The Two Georges

VII

Bushell pulled out his watch and looked at it. When he saw the hour was just past nine, he shook his head in astonishment. The fight with the Sons of Liberty seemed to have lasted for hours, not bare minutes. He’d run into that before, down on the Nuevespañolan border. One more thing about combat I’d managed to forget, he thought.

“What now?” Sam Stanley asked. “The cutter isn’t due back till noon.”

“We search the area and we question the prisoner,” Bushell said. “I wish Felix hadn’t bought his plot. He was the one who knew the Sons backwards and forwards.” He turned to Fuller. “What were your casualties, Sergeant?”

“Not counting your comrade, sir, two dead and four wounded,” the noncom answered. “None of the wounds seems likely to prove fatal, but one of the lads will be on a stick for a long time to come, I’m afraid: took a bullet in the ankle.”

“I’m sorry,” Bushell said. “I never dreamt it would come to - this.” Few criminals in the NAU had firearms, few of those who had them used them when the forces of the law caught them up, and none who did resort to firearms fought with such determination. None had, at any rate - not till now.

“In what sort of shape is the one you captured?” Stanley asked.

“Bullet in the shoulder, through-and-through flesh wound in the leg.” Sergeant Fuller spat in the dirt.

“Bugger’ll live to hang. Waste of good rope, I call it, but what can you do?”

“Can he answer questions?” Bushell said.

A murky light kindled in Fuller’s eyes. “If he doesn’t, by God, we’ve ways to make him sing.”

Two things flashed through Bushell’s mind: Sam would never say such a thing and then, a moment later, Thank heaven the military stays out of police work most places. He kept that to himself; Fuller had put his life on the line to bag the Sons of Liberty. What he did say was, “Take us to him. We’ll see what he tells us.”

“Yes, sir.” Sergeant Fuller led them back toward the grocer’s shop. They passed several two-man teams of Royal Marines methodically going through the abandoned businesses of Buckley Bay. “I set them searching, sir,” Fuller said, noting Bushell’s glance. “We don’t know for a fact there were only the four of them, do we?”

“No, we don’t.” Bushell took a tighter grip on his rifle; he hadn’t thought of that. His soldierly skills, at least in the field, left a good deal to be desired these days. He hoped he’d made up for that loss with what he’d learned as a RAM. Given the way The Two Georges had vanished from under his nose, he had no proof of that, either.

No more gunshots rang out, from which he presumed the Marines found no one new to flush from cover. Lieutenant Green and a couple of other men crouched on the ground beside a fellow who, from his looks, could have been a cousin to the Son of Liberty Bushell and Stanley had shot. He had a bandage on his shoulder and another on his leg, both stained with red. Green looked up. “Here he is, Colonel. Says his name is Elgin Goldsmith. Past that, he’s kept mum, except to say he wants to speak to a solicitor.”

Bushell glowered at the prisoner. “To hell with him and to hell with what he wants. Your men are more important to me, Lieutenant. How are your wounded? Sergeant Fuller says they should pull through.”

“Seems that way, yes,” Green said, nodding, “though poor Metcalf took a nasty one. Do you want to see what you can get out of Mr. Goldsmith here?” He made the title one of contempt.

“What I want is to drag him into the woods and let the bears have him,” Bushell said savagely. “If I do that, though, I sink to his level, which isn’t a place I care to go.” He squatted beside Lieutenant Green.

“All right, Goldsmith, you may as well talk. It can’t make things worse for you, and it might make them better.”

Pain twisted Goldsmith’s face, but his pale eyes blazed at that. “Don’t make me laugh,” he said. “You’ll fucking try me and you’ll fucking hang me, whether I nark or not.”

Since that was true, Bushell didn’t bother arguing it. “Where did you get the rifles you were posting down to New Liverpool?” he asked. Goldsmith set his jaw and said nothing. In a conversational tone of voice, Bushell remarked, “I wonder what would happen if I hit that shoulder of yours with my rifle butt purely by accident, of course.”

“Chief - “ Samuel Stanley began in worried tones. He hadn’t cared for Sergeant Fuller’s suggestion either, then. The sergeant, though, grinned from ear to ear. Bushell would not have cared to be on the receiving end of that grin.

Elgin Goldsmith started to shrug, winced, and stopped halfway. “Go on, then, you damned Okhrana man, if you’re about to. Couldn’t make me hurt no worse than I do already.”

“Oh yes, he could,” Sergeant Fuller said, sounding as if he looked forward to the prospect - and also as if he knew what he was talking about.

Bushell turned his head away from the prisoner before he sighed. One of the things he’d learned was that, unfortunately, courage did not reside only in the hearts of those who were by his standards good men. Villains had their share of it, too: and, of course, no man was ever a villain in his own eyes. Goldsmith no doubt reckoned himself a martyr to the cause of liberty. To him, the cause justified gunrunning, murder, and whatever other crimes he’d committed.

To Bushell, no cause justified crimes. While he might threaten torture, he would not inflict it. “How many rifles have you sent to New Liverpool?” he asked. Goldsmith said nothing. Bushell tried again: “Who pays you to send the rifles, and how much?”

When Goldsmith still refused to talk, Sergeant Fuller said, “Why don’t you walk out into the woods, Colonel? I’ll get your answers for you, and you won’t have to know how I did it.” Noncommissioned officers did many useful things for their superiors in that fashion, but Bushell shook his head. He might not see what Fuller did, but he’d know.

The Marine sergeant shrugged; his was not to argue with a colonel. Elgin Goldsmith visibly gloated. That came closer than any of Fuller’s suggestions to making Bushell want to let the Marine loose on him. Instead, he turned away himself. “Let’s see what we can find in the building where they were living,” he said to Samuel Stanley. “Maybe that will tell us what our charming friend won’t.”

“Maybe,” Stanley said. As they walked toward the grocer’s shop, he added quietly, for Bushell’s ears alone, “For a second there, Chief, I thought you really were going to knock that bugger around.”

“The only time I was tempted was when he sneered at me,” Bushell answered. “If he’d caught me instead of the other way round, he wouldn’t have thought twice.” He stepped into the gloom inside the shop. “To hell with that. What have we here?”

As his eyes adjusted, he saw dark stains on the rammed-earth floor. A trail of blood led toward the back and, when he followed it, out into the alley behind the grocer’s shop. Maybe he hadn’t fired at an imaginary target back there after all, then.

Behind him, Samuel Stanley whistled softly. “Will you just look at this, Chief?”

Bushell had followed the blood trail into the back room without paying attention to anything else there. Now he ducked back inside and turned around. He sucked in his breath in what was almost a gasp: a couple of dozen Nagant rifles hung on nails that had been driven into the boards of the wall. On the floor were piled wooden chests. The top one was open, and half empty. He reached in and picked up a metal five-round box magazine of slightly different shape from the one that fed his Lee-Enfield.

“They had all the ammunition they needed, didn’t they?” Stanley said.

“Enough to fight a small war,” Bushell agreed. “All of it Russian gear.” He looked north, toward Alaska. Stanley nodded, understanding that huntsman’s gaze without a word of explanation. Next to the wooden ammunition chests stood a smaller one made of painted metal. A lock held it closed. Bushell attacked the chest with the butt of his rifle, venting some of the fury he hadn’t let himself turn on Elgin Goldsmith. The lock was made of stern stuff; it did not yield. After a few strokes, though, the hasp that held it to the chest broke off.

