a doll with dark features like his own. He'd scarcely imagined there might be such a thing. Whites dominated the Confederate States in ways neither they nor the Negro minority quite understood.

No matter what this doll looked like, Scipio knew his little girl would enjoy it. He set money on the counter before asking the clerk for it. To that extent, he did understand how things worked in the CSA. But the clerk, once he had the price, was polite enough, saying, "Here you are. Have a good evening."

"Thank you, suh," Scipio answered. He started for the door, and had just set his hand on the knob when he heard a scuffle outside, and then a man's shout of pain.

From behind him, the clerk said, "Maybe you don't want to go out there right now. Freedom Party hasn't always been nice to colored folks they catch out in the evening."

Hasn't always been nice to seemed to translate into is beating the stuffing out of. Scipio's first emotion was raw fear. His next was shame that he couldn't help the luckless Negro the goons had found. He felt gratitude toward the clerk, gratitude mixed with resentment. "Ought to call the cops," he said: as close as he dared come to letting that resentment show.

"I've done it before," the man answered. "They don't usually come for a call like that. I'm sorry, but they don't."

Erasmus had insisted the Augusta police weren't all bad men. Maybe he was right. Scipio found it harder to believe now. He did nod to the clerk. "Thank you fo' tryin', suh," he said. Not all whites were bad. He was reasonably sure of that.

A little while after the sounds of violence ended, Scipio left the toy store and hurried back to the Terry. He got home safe. His daughter did love the doll. Everything should have been fine. And it would have been, if only he could have forgotten what had happened in the white part of town. As things were, he got very little sleep that night.

W hen the train pulled into Abilene, Texas, Jake Featherston knew he was in a different world from the one he'd left. The plains seemed to go on forever. Dust was in the air. This wasn't the narrow, confined landscape of Virginia. No wonder Texans had a reputation for thinking big.

But Texas itself wasn't so big as it had been. Not far west of Abilene, Texas abruptly stopped. What the damnyankees called the state of Houston began. That was why Jake had come all the way out here: to make a speech as close to what he still called occupied territory as he could.

The train stopped. His bodyguards got up, ready to precede him out onto the platform. Looking out there, one of them said, "It's all right. Willy Knight's there waitin' for us."

"Hell it's all right, Pete," another guard said. "What if that Knight bastard's the one who wants to try and get rid o' the boss?"

Pete, an innocent soul, looked shocked. Jake wasn't. Willy Knight's Redemption League might have swallowed up the Freedom Party instead of the other way round. It hadn't, though, and Knight couldn't be happy that he wasn't the biggest fish in the pond, the way he'd dreamt of being. Still… "If he wants to put me six feet under, reckon he can do it," Featherston said. "This is his part of the country; he can hire more guns than I can bring along. But if you stick your head in the lion's mouth and get away with it, after that the lion knows who's number one. That's what we're gonna do here."

When Jake stepped out onto the platform, the band struck up a sprightly version of "Dixie." People cheered. Jake took off his hat and waved it. Willy Knight stepped forward to shake his hand. As the two Freedom Party leaders met, photographers took pictures. The flashes made Featherston's eyes water.

"Welcome to Texas, Jake-what's left of it," Knight said, a broad smile on his handsome face.

"Thank you kindly, my friend." Featherston lied through his teeth. "We'll see what we can do about getting back what the USA stole from us."

"How are you going to do that?" a reporter shouted. "The Yankees won't pay any attention to us."

"They don't have to pay any attention to the CSA, not as long as the Whigs hold on to Richmond," Jake answered. "The Whigs say we lost the war, and so we're stuck-stuck forever. And we are, too, long as we think that way. But even the Yankees knew better. After we whipped 'em, they set up Remembrance Day so they wouldn't forget what happened. The Whigs want to forget-they want to pretend all their mistakes never happened at all. And they want the country to forget. Me, I don't intend to."

"That's right." Willy Knight nodded vigorously. "That's just exactly right. Here in Texas, we live with that every day when we look west and see what the United States did to us."

The reporters scribbled. Jake sent Knight a sour look. The Texan wanted to be part of the story, too. If you wanted to horn in on this, why'd you invite me out here to the middle of nowhere? Featherston thought. But he knew the answer, knew it all too well. Because you still want to be top dog, that's why, you son of a bitch. Most ways, having ambitious men in the Party was wonderful. They worked hard, for their own good as well as its. But having them here meant Jake could never stop watching his back.

"I'm making my main speech at a park west of town, isn't that right?" he asked Knight, though he also knew that answer. "Almost within spitting range of what they call Houston. Spitting's not half what they deserve, either."

"Sure isn't," Knight said. "If the people in occupied Texas ever got the chance to vote, they'd come back to the Confederate States in a red-hot minute."

"Same with Kentucky," Featherston agreed. "Same with Sequoyah." He had mixed feelings about Sequoyah-it was, after all, full of redskins, and he had little more use for them than he had for niggers. (The USA had even less use for Indians; Sequoyah remained occupied territory, while Houston and Kentucky were full-fledged U.S. states.) But Sequoyah was also full of oil and gas, and cars and trucks and aeroplanes meant the Confederate States needed all the oil and gas they could lay their hands on. If the redskins came along, too, then they did, that was all. At least they'd been loyal during the war, unlike the blacks in the Confederacy.

