The Two Georges

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Bushell had never seen so many black men on the streets in his life. The miners heading away from the mines after their shift ended were not merely brown, as Samuel Stanley was - they were black. Black as coal, Bushell thought, and no wonder.

They bantered with one another as they spread through the town, some going home, others hurrying to the taverns to slake their thirst. Had Bushell been among their number, he would have had a drink, or more likely several, before he’d have wanted to face anyone he loved. Putting in a day’s work hundreds, maybe thousands of feet underground in tunnels barely tall enough to stand up in, never knowing when those tunnels would flood or come crashing down on your head or collapse somewhere behind you, sealing you off from any hope of rescue . . . The very idea made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

But what had Shakespeare said of the gravedigger? “Custom had made it in him a property of easiness,” that was the line. It held with the miners, too. They were raucous and cheerful, almost to a man. If they worried about how they made their living, they didn’t show it on the outside. They were magnificent-looking men, too, despite, or maybe because of, the coal dust that coated their bare torsos. Whatever evils that could be ascribed to it - and Bushell know how many they were laboring in the mines kept a man fit - till blacklung got him, anyhow. For his age, he was in good condition, but miners who had to be ten years older were far firmer and stronger. He felt himself drawing back his shoulders, tightening his belly. Walking along beside him, Samuel Stanley also held himself quite erect.

As soon as the two RAMs and Kathleen Flannery got out of Charleroi’s business district, Kathleen’s attention swung from the miners themselves to the homes in which they lived. “How can we expect human beings to put up with conditions like these?” she said, pointing. “And how long can we expect human beings to put up with them?”

Looking down the long rows of hovels jammed against one another, Bushell had a hard time finding an answer for those questions. The whole block of houses on Lantern Way leaned from the vertical; doors and windows were ten or even twenty degrees out of true. Grass grew rank on the thin strip of lawn between the sagging houses and the street. A few houses had decrepit steamers in various states of disrepair up on the lawn. Most, though, were without motorcars of any sort. Swarms of boys played on the grass and in the street. With bats that looked carved from branches, wickets made of piled jackets, and a sixpenny India-rubber ball, a mob of them had a spirited, if disorderly, game of cricket under way. They paused in their action while Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen walked through the makeshift playing field toward Percy McGaffigan’s house at number 39. The older lads followed Kathleen Flannery with their eyes; young and old seemed to view the presence of well-dressed strangers with suspicion, for Bushell and his companions brought silence with them, the usual racket resuming behind them after they’d passed.

Only a worn path in the grass served as a walkway up to number 39. The door leaned enough to the left to be disconcerting. Bushell wanted to lean that way himself, to make the world look straight. Running into the effect without having several Jameson in him was new, but not particularly welcome.

“I feel like I’m going into one of those crooked houses they have at carnivals sometimes,” Samuel Stanley said, so Bushell wasn’t the only one the off-kilter door bothered. He looked for a bell. Not finding one, he rapped on the door. A dog yapped inside the house. The door opened with a squeal; Bushell wouldn’t have been surprised if it hadn’t been capable of opening. A plump, pale, tired-looking woman in a cheap cotton dress of a bilious green stared at him as if he’d just dropped from the moon. Behind her, two small boys and a somewhat larger girl looked equally amazed.

“Does Percy McGaffigan live here?” he asked, showing his badge.

The woman’s eyes got even wider. “No,” she said quickly. “Never heard of no McGaffigans. You got the wrong house, Mister. Go away.”

“It’s all right, Maggie,” a man’s voice said from behind her. “Leastways, I think it is. These are the blokes from New Liverpool I was telling you about. Let ‘em in. They’re just sniffing after The Two Georges, nothing more.”

Reluctantly, Maggie McGaffigan stood aside. She didn’t look happy about it, whether because she still feared for her husband’s safety or because she didn’t want strangers inspecting her housekeeping Bushell couldn’t have said. By the way the parlor looked, she didn’t do enough housekeeping to make inspection worthwhile. The room was small and dingy, the furniture - mismatched pieces looking as if they’d been found at jumble sales - falling to bits, dirty clothes strewn everywhere. The place smelled of sweat, grease, and dog.

Percy McGaffigan squatted in a corner of the parlor with an enamel basin half full of water, a rag, and a bar of soap. His face and arms and most of his chest were pink, the rest of his chest, his ridged belly, and his back still the coal-dust black they’d been when he emerged from the mine. The rag and the water had already gone gray with the dust he’d washed from himself.

“Don’t mind me,” he said, lathering the soap in the dirty water. “Just cleanin’ up a bit afore supper, I am. Some o’ the fellers, they eat first and then wash, but I figure I been breathin’ coal all day long, an’ I don’t much fancy swallowin’ it, too, that I don’t.” He soaped the left half of his belly, scrubbing away at the grime there with the washrag.

In a rather faint voice, Kathleen Flannery said, “But, Mr. McGaffigan - haven’t you got a bathtub?”

“If I did, Miss, you think I’d be doin’ this?” McGafflgan’s voice had been mild, even affable. Now it turned sharp. “Dang few miners hereabouts with bathtubs, Miss, or toilets either. Can’t afford such. These here houses are back to back, is what they are, with others just like ‘em built against the far wall there. Us, we get to look out on the street, but we got to go round the corner to visit the loo. Them others back around there, they have themselves a short walk, but they get to look at the backhouses and the rubbish pitch all year long. You had your druthers, Miss, which’d you sooner do?”

Kathleen didn’t answer. She looked green. Bushell had read, had heard of the conditions in which the miners lived. Running up against the reality was like a kick in the face.

“You’re not a wealthy man, then?” he said.

McGaffigan stared at him, then laughed raucously. “Oh, sure and I am. This here is just me summer home, you know. Come winter, the missus and me, we takes an airship to our Florida mansion, and brings the young ‘uns with us.”

Bushell smiled, enjoying the miner’s pungent sarcasm. “One for you. But if you haven’t the money for a better house, how did you come by the train fare for your trip to New Liverpool? How did you manage to pay your hotel bills, you and all your friends?”

McGafflgan’s face went hooded, wary. “All the lads roundabout, we been pitching in sixpences and shillings and the odd half a crown as we could, all these past months,” he said at last. “Do it with enough of us, do it long enough, and in the end you have yourself a fair pile o’ brass.” Methodically, he began to wash his back. The water in the basin was now as black as he had been. Bushell marveled that it would still clean him. Pale skin did emerge from under the coal dust, though. Samuel Stanley said, “If you all clubbed together to pay for your journey, you’ll have the accounts of the money you collected, I expect. Who keeps those? We wouldn’t mind having a look at them.”

“Don’t recall offhand, I’m afeared,” McGaffigan answered casually, as if he’d been asked what he had for supper night before last. “D’you happen to remember the feller’s name, Maggie?”

“No,” his wife said, in the same sharp tones she’d used at the front door when she’d denied he lived there at all. “I never heard it, that I know of.” She smiled a quick, false smile. Kathleen Flannery exhaled sharply through her nose. That meant she had to take a deep breath a moment later, which made her look even less happy. Bushell didn’t so much as bother looking over at Stanley. He could read his adjutant’s thoughts, knowing they matched his own: Percy and Maggie McGaffigan were both liars, but the man of the family at least brought a certain amount of skill to the game.