Bushell lifted the lid. For a moment, he just stared. “Lord have mercy,” Samuel Stanley said softly.

“How many roubles d’you reckon there are?”

“A great bloody lot of them,” Bushell answered. Even in the dim light of the back room, the gold coins gleamed and sparkled. Next to English sovereigns, they were little things, each one worth two shillings, a penny ha’penny. Enough of them, though, added up to a good sum of money. There were more than enough here for that.

“I wonder how often those four shipped roubles out of here along with rifles,” Stanley said. “The money and the guns all ended up in the wrong hands.”

“I know one set of hands that closed on the money,” Bushell said: “that printer I raided. He got paid in roubles for sightseeing brochures about the Queen Charlotte Islands, and spent them on those obscene pamphlets about the princesses.”

“You’d have the devil’s own time proving it before a magistrate,” Stanley said. “A smart barrister would talk about circumstantial evidence and reasonable doubt until a jury couldn’t tell right from Tuesday.” He quoted Shakespeare, something he was fond of doing: “ ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’“

Normally, Bushell would have joined him for a round of cursing at men whose principal task, as he saw it, was keeping villains out of the gaol cells they deserved. Here, though, he kept his equanimity. “I don’t care about barristers and judges. I know what I know. The Sons of Liberty here got the Nagant that killed Tricky Dick, and they got the roubles for Titus Hackett to spread his filth around. That means those two are connected here, even if neither one knew what the other was doing.”

His adjutant nodded. “It also means both operations were getting their money from the same place.”

Now he turned his head toward Russian Alaska.

“We’ll have a day of reckoning,” Bushell said. “First, we need to put our own house in order. Once we get The Two Georges back, we’ll be in a better position to ask questions of Duke Orlov in Victoria and also of Sergei Pavlov back in New Liverpool.”

“Indeed we will,” Stanley said with a certain anticipatory relish. “One always assumes Russian consuls are spies. Now we’ll have evidence to ship Sergei back to St. Petersburg. And speaking of evidence, let’s see what else we can come up with here.”

Before continuing the search, Bushell lowered the lid to the little metal chest, lest a Royal Marine find temptation stronger than duty. The trouble with gold was its very anonymity; any banker anywhere in the world would give you two shillings, a penny ha’penny for every gold rouble you handed him. Away from a setting like this, the coins weren’t evidence, they were just money. As Stanley had said, a barrister would have no trouble establishing reasonable doubt about the provenance of the printer’s roubles. Up here near the border, a lot of Russian gold would be in circulation, just as a good many British sovereigns were apt to be floating around in Sitka and Kodiak.

But for the rifles and money, the interior of the grocer’s shop yielded little in the way of evidence. Geoff, Patrick, Elgin, and Benjamin had apparently whiled away some of their time with tracts full of hatred similar to those Joseph Watkins had had in his flat, but those, however distasteful, were not against the law. The traps and lines stored in the front room said the Sons of Liberty truly had made part of their living hunting and fishing, as they’d claimed.

“This place is too bloody neat,” Samuel Stanley complained. “It’s almost as if they knew they were going to have visitors, but we made sure they hadn’t a clue.”

“Just because we haven’t found everything doesn’t mean it’s not here,” Bushell said. He snapped his fingers. “For instance - where’s their rubbish pitch?”

Stanley’s eyes lit up. “We haven’t smelled it much, so it’ll be downwind from here: by the water, I’d guess, unless they’ve gone and heaved everything straight into Masset Inlet.”

“There’s a grim thought,” Bushell said. “But you wouldn’t chuck everything into the inlet. If some of your rubbish started turning up at Port Clements, that might bring the Grampus by to give you a caution. They wouldn’t want to draw notice to themselves.”

“Let’s look about,” Stanley said.

Looking didn’t find the rubbish pitch; their noses did. As soon as they’d gone a little more than halfway toward the edge of Masset Inlet, they got wind of the stink. “That way,” they said together. After a moment, Bushell added, “It’s a wonder we haven’t spied a great flock of bald eagles quarreling over the refuse. That would have told us where they kept it.”

When they reached the building where the Sons of Liberty stowed their rubbish, they found a grid of slats nailed over its windows, perhaps for the very purpose of keeping away the eagles. The door also bore a stout padlock. “Bears,” Stanley said, and Bushell nodded.

This time, hammering at the lock with a rifle butt accomplished nothing. “Back in a moment,” Bushell said. When he returned, he had Lieutenant Green in tow, and was carrying all the keys the Sons of Liberty had had on their persons. One of those proved to fit the lock.

“Phew!” Green said, as opening the door released a wave of stinking air. “I’m damned glad this place never has hot summers.”

“Well - yes.” Bushell went first into the rubbish-filled room. The stench here wasn’t as bad as it might have been, but it was pretty bad. Cockroaches scurried round his feet; slugs would have scurried had they been able to move faster.

The midden inside reached more than halfway to the ceiling. An archaeologist could have studied the festering pile for weeks, going through it layer by layer. Bushell, however, was uninterested in the geologic past. He snatched papers off the front and top of the mound, figuring they were the most recent. Gasping and fighting his stomach, he carried a double handful outside.

“My turn,” Stanley said, and plunged into the reeking room. The papers he brought out, like those in Bushell’s hands, carried the reek with them. They were crumpled and torn and stained with tea leaves, coffee grounds, grease, and other less easily identifiable substances. As soon as Stanley emerged, Bushell went back inside.

Lieutenant Green watched them with genuine admiration. “You couldn’t make me do that every day,” he said, “not for a hundred thousand pounds a year.”

“Most of the filth we go through is metaphorical,” Bushell said, setting down another stinking load of what might have been evidence and might have been only wastepaper. “Every now and then, though - “

Samuel Stanley brought out a few more papers. “I think that’s the last of them, unless we want to go digging,” he said, and then, “Phew! They won’t let us into the Skidegate Lodge tonight, not smelling like this they won’t.”

“We’ll worry about that later.” Bushell turned to Morton Green. “Have you stripped the bodies of the Sons of Liberty? We’ll want any papers you find on them, and on the live one, too - Elgin, that’s his name.” As long as he concentrated on what needed doing here, he wouldn’t have to think about Felix Crooke, now growing cold and stiff inside a dead house in a dead town.

“We’ve searched the prisoner, sir, but, except for those keys, we haven’t gone over the effects of the dead men,” Green answered. “I’ll tend to that straightaway.”

He started to leave. Before he could, Bushell said, “If you have someone with a sack, have him bring it here so we can load this” - he groped for a word, but found only a vague gesture - “into it.” Nodding, Green took off at a trot.

That left Bushell having done everything he could for the moment. “Jesus God, Sam, what have we stumbled into?” he groaned, his face a naked mask of pain. “Poor Crooke told the buggers who we were, and they shot him down like a dog. Like a dog.” His shoulders sagged, as if, like Hercules, he’d taken the weight of the world away from Atlas for a moment.

“He was stupid, Chief, and you know it,” Samuel Stanley answered. “We told him what these villains were liable to be like, but he stood up and gave them a clean shot at him. He didn’t believe you, he didn’t believe me, he thought everything would be cricket no matter what we said - and he paid for it.”

“Thinking everything will be cricket shouldn’t get you killed,” Bushell said.

“No, it shouldn’t - but sometimes it will.” Stanley sounded very much like a veteran sergeant talking with a young lieutenant after his first action. “If everything were cricket all the time, there’d be no work for the likes of you and me.”