"Take you to the hotel first, if that suits you," Knight said. "Give you a chance to freshen up, maybe rest a little bit, before you go out and give your speech. You aren't set to start till six, you know."

"Oh, yeah." Jake nodded as they left the platform together. "That way, it's eight o'clock back on the East Coast-a good time for folks on the wireless web to listen in." He laughed. "Who would've reckoned a few years back that we'd have to worry about such things? Times are changing-if we don't change with 'em, we're in trouble."

"That's what's wrong with the Whigs," Knight said. "They're a bunch of damn dinosaurs, is what they are."

Dinosaurs had been much in the news lately. A team of Japanese scientists in Mongolia had come back with not only spectacular skeletons but also some of the first dinosaur eggs ever seen. They'd sent some of their specimens to the Museum of Natural History in Richmond, where they'd drawn record crowds. Jake liked the phrase, too; it captured exactly what he felt about the Whigs.

He slapped Willy Knight on the back. "They sure are," he said. "You took the words right out of my mouth, matter of fact-I'm aiming to call 'em that very thing tonight." And so he was, even if he hadn't been a moment before.

"Good," Knight said, not suspecting Featherston was stealing his figure of speech.

Driving through Abilene was depressing. The town had flourished in the years just before the Great War and, like so much of the Confederacy, languished since. Timber buildings looked sun-blasted; brick ones looked old before their time. As he did all over the CSA, Jake saw men sleeping on park benches and in bushes, and others prowling the streets looking for food or work.

The hotel seemed as gloomy as the rest of the place. Ceiling fans spun lazily in the lobby, stirring the air without cooling it much. The carpet was shabby. The walls needed painting. The clerk behind the registration desk seemed pathetically glad to have anybody come in. "Welcome to Abilene, sir," he said as he gave Jake his key.

"Thanks," Jake replied, in lieu of what he really thought. "Freedom!"

"Uh, freedom," the clerk said, but not as if he were a Party man.

Since Featherston was due to speak at six, he and Willy Knight ate an early supper: enormous slabs of steak, a Texas specialty. Texas wasn't dry; they could drink beer without breaking the law. Knight swallowed a big piece of rare meat and then said, "God damn you, Jake. I thought you were buzzard bait, but you turned out to be right all along. Our time is coming."

"I always said so." Featherston cocked his head to one side. "You reckoned we were going down the drain, and you'd pick up the pieces."

The mixed metaphor didn't faze the former head of the Redemption League. "Damn right I did. This party was drying up and blowing away four years ago." He cut off another chunk of steak. By the way he did it, he would sooner have stuck the knife into Featherston. "Amos Mizell and I, we were ready to get on another horse. The Party did jussst well enough"-he stretched the word into a long hiss-"to keep us on board. But now-"

Jake finished for him: "Now we're back in business."

"We are." Knight nodded. "Hell with me if we're not. I'd take my hat off to you if I was wearing it. All through everything, you said this was going to happen one of these days. You said so, and you were right."

"You bet I was," Featherston said, adding, You stinking bastard, to himself. "Come November, we're going to pick up a hell of a lot more seats in the House. We'll pick up some in the Senate, too, from states where we got control of the legislature two years ago. And two years from now… Two years from now, by God…" Even in the dimly lit steakhouse, a feral glow shone in his eyes.

"Yeah." That same glow lit Willy Knight's face. He and Jake nodded to each other. Both men had been hungry, hungry in the spirit, for a long, long time, and at last they thought they could see satisfaction on the horizon.

Softly, Jake said, "If things go our way two years from now, I'm going to pay back every blue-blooded bastard and every nigger who ever did me wrong. And I'm going to put this poor, sorry country back on its feet again."

"Yeah," Knight said again. As with Featherston, he sounded more as if he looked forward to revenge than to rebuilding. He added, "We've got the United States to pay back, too."

"I haven't forgotten," Jake said. "Don't you worry about that, Willy. I haven't forgotten at all. That's why I came out here-to help everybody remember."

When he got to the park, it was filling up fast. Bare bulbs bathed the platform from which he would speak, though the sun hadn't set yet. As he walked up onto the platform and over to the microphone that would send his words across the CSA, a frightening, almost savage, roar went up from the crowd. He hoped the microphone would pick it up. He wanted people to get all hot and bothered when they heard him or thought about him.

"Hello, friends," he said at six on the dot. "I'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth. The truth is, the United States are afraid of us. You look across what they call the border, you look into what they call Houston, and you'll know it's the truth. If they let people over there vote which country they wanted to belong to, they know what would happen. You know what would happen, too. Texas would be itself again. And so the Yankees don't let 'em vote."

Cheers in Abilene had that savage edge, too. Here not far from the border, people feared the United States, whether the United States feared them or not.

Jake went on, "The USA won't let people in Kentucky vote on that, either, or people in Sequoyah. They know where the people would go, and they don't aim to let 'em. Why? They're scared, that's why!"