“Thank you so much for your help,” Bushell said dryly.

Percy McGafflgan’s eyes kindled for a moment; not only could he use irony, he also recognized it when he heard it. He finished washing himself, dried his muscular upper body, and put back on a long-sleeved, collarless cotton shirt that, like everything else in the mean little house, had seen better days.

“Is that all?” his wife asked. “Our supper’s just about ready.”

“Only a couple more questions,” Bushell told her before turning back to Percy. “Where does the Michael O’Flynn who went with you to New Liverpool live?”

“Red Mike, you mean? He’s out on Colliery Road - number 29, I think, unless I misrecall.”

“That is a help,” Bushell said, meaning it this time. “One more thing, and we’ll leave you be for the evening: do you know a man from up in the Six Nations named Joseph Kilbride? If you do, have you seen him in the last few days?”

“I know a Daniel Kilbride, but he was born in Charleroi, same as me,” McGaffigan answered. “Poor devil had his leg crushed in a cave-in a couple-three years ago. He’s been on the dole ever since, tryin’ to raise a family on ten quid a week. Now I’ve got it hard, like all us working blokes do, but oh, Mother Mary, I pity the likes o’ poor Daniel - and too bloody many like him there are, too.”

Bushell thought he was telling the truth, but doubted his own judgment. To check it, he asked Maggie McGaffigan, “Have you seen this Joseph Kilbride?”

“That I haven’t,” she said. “I never heard o’ the man, nor wanted to, neither.” The pride and relief with which she spoke convinced Bushell that here, at least, she wasn’t lying. He left the McGaffigans’ home neither elated nor cast down; he hadn’t expected to come away with much in the way of new information, and so wasn’t unduly disappointed when he didn’t. It got very quiet when he and his companions came out onto Lantern Way. The children in the street stopped their games and stared at them. So did the couple of miners who’d carried chairs out onto their lawns to try to escape the heat - and, no doubt, the smells - inside their houses.

“They’ll all grill the McGaffigans as soon as we’re out of sight,” Stanley muttered out of the side of his mouth.

“How can you imagine such a thing?” Bushell said, as if incredulous. Stanley chuckled softly. Bushell was looking across Lantern Way, not at the men there but at the houses. While those on this side leaned to the left, those on that leaned to the right, so as to be parallel to them. He wondered how many tunnels, and how deep, had been gnawed in blackness through black seams of coal under Charleroi, and how many had fallen in upon themselves to make the very ground ripple and buckle and the houses built upon it list like ships on a stormy sea or drunken men.

Kathleen Flannery also spoke in a low voice, but one filled with fury: “Any man who lives like this but isn’t a Son of Liberty, he’s the crazy one.”

“Something to that,” Sam Stanley said. “If you’ve got nothing, you go with anything that offers you hope of better.”

When a man of manifest conservatism like Stanley could speak such sentiments, the squalor of Percy McGaffigan’s home, of Percy McGaffigan’s life, had to have bitten deeply into him. But Bushell shook his head. “If your roof leaks, you don’t burn down your house to fix it.” He kicked at a clod of dirt. “Oh, maybe you do, if you’re twenty-five or so and don’t know better. But then you have to live in the ruins you made yourself, and that teaches you something - or it should.”

“There’s more wrong with McGaffigan’s house than the roof,” Kathleen said, “and you may take that literally or metaphorically, as you please.”

Bushell raised an eyebrow. “The idea, Dr. Flannery, is to convince me that you’re not a Son of Liberty, not that you are.”

“If you don’t know by now that I’m not - “ She stopped and glared at him. “But I don’t turn a blind eye to misery or injustice, unlike some people I could name.”

“You want to think before the next time you say something like that to an officer of the Crown.” Bushell spoke so quietly, Kathleen had to lean forward to hear what he said. When she did, she rocked back as if he’d slapped her.

Samuel Stanley pulled out the map they’d got from Chief Lassiter. “Let’s see whether we’re closer to Rothrock’s house or to Red Mike O’Flynn’s,” he said, changing the subject the best way he could find. It worked. “Here, let me have a look at that,” Bushell said. In his army days, he’d learned to have an enormous amount of respect for maps. With them, you could do anything. Without, you’d wander in the desert like the children of Israel, and likely never come to the Promised Land. Kathleen Flannery bent over the map, too. She stabbed out a red-painted fingernail. “There’s Coker Drive,” she said. “It’s only a couple of blocks over, and then a couple down toward the river, too.” She grimaced. “I’m going to have tired feet tonight.”

“We’ll all have tired feet tonight,” Bushell said, accepting the tacit truce. “All right, we’ll go talk with Mr. Anthony Aurelius Rothrock. Let’s see if he sings a more interesting song.”

Rothrock’s house was also on a block built back to back. Unlike McGaffigan’s, it faced not Coker Drive itself but the alley behind it, giving him and his family a charming view of lavatories and dustbins. Someone had put naphthalene in the outhouses, so the reek that came from them was half barnyard, half mothballs. It was stronger if marginally less unpleasant than straight sewage would have been. Where McGaffigan’s house listed to the left, Rothrock’s leaned forward, so that the wall at the base of the roof overhung the door by a startling and rather alarming amount. As he had in Doshoweh, Bushell wondered what an earthquake would do to the place. Then he thought again of all the tunnels worming under Charleroi, and decided the whole town might well plunge into the abyss. From what he’d seen here, he wondered if that might not be the best thing that could happen to it. He knocked on the door; like McGaffigan’s, Rothrock’s house was innocent of bell. The door didn’t open. Instead, a middle-aged man with a walrus mustache, a stubbly chin, and a surly expression stuck his head out the window and glowered at him and his companions. “Who the hell’re you?” he growled, the slur in his speech arguing he’d been home long enough to knock back more than a couple of drinks.

“Are you Anthony Rothrock?” Bushell asked.

“Who the hell’re you?” the fellow repeated, scratching under the left shoulder strap of his dirty white vest - he wore no shirt over it. “A man’s home’s still his castle, ain’t it? That’s what the law says. You come round here bothering me, I’ll set the law on you.”

“I’ll take that chance,” Bushell said, and displayed his Royal American Mounted Police badge. “Not let’s try it again - you are Mr. Rothrock?”

“Yeah, I’m Tony Rothrock,” the fellow said unwillingly. “What’s it to you?” His eyes narrowed. “You got a warrant, Robin Redbreast?”

“No,” Bushell said. “We only want to ask you a few questions.”

“Shove off,” Rothrock told him. “I don’t have to say nothin’ to you, and I don’t aim to say nothin’ to you. You can go take a hike - far as I’m concerned, you can jump down the main shaft of Mine Number One. Take the big smoke with you when you go, too. You want to leave the redhead, that’s jake by me.” He leered at Kathleen Flannery.

Bushell waited for her to go up like a steamer with a punctured boiler. Instead, she turned to him and said in a low voice, “Would you like me to go in there and question him? I will, if he’ll let me - and if you don’t mind.”