“He should have stayed behind his desk,” Bushell said. “He knew what he was doing there.”

“The Two Georges should have stayed on the wall in the governor’s mansion,” Stanley said. Bushell grimaced, then nodded.

Lieutenant Commander Edward Woodbridge got out of the larger of the two boats his sailors had rowed from the Grampus to the shore. Nodding to Bushell, he said, “Good morning - no, excuse me, good afternoon, Colonel. I trust you have the villains in captivity?”

Bushell gestured wordlessly. The Navy man followed him to what had been the Buckley Bay town square. The oarsmen tagged along after them. There, faces covered by rain capes, lay Felix Crooke, the three dead Sons of Liberty, and the two dead Royal Marines. With them were the wounded prisoner and the four wounded Marines.

Woodbridge stared in disbelief at the carnage. Before he could speak, one of the sailors behind him burst out, “Lor’ love a duck, wot the bleedin’ ‘ell ‘appened ‘ere?”

“Silence, Montague!” Woodbridge snapped automatically. But he said nothing more after that: Montague’s question was the only one that made sense. Bushell himself was damned if he could see how better to phrase it.

As baldly as if he were dictating an after-action report - something he would have to do all too soon - he described the morning’s events for Woodbridge. When he was through, he asked, “Could a boat have slipped out of Port Clements after the Grampus sailed, to warn these men here?”

“No, sir,” Woodbridge answered decisively. “Not possible. I’ve been on the wireless back to the port several times since we disembarked your party. No untoward action of any sort.”

“That makes sense, Chief, much as I hate to say it.” Samuel Stanley looked as unhappy as he sounded, but went on, “They wouldn’t have yelled out ‘Who are you?’ the way they did if they’d known what we were about.”

“You’re right, and I’m grasping at straws.” Bushell slammed a fist into his open palm. “It just - went wrong.” He turned away.

Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge said, “Let’s get everyone aboard ship. We’ll stow the prisoner in the brig and the other wounded in sick bay; we have a pharmacist’s mate who can tend to them there. Not that you haven’t done well with your first aid, I’m sure, but - “

Bushell nodded, cutting him off. “That would be splendid. Would you see to it?” He started to walk away, to be alone again, but duty pulled him back and made him ask, “When we get back to Port Clements, have you a telephone there I might use?”

“Certainly, Colonel,” Woodbridge answered. “Would you care to wireless a message ahead, so one of my men might relay it for you?”

After a moment’s thought, Bushell shook his head. “No, I’ll tell the RAMs myself. I know the details.”

That said, he did walk off. He’d never set himself a task he relished less.

“Sir, I shall also need to ring up Commander Hairston,” Lieutenant Green said to Woodbridge. The Navy man nodded. Then he turned to his sailors and ordered them back to the Grampus for stretchers to transport the wounded - and the dead - to the boats. “And bring Hartnett with you when you return,” he added, explaining to Bushell, “That’s the pharmacist’s mate I mentioned.”

“Very good,” Bushell said wearily. He took out his water bottle and drank from it. It wasn’t as cold and sweet as it had been when he filled it at St. Mary’s Spring in the early hours of the morning. He didn’t care. Water wasn’t what he craved. Enough whiskey to find oblivion at least for a night. . . that would be sweet. But he couldn’t even drink himself into a stupor, not now, not with so much still to do. Transferring everyone back to the Grampus took far longer than anyone would have imagined before the familiar world of law exploded in gunfire. The Royal Marines would not let the sailors load their fallen comrades onto the stretchers or carry them to the boats. “We tend to our own,” one of them said, pride in his voice. Bushell understood that; he and Stanley set Felix Crooke’s body on its stretcher. Royal Marines also put the dead Sons of Liberty on stretchers, dumping them down onto the canvas as if they were so many chunks of wood.

Hartnett fixed a fresh splint to the leg of the Marine with a shattered ankle, but otherwise pronounced himself satisfied with the treatment the wounded had received. Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge said to Bushell, “By your leave, I can wireless ahead to Port Clements so Dr. Lansing can meet us at the wharf.”

“Yes, go ahead,” Bushell said. He wished Woodbridge - and the entire world - would leave him alone: this even though he knew work, in the absence of whiskey, was the best anodyne he would find. At last the unwounded living went back aboard the Grampus. The cutter backed away from the shore, turned, and, skirting the little tree-covered island not far from Buckley Bay, sailed east across Masset Inlet toward Port Clements.

Bushell stood at the stern, staring back toward the abandoned town. Once Woodbridge made as if to approach him. He did not turn his head, he did not move in any definable way, but he made it plain he did not want anyone near. Woodbridge’s shoulders slumped, ever so slightly. He went back to his duties. Perhaps ten minutes after that, Sam Stanley came up. Bushell projected the same signal by body wireless. Taking advantage of long friendship, Stanley ignored it. He stood beside Bushell, leaning his elbows on the rail and propping his chin in his hands. “Brooding about it won’t make it better,” he observed. “Won’t make you better, either.”

“Go away,” Bushell said without turning his head.

Instead of leaving, Stanley reached into the hip pocket of his trousers and pulled out his wallet. From it he drew a purple five-pound note. He held it in front of Bushell’s nose, so close that Bushell’s eyes had to cross to focus on the small reproduction of The Two Georges on the banknote. “This is what it’s all about, Chief,” he said quietly. “Shall we start looking over the evidence we picked up? Woodbridge has given me a little compartment we can use.”

He waited. When Bushell didn’t answer, he sighed and went off. After a moment, Bushell followed him. Work did prove a pain reliever almost as potent as Jameson. Seated across a steel table in a tiny, metal room painted grey and garishly lit by a bare bulb mounted in the ceiling, Bushell and Stanley sorted through the pile of papers they’d snatched from the rubbish heap the Sons of Liberty had built up in Buckley Bay.

“We’ll do envelopes first,” Bushell declared. “They’ll have dates and postmarks on them, so we’ll know when the villains got them and where they came from.”

“Right, Chief,” Samuel Stanley said, so enthusiastically that Bushell suspected he’d have got loud agreement had he suggested sorting papers by the size and color of the stains they bore. But he was functioning again, and when he functioned, he functioned well.

“Thanks, Sam,” he murmured without looking up.

“For what?” his adjutant asked. “Here, you take this bunch while I’m going through the rest.” He pushed filthy, crumpled papers at Bushell.

Some of the envelopes were from commercial establishments in Skidegate. Bushell set those aside for the time being, since they’d been discarded unopened. Then curiosity got the better of him. He slit one and pulled out an advertising circular. Even in the back of beyond, such worthless tripe got posted. The rest of the envelopes proved more interesting. “They had friends all over the bloody place, didn’t they?” Stanley remarked.

“That they did,” Bushell said somberly. Just looking at the postmarks made him see the spiderweb of conspiracy the Sons of Liberty had spun across the NAU. The threads were thin and normally all but invisible, but no less sticky and dangerous on account of that.

He’d expected to find envelopes posted from New Liverpool, and he did. To his disappointment, none of them came from Sergei Pavlov. And he knew the Sons of Liberty were strong in Boston and Pennsylvania: Common Sense came out of the one, while the harsh lives the coal miners of the other led inclined them away from the status quo. But one envelope he discovered left him shaking his head. “Will you look at this, Sam?”