He pointed east, a gesture full of contempt. "And do the Whigs way over there in Richmond, the Whigs who've been running this country ever since the War of Secession, do they do anything about it? Do they push the USA to let the folks in Houston- Houston! — and Kentucky and Sequoyah vote about who they want to belong to? Do they? Do they? Noooo!" He made the word a howl of rage. "They're nothing but a pack of dinosaurs, is what they are. And you know what you've got to do with dinosaurs, don't you? Send 'em to the museum! "

A vast roar went up. Featherston looked back at Willy Knight, standing there behind him. They grinned at each other. Knight was happy about his own cleverness, even though he thought Featherston had had the idea on his own, too. Jake was happy about how well the line had gone over. He knew he'd stolen it, knew and didn't care. The point was, it did what he wanted. And nobody else in the whole wide world knew, or cared, where he'd got it.

Little by little, Party men turned the roar into a chant: "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" The crowd followed along. The chant went on till Jake's head rang with it.

He raised his hands. Quiet slowly returned. Into it, he said, "Come November, you get your chance to send some more Whigs to the museum. I know you'll take care of it, friends. Folks who think they're smart used to say the Freedom Party was dead. We'll show 'em who's dead, see if we don't, and who needs burying, too. We're not dead, by God. We're just getting started!" Another roar went up, one that told him he'd found a brand-new slogan.

"H asta luego," Hipolito Rodriguez told his wife. "I'm going into Baroyeca. I'll vote, and then I'm going to stay to see how the election turns out."

Magdalena wagged a finger at him. "And in between times you'll sit in La Culebra Verde and waste money on cerveza."

"If a man can't have a beer or two with his friends, the world is in a sorry state indeed," Rodriguez said with dignity.

"A beer or two, or four, or six." Magdalena wagged that finger again, but indulgently. "Go on. Have a good time. I will say you've never been one to sit in the cantina all the time and come home drunk four days a week. Libertad! "

"Libertad!" Rodriguez echoed. He put a serape on over his shirt; the weather was about as chilly as it ever got around Baroyeca. He put on a wide-brimmed straw hat, too. It wasn't raining, but looked as if it might.

The polling place was in one room of the mayor's house. More often than not, Rodriguez still thought of the mayor as the alcalde; even though Sonora had belonged to the CSA longer than he'd been alive, the old Spanish forms died hard, especially here in the south.

He gave his name, signed on the appropriate line in the record book, and took his ballot into a voting booth. He voted for the Freedom Party candidates for Congress, for his state legislature, and for governor of Sonora. When he'd finished, he folded the ballot, gave it to a waiting clerk, and watched till the man put it into a ballot box.

" Senor Rodriguez has voted," the clerk intoned, a formula as full of ritual as any in the Mass.

As Rodriguez left the mayor's office, Jaime Diaz came towards it. They exchanged greetings. From within, someone called out a warning: "No electioneering within a hundred feet of the polling place."

That too was ritual. Rodriguez snorted. "Electioneering!" he said. "All I want to do is say hello."

"I can't chat anyhow," Diaz said. "I've got Esteban back at the general store, and he can't count to eleven without looking at his toes, so I have to get back there as fast as I can."

"We'll talk some other time, then," Rodriguez said. "Adios." He didn't say, Libertad. The fellow inside had warned him against electioneering.

When he wandered over to La Culebra Verde, he found it crowded. Many of the men sitting and drinking had worked in the silver mines that went belly-up soon after the stock market sank. These days, the miners didn't have much to do with their time but sit around and drink. Rodriguez wondered where some of them came up with the dimes they used to buy beer, but that wasn't his worry. A lot of the miners, he suspected, would spend money on cerveza before they spent it on their families. That wasn't the way he would have done it, but they wouldn't care.

Carlos Ruiz waved to him. He waved back, bought himself a bottle of beer, and joined his friend at a corner table. Ruiz was also a farmer. He might not have a lot of dimes-what farmer ever had a lot of money? — but he did still have some income. "Have you voted?" he asked as Rodriguez sat down across from him.

"Oh, yes. Libertad! " Rodriguez answered. He kept his voice down, though. Some people came into the cantina to brawl as well as to drink. Arguments over politics gave them a good excuse. Rodriguez had seen enough fighting during the Great War that he never wanted to see any more.

"Libertad!" Ruiz said, also quietly. "I think we are going to do very well this year."

"I hope so," Rodriguez said. "A pity, though, that it takes trouble to show people what they should have been doing all along."

His friend shrugged. "If you're fat and happy, do you want to change? Of course not. You keep on doing what you always did. After all, that's what made you fat and happy, si? You need a jolt to want to change."

"Much truth in that," Rodriguez agreed. "But the whole country got a jolt in 1917. Too many people try to pretend it never happened. Ah, well- asi es la vida." He shrugged, too, and took a pull at the beer.

The question that had occurred to Rodriguez was also on the minds of the out-of-work miners. One of them asked the man behind the bar for another beer, saying, "You know I'll pay you soon, Felipe."

Felipe shook his head. " Lo siento, Antonio, but if you pay me soon you'll get your beer soon, too-as soon as you pay me, as a matter of fact. I can't carry people, the way I could when times were better. I hardly make enough money to keep this place open as is."

Rodriguez had his doubts about that. If a cantina couldn't make money, what could? Probably nothing. After all, what did hard times do? They drove men to drink.