That wasn’t really what she was asking. What she wanted to know was, Do you trust me? It was a question Bushell wished he didn’t have to confront so bluntly, because the only answer he’d found was, I don’t know. He kicked at the boards of the tiny porch in front of Rothrock’s door. They were as bare of paint, as cracked and faded and defeated, as any he’d seen in Buckley Bay.

“Go ahead, then,” he said - suddenly, without warning. Before the look of surprise could do more than begin to form on her face, he turned away from her and said, “She can come in, if you’ll let her.”

The miner seemed startled for a moment, too. Then he laughed. Bushell did not find it a pleasant sound.

“Oh, aye, she can come in, all right, that she can.” He disappeared from the window. By her expression, Kathleen hadn’t fancied that laugh, either. Quickly, before the door opened, Bushell said, “If you’re not out in five minutes, I’m coming in after you. Shout if you need me.” She just had time to nod before Rothrock, with drunken, scornful courtesy, waved her inside and shut the door in Bushell and Stanley’s faces.

The two RAMs drew back a few steps from the doorway. Bushell did not want to retreat any further, not only for fear of missing a cry for help from Kathleen but also because the outhouses Rothrock’s home faced were hardly pleasant company. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Chief?” Stanley asked in a low voice.

“Not even close to it.” Now Bushell kicked a the grass of the narrow strip of lawn. It was as tired and dejected as the porch boards. “I hate having to depend on anybody but me, especially someone who’s not a RAM, especially someone whom - “ He broke off.

“God knows what she’s talking about in there with him,” Stanley said, obliquely completing the thought for him.

Bushell lighted a cigar. People coming to use the plumbing facilities stared at him and Stanley. So did the harried-looking women who dumped rubbish in the bins. Those hadn’t been emptied any time recently, and added their sickly-sweet reek to that of the lavatories.

“You know, if I lived in the middle of the other side of these back to backs, I think I’d sooner pitch my tea leaves and such in the gutter than haul them all the way around back here,” Stanley said.

“By the look of some of the gutters we’ve seen, you’ve got what it takes to make a first-rate Charleroi housewife,” Bushell answered.

Stanley drew back in dismay. “You’ve said some hard things about me over the years, Chief, but I don’t think I deserved that.” He rolled his eyes. “Lord, what Phyllis would say if she saw these places - “

“Poor people live like this,” Bushell said. “If you’re not poor, you don’t have to go round the corner to throw away your rubbish.”

“Mm, that’s so,” Stanley admitted. “But from the look of things, not all the ones on this side take much care of the places they’re in, either.” He had simple, straightforward, straitlaced notions of right and wrong. One look at the sad, frowzy homes on this side of the block said he also had a point. Bushell smoked for a bit, then crushed his cigar under his heel. He pulled out his pocket watch and glumly studied the dial. “What is she doing in there?” he muttered.

“More to the point, how long are we going to let her keep doing it?” Stanley muttered.

“I’ll give her another two minutes,” Bushell said, glancing not only at his watch but also at the steadily sinking sun. “If she hasn’t come out by then, I’ll. . . go in.” He grimaced. He wasn’t in control, and he didn’t like it.

He paced back and forth, his short choppy strides showing the worry he wouldn’t acknowledge in words. A couple of seconds before the deadline he’d set himself, the door to Anthony Rothrock’s house opened. Kathleen bounded off the little porch; her pleated skirt flew up enough to show a length of shapely calf.

Rothrock stood in the doorway. “Come back anytime, darling,” he called, and blew a kiss after her. Laughing a loud, half-drunken laugh, he slammed the door shut.

One of Bushell’s eyebrows twitched. “Darling?” he echoed.

If looks could kill, Kathleen’s eyes would have started a massacre. Her cheeks were flushed - not embarrassment, if Bushell was any judge, but fury. Through tightly clenched teeth, she said, “Take me away from here this instant, or I shall go back in there and kill that man.”

“What did he do?” Samuel Stanley asked, the usual, easy good nature dropping from his voice like a discarded mask. His big hands curled into fists. “Maybe we’ll take care of it for you.”

Kathleen shook her head, strands of auburn hair flipping back and forth as she did. “No, nothing like that - nothing so overt. Just take me away from here, please. Can we go back to the hotel?”

Bushell had wanted to track down Red Mike O’Flynn, but another glance at the sinking sun said that was probably not a good idea. He didn’t care to try finding his way through the back streets of Charleroi in the dark, and he didn’t think those streets would prove any too safe, especially to well-dressed strangers. “We’ll go back,” he said resignedly.

“Lassiter will be calling us, anyway,” Stanley said with the air of a man trying to make the best of things. Kathleen did not wait for them to finish talking themselves into it. She simply headed back toward the street and left it to them to follow. Bushell had to push himself to catch up with her. “Did you learn anything from the charming Mr. Rothrock?” he asked, and was rewarded with another murderous glare.

“Chiefly what tyrants men can be,” she snarled, adding, presumably for his benefit, “not that I haven’t already had lessons along those lines.”

Not loquacious under any circumstances, Bushell maintained a prudent silence now. Kathleen stamped back toward the Ribblesdale House, looking neither to the left nor the right. After half a block, Sam Stanley, who came as close to being neutral as anyone available, worked up the gumption to ask, “Er what did Rothrock do, exactly?”

“For starters, he chased his wife and daughter upstairs, and if he wasn’t a gorilla about it, I’ve never seen one,” Kathleen said, hunching over and clenching her fists to show how the miner had acted. “Didn’t Chief Lassiter say he beat her? I believe it, I’ll tell you that. The poor woman was terrified of him, and the little girl - a pretty little girl - too.”

“Did you learn anything from Rothrock?” Bushell asked again.

Kathleen continued as if he hadn’t spoken: “Then he sat me down on the filthy sofa in the front room, and then he sat down beside me. Right beside me.” Her nose went into the air. “He smells.”

“Go on,” Bushell said. She was going to tell the story her way or not at all.

“He didn’t - put his hands on me,” she said. “That much I give him. It is all I give him. He got up, went to a little alcove under the stairway, and came back with a bottle of whiskey. Just in front of the couch, he struck a pose like a circus strong man and said, ‘You like a real man, don’t you - not one o’ them toffs?’ I wanted to laugh in his face . . . but I was afraid.” She kicked at the ground; the admission plainly shamed her. “When I didn’t say anything, he sat down next to me again, even closer than he had before.”

She ran a hand down the right side of her skirt, as if to wipe away the memory of Rothrock’s presence. Bushell tried again. “Does he know Joseph Kilbride?”

“As best I can tell, he doesn’t know anything, the alphabet quite possibly included,” Kathleen answered.

“He would swig from the bottle, breathe cheap whiskey into my face, and tell me what a ladies’ man he was.” Even in the fading light, Bushell watched her turn red. “He went into some detail.”

“If you expect a coal miner to have the manners of a baronet, you’re apt to be disappointed,” Samuel Stanley observed.