“What have you got?”

Bushell passed him the envelope. It was franked not with the usual one-florin stamps of the NAU, but with one that bore a lightning bolt, the legend HENO THE THUNDERER, and, in larger letters, the words THE SIX NATIONS. The postmark read Doshoweh.

Stanley clicked his tongue between his teeth. “If that’s not the strangest place from which to post something to the Sons of Liberty, damn me if I know what is.”

“Just what I was thinking,” Bushell answered. The Six Nations that made up the Iroquois Confederacy controlled the land just west of the province of New York, and did so for the most part under their own laws, though the NAU had charge of their dealings with foreign powers. The relationship, though (like much of the Empire’s constitution) never formally defined, had continued for more than two centuries, and satisfied most people on both sides of it.

“Doshoweh’s that town not far from Niagara Falls, isn’t it?” Stanley said.

“That’s right - capital of the Six Nations. And, as you said, a bloody odd place for the Sons of Liberty to be operating.” The liberty to which the Sons dedicated themselves was reserved for them alone, and emphatically did not include the Indians who had inhabited North America before the Sons’ fathers crossed the Atlantic.

“It might be a brilliant piece of cover,” Stanley said, passing the envelope back to Bushell. “I don’t think we’ve ever looked for the Sons of Liberty inside the Six Nations - who would? They could do just about whatever they pleased there, so long as they kept quiet about it and didn’t draw the notice of the local authorities.”

Bushell examined the postmark more closely. “Whatever they’ve been doing, they’re still at it. This was sent less than a week ago. Eighteenth June, the date is.”

“Is that a fact?” Stanley said. “Then it won’t have got to our villains much before we did. I wonder if we can find the letter that came in the envelope.”

They went through the papers they’d collected from the rubbish heap. To their frustration, none of them proved to bear the requisite date. Then Bushell said, “Maybe one of the villains still had it on him when the fighting started.”

Those papers were separate from the ones plucked off the midden. Instead of stains from tea leaves and coffee grounds, some of them were brownish-black with drying blood. Bushell carefully unfolded one.

“Here!” he exclaimed. “It’s dated 18 June - no address, though, worse luck. Just the message - listen to this, Sam: ‘Stop sending rifles at once; repeat, at once. No point to drawing unwanted attention to ourselves.’ And it’s signed, ‘Joe.’“

Stanley slammed his fist down on the tabletop. “We’re on the right track.” He looked up to the bare bulb as if it were the naked face of God. “At last.”

“Amen,” Bushell said: it was, for him, an answered prayer.

Bushell approached the telephone in Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge’s office in Port Clements like a man walking to the gallows, each step more difficult than the one that had gone before. When he sat down at the desk, he felt as if the hangman had slipped the hood down over his head. He picked up the phone, and in his mind heard and felt the trap fall out from under his feet. To the operator, he said, “I’d like to ring the offices of the Royal American Mounted Police in New Liverpool, Upper California, please. The number there is BLenheim 1415, and my name is Thomas Bushell.”

“Sir, your call will need a little while to put through,” the operator warned, surprise in her voice. He’d expected that. He wondered how long it had been since anyone in the Queen Charlotte Islands had telephoned New Liverpool. “Do whatever you need to do,” he said, and settled down to wait, the telephone handset against his ear.

The Port Clements operator relayed the call to Skidegate, the Skidegate operator to Prince Rupert across the Hecate Strait. That connection took a while to make; listening to the clicks and pops in his ear, Bushell wondered if the call was going by wire or swimming over the waves. At last Prince Rupert acknowledged the existence of Skidegate, but then had to pass the call on to Prince George. From Prince George, probably by a roundabout route paralleling the railroad tracks, it reached Wellesley on the Puget Sound.

After that, as if relieved to be returning to civilization, the call moved rapidly south. Almost twenty minutes had passed before the Port Clements operator told the RAM switchboard, “I have a long-distance call for you from Mr. Thomas Bushell.”

“Yes, have him go ahead,” the RAM operator said, and then, to Bushell, “How may I help you, Colonel?”

“Is that you, Jonathan?” Bushell said. “Put me through to Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg, please.”

“I’m sorry, Colonel, but I can’t,” Jonathan answered. “His train departed for Victoria this morning.”

“What’s that?” Bushell said. “He told me he was going to stay in New Liverpool for a couple of weeks, maybe longer.”

“Yes, sir, that’s what he’d been saying up until yesterday,” the RAM operator answered. “But Sir Martin Luther King and his staff headed back for the capital last night. I don’t know this for a fact, sir” Jonathan’s voice went low and conspiratorial as he shared his gossip - “but they say Sir Horace was going on about not letting Sir Martin and some of the people who work for him out of his sight for any longer than he could help.”

“Was he?” Bushell replied with interest. Sir Horace had suspicions, then; Bushell wondered how closely they marched with his own. “Get me Gordon Rhodes, then.”

“Colonel Bushell! I’m so glad to hear from you,” Major Rhodes exclaimed when the call went through. Before Bushell could answer, Rhodes went on, “We’ve finally tracked down the newspaper whose headline the Sons of Liberty used in the photograph they sent us and the press along with their ransom note.”

“Have you?” Bushell said. That was important enough that he needed to know it, so he held off giving his own news, most of which he was less than eager to pass on in any case. “Tell me.”

“Yes, sir.” Rhodes took a deep, portentous breath. “It’s from the Doshouieh Sentinel, the chief English-language newspaper in the Six Nations. Isn’t that remarkable? Who would have thought the Sons of Liberty had penetrated the Iro-quois chiefdom?”

“Up until an hour ago, no one,” Bushell said. That discovery fit all too well with his own, and had been won at far less cost.

Full of his own concerns, Rhodes failed to pay close attention to his superior’s reply. He continued, “It’s a pity Captain Oliver had to return to Victoria with Sir Horace. She did some outstanding work for us here, identifying that headline, and I want to be certain she gets the credit she deserves.”

He sounded so enthusiastic, Bushell wondered whether Patricia Oliver had been as outstanding off duty as she had while at RAM headquarters. He scowled down at Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge’s desk. It wasn’t his business. Better he didn’t know, in fact.

Gordon Rhodes said, “And how are things up in the Queen Charlotte Islands, sir? Do you know, I had to check in the Times Atlas of the British Empire to be sure where you and Captain Stanley and Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke were going.”

“So did I, before we set out,” Bushell answered. Once he’d said that, though, he had to tell the rest: the Sons of Liberty shooting Felix Crooke as he tried to persuade them to surrender, the gun battle that followed, the casualties among both the Sons and the Royal Marines.

“Good God, sir!” Rhodes said when Bushell paused in the dismal narrative. “A RAM gunned down like a bandit down in the Nuevespañolan mountains?” He sounded shocked to the core. Bushell did not blame him. He was shocked, too; he’d seen it happen instead of hearing about it over fifteen hundred miles of wire. When the news spread, flags would fly at half staff in front of every RAM office in the NAU.

Mechanically, Bushell went on to summarize the evidence he and Samuel Stanley had found after the shooting stopped. “We need to notify the RAMs in Doshoweh at once,” he said. “I doubt The Two Georges is still there - the Sons would have moved it as soon as they posted their pictures - but we may be able to keep them from operating out of the Six Nations anymore.”

“I’ll take care of that, sir,” Gordon Rhodes said. “We’ll have to deal with the local Iroquois constabulary, too; the Six Nations being as they are, we have rather less authority there than elsewhere in the Union.”