"My wife is going to get a job any day now," Antonio whined. "I'll have the money. By God, I will."

Women's jobs in Baroyeca were even harder to come by than those for men. There was, of course, one obvious exception. Somebody behind Antonio-Rodriguez couldn't see who-said, "She'll have a nice, comfortable time of it, too, working on her back."

Rodriguez didn't think the man who made the crack intended Antonio to recognize his voice, either. Coming from nowhere in particular, a gibe like that might be tolerated. But Antonio whirled, shouted, "Chinga tu madre!" and threw himself at another miner. They rolled on the floor, cursing and clawing and pounding at each other.

Felipe kept a club under the bar. Rodriguez had seen him take it out before, mostly to brandish it for effect. He'd never seen a sawed-off shotgun come out from under there before. Men dove away from the two battling miners.

"Enough!" Felipe yelled. Antonio and his foe both froze. The bartender gestured with the shotgun. "Take it outside. Don't come back, either-and that goes for both of you. Out-or else I blow holes in you."

Out they went. Rodriguez realized he was holding his beer bottle by the neck, ready to use it as a club or break it against the table for a nastier weapon. He'd also scooted back his chair so he could dive under the table if he had to. Across from him, Ruiz was just as ready to fight or take cover. Very slowly and carefully, Rodriguez set down the bottle. "Some of the things we learned in the war don't want to go away," he remarked sadly.

"You're right," Ruiz said. "It's terrible that we should remember all the best ways to kill the other fellow and keep him from killing us."

As Felipe made the shotgun disappear, Rodriguez nodded. "Of course, most of the men who didn't learn those ways are dead now," he said. "And a lot of the ones who did learn are dead, too. A shell from the yanquis didn't care who it killed."

"Oh, yes." His friend nodded. "Oh, yes, indeed." Ruiz's face twisted, as at some memory that wouldn't go away. Rodriguez didn't ask him about it. He had memories of his own. Every once in a while-not so often as right after the war, when it would happen every week or two-he would wake up from a dream shuddering and drenched with sweat. Sometimes he would remember what he'd seen in his sleep. Sometimes the details would be gone, but the horror would remain. He didn't scream very often any more. That made him glad and Magdalena, no doubt, gladder.

Not wanting to think about such things, he got up, bought himself another beer, and got one for Carlos Ruiz as well.

"Muchas gracias, amigo," Ruiz said when he brought it back.

"De nada," Rodriguez answered. He sipped from the beer, then asked the bartender, "Que hora es?"

Felipe wore a big brass pocket watch on a chain. It could have been a conductor's watch-a thought Rodriguez wished he wouldn't have had, since the railroad came to Baroyeca no more. The bartender made a small ceremony out of pulling it out and checking it. "Son las cuatro y media," he answered, and made another ceremony of returning the watch to his pocket.

Half past four. Rodriguez nodded. "Gracias," he said. Sure enough, by the lengthening shadows outside, the sun was getting low in the west.

Ruiz said, "Pretty soon we can go over to Freedom Party headquarters. The trains may stay away, but the telegraph still comes. We can find out what's happening in the elections, especially since the polls in the east of los Estados Confederados close earlier than they do here. Let me buy you a beer to pay you back for the one you so kindly got me, and then we'll see what we see, eh?"

Rodriguez was glad to let his friend buy him a beer. He was a little elevated-not drunk, but a little elevated-as he and Ruiz walked down the street to the shopfront that said FREEDOM! and LIBERTAD!

A couple of men were already there. "Hola, amigos," Robert Quinn said in his accented Spanish as Rodriguez and Ruiz came in. Three more men followed right behind them. Quinn went on, " Libertad! I wish we had a wireless set here. This town needs electricity, por Dios."

"If the mines had stayed open…" Rodriguez began, and then shrugged, as if to say, What can anyone do?

But Quinn didn't have that attitude. "Let the Party come into power, and we'll do something about the mines. We'll do something about all sorts of things. That's why you're here, right? You believe in doing things, not in sitting around and waiting for them to happen."

Is that why I'm here? Rodriguez wondered. He thought he was here mostly because he couldn't stand the United States and wanted revenge on them. But if that required doing other things, then it did, that was all.

A messenger from the telegraph office came in with a sheaf of flimsy yellow papers. "Gracias," Quinn told him, and gave him a dime. He went through the telegrams in a hurry. Then he let out a banshee whoop of a sort Rodriguez hadn't heard since his days in the trenches. Some of the men there had called the battle cry a Rebel yell. "We're winning," Quinn said. "Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida-wherever I have returns, we're picking up seats in Congress and in the state legislatures. And our men running for governor are ahead in South Carolina and Florida, and the race in Virginia is still very close. Libertad! "

"Libertad!" the Freedom Party men shouted. Rodriguez couldn't wait for results to start coming in from states closer to Sonora.

To while away the time, Quinn pulled a whiskey bottle out of a desk drawer. He took a pull himself, then passed it around. Rodriguez had always thought whiskey tasted nasty. He still did, but that didn't keep him from swigging when the bottle got to him. "Ahh!" he said. The stuff might taste bad, but he liked what it did.