“Did Rothrock say anything about who the miners’ treasurer was and where we can find him?” Bushell asked, persisting in what looked as if it were going to be a losing fight to get information out of Kathleen. She shook her head. “He said he saw me at the governor’s mansion, and that he fell in love with me then.” She flushed once more. “I’m paraphrasing.” She muttered something uncomplimentary to Anthony Rothrock, coal miners, and, by extension, the entire male sex. “I fear it was a useless and unpleasant conversation. He wasn’t interested in answering my questions, and I wasn’t interested in ... what he was interested in.”

“Thanks for making the effort,” Bushell said with a sigh. “I do appreciate it.” Everything she’d said had been in perfect keeping with what he’d seen of Anthony Rothrock: drunken, boorish, lecherous. Whether it had any relation to the truth, only she and Rothrock knew.

“Miserable, filthy place,” Kathleen said. “A monster of a husband, a frightened wife - God help their poor daughter, is all I can say.” She cocked her head to one side, fixing Bushell with that measuring stare once more. “Don’t you think there should be Daughters of Liberty, too, dedicated to getting women free of beasts like Rothrock? A movement like that might sweep the Empire, not just the NAU.”

“If you want men - and women - to stop acting like beasts, you need to talk to a priest, not a police officer,” Bushell said. “We don’t deal in miracles.”

“You’ve grown hard, Colonel,” she said after a moment’s thoughtful consideration. Bushell didn’t answer: what point to responding to self-evident truth? After a couple of paces, Samuel Stanley said, “If you don’t get hard on the outside, you can’t do this job.”

Kathleen thought that one over, too, then nodded judiciously. “But what if you get hard on the inside, too?” she asked.

“You have to be a little soft in the head to want to join the police in the first place,” Bushell said. But a quip wasn’t a real reply, and he knew this one was a shield to keep him from having to come up with a real reply.

They approached the train station and the Ribblesdale House close by. “You know,” Stanley said, pointing toward the hotel, “compared to the way the rest of Charleroi lives, we don’t have it so bad there.”

“You’re right,” Bushell said, “and if that’s not a judgment on the rest of the town, I don’t know what is.”

He paused, his gaze swinging back toward the station. “We ought to talk to the ticket sellers here tomorrow. If Kilbride wanted to get out of town, he’d have to have bought a ticket.”

“If, of course, he was ever here,” Stanley said with a heartiness he obviously did not feel. “He could have got off in Pittsburgh, say, instead of riding as far as his ticket would let him. If he did something like that, he could be anywhere in the NAU by now.”

“Oh, no!” Kathleen Flannery said; that chance evidently hadn’t occurred to her. It had to Bushell. “Yes, that’s a cheery thought, isn’t it?” he said. Now he looked toward the Ribblesdale House. “I wonder if the dining room has wild goose on the menu ?”

In the dining room, along with a few other patrons, sat Jerry Doyle and Michael Shaughnessy. Stanley eyed them with something less than delight. “I wouldn’t mind cooking their goose,” he murmured. Bushell nodded.

When he and his companions walked in, Shaughnessy sniffed ostentatiously, then said, “What’s that I smell?”

“Must be the odor of rectitude,” Doyle said.

“No, it’s Robin Redbreast, sure as the devil,” Shaughnessy said. He sniffed again. “Either that or polecat.” He and Doyle brayed laughter. They both had whiskey glasses in front of them. By their mirth, they’d already done some drinking.

Bushell took no outward notice of them, but found a table and sat down. Samuel Stanley sat across from him. Stanley’s face was calm, but a deep rumble rose from deep in his chest, as if he were a tiger reacting to the chatter of monkeys in the jungle. Kathleen Flannery said, “The job you RAMs do is harder than I’d thought.”

“Most people think well of us,” Stanley said pointedly.

“And as for the ones who don’t - “ Bushell shrugged. His eyes flicked to the reporters from Common Sense. “I’ll spend sleepless nights fretting over their good opinion.”

“Of course you will,” Kathleen said, in the same solemn tones he’d used. He raised a warning forefinger. “See what you get for associating with us low types? You’re in danger of becoming an ironist.”

Kathleen made as if to flee the table. Now she, Bushell, and Stanley laughed. Doyle and Shaughnessy stared over at them. No doubt they thought they were the butt of the joke. That make Bushell feel better than he had in some time.

After supper, he went up to his room and took a shower. He’d been relieved to discover the room boasted a showerbath; given the less than luxurious nature of the Ribblesdale House, he’d feared he’d find a single bathroom down at the end of the hall.

He was toweling himself dry when the telephone rang. He rubbed at his mustache in wry amusement; the way things had been going, the call should have come while he was in the showerbath. Wrapping the towel around his waist, he hurried over to the nightstand. “Hullo? Bushell here.”

“John Lassiter.” The local constabulary chief’s big, deep voice could hardly have belonged to anyone else. “I’ve tracked down the Michael O’Flynn you’re looking for.”

“So have I,” Bushell said. “Red Mike O’Flynn, on Colliery Road.”

He waited for Lassiter to congratulate him on his cleverness. Instead the chief sounded puzzled: “That’s not what I got from Stephen at the mine. He told me it was Michael F. O’Flynn, powderman, who I happen to know is a black Irishman - and who lives at 51 Brattice Street. Who told you it was Red Mike?”

“McGaffigan,” Bushell answered. “Somebody’s lying. Finding out who might be - interesting.” He dug out a notebook and pencil, then snorted - he reminded himself of Jerry Doyle. “Can you give me their telephone numbers?”

“Colonel, these chaps are lucky the months they scrape together enough brass for rent and food both,” Lassiter said. “That’s how it is in Charleroi. I’m not saying that’s how it should be, necessarily, but that’s how it is. There’ll be no phone in either of those houses.”

“Damnation,” Bushell said. “Well, Chief, will you send a constabulary steamer over to the hotel here? If I can’t telephone them, I’ll have to take a steamer to both Michael O’Flynns and find out which one of them was really out in New Liverpool.”

“And whether McGaffigan or Stephen Niles is lying,” Lassiter said. “I can’t believe Stephen would. He’s always been - “

Though Lassiter couldn’t see him, Bushell made a chopping motion with his right hand. “In this bloody case, saying ‘I can’t believe’ is the best way I can think of to make something come true. Are you going to send me that steamer?”

“Five minutes,” Lassiter promised, and hung up.

Bushell told Stanley where he was going, then hurried downstairs to wait in front of the Ribblesdale House. A northbound train rolled out of the Charleroi station, a plume of black smoke rising against the fading twilight. The steamer pulled up. A red lamp on its roof proclaimed its status. The constable who was driving leaned over to open the kerbside door. “Colonel Bushell? I’m Sergeant Vining. I’ll do what I can for you.”

“Thanks.” Bushell slid in. “Are we closer to 29 Colliery Road or 51 Brattice Street?”

“Colliery Road,” Vining answered.

“Then go there,” Bushell said.

“Right you are, sir,” Vining said. Bushell leaned forward in his seat, as if to urge the steamer to a greater turn of speed. At last, one place or the other, he’d get some answers. Colliery Road was narrow and winding and full of potholes. Most of the street lamps along it had been broken. Sergeant Vining peered through the windscreen. About halfway down a long block, he stepped on the brake. “There you are, sir,” he said, pointing. “That one on the left is number 29.”