“That’s right,” Bushell said. One more thing to complicate my life ran through his mind. “We’ll have to manage as best we can, that’s all. Oh - when you call Doshoweh, tell them one more thing, will you?”

“Whatever you like, sir,” Rhodes said, and waited expectantly. When Bushell didn’t answer right away, he asked, “Er - what is it?”

“Tell them Sam and I are on our way.”

Getting off the Queen Charlotte Islands wasn’t as easy as Bushell had hoped. He and Lieutenant Green both spoke to Commander Hairston by telephone from Port Clements, but, in a case with half a dozen men dead by gunfire and more wounded, that was not of itself an adequate response.

“I’ll need formal depositions from you and Captain Stanley, Colonel,” Hairston said. “I want to wrap up the case against this Goldsmith so tight, there’ll be not a chance of his wriggling free of the noose.”

“But, Commander, Captain Stanley and I have to go back to the mainland to follow the leads to The Two Georges we discovered,” Bushell protested.

“No, sir,” Hairston said. “That case is a theft. This one is a homicide, so it takes precedence. You and your adjutant are not going back to Prince Rupert till you tell me everything you know about what happened at Buckley Bay. The faster you do that, the faster you get what you want.”

He was right. After a moment’s anger, Bushell realized as much. He also realized it wouldn’t have mattered had Hairston been wrong: the man had the authority to hold him here, if not indefinitely, then long enough to play havoc with the investigation. He sighed. “All right, Commander. When we get back to Skidegate, we shall be at your service.”

The drive back to Skidegate was made in mournful silence. Along with the lorries that had made the trip north from the naval base came a flat-bed machine driven by one of Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge’s sailors. In the staked bed, covered by a large canvas tarpaulin from the Grampus, lay the bodies of Felix Crooke and the slain Royal Marines and Sons of Liberty. Dr. Lansing, the Port Clements physician, drove some of the wounded to Skidegate in the town ambulance. Another sailor drove the rest - including Elgin Goldsmith - in Lansing’s private steamer.

It was nearly four o’clock by the time the sad convoy reached the naval base. Redcaps took charge of Goldsmith, and of the dead; Navy doctors saw to the injured Marines. The flatbed lorry, ambulance, and motorcar steamed back toward Port Clements.

Commander Hairston met the returning RAMs and Royal Marines with half a dozen yeomen, each poised to record witness statements tachygraphically. Four of the six clerks were Negroes; their predilection for bureaucratic slots seemed to hold good even in the Navy. Bushell spoke mechanically, as if someone had wound up a platter and were playing it through his mouth rather than a phonogram. A yeoman’s pen raced across sheet after sheet of paper, covering the pages with arcane pothooks. Hairston sat in a chair off to one side, listening like a man carved from stone. When Bushell had finished, Hairston spoke to the yeoman: “Thank you, Washington. Now go transcribe that; I’ll want Colonel Bushell’s signature on the fair copy before he leaves Skidegate.” Saluting, the colored yeoman departed. Hairston turned to Bushell. “You got your tail in a crack, didn’t you, Colonel?

God in heaven, what a mess.”

“God in heaven,” Bushell repeated dully. He shook his head, still having trouble believing how things had turned sour so fast. “Everything was going just as it should, and then - “ He didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on.

“Not your fault, Colonel, I shouldn’t think,” Hairston said. “You and your party did everything right, up to the very last minute. For whatever it may be worth to you, you have my sympathy.”

“I don’t want your sympathy,” Bushell said. “I want to - “ To get drunk and blot out everything that happened today. But he couldn’t say that. Worse luck, he couldn’t do it. Haltingly, he continued, “I want to get on with the investigation. I want Felix still to be alive, and your Marines, too.” He couldn’t have that, either.

In a room not far away, a typewriter started tapping. After a while, another joined it, then another and another. The clattering keys and the warning bells as the machines reached the ends of lines were normally sounds of purposeful activity. Now they reminded Bushell of the other, more violent activity they were setting down on paper, magically transmuting terror to evidence. Hairston said, “I’m afraid the afternoon ferry will already have sailed for Prince Rupert, Colonel. You’ll be laying over here another night.”

“Yes, I know.” Bushell kept his temper under tight rein - as well he was sober. Rationally, he knew the local security chief was doing his job, and doing it properly. Rationality had nothing to do with the way he wanted to storm forward after The Two Georges - and escape the Queen Charlotte Islands as fast as he could.

“Will you take charge of Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke’s body?” Hairston asked. “I’m sure you RAMs have your own procedures for comrades killed in the line of duty.”

Bushell covered his face with his hands. Wish as he would, he couldn’t escape what had happened. “I’ll see the body across to Prince Rupert, at any rate,” he said. “I’m sure we do have procedures for such a case, Commander, but I’m damned if I know what they are. I don’t remember when the last RAM was shot dead attempting to make an arrest. It’s been years - I know that.”

Yeoman Washington brought in a typed version of Bushell’s statement. Bushell skimmed it, scrawled his signature, and thrust the papers at Hairston. The security chief took them, then reached for the telephone.

“I’ll get you and Captain Stanley a driver to take you back to the Skidegate Lodge,” he said. The ride to the hotel passed in almost complete silence. The sailor at the wheel of the steamer knew what had happened up at Buckley Bay. His mute outrage blended with those of Bushell and Stanley; the men understood one another without need for words.

“Evenin’, gents,” the clerk who had registered them the day before called from behind the desk. He suddenly noticed that, while he’d registered three men, only two were walking into the hotel. “Where’s your friend? The fish catch him?” He laughed at his own wit. Bushell crossed the lobby in half a dozen long strides. Eyes blazing, he seized the clerk by the cravat and dragged him forward across the registration desk until the two men were nose to nose. The clerk let out a strangled squawk and tried to break free, but Bushell slapped his arm aside. Samuel Stanley hurried up, set a hand on Bushell’s shoulder. “Let him go, Chief!” he said in a low but urgent voice.

As if throwing a piece of garbage, Bushell pushed the clerk back to his place. The man stared at him, popeyed. “I’ll have the redcaps on you,” he gasped.

“Our friend is dead - shot dead,” Stanley said. “So are two Royal Marines. So are three villains. Aside from those small details, the world’s a lovely place.”

The clerk’s eyes got wider. Bushell watched the process with a certain abstract interest; he hadn’t thought it possible. “I - I’m sorry,” the fellow stammered. “I didn’t know - “

“Why does this not surprise me?” Bushell turned on his heel and strode toward the stairs. Stanley followed him. As they climbed to their rooms, Bushell said, “We have a lot of planning to do, if we’re going to find the fastest way to get to Doshoweh from Prince Rupert.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” His adjutant started ticking possibilities off on his fingers: “Train back to Wellesley and then airship - or airships; I don’t know the routes offhand - to Doshoweh; train all the way from Prince Rupert; or train partway east from Prince Rupert to Doshoweh and then pick up an airship. Which one’s fastest is going to depend on what sort of conditions we can get and the layovers we’ll have to make.”

“We can’t find out what we need to know, not here in this one-lung town,” Bushell said. “We’ll learn more in Prince Rupert - at the train station, or else from the RAMs: they’ll have to do a good deal of traveling, I expect.”