More telegrams came in. So did more people. The Freedom Party didn't look as if it would win the governorship of Virginia after all, but it gained a Senator from Mississippi and another from Tennessee. Before long, it also picked up two more Congressmen in Alabama, a Senator from Arkansas, and several Congressmen from eastern Texas. "Will we have a majority?" Rodriguez asked. Even a few weeks before, the question would have seemed unimaginable. Now…

Now, to his disappointment, Robert Quinn shook his head. "No, I don't think so," he answered. "But we're still doing better than anybody thought we could." He pulled out a fresh bottle of whiskey and led the Party men in a new shout of, "Libertad!"

An hour or so later, returns from Chihuahua started arriving. The Freedom Party men in Baroyeca cheered: their candidate for governor there was well ahead of the Radical Liberal incumbent. And in Sonora itself, two more Congressional districts swung to the Party. As Rodriguez had known he would be, he was very late getting home that night. But he hadn't known-he'd had no idea-how happy he would be making that long walk in the dark.

L ucien Galtier parked his motorcar in front of the house where his daughter Nicole lived with Dr. Leonard O'Doull. Nicole opened the door at his knock and gave him a hug. "Hello, Papa," she said. "It's always good to see you."

"Is it?" Galtier said. "I don't want to make a nuisance of myself." Since Marie died, he'd started visiting his children as often as he could. For one thing, he was lonely. For another, he was sure he was the world's worst cook. Any evening where he didn't have to eat what he turned out was an evening gained.

Nicole made a face at him. "Don't be silly. You know you're welcome here."

As if to underscore that, little Lucien came running up shouting, "Grandpere!" When Galtier picked up his namesake, the boy threw his arms around his neck and gave him a big, sloppy kiss.

"You're growing up," Galtier told him. "You're heavier every time I try to lift you." He turned to his daughter. "It must be that you keep feeding him."

She snorted. "You sound like Georges. He must get his foolishness from you. Now come in, for heaven's sake. Sit down. Relax."

"This is a strange word for a farmer to hear." But Galtier wasn't sorry to sit down on the sofa. Leonard O'Doull walked in a moment later, with glasses of applejack and fine Habana cigars.

"I thank you very much," Galtier said, accepting the brandy and the tobacco. He raised his glass in salute. "To your good health!"

"And to yours," his son-in-law answered. They both drank, as did Nicole. The applejack went down soft and sweet as a first kiss. Little Lucien ran off to play. O'Doull asked, "And how are you, mon beau-pere?"

Lucien shrugged. "As well as I can be, I suppose. It is not easy." That was as much as he would say. It would also do for an understatement till he found a bigger one, which might come along.. oh, a hundred years from now.

Dr. O'Doull looked sly. "But of course you have all the pretty ladies for miles around looking in your direction now that, however unfortunately, you are a single man once more."

He probably meant it for a joke. In fact, Galtier was almost sure he meant it for a joke. But that didn't mean it held no truth. He'd been amazed how many widows and maiden ladies had come to call on him, to say how sorry they were that Marie was gone… and, sometimes quite openly, to size him up. He'd been even more amazed that a couple of farmers, both in the most casual, offhand way imaginable, had brought up their marriageable daughters with him. True, he wasn't an old man-he wouldn't see sixty for a few years yet-but what would he do with an eighteen- or twenty-year-old girl? Oh, there was one obvious answer, but he couldn't even do that so often as he had when he was younger. And, if he were to have a wife younger than his youngest daughter, wouldn't making love to her feel like molesting a child? Some men his age, no doubt, would have thought themselves lucky to get offers like those. He didn't.

Making a production out of lighting his cigar meant he didn't have to answer his son-in-law. Once he had it going, once he'd savored the fine, mild smoke, he asked, "And how is it with you here?"

"Not too bad," O'Doull answered. Nicole nodded. Galtier did, too, in approval. The American sounded more like a Quebecois with each passing year. It wasn't just his accent, though the years had also meant that Riviere-du-Loup supplanted Paris in his French. But Americans, from everything Galtier had seen, liked to brag. Not too bad was about as much as a man from this part of the world was ever likely to say. Dr. O'Doull went on, "I wish I could do more about influenza and rheumatic fever and a dozen other sicknesses, but I don't know of any other doctors anywhere else in the world who wouldn't say the same thing."

"Your glass is empty, Papa," Nicole said, and then did something to correct that.

"Pour me full of applejack, yes, and how will I go home?" Galtier asked, not that he didn't want the freshened glass. "The one advantage a horse has over an automobile is that the horse knows the way."

"You can sleep here. You know you're welcome," his daughter said.

He smiled. He did know that. He'd even done it once or twice, on nights when he'd been too drunk to find the door, let alone to fit the Chevrolet's key into the ignition. He might even have slept better here than at home, and that wasn't because he'd been drunk. Trying to sleep alone in a bed where he'd had Marie beside him for so long… He grimaced and took a quick nip from the brandy. No, that wasn't easy at all.

To keep from brooding about that empty bed back at the farmhouse, he asked his son-in-law, "What do you think of the state of the world?"

That was a question usually good for a long, fruitful discussion. Galtier got one this time, too, but not of the sort he'd expected. The corners of Dr. O'Doull's normally smiling mouth turned down. He said, "Right this minute, mon beau-pere, I like the state of the world not at all."