Bushell got out of the steamer and walked up to the door. The racket of several children playing together or trying to kill one another - Bushell couldn’t quite tell which - floated out through the open window next to it. He knocked on the door. When nothing happened, he knocked again, harder this time. The door opened. A young man with carroty red hair and mustache and wearing a sleeveless vest and denim trousers with holes at the knees stared out a Bushell. “Who the devil might you be?”

“I might be anyone.” Bushell showed his badge. “I am Colonel Thomas Bushell of the Royal American Mounted Police.” The redheaded man gaped in blank surprise. “Are you Michael O’Flynn, called Red Mike?”

“That I am,” O’Flynn answered. “And what would you want with me?”

“Were you in New Liverpool on the night of 15 June?”

“New Liverpool? In Upper California, d’you mean? That I wasn’t. I’ve never been further than Pittsburgh in all my days, and I’ve not been out of Charleroi this year, nor the last one, either. Why on earth do you care to know that?”

“To see who’s lying to me - today,” Bushell said. He turned and hurried back to the constabulary steamer, leaving Red Mike O’Flynn standing in the doorway staring after him. “Brattice Street,” he told Sergeant Vining. “Red Mike here says he’s never been out past Pittsburgh, and I believe him, so that means Percy McGaffigan’s been telling tall tales. I do wonder why.”

“Maybe you’ll find out,” Vining answered. “Brattice Street’s about five minutes from here. Number 51 you want, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

Brattice Street was a step up the social ladder from Lantern Way and Colliery Road. More houses had steamers in front of them, and fewer leaned either forward or sideways. More of the street lamps worked, too. It still wasn’t the sort of place where Bushell would have wanted to live, but he might have contemplated the prospect without giving suicide at least even money as the better choice. Sergeant Vining came to a stop in front of number 51. “Here, I’ll come with you, sir,” he said, and got out. “If this fellow’s a right villain, who knows what he’ll try? I should have thought of that before.”

Bushell wondered how much help Vining would be in case of trouble. Constables dealt with vagrants and drunks and burglars. When it came to the Sons of Liberty . . . when it came to them, the Royal Marines hadn’t been as much help as they might have. But any reinforcement was better than none. If this Michael O’Flynn was a villain, his children didn’t know it. They were raising Cain inside the house when Bushell rang the bell: this was the first miner’s house with such an amenity he’d visited. A blonde who might have been pretty if she hadn’t looked worn to death opened the door. “Yes?” she said, staring in surprise from Sergeant Vining to Bushell and back again. “I thought you’d be my husband.” Four or five children of assorted sizes peered out from behind her.

“Michael O’Flynn’s not here?” Bushell said, making sure he had the right house. When the woman nodded, he showed his RAM badge and demanded, “Where’d he go?”

“Why, he took a friend to the train station,” Mrs. O’Flynn answered. “And is there anything wrong with that, I’d like to know?” She set her hands on her hips. “Now you see here, sir, my husband’s not done a thing, and I’ll thank you to remember it.”

“That’s telling him, Mother,” said the oldest child, a boy of about thirteen.

“I didn’t say he had,” Bushell answered. “He did go to New Liverpool, to the governor’s mansion there, didn’t he?”

“What if he did? It wasn’t against the law, and not even a RAM can make out that it was.” By the way she said not even a RAM, she gave Bushell the distinct impression she lacked the admiration for his corps most citizens of the NAU felt. Taking a deep breath, she went on, “And taking Mr. Kilbride to the train station isn’t against the law, either, so why don’t you just go home?”

“I didn’t say it was against - “ Bushell’s wits caught up to what his ears had heard. “Mr. Kilbride?” he said. “Mr. Joseph Kilbride? Older man, looks like he’s taken a few too many rights to the chops?”

“He does not,” she said indignantly. “No such thing. He’s - distinguished, Mr. Kilbride is. Collects art, he does, and all like that.”

“Does he?” Bushell said. “And how does such a - distinguished - man know your husband?”

“He sympathizes with the hard life coal miners have, Mr. Kilbride does,” Mrs. O’Flynn answered. “More than you can say for most officers of the Crown, too,” she added with a venomous glare.

“You may find others with a different opinion,” Bushell said. He turned to Vining and snapped, “Come on, Sergeant, what are you dawdling for?” Without waiting for a reply, he hurried back down the walk to the constabulary steamer.

Vining followed; being well trained, he didn’t start expostulating till he got into the motorcar and saw Mrs. O’Flynn slam the door in what she obviously took to be triumph. So did Vining. “Aren’t you going to wait and pinch Mike?” he asked in incredulous tones.

“Sergeant, I don’t give a damn about O’Flynn,” Bushell said. “I want Kilbride. He gives me a straight trail to The Two Georges; O’Flynn doesn’t. Get me to the train station right now.”

The constabulary steamer was a middle-class Henry. Vining did his best to drive the way Shikalimo performed in his high-powered Supermarine. By the time they got to the station, Bushell regretted his request - he was glad to arrive in one shaken piece.

“What can I do for you now, sir?” the constabulary sergeant asked as he squealed to a stop.

“Nothing, by God,” Bushell said, in lieu of telling the man he was a public menace. “You wait here while I talk to the ticket seller.” He got out of the steamer and headed for the ticket booth before Vining could come up with any convincing arguments for joining him.

The man in the booth was the same sour-faced chap who’d denied the existence of a good hotel in Charleroi when Bushell and his companions came to town. He looked up from the newspaper he was reading and said, “Told you the Ribblesdale House weren’t worth a damn. Now I reckon you’re going to blame me on account of it.”

“Only if you’re the chef there,” Bushell said, which won a startled snort from the fellow. He went on, “Did you sell a ticket to a man answering this description?” and painted the best word picture he could of Joseph Kilbride.

“It ain’t nobody’s business but mine and his whether I did or whether I didn’t,” the ticket seller answered. “How come you get to go poking into people’s business?”

“Best reason of all - they pay me for it,” Bushell answered, and displayed his RAM badge. He’d done that so often lately, he wondered if he ought to have it mounted on his forehead, perhaps with a pair of tenpenny nails.

He watched the ticket seller study the badge, study him, and very visibly decide what to say. In the Pennsylvania coal country, most people were not automatically eager to help the duly constituted authorities. At last, though, in reluctant tones, the fellow said, “Yeah, I sold him one. What’s he gone and done to have you Robins after him?”

“You’re not the first person to ask me that,” Bushell said. “Where’s he going?”

The man inside the grilled cage looked out at him, then chuckled rheumily. “Bet the first fool who asked didn’t get a straight answer, neither. I ought to make you trade me one for one, but you’ll sweat me if I try - and besides, that feller’s as bloody-minded as they come; you can tell it by lookin’ at him. He’s headin’ for New York City, he is.”

“Is he?” Bushell said. “We’ll have to see if he gets there. What time did that train pull out of here?”

“Hour and seventeen minutes ago,” the ticket seller told him. He didn’t look at any timepiece Bushell could see, but sounded very certain all the same. If pressed, he probably could have answered to the second.

“He’ll have been through Pittsburgh already, then,” Bushell said musingly.