“Yes, Prince Rupert’s a long way from - anywhere, when you get down to it,” Stanley said. “For tonight, what say we wash up and eat some supper in the Haida Lounge?” He paused, then added cautiously, “And maybe we could have a couple of drinks, too.”

“Now you’re talking,” Bushell said with such enthusiasm that his adjutant looked at him in alarm. He patted Stanley on the shoulder. “Relax, Sam. I don’t have to be functional till tomorrow afternoon. When the ferry comes, I’ll be ready to meet it.”

“All right, Chief.” Stanley still looked dubious. “See you downstairs in, oh, half an hour?”

Bushell nodded and went into his room. He spent most of the time in the showerbath, with the water as hot as he could stand it. Scrub as he would, though, he couldn’t wash away the feeling that Felix Crooke’s blood still stained him.

In the Haida Lounge, he ordered salmon cheeks. Samuel Stanley surprised him by picking the dried herring eggs on kelp. He started to ask Stanley about it, then held his peace: his adjutant had found his own way to memorialize their fallen comrade.

Both men chose Caribou Ale. Bushell resolved to stick to that. Getting drunk on ale took application; it wasn’t as easy as it was with Jameson. After the third bottle, the tip of his nose began to go numb, a sign the brew was starting to have its way with him. After the third one, though, he also had to visit the jakes, and he sloshed when he got up to do it. Dedicated drinkers of ale and beer could put away vast amounts of their chosen beverage, but he hadn’t developed the knack. After five ales, he was logy and yawning and ready for bed. Samuel Stanley beamed with well-hopped approval as the two of them, none too steadily, headed up to their rooms.

The headache with which Bushell woke soon yielded to a couple of paracetamol tablets. He called the hotel’s housekeeping service and gave them the clothes he’d worn the day before. A couple of hours later, a young woman returned the garments. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “but you can still see the stain on your anorak from the deer or whatever you killed. We did our best, but - “ She spread her hands.

“Thanks for trying,” Bushell said, and tipped her ten shillings. After he shut the door, he wadded up the anorak and threw it into a corner of the closet. If one of the cleaning men wanted it, he could take it, and welcome.

He jumped when the telephone rang. It was Commander Hairston. “We’ll have Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke’s body at the dock in a Navy coffin to meet the ferry. I’ve rung up the Prince Rupert RAMs, too, let them know what’s happened. Someone will be waiting for you there when you make port.”

“I’m grateful for your help,” Bushell said, though he dreaded spending hours having to bear the silent reproach of the plain pine box and what it bore.

He and Stanley took a cab to the harbor - by chance, the same cab that had taken them to the Skidegate Lodge when they reached the Queen Charlotte Islands. As the desk clerk had, the driver said, “Weren’t there three of you gents before?”

Unlike the clerk, he wasn’t being snide, merely curious. After a moment of awkward silence, Samuel Stanley answered, “Our friend - will be waiting for us there.” Bushell bit his lip. A long queue of happy sailors bound for leave waited for the ferry to board passengers for Prince Rupert. A couple of minutes after Bushell and Stanley arrived, a Navy lorry pulled up at the dock. Half a dozen redcaps lifted the coffin down from the bed of the lorry. The sailors stared. Commander Hairston got out of the left side of the driver’s compartment and walked over to Bushell and Stanley. “I’m sorry it turned out this way, gentlemen,” he said heavily. “That’s all I can tell you.”

When the crew of the Northern Lights moved aside the light metal gate from the dock end of the gangplank, the sailors stood aside to let the military police carry Felix Crooke’s body aboard the ferry. Some of them took off their caps in token of respect for the dead. They would have heard about what happened up at Buckley Bay; that story must have gone through barracks and ships at the speed of light. Bushell stood by the bow rail most of the way across the Hecate Strait, as if he did not want to look back at the islands he was leaving. Once or twice, sailors started to come up to him, whether to ask questions about the gun battle or to offer their sympathies he could not guess. None actually got close enough to speak to him; as he had on the Grampus, he made it very plain he wanted to be left alone. On this journey, Samuel Stanley respected his privacy, too. Stanley, no doubt, did not want sailors importuning him, either.

The sun still stood high in the northwest when the Northern Lights got into Prince Rupert a few minutes past eight in the evening. On the docks waited six RAMs in dress reds - more pallbearers, Bushell thought - along with another, older man in civilian clothes. After the sailors streamed off the ferry, the RAMs boarded and came up to Bushell and Stanley, who met them beside Crooke’s coffin.

“Colonel Bushell?” The man in mufti held out his hand. “I’m Major Winston Macmillan, commandant here. Commander Hairston rang me up this morning. Terrible thing.” His eyes flicked to the coffin. “I can’t believe it.”

“Thank you for your help, Major.” Bushell was sick of saying that. He didn’t want to be the object of anyone’s help; he just wanted to get on with the business of cracking his case. But what he wanted and what he got had swung away from each other in the old logging town.

“I gather you’ll want us to take charge of arrangements for transportation of the body and such.”

Macmillan again glanced down at the box that held the mortal remains of Felix Crooke.

“If you’d be so kind.”

“We are at your service, Colonel - and at Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke’s.” He looked at the coffin once more. His voice went heavy and full of grief: “He’s one of ours, after all.” After a moment to collect himself, he continued, “If you two gentlemen will be so kind as to accompany me? No matter what has happened here, of course, your duty does not cease. The Two Georges - “ As he had before, Macmillan murmured, “Terrible thing.”

By the size of the headquarters he commanded, Macmillan had been hard-pressed to collect half a dozen men to bear away Felix Crooke’s coffin, though he had responsibility over an area the size of Upper California. He did, however, possess an abundance of railroad and airship schedules, and pored over them with Bushell and Stanley.

“The train rolls out of here at half past five tomorrow morning,” he said. “That’s the one fixed point amongst the variables. It’s bound for Wellesley, of course, and would put you there late tomorrow evening. The next airship out of Wellesley wouldn’t be till the morning after, though. You could change trains in Prince George and go east over the Rockies that way. From Regina, you could take an airship to Astoria on Lake Michigan and make your connection for Doshoweh there. If all goes well, I believe that is your fastest route to the Six Nations.”

“Let me see the schedules once more,” Bushell said, and he and Stanley spent the next hour or so in calculation. At some time during that interval, roast-beef sandwiches on sourdough bread appeared as if by magic. Bushell had his two thirds eaten before he fully realized it was there.

“Going to be very tight, Chief,” Stanley said. Bushell looked for him to complain about having to rise early yet again to catch the eastbound train, but he was all business. “We don’t have much time to get from the train station to the airship port in Regina, or from one airship to the other in Astoria. If we run even a little late, we lose half a day, and you know what they say about the Astoria airship port.”

Bushell did know. O’Hare Airship Port was the busiest one in the NAU. Astoria, being centrally located, lay at the heart of several airship companies’ routes. Delays there were legendary.

“Safer just to take the train all the way from Regina,” Stanley went on. “We could just as easily get into Doshoweh later as earlier if we gamble on the airships.”

“You’re right - it would be safer,” Bushell said. His adjutant started to brighten, but then he went on, “All the same, we’ll gamble. If we’re late, we’re late, but I want the chance to be early.” He turned to Major Macmillan. “Have your people make the arrangements.”