"And why not?" Galtier leaned forward, ready to argue with what ever O'Doull said.

"Because I read the newspapers. Because I listen to what they say on the wireless," O'Doull replied. "How could anyone like it when the Freedom Party doubles its vote in the Confederate States? They hold more than a third of the seats in the Confederate Congress now, and heaven only knows what they'll do next."

With a shrug, Lucien said, "This, to me, is not so much of a much. The Confederate States are a long, long way from Riviere-du-Loup."

His son-in-law looked startled. "Yes, that's true," he said after a momentary hesitation. "I still think of myself as an American some ways, I suppose. I've been here more than fifteen years now, so it could be that I shouldn't, but I do."

"It is not so bad that you do," Galtier said. "A man should know where he springs from. If he does not know what he was, how can he know what he is?"

"You sound like a Quebecois, all right." Leonard O'Doull smiled.

"And why should I not?" Lucien replied. "By the good God, I know what I am. But tell me, mon beau-fils, why is this Freedom Party so bad for the United States?"

"Because it is the Confederate party for all those who don't want to live at peace with the United States," O'Doull replied. "If it comes to power, there will be trouble. Trouble is what its leader, this man Featherston, stands for."

"I see." Galtier rubbed his chin. "You say it is like the Action Francaise in France, then? Or that other party, the one whose name I always forget, in England?"

"The Silver Shirts." O'Doull nodded. "Yes, just like them." He cocked his head to one side, studying Galtier. "And what do you think of the Action Francaise?"

Lucien Galtier clicked his tongue between his teeth. "That is not an easy question for me to answer," he said slowly. As if to lubricate his wits, his son-in-law poured him more apple brandy. "Thank you," he murmured, and drank. The applejack might not have made him any smarter, but it tasted good. He went on, "I would not be sorry to see France strong again. She is the mother country, after all. And even if the Republic of Quebec is a friend of the United States, and so a friend of Germany, which is not a friend of France…" He could feel himself getting tangled up in his sentence, and blamed the applejack-certainly easier than blaming himself. He tried again: "Regardless of politics, I care about what happens in France, and I wish her well."

"Moi aussi," Nicole said softly.

Dr. O'Doull nodded. "All right. That's certainly fair enough. But let me ask you something else-do you think the Action Francaise will do well for France if they take power there? If France goes to war with Germany, for instance, do you think she can win?"

"My heart says yes. My head says no." Galtier let out a long, sad sigh. "I fear my head is right."

"I think so, too," his son-in-law agreed.

"But let me ask you something in return," Lucien said. "If the Confederate States were to go to war with the United States, do you think they could win?"

"Wouldn't be easy," O'Doull said. Then he shook his head. "No. They couldn't. Not a chance, not now."

"Well, then, why worry about this Freedom Party?" Lucien asked.

Before O'Doull answered, he poured his own glass of brandy full again. "Because I fear Featherston would start a war if he got the chance, regardless of whether he could win it or not. Because a war is a disaster whether you win or you lose-it's only a worse disaster if you lose. I'm a doctor; I ought to know. And because"-he took a long pull at the applejack-"who knows what might happen five years from now, or ten, or twenty?"

"Who knows, indeed?" Galtier wasn't thinking about countries growing stronger or weaker. He was remembering Marie, remembering her well, and then in pain, and then, so soon, gone forever. He gulped down his own glass of apple brandy, then reached for the bottle to fill it again.

Nicole reached out and set her hand on his own work-roughened one. Maybe she was remembering Marie, too. She said, "Hard times mean trouble, no matter where they land. And when they land everywhere.. " She sighed, shook her head, and got to her feet. "I'm going to see how supper's doing."

By the odor of roast chicken floating out of the kitchen, supper was doing very well indeed. For a moment, Lucien kept thinking about his wife. Then he realized Nicole meant the hard times that made it easy for him to hire help with the planting and harvest; with so many out of work in Riviere-du-Loup, he could pick and choose his workers. Some of them had never done farm labor before, but they were pathetically grateful for a paying job of any sort, and often worked harder than more experienced men might have done.

To Leonard O'Doull, he said, "It seems to me, mon beau-fils, that you and I are lucky in what we do. People will always need something to eat, and, God knows, they will always fall sick. No matter what sort of troubles the world has, that will always be true. And so the two of us will always have work to keep us busy."

"No doubt you are right," Dr. O'Doull said. "I think you are also lucky you own your farm free and clear and don't owe much on your machinery. There are too many stories these days of men losing their land because they cannot pay the mortgage, and of losing their tractors and such because they cannot keep up the payments."

"I've heard these stories, too." Lucien shivered, though the inside of his son-in-law's house was toasty warm. "To be robbed of one's patrimony… that would be a hard thing to bear."

"It is a hard thing to bear," O'Doull said. "That fellow in Dakota a couple of weeks ago who shot his wife and children, shot the sheriff and three of his deputies when they came to take him off the farm he'd lost, and then shot himself… Before all this started, who could have imagined such a thing?"

Galtier crossed himself. He'd seen that in the papers, too, and heard about it on the wireless, and he still wished he hadn't. "God have mercy on that poor man's soul," he said. "And on his family, and on the sheriff and his men. That farmer worked a great evil there."