“Stops after that are Greensberg, Torrance, Altoona, Tyrone, Huntington, Lewistown, Harrisburg, Lancaster, Downington, and Paoli before you get into Philadelphia,” the ticket seller said, again without consulting any visible reference.

“Had this job a while, have you?” Bushell murmured. He went back to the constabulary steamer and told Sergeant Vining, “I’m grateful for your help. Now I’m going back to the Ribblesdale House - I’ll walk, thank you very much,” he added hastily, before Vining could offer to drive him there. When he got back to the hotel, he rapped on Samuel Stanley’s door and told his adjutant how close he’d come to nabbing Kilbride. Stanley’s eyes glowed. “We can still get him,” he said.

“Don’t I know it,” Bushell said. “I’m going to call Sir Horace and have him arrange to pull Kilbride off the train before he even gets to Philadelphia, let alone New York. Then we’ll see what we shall see.”

“Sounds fine,” Stanley said. “He got away from us once, he got away from us twice, but let’s see him do it three times. Better yet, let’s not.”

Bushell went back to his own room and placed a long-distance call to Sir Horace Bragg’s home in Victoria. It took longer to go through than he thought it should have; both the hotel operator and the operator at the Charleroi exchange seemed startled that anyone inside Charleroi knew anyone out of town. But at last the phone rang. “Hullo? Bragg here.”

“Sir, I have a call for you from Colonel Thomas B - “ the operator began.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Bragg said impatiently. As the operator clicked off, he continued, “Hullo, Tom. Haven’t heard from you in a few days. What’s up?”

Briefly, precisely, Bushell told him what was up. “This could be a major break, sir,” he finished. “If we can pull in Kilbride, he might lead us right to the heart of the plot.”

“You’re right,” Bragg agreed, more enthusiasm in his voice than Bushell usually noted there. “I’ll have men posted in all those stops your side of Philadelphia. Here, give them to me again so I can write them down. If we don’t put manacles on Kilbride, he’s not on that train. I’ll ring you directly we have word.”

“That’s first-rate, sir,” Bushell said. “I’ll be looking forward to your call.”

He thought about going downstairs to celebrate with a drink. He thought about going downstairs to celebrate with several drinks. He could hear Jameson calling to him, a lilt more tempting than any a colleen from the Auld Sod might turn his way. Odysseus had had himself tied to the mast so he could listen to the Sirens sweetly singing. If Bushell heeded Jameson siren song, he’d fling himself into that coppery sea and drown. He made himself get out of his suit and into his pyjamas, made himself get into bed and pretend to read, made himself turn off the bedside lamp and stretch out in the darkness. Try as he would, he could not make himself sleep.

Or so he thought. The chime of the telephone bell made him jerk as if it were a bullet cracking past his head. He pulled the chain that turned the lamp on again, then glanced at his pocket watch. A quarter of three! The phone rang again. He picked up the handset. “Bushell here.”

“Hullo, Tom.” Sir Horace Bragg’s voice dragged with weariness; he undoubtedly hadn’t been to bed at all.

Hearing Sir Horace made Bushell’s own weariness drop away. “Have we got him, sir?” he demanded excitedly.

“No,” Bragg answered: a world of disappointment boiled down to a single word. “We went through that train four different times. When we searched it, nobody answering Kilbride’s description - no one even close to Kilbride’s description - was aboard. He must have left it at some earlier stop.”

“Pittsburgh,” Bushell said. “It has to be Pittsburgh. You should - “

“ - Set some men going through it?” Bragg asked. “Is that what you were going to say? It’s already being done. I don’t know what luck they’ll have, though. That’s a big, busy train station. It’ll be hard to spot someone there, and by now Kilbride could be on his way to - “

Bushell interrupted in turn: “ - Anywhere.”

Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg let out a long, somber sigh. “I fear that’s true. They’ve outfoxed us again, dammit. I don’t know about you, Tom, but I’m bloody sick of it.”

“Oh, yes,” Bushell said. “But no matter how sick of it I am, I’m going to run Kilbride and all the Sons of Liberty to earth, and then the shoe will be on the other foot.”

Bragg sighed again. “I wish I had your confidence.”

It wasn’t confidence. After all the setbacks he’d suffered, Bushell had no reason to feel confident. “I’m just stubborn, that’s all,” he said. “Either that’ll be enough, or else - “ He broke off. He didn’t fancy even hypothetical consideration of or else.

“We’re all doing everything we can,” Bragg said: “You and I and the whole corps of RAMs. Whether it will be enough, though . . . We haven’t got a lot of time.”

“I know that,” Bushell replied grimly. “Before long, the Britannia will sail for Victoria, and then Charles III will make his speech about the virtues of unity - at which time our chief symbol of unity had better be there behind him.”

“As I said, everyone’s doing everything he can,” Bragg answered.

“I know,” Bushell said. “But if we come up short, losing The Two Georges or having to ransom it won’t be everyone’s fault. It’ll be mine.”

Bushell sat bolt upright in bed. “God in heaven, I am an idiot!” he said before he was more than half awake. The early-morning sun was sifting its way through the curtains in front of the window. He looked at his watch again. It was a little past six.

He telephoned the Charleroi constabulary headquarters and got the promise of a steamer in fifteen minutes. He used the time to get dressed and hurry downstairs. Once there, he went over to the front desk, got a sheet of notepaper and an envelope from the clerk, and scrawled a few quick sentences telling what he was up to. He handed the clerk the sealed envelope, saying, “Give this to Mr. Stanley the Negro gentleman traveling with me - directly he comes down.”

“Certainly, sir.” The clerk stuck the note in a pigeonhole.

The constabulary steamer pulled up a couple of minutes later. To Bushell’s relief, Sergeant Vining was not at the wheel. “Take me to Michael O’Flynn’s house on Brattice Street,” he told the constable who was. If anyone knew where Joseph Kilbride really intended to go, O’Flynn was likeliest to be that man.

“Yes, sir,” the constable said, and slid out into traffic. After a moment, though, he asked, “Is it O’Flynn himself you need to speak to?”

“If I’d wanted to talk to Percy McGaffigan, I’d likely have asked you to go to his house instead,” Bushell answered.

“Yes, sir,” the constable repeated. “But O’Flynn will be down in the mines by now, not all snug in his bed.”

“So early?” Bushell said. “How long is a shift in the mines?”

“Seven, seven and a half hours,” the constable said. “But that’s just work at the coal face. Then there’s the travel to it, which can be a mile, or two, or three, going along underground. The miners don’t get a ha’penny for that, and it takes ‘em a goodish while to manage: not all the tunnels are tall enough to walk upright in, you see.”

“So I do,” Bushell said slowly. “Yes, you’d better take me to the mine, then.” The more he heard about what miners had to endure, the better he understood why their politics inclined toward the radical. What they had now was disastrously bad.

The rattle and clank of the coal-breaking and coal-sorting machinery dinned in his ears as the constabulary steamer glided to a stop in front of the offices outside the upper opening of the mineshaft. The constable said, “They’ll be able to tell you in here where in the mine O’Flynn is working today.”