“Yes, sir,” Macmillan said, in the tone of voice juniors use to betoken obedience to their superior’s foolish orders. Samuel Stanley said nothing, but the expression he wore was eloquent. Bushell didn’t care. He felt all too acutely time’s hot breath on the back of his neck. Anything he could do that might wring out a few more precious hours in which to pursue The Two Georges, he would. He and Stanley waited at the headquarters building until their travel plans were set up. Then Macmillan, as if washing his hands of them, had them motored to the Highliner Inn. It was after eleven, but through scattered clouds twilight remained bright in the west and north. As it did at any other hour, the air smelled faintly of halibut.

Over halibut balls in the train-station cafe the next morning, Bushell plowed through the Prince Rupert Register. The banner headline told of the gunfight at Buckley Bay and the death of Felix Crooke. He was, an enterprising reporter had discovered, the first RAM killed by gunfire in fourteen years. Samuel Stanley had a copy of the Register, too. When he finished his eggs and bacon, he slammed the paper down and growled, “Why don’t they just wire the Sons of Liberty what we were up to there?

Every bloody rag in the whole bloody NAU will have printed this by tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, the two RAMs would, if everything went well, be getting into Regina and making their airship connection for Astoria. Worrying about that was enough for Bushell at the moment; he stayed philosophical about the newspaper. “Could be worse,” he said. “The story doesn’t mention our names.”

“Huzzah,” Stanley said sourly. “The whole bloody Empire already knows we were headed up this way. The trouble with the Sons is, they’re smart enough to remember that and make the connection.”

“Damn all we can do about it,” Bushell said. A tinny speaker announced the imminent departure of the train bound for Prince George and Wellesley. He gulped the last of his Irish Breakfast, slammed the cup down on the table, and hurried to the platform. Still grumbling, Samuel Stanley followed. The nine-hour trip back to Prince George was like watching a film run in reverse. Bushell felt bored and useless. On most journeys, he used his time wisely, bringing along plenty of work to occupy him while he was traveling to ready him for whatever he had to do once he arrived at his destination. All that mattered now was arriving, for he couldn’t do anything useful till he got to Doshoweh. The thought of climbing into the open cockpit of a military aeroplane and whizzing across the continent at a couple of hundred miles an hour seemed less foolishly extravagant than it had when he’d laughed at it in the dining room of the Upper California Limited.

He fell asleep in his seat, lulled by the rhythm of the rails and by a long succession of short nights. The squeal of the train’s brakes as it pulled into Prince George woke him. In the aisle seat beside him, Samuel Stanley seemed ready to snore all the way down to Wellesley.

Regretfully, Bushell shook him. “We change trains here, Sam.”

Stanley’s eyes flew open. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said indignantly. He looked out the window and saw they were at the station. A sheepish grin spread over his face. “Oh. Maybe I was.”

They went back to the baggage car and made sure a porter transferred their cases to the platform where the train that would take them to Regina waited. Bushell slipped the fellow a ten-shilling note and, after a moment’s hesitation, half a crown to go with it. Far from home, he was willing to pay to ensure things running smoothly.

The Northern Rockies Special pulled out of Prince George at twenty past three, ten minutes late. Although the delay would be inconsequential when set against the nearly daylong journey to Regina, Bushell fretted nonetheless. He knew he was gambling, and knew that if he lost his gamble he would have done better not to make it.

“I wish Edmonton had airships going out of it oftener than every third day,” he muttered to Samuel Stanley.

“So do I, Chief - uh, Tom - but I can’t do anything about it,” Stanley answered. “Might as well wish the Rockies were flat, so we’d make better time through ‘em. We do the best we can with the hand we’ve been dealt, that’s all.”

They were approaching the Rockies when they went to the dining car for supper. Bushell ate steak and kidney pie, Stanley Helvetian steak with mushrooms. When they’d finished, they returned to the sleeping compartment they were sharing and watched for a while as the mountains grew all around them. Yellowknife Pass, through which they’d traverse the Rockies, topped out at less than four thousand feet, but great steep piles of granite and basalt, cloaked with conifers on their lower slopes and snow and ice above, reached high into the sky to north and south.

“Pretty country,” Stanley remarked after a while.

Bushell grunted. He had his nose in a book by then: a scientific romance he’d taken from the Sons’ shelter in Buckley Bay. It was called The United Colonies Triumphant and seemed typical of the breed: it showed an independent North America coming to the rescue of England in a great European war against, not the Holy Alliance or Russia, but, of all improbable things, a unified Germany.

“Damned foolishness,” Bushell growled, tempted to fling the poorly written tome across the compartment. “As if the British Empire wouldn’t be the mightiest in the world even without North America.”

“Why do you wade through the tripe if it annoys you so?” Stanley asked.

“I keep trying to understand how the Sons think - ‘know your enemy,’“ Bushell said. “But this is just foolishness. The book is set now, more or less, and in this mythical world North America is an even greater center of manufactures than it is in truth, but it still keeps Negroes and Indians in bondage as farmhands. The author is too ignorant to see how machines would take the place of slaves.”

Stanley’s mouth tightened. “Even so, that does tell you something about the way those people think.”

“Something, yes, but nothing pleasant - and nothing I didn’t already know.” Bushell paused to light a cigar, then picked up The United Colonies Triumphant once more. “ ‘Scientific romance’ my arse - no science and no romance to it that I can see: just someone who doesn’t write very well proving it at great length. A world that never could be, not in a thousand years.” He let out a noise half snort, half guffaw. The book was too preposterous for words.

A large sign by the railroad track announced that they were passing out of the province of Vancouver and into the province of Albertus. A few hundred yards farther on, a series of several smaller signs extolled the virtues of a patent shaving soap. Bushell found the foolish jingling verses on them badly out of place when set against the brooding majesty of the mountains.

Shadows pooled and lengthened. After a while, the train was running in deep twilight while the mountainsides above still blazed with light. Some of the mountains’ flanks were covered not merely with snow but with ice; near the little town of Jasper, one glacier came down almost near enough to touch out the window, or so it seemed.

“Beautiful scenery,” Bushell said; The United Colonies Triumphant wasn’t nearly interesting enough to keep him reading at a steady clip. “But it’s a cold beauty, and it makes me cold looking at it.”

“If that Swedish fashion for sliding through snow with boards on your feet ever caught on in the NAU, this is where they’d come to do it,” Samuel Stanley said. “Skiing, that’s what they call it. I’d almost forgotten.”

“I never knew,” Bushell said. “Where did you learn that?”

“The army, a couple of years before I was attached to your platoon,” Stanley answered. “If you ever have to fight on snow, you can go a lot faster on those skis than you can on snowshoes. The Russians have skiers in Alaska: a couple of regiments of them, they said at my training center.”

Bushell had a disquieting vision of regiments of Russians with boards on their feet and Nagants on their backs gliding across the frozen northern reaches of the NAU one winter, not stopping till they came to the icebound shores of Hudson Bay. He knew the vision was absurd; no matter how mobile they were, a couple of regiments of troops wouldn’t go far, and a lot of land lay between the Alaskan frontier and Hudson Bay. But he’d had Russians on the brain lately.

To keep from thinking about Russians and ski troops, he went back to the scientific romance again. They worried about Germans there. That was laughable by anyone’s standards. Germans were good for music, beer, heavy food, heavier philosophies, and squabbling among themselves. Bavarians were jolly, Austrians haughty, and Prussians inclined to be dour (who could blame them for that, when they were stuck next to Russia?), but they weren’t forces to reckon with, nor was any other German kingdom, principality, duchy, archibishopric, or free city. The idea of all of them behind a single malign ruler was . . .”Absurd,” Bushell said with another snort, and plowed on.