He let it go at that. He'd told nothing but the truth. If he also said he understood how the desperate American had felt when he knew he must lose his patrimony, Nicole would understand if she was listening from the kitchen, but would Dr. Leonard O'Doull? Lucien doubted it, and so kept quiet.

Then Dr. O'Doull said, "Of all the sins in this world, which is more unforgivable than the sin of not having enough money? None I can think of." Galtier realized he'd underestimated his son-in-law.

"W ell, well." Colonel Irving Morrell stared at the report on his desk. "Isn't that interesting?" He whistled tunelessly, then looked back at his aide-de-camp. "There's no doubt of this?"

"Doesn't seem to be, sir," answered Captain Ike Horwitz, who'd gone through the report before giving it to Morrell.

"It makes an unpleasant amount of sense," Morrell said, "especially from the Japs' point of view. I wonder how long it's been going on." He flipped through the document till he found what he was looking for. "We never would have found out about it at all if that fellow in Vancouver hadn't had a traffic accident while his trunk was full of Japanese gold."

"Tokyo's denying everything, of course," Horwitz said.

"Of course." Morrell laced agreement with sarcasm. "But what makes more sense for Japan than keeping us busy with rebellion up here? The busier we are here, the less attention we'll pay to what goes on across the Pacific. Hell, we did the same thing during the war, when we helped the Irish rise up against England so the limeys would have more trouble getting help across the Atlantic from Canada."

"A lot of coastline in British Columbia," his aide-de-camp observed.

"Isn't there just?" Morrell said. "I wouldn't be surprised if the Japs are operating out of Russian Alaska, too. The Russians have to be afraid we'll take their icebox away from them one day."

"Why would anybody want it?" Horwitz asked.

"There's gold in the Yukon," Morrell answered. "Maybe there's gold in Alaska, too. Who knows? The Russians don't; that's for sure. They've never tried very hard to find out, or to do much else with the place."

"They tried to sell it to us after the War of Secession-I read that somewhere, a long time ago," his aide-de-camp said. "I forget what they wanted for it; seven million dollars is the number that sticks in my mind, but I wouldn't swear that's right. What ever it was, though, we turned them down because we didn't have the money."

"From what the old-timers say, we didn't have a pot to piss in after the War of Secession," Morrell said, and Horwitz nodded. Morrell went on, "But that's neither here nor there. The question is, what do we do-what can we do-about the damned Japanese?"

"At least now we know we've got to do something about them," Horwitz replied.

"Anybody with half an eye to see has known that since the Great War ended. No, since before it ended," Morrell said. "We didn't beat 'em; they fought us to a draw in the Pacific, and then they said, 'All right, that's enough. We'll have another go a few years from now.' And they're stronger than they used to be. They took Indochina away from the French and the Dutch East Indies away from Holland-oh, paid 'em a little something to salve their pride, but they would've gone to war if the frogs and the Dutchmen hadn't said yes, and everybody knows it."

"Who could have stopped them?" Horwitz said. "England before the war, yes-but not any more. She's got to be glad the Japs didn't take Hong Kong and Malaya and Singapore the same way and head for India. The Kaiser doesn't have the kind of Navy or the bases to let him fight the Japs in the Pacific. And we'd have to get past the Japanese Philippines to do anything. So…"

"Yeah. So," Morrell agreed sourly. "What they do six thousand miles away is one thing, though. What they do right here in our own back yard-that's a whole different kettle of fish. If they don't know as much, we'd better show 'em pretty damn quick." He'd been aggressive leading infantrymen. He'd been aggressive leading barrels. Now, with a vision that suddenly stretched to the Pacific a few hundred miles to the west, he wanted to be aggressive again.

"What have you got in mind, sir?" Horwitz asked.

"We ought to be flying patrols up and down the coastline," Morrell answered. "They couldn't sneak their spies ashore so easily then. And if they have a destroyer or something lying out to sea, we damn well ought to sink it."

"In international waters?"

"Hell, yes, in international waters, if they're using it as a base to subvert our hold on British Columbia. All we'd need is to spot a boat and the destroyer. That'd be all the excuse I needed, anyhow."

Horwitz frowned. "You might start a war that way."

"Better to start it when we want to than when they want to, wouldn't you say?" Morrell returned. "Sooner or later, we will be fighting 'em; you can see that coming like a rash. Why wait till they're ready for us?"

"I don't think President Blackford wants a war with Japan," his aide-de-camp said.

"I don't, either." But Morrell only shrugged. "But I also don't think Blackford has a Chinaman's chance of getting reelected this November. Come next March-"

Horwitz shook his head. "No, they've amended the Constitution, remember? The new president takes over on the first of February from now on. With trains and aeroplanes and the wireless, he doesn't need so long to get ready to do the job."

"That's right. I'd forgotten. Thanks. Come February first, then, we'll have a Democrat in the White House-or Powel House, take your pick-again. Maybe he'll have better sense. Here's hoping, anyhow." Morrell rubbed his chin. "It would be a funny kind of war, wouldn't it? Not much room for chaps like us: all ships and aeroplanes and maybe Marines."

"It would be good practice for a war with the Kaiser, if we ever had to fight one of those," Horwitz said.