Bushell took out his badge as soon as he got out of the steamer. It worked its usual magic on the clerks in the office, a set of men who wore their white shirts, collars, and ties with an air of special pride, as if to proclaim to the world - and to themselves - that they weren’t miners. “I’ll have him located for you in a moment, sir,” one of them said, flipping through a large box of cards. “O’Flynn, Michael F. That would be Level D, Corridor 3. We’ll have to send a man down to bring him out. It will take some time.”

“I haven’t got time to waste,” Bushell said. “Get me a guide and a helmet or whatever you use, and I’ll go down there after him.”

The clerk stared at him in something approaching horror. “But, sir, you’ll ruin your suit!”

“Worse things have happened,” Bushell answered. By the look on the clerk’s face, he couldn’t think of any offhand.

He was, however, good at doing as he was told. He found Bushell an aluminium helmet with a battery lamp, then said, “Let’s go over to the infirmary, sir. One of the miners there should be able to take you where you need to go.” He seemed confident the infirmary would have patients in it. And so it did. A gray-haired fellow who was getting a gashed arm sewn up and bandaged said, “Yeah, I’ll get him down there.” He looked Bushell over. “Let him see how the other half lives, what working for a living is really like.”

“Thanks.” Bushell stuck out his hand. “Tom Bushell.”

The miner shook hands with him. His grip was as strong as the stone with which he labored. Bushell squeezed back, hard enough to gain some small measure of respect. “Rufus Fitzwilliam,” the miner said. He picked up his helmet from the medicine cabinet where it rested and set it on his head. “Come on, let’s go to the cage.”

Bushell followed him to the lift that took men down in to the mine. It did look like a cage, with a plank floor, and sides and top of steel mesh. A tall man would have had to stoop to stand upright in it. “Level D,” Fitzwilliam called to the operator. To Bushell, he said, “Usually we’re all jammed in here like tinned herrings. I head down with just two in the box, it’s like going on holiday.”

“If you say so,” Bushell answered. Halfway through the sentence, the floor of the cage dropped away from beneath his feet. His stomach tried to crawl up into his throat. Doing his best to keep his voice casual as he plunged down into the lightless shaft, he asked, “How deep are we going?”

“Level D? Oh, about fifteen, sixteen hundred feet, something like that,” Fitzwilliam answered casually. It seemed less, partly because the lift was descending so fast. Increasing air pressure made Bushell’s ears pop several times. Without warning, the cage slowed abruptly; the floorboards pushed hard against the soles of his feet. For a horrid moment, he imagined he felt the planks giving away. Then the cage stopped and the sensation, if it had been real, vanished.

Rufus Fitzwilliam reached up and flicked on his helmet lamp. Bushell imitated him. Fitzwilliam bent down and unlatched the door to the cage. “Come on out,” he said, chuckling slyly. “You’re not one of those chaps who go all balmy for fear of being shut in, are you?”

“No,” Bushell answered, to the miner’s disappointment. Under any normal circumstances, that was true. But, when he stepped out into the mine and thought of better than a quarter of mile of rock above his head, suspended only by the stone walls of the tunnel and by stout support timbers, he had to wonder if he’d told a lie.

His lamp and Fitzwilliam’s cast pale beams through the gloom. Globes were strung along the roof of the tunnel, too, but so far apart that they shed only a dim light.

Bushell looked around. Except for Fitzwilliam, he saw no one. “All right, where’s O’Flynn?” he asked. Fitzwilliam laughed. “We have us some traveling to do first, Mister RAM.” He pointed into the black pit of a tunnel mouth. “He’s about a mile and a quarter, maybe a mile and a half, down that way.”

“Lay on, Macduff,” Bushell said. When the miner stared at him in incomprehension, he waved for him to lead the way. The bluff gesture helped hide his own dismay. When you thought of what miners did, you thought about them going down into their shaft and digging out the coal. What you didn’t think about unless you were a miner, Bushell supposed - was what happened after you’d dug out all the coal from right around the bottom of the shaft.

The Charleroi constable had talked about travel time to the work, but what he’d said hadn’t fully sunk in. Now it did. And a mile and a quarter or a mile and a half deep underground was not the same as a mile and a quarter or a mile and a half along a smooth sidewalk with trees all around and a breeze in your face.

Fitzwilliam stepped into the tunnel down which he’d pointed. “Watch your head, Mister RAM,” he said.

“While you’re at it, watch your feet, too.”

Bushell followed him into the tunnel. He hadn’t gone more than twenty feet before he banged the top of his helmet on the ceiling. He did it again a couple of paces later, and then again a couple of paces after that. Ahead of him, Rufus Fitzwilliam was moving along easily. “This tunnel isn’t tall enough to stand up in,” Bushell called to him.

“Just noticed that, did you? You’re not the tallest feller I’ve ever seen, or you’d’ve found it out sooner.”

Fitzwilliam’s stooping gait didn’t interfere with his speed at all. Bushell did his best to imitate it. Before he’d gone very far, a knotting in his thighs warned that it required practice - practice he’d never had. He suspected he’d spend the next few days shambling around like a chimpanzee with the rheumatism. And, despite everything, he kept banging his helmet on the rough stone just above him. “What did miners do back before they wore helmets?” he asked.

“Oh, I expect we was just a bunch of knotheads in them days,” Fitzwilliam replied with a chuckle. Bushell would have laughed, too, but he tripped over a rock the size of both fists and staggered, flailing his arms wildly to keep from falling on his face. The tunnel wasn’t very wide, either; he caught the back of one hand a painful whack against the jagged rock of the side. He held the hand in the beam of his helmet lamp to see if it was bleeding. It was.

“Told you to watch your feet,” Fitzwilliam called back over his shoulder.

“Lots of people tell me lots of things,” Bushell answered, panting a little. He was getting a crick in his neck to go with the ache in his thighs. He’d come only a few hundred yards, but already he felt worse than he had at the end of his hike through the woods of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Then something moved in the tunnel, something that wasn’t him or Rufus Fitzwilliam. “What the devil’s that?”

“A mouse, is all,” the miner said. “You’ll see ‘em every now and again. They fall down the shaft, they’re too little to smash themselves when they hit bottom. Wish us miners could say the same thing.”

Not much later, they came to a stretch where Bushell could walk upright for fifty yards or so. The relief was indescribable. But then the roof got lower again, and lower, and lower. Before long, he was waddling forward like a duck; it was either that or get down on all fours. Rufus Fitzwilliam took it utterly for granted.

Bushell wondered if he’d have any legs left by the time he got to Michael O’Flynn. He rather hoped not; if they fell off, he wouldn’t have to feel them anymore.

When the ceiling got higher, Fitzwilliam showed off by taking perhaps ten yards at a waddling, arm-swinging run. Bushell was barely able to stagger on, let alone run. Any trade had its tricks, and he knew none of the ones that worked here.

Noise came echoing up the tunnel from ahead. It got louder till it grew into a dreadful din of saws grinding through rock and pneumatic hammers pounding away at it. Bushell set his teeth and hoped that meant they were getting closer to where O’Flynn was working. If it didn’t, it probably meant he’d died and gone to hell.