After a while, he surprised himself in a yawn. The book made a soporific to rank with Jameson. He set it down and got into his pyjamas. After his earlier nap, he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep, but surprised himself again by dropping off almost at once.

“Get down, you damned fool!” Bushell shouted. A shot rang out. But instead of watching Felix Crooke fall, he felt an explosion of light in his own head.

His eyes flew open. A morning sunbeam had stolen through the slats of the blinds and was hitting him in the face. “Jesus,” he muttered. The dream had been terrifyingly real. He groped for his pocket watch. It was a little past five. The dining car wouldn’t be open for breakfast yet, and he’d wake Sam if he did a lot of moving around. That meant going back to The United Colonies Triumphant. He turned on the reading lamp in his bunk. The book was better than his nightmare - but not much.

Samuel Stanley woke up less than half an hour later. He blinked to see Bushell already among those present, then let out a wry chuckle. “We must be getting used to climbing out of bed at these appalling hours. I didn’t think that was what the papers meant by a fate worse than death, but I could be wrong.”

Bushell dogeared the book with a grunt of relief and slid out of bed. When he pulled up the blinds, he grunted again, this time in surprise, and gave back a pace from the window. The train might have been transported to a new and different world while he and Stanley slept. The Rockies that separated Vancouver from Albertus had vanished behind them. Instead, the Northern Rockies Special rolled through flat farmlands, punctuated here and there with low, rolling hills.

“Are those wheatfields out there?” Stanley also seemed startled at the overnight transformation of the world.

“More likely rye or barley,” Bushell answered. “We’re still pretty far north.”

“Mm, maybe so.” Stanley also got up. His mind quickly went to more immediately relevant matters:

“What time do you suppose the diner opens?”

“Six if we’re lucky, seven if we’re not.” Bushell unbuttoned his pyjama tops. “I intend to find out how lucky I am.”

His luck was in. He and Stanley systematically demolished their breakfasts, then sat at the table while they fortified themselves from a strong pot of English Breakfast tea. “Damned if I know how the Russians take it without milk all the time,” Stanley said, pouring a generous white stream into his cup. Bushell quoted Herodotus: “ ‘Custom is king of all.’ They’re used to it that way, so for them it tastes right.” He wondered if custom was all that bound the NAU to England. Had the American colonies broken away all those years ago, would they now think of their independence as natural and right?

He shook his head. It wasn’t the same thing.

The train pulled in to Regina at half past one. The airship was due to leave for Astoria at 2:05. “We’re not going to make it,” Stanley said as they recovered their bags and flagged a cab.

“The hell we’re not.” When the driver opened the boot of his steamer for their baggage, Bushell told him, “Ten quid - no, fifteen - if you get us to the airship port in time for the flight to Astoria.”

The cabbie touched a forefinger to the brim of his cap, then pulled out his pocket watch. He whistled softly. “Won’t be easy, gents, but I’ll do my damnedest. Hop in.”

Afterwards, Bushell decided Regina’s constables slept on the job. If they hadn’t, they would have cited the cab a dozen times, maybe more. He wondered if he was going to live through the wild ride to the southwestern outskirts of town. But the cab pulled up to the waiting airship at seven minutes of two. “I will be damned,” Samuel Stanley said reverently.

Over and above the fare, Bushell handed the cab man a green ten-pound note and a purple fiver. The fellow helped them carry their bags to the airship and gave them to the handler while a supercilious clerk declared, “You gentlemen are lucky this flight did not depart without you.”

“Don’t you take that uppity tone with us,” Stanley snapped. Had the clerk been white, he would have flushed. As it was, he stamped their tickets with altogether unnecessary force, thrust their stateroom keys at them, and pointed to the ladder without another word.

As soon as Bushell and Stanley climbed aboard, that ladder was moved away from the passenger gondola. Pumps were noisily sucking water ballast from the airship. “Welcome to the Prairie Schooner, gentlemen,” the steward said. If passengers arriving at the last possible minute upset him, he didn’t show it.

“Thanks,” Bushell said. “Is the bar to port or starboard?” The steward pointed to the left. To Stanley, Bushell added, “I’d say we’ve earned watching takeoff from there this time.”

Stanley swept off his fedora and bowed. “Motion seconded and passed by acclamation. First round is on me, too - I never thought we’d get here on time.”

“O ye of little faith,” Bushell said.

“If I had little faith, I never would have got in the cab with that madman. Come on.”

They’d just walked into the bar when, light as a feather, the Prairie Schooner floated away from the ground. The floor developed a list. Once on a stool, though, his feet resting on the brass rail, Bushell felt altogether at home. “Here’s to getting into Astoria at six tomorrow morning, and out again an hour later,” he said, lifting his glass of Jameson high before he drank. Stanley joined him in the toast. The bartender raised a grizzled eyebrow. “Good luck, gents,” he said in a gravelly voice. Both RAMs ignored him.

Bushell watched prairie go by under the Prairie Schooner till it was time for supper, and then till it got too dark to see. The land was green and flat and dotted with lakes and ponds of every imaginable size and shape. “There must be ten thousand of them down there,” Stanley said.

“Easily,” Bushell agreed.

He went to bed in his stateroom reveling in the prospect of being able to sleep undisturbed till half past five. And, sure enough, at exactly that hour, a burst of static announced the ceiling speaker coming to life:

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We’re about thirty-five miles outside of Astoria, on our final approach to O’Hare Airship Port. I regret to have to inform you, though, that wireless traffic tells me all mooring masts at the airship port are currently occupied, and several airships are already floating above the port, awaiting their turn to land. Because O’Hare is so busy, these things do happen from time to time. We regret the inconvenience. We’ll get you down on the ground just as soon as we can, I promise you. Meanwhile, enjoy a little extra sleep. Thank you.”

The speaker crackled again, then fell silent. Bushell got out of bed with an oath. He dressed fast enough to satisfy the most irascible training sergeant and dashed for the lounge. Sam Stanley burst in not thirty seconds behind him.

The newly risen sun shone off farmland and forest, and reflected brilliantly from Lake Michigan. Astoria’s never-sleeping factories threw columns of smoke into the air. A light breeze from out of the east brought the harsh smell of industry to the Prairie Schooner. With it came a barnyard reek; along with its factories, Astoria was a great livestock center.

As the airship neared the port, Bushell spied half a dozen fat cigar shapes hanging in the sky, decked out in the varying bright colors of their airship lines. He wished desperately for them to disappear. A steward approached with two pots and some cups on a silver tray. “Would you like tea or coffee?” he asked the two RAMs.

“What I’d like is to land,” Bushell said. “Have you got that in a pot?” The steward beat a quick retreat. Land the Prairie Schooner did, at twenty past seven. By then, another handful of airships had queued up behind it. As soon as their feet hit the ground, Bushell and Stanley rushed for the transfer agent, who’d set up a podium near the tail of the dirigible. With his longer legs, Stanley got there first. “Do we still have time to catch the Six Nations Special?” he gasped, panting. The transfer agent gave him a bright, meaningless professional smile. “I’m afraid not, sir,” she said. “The Six Nations Special is the airship that departed from this mooring mast so the Prairie Schooner could land.”

Bushell and Stanley looked at each other in dismay. They would be late to Doshoweh after all.