"Yes, it would, wouldn't it?" Morrell grinned at his aide-de-camp. "There's another report for you, if you feel like writing it-tell the people back in the War Department what you just told me. Back it up with maps and force breakdowns and distance charts and all the other little goodies you can think of."

Captain Horwitz's expression was less than overjoyed. "You've really got it in for me, don't you, sir?" he said, about half in jest.

And, about half in jest, Morrell nodded. "Damn right I do. I want to get you promoted again so I don't have to deal with you any more. If you don't want to be a major, don't write the report. I think the last one helped make you a captain."

"I'll write it," his aide-de-camp said. "Anything to escape you." They both grinned.

But Morrell wasn't grinning after Horwitz left his office. "The Japs!" he said softly. " Son of a bitch." As he'd told Horwitz, meddling in Canada did make good logical sense from their point of view. A USA distracted by troubles close to home would be less inclined to look or reach out across the Pacific. But now that Tokyo had got caught with its hand in the cookie jar, the United States would likely… do what?

Sure enough, that was what a popular wireless show called the ninety-nine dollar question. For the life of him, Morrell didn't know why that show didn't give winners a full hundred bucks, but it didn't. He took Japanese interference in British Columbia very seriously indeed. But how serious would it look to War Department functionaries back in Philadelphia? That wasn't so easy to see. He sometimes thought that, if it weren't for the Sandwich Islands the Navy had captured from the British at the start of the Great War, the War Department would have forgotten the Pacific Ocean and the West Coast existed.

Maybe this would make a useful wakeup call. Maybe it would remind those easterners that the United States did have two coastlines, and that they had unfriendly countries to the west as well as to the east. Maybe. He dared hope.

And maybe, just maybe, having an unfriendly power making a public nuisance of itself would remind even the Socialists of why the United States needed an Army and a Navy in the first place. They'd gone out of their way to conciliate the Confederates. (And the Confederates, to be sure, had gone out of their way to conciliate the USA. They were smart enough to remember they were weak, and not to get into trouble they couldn't get out of. They were under the Whigs, anyhow. The Freedom Party worried Morrell more than ever, not least because now it looked as if it might come to power one day.)

I wonder if I ought to write my own report. He laughed and shook his head. What point to that? He wouldn't have been posted to Kamloops if bureaucrats in Philadelphia were likely to pay attention to anything he said. For some people, a report from him might be an argument to do the opposite of what ever he suggested.

Besides, Horwitz might win promotion to major, in which case he would escape Morrell's perhaps stifling influence on his career. No report would get Morrell the brigadier general's stars he craved. Promotion during the war had been swift. Promotion after the war… Even men in good odor in Philadelphia languished. Promotion for someone who wasn't might never come.

And if you retire a colonel? Morrell shrugged. He'd done his part to win one war for his country. No one could take that away from him. If they wanted him to count jackrabbits and pine trees out here in Kamloops, he would do it till they wouldn't let him do it any more. One of these days, they may decide they need someone who knows something about barrels again. You never can tell.

He laughed a bitter laugh. He knew he did a good enough job here in Kamloops, but what he did had nothing to do with the specialized knowledge he'd acquired during the war. Any reasonably competent military bureaucrat could have taken his place and done about as well. That even applied to his proposed solution to Japanese meddling in British Columbia, though he might have wanted to push harder than most uniformed drones would.

He laughed again, this time with something approaching real amusement. Reasonably competent military bureaucrats shuddered at the prospect of ending up in a place like this. They intrigued and pulled wires to stay in Philadelphia, or to go on inspection tours of places like New Orleans. That meant Kamloops and other such garrisons in the middle of nowhere attracted drunks, fools, dullards… and people like me, Morrell thought.

When he went home after finishing the day's stint, he didn't walk. He couldn't, not when the last blizzard had left a foot and a half of snow on the ground, snow that piled into drifts higher than a man. Instead, he buckled on the pair of long wooden skis leaning against the wall of the entry hall.

Captain Horwitz came out while Morrell was making sure he'd got everything tight. His aide-de-camp shook his head. "You wouldn't get me on those things, sir."

"I know. I've tried," Morrell answered. "I keep telling you-you don't know what you're missing. It's the next best thing to flying with your own wings."

"I know what I'm missing," Horwitz said stubbornly. "A broken ankle, a broken leg, a dislocated knee, a broken arm, a broken neck.. And if I go flying, I'll do it in an aeroplane, thanks."

"O ye of little faith." Holding both ski poles in one hand, Morrell opened the door, then quickly closed it behind him.

Cold smote. He skied down the steps-there was enough snow on them to make it easy-and pushed off for home. Darkness had already fallen. He relished the wind in his face, the play of his muscles as he glided along over the smoothly undulating snow. A shimmer of motion in the sky caught his eye. He stopped, staring up in awe. White and golden and red, the northern lights danced overhead.

He didn't know how long he simply stood there staring. At last, he got moving again, though he kept looking up to the heavens. Warmth and home and family had their place, no doubt-he was always delighted to get back to Agnes and Mildred. But there were so many who, like Captain Horwitz, closed their souls to this chill magnificence.

"God, I'm sorry for them," he said, and skied on.