Moving shapes in the lamplight up ahead were not demons armed with pitchforks, so they had to be miners. One of them turned and spotted Fitzwilliam and Bushell. Seeing Bushell’s unminerly apparel, he called to Fitzwilliam: “Who you got there? Some big steam from the company?”

“Not today, Henry,” Fitzwilliam answered. “This here’s a RAM. He’s looking for Mike O’Flynn - wants to ask him some questions.”

“A RAM?” Henry’s voice rose in surprise. He waved to Bushell. “Come on, buddy. I’ll take you to Mike. He’s tending the coal-cutter.”

That machine looked like an enormous, electrically powered handsaw. It had teeth that would have done credit to a shark. One of the miners shifting it to make a new cut smiled unpleasantly at Bushell and said, “How’d you like to have it bite you in the leg?”

“Given the choice, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” Bushell answered. “Are you Michael O’Flynn?”

“No, he’s right - “ Before the miner could say there, the coal-cutter started up, and its hideous racket made speech impossible. It ground into the black seam of coal. Clouds of coal dust spurted out over the crew at the cutter - and over Bushell. For a little while, everyone was too busy coughing to worry about anything else. Great chunks of coal and gray shale crashed to the floor of the tunnel, making it shake beneath Bushell’s feet.

The coal-cutter stopped. The silence that slammed down afterward was almost like a blow. Into it, one of the miners said, “I’m Mike O’Flynn.”

“I thought you were a powderman, not a slicer,” Bushell said, pointing to the infernal device.

“A damn fine one I am, too,” O’Flynn said. A couple of other miners nodded to show they agreed with the self-assessment. He went on, “That means I’ve got the sense to know when to use the stuff and when to leave it alone. Use it here and we’d be wearing that roof.” He gestured up toward the rough stone just above his head. “Now - my wife told me you came by the house last night. What the hell do you want to know bad enough to come down here and ask me about it?”

Bushell looked at the other miners, who’d gathered round to listen. “Is there any place we can talk just between ourselves?”

O’Flynn shook his head. “I’m not afraid of my chums’ hearing what we have to say. Are you?”

“No,” Bushell answered. If O’Flynn and his chums took it into their heads to make him have an “accident,” there wasn’t much he could do about it, the more so as he’d left his pistol behind in a suitcase. Stupid, he told himself: he’d done what he’d warned Felix Crooke against. Too late to worry about it now. The best way to keep the miners from getting the idea was to go on as if it had never occurred to him, either. He said, “You’re the Michael O’Flynn who went to New Liverpool to picket the governor’s mansion?”

“Yeah, that’s me.” O’Flynn studied him. “I saw you there, didn’t I? After Tricky Dick got his head blown off, I mean. Is that what this is about? About The Two Georges?”

“Yes and no,” Bushell said. “Has Joseph Kilbride from Doshoweh been visiting your home?”

“Yeah. I took him to the train station last night - my wife told me she told you that already. What’s it to you, anyhow?”

“Where did Kilbride tell you he was going?” Bushell asked.

“What’s it to you?” O’Flynn repeated. “Nothing against the law about having somebody over at your house, is there? What’s he done? What do you say he’s done?”

“He’s involved in running rifles into the NAU. I have evidence for that,” Bushell said, stretching a point only slightly. “The people who run guns are involved one way or another with stealing The Two Georges.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Michael O’Flynn declared.

“I didn’t say you did,” Bushell said. “But you do now.” He glanced from O’Flynn to the other miners. They looked solemn, thoughtful: not everyone in the Pennsylvania coal country was an Independence Party man or a sympathizer with the Sons. The call of King-Emperor and country was heard here, too, even if not so loudly as in most of the NAU. Bushell pressed ahead: “So. Where did Kilbride say he was going?”

O’Flynn licked his lips. After he’d done it, they were the only color in a face blackened by coal dust. At last, reluctantly, he answered, “He told me he was heading up to Boston for a while.”

“Is that a fact?” Bushell’s voice was soft, toneless, the better to conceal the elation he felt. But he had to nail down what O’Flynn had given him: “Why did you take him to a train that was bound for New York, then?”

“I figured he’d change trains in Pittsburgh,” O’Flynn said. “How come? Didn’t he?”

“He bought a through ticket to New York, anyhow,” Bushell replied.

“News to me,” O’Flynn said with a shrug. “I dropped him at the station, dug his bags out of the boot, and went on home.”

“How did you get to know Kilbride?”

“We met in a saloon here, a couple-three years ago,” the miner said. “He was down here selling this and that, and we got to talking. He doesn’t say a whole lot, but he’s smart, Kilbride is - you can tell. And he cares about miners; you can tell that, too. And, every so often, he’d send me some good hooch. When he wired me asking if he could stay a couple of days, I said sure. Why not?”

“He didn’t tell you he was in any sort of trouble while he stayed with you?” Bushell asked.

“Not a bit of it,” Michael O’Flynn answered. “I had no idea till my wife told me you came round last night. And now you’re down here.” He shook his head. “Any man who comes down here when he doesn’t have to is plain crazy, you ask me.”

“Well, there you are, Mr. O’Flynn,” Bushell said. The miner cocked his head to one side, not following him. He didn’t try to explain. When he’d ridden down the lift with Rufus Fitzwilliam, his thought had been to get answers from O’Flynn as fast as he could. The more he saw down in the mine, though, the more he thought that everyone down in this pit was crazy, whether he had to be here or not.

“You going to arrest Mike here?” one of the other miners asked, in a tone that warned Bushell would be sorry if he answered yes.

But he’d already decided to answer no, and did. Percy McGaffigan was another matter, though he’d leave him to men who came behind. When he thought about how many problems he was leaving for men who came behind, he felt acutely embarrassed. Were he one of those men, he would have hated him. When weighed against the direct trail - what he devoutly hoped was the direct trail, at any rate - to The Two Georges, though, everything else was trivial.

He turned to Rufus Fitzwilliam. “Take me back to the lift, please.”

“Right y’are.” Fitzwilliam chuckled. “We’ll see how the legs hold up when you’ve traveled out and back.”

The legs barely held up at all. By the time Bushell finally came up into the sunlight again, he was walking as if he’d been galloping a horse for twenty-four hours straight after never getting on a horse till that moment: a slow, bowlegged hobble. When he had to go up a couple of stairs, he took them sideways, crab-fashion, that being the only way in which he was physically capable of ascending. He was also, he discovered, a hell of a mess. When he checked into a hotel in Boston, its cleaning staff would not look on him with delight. Even now, the Charleroi constable seemed less than enthusiastic about having him in his steamer. “Back to the hotel,” he said. The constable might have been thinking about asking him questions, but didn’t.

Back at the Ribblesdale House, Samuel Stanley was full of them. He waved Bushell’s hasty note in his face and berated him for going off alone. “Off into the mines, you mean?” Bushell said, hobbling up to his adjutant. “I assure you, Sam, you didn’t miss a thing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m for the showerbath.”

He thought of McGaffigan and all the other miners who got far filthier than he was and had to try to clean up with a basin’s worth of water.

“Go ahead,” Stanley said. “You’re blacker than I am, and you didn’t start out that way. But what do we do after you get back to your proper color?”

“We go to the train station,” Bushell answered, “and get tickets for Boston.”