The Victorious opposition

XVIII

"Alec!" Mary Pomeroy called. "Don't you dare pull the cat's tail. If he scratches you or bites you, it's your own fault."

Mouser was, on the whole, a patient cat. Little boys, though, were liable to drive even patient cats past the limits of what they'd put up with. Mouser had bitten Alec only a couple of times, but he scratched whenever he thought he had to. Alec was still learning what would annoy him enough to bring out the claws. Sometimes his experiments seemed deliberately hair-raising.

Mary turned on the wireless just ahead of the hour to catch the news. The lead story was a bomb that had blown up a police station in Frankfort, Kentucky. Seventeen policemen were dead, another two dozen wounded. A group called the American Patriots-a group, the newscaster said sarcastically, that no one had ever heard of till they committed this outrage-was claiming responsibility.

And the president of the Confederate States was all but foaming at the mouth. Jake Featherston claimed the bombing proved Kentucky was full of pro-U.S. fanatics who refused to accept the results of the plebiscite. The newscaster poured more scorn on that idea. Mary was willing to believe it, simply because this smooth-voiced stooge for the Yanks didn't.

"In another bombing case," the broadcaster went on, "investigators continue to probe the ruins of a Berlin, Ontario, apartment building, seeking clues to the perpetrator of the atrocity. A mother and child, Laura and Dorothy Moss, are confirmed dead. Several other persons were injured in the blast, and three remain missing…"

A mother and a child. That wasn't how Mary had thought of them. A traitor and her half-American brat was more what she had in mind. That way, she didn't have to remind herself that the woman who'd been born Laura Secord-born with the name of a great Canadian patriot-had been a person as well as a political symbol. She didn't want to think of the late Laura Moss as a person. If she did, she had to think about what she'd done.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd physically hurt anyone, aside from spanking Alec when he needed it. Maybe when she was little, in a fight with her older sister. But Julia had several years on her, so she might not have managed it even then.

Well, she'd managed it now. She'd blown a woman and her little girl to kingdom come, and she'd hurt some other people with them. Not bad for a package she'd mailed from Wilf Rokeby's post office. Not bad? Or not good?

This is war, she told herself. Look what the Americans did to my family. Why should I care what happens to them, or to the people who collaborate with them?

Had the Americans blown up women and children? Mary nodded defiantly. Of course they had, with their bombs and their artillery. She didn't feel guilty. She paused, too honest to go on with that. The trouble was, she did feel guilty. Unlike the Yanks-or so she insisted to herself-she had a working conscience. At the moment, it was working overtime.

"No one has claimed to be responsible for the murderous attack in Berlin," the newsman continued. "Attention is, however, focusing on several known subversive groups. When the truth is known, severe punishment will be meted out."

Mary laughed at that. The Yanks were liable to grab somebody, say he was guilty, and shoot him just to make themselves look good. She remained certain that was what they'd done with her brother, Alexander, Alec's namesake. Her conscience twinged again. Did she want them to punish someone else, someone who hadn't done anything, for what she'd done?

She wanted them to get out of Canada. Past that, she didn't-or tried not to-care.

"Ironically, the victims' husband and father, barrister Jonathan Moss, though a U.S. aviation ace during the Great War, was well known in Ontario for his work on behalf of Canadians involved in disputes with the occupying authorities," the man on the wireless said. "Only desperate madmen who hate Americans simply because they are Americans would have-"

Click! "Why'd you turn it off, Mommy?" Alec asked.

"Because he was spouting a lot of drivel," Mary answered.

Alec laughed. "That's a funny word. What does it mean?"

"Nonsense. Hooey. Rubbish."

"Drivel!" Alec yelled, alarming Mouser. "Hooey!" He liked that one, too. The cat didn't, at least not yelled in its ears. It fled. Alec ran after it, screeching, "Drivel! Hooey! Hooey! Drivel!"

"Enough," Mary said. He didn't listen to her. "Enough!" she said again. Still no luck. "Enough!" Now she was yelling, too. Short of clouting Alec with a rock, yelling at him was the only way to get his attention.

She didn't usually turn off the wireless in the middle of the news. She found she missed it, and turned it back on, hoping it would be done talking about what had happened in Berlin. It was. The newscaster said, "King Charles XI of France has declared that the German Empire is using Kaiser Wilhelm's illness as an excuse for delay on consideration of returning Alsace-Lorraine to France. 'If strong measures prove necessary, we are not afraid to take them,' he added. Prime Minister Churchill of Great Britain voiced his support for the French. In a speech before Parliament, he said, 'High time the Germans go.' "

Music blared from the speaker. A chorus of women with squeaky voices praised laundry soap to the skies. When Mary first listened to the wireless, she wanted to go out and buy everything she heard advertised on it. She was vaccinated against that nonsense these days. She did sometimes wonder why a singer with a voice good enough to make money would choose to sing about laundry soap. Because she couldn't make money with her voice any other way? Sometimes that didn't seem reason enough.

I killed two people, one of them a little girl who never did anybody any harm. The thought didn't want to go away; even if she hadn't watched them die, they were as dead as if she'd taken them to a chopping block and whacked off their heads with a hatchet, the way she had with so many chickens on her mother's farm. Laura Secord betrayed her country. Mary had no doubt of that. But who appointed you her executioner? she asked herself.

Her back stiffened. She was damned if she'd let herself feel guilty for long. Who appointed me her executioner? The Yanks did. If they hadn't shot Alexander, her father never would have felt the need to go on the war path against them. She was entitled to revenge for that. She was entitled to it, and she'd taken it.

She nodded to herself. Nothing was going to make her feel sorry about ridding the world of Laura Secord. Every so often, though, she couldn't help feeling bad about Dorothy Moss. She wished she'd blown up the girl's father instead. Yes, the newsman went on and on about how he struggled for Canadians' rights, but that overlooked several little details. First and foremost, no Yank should have had any business saying what rights a Canadian had or didn't have. And Jonathan Moss had been one of the Yanks who'd beaten Canada down during the Great War. And he was still a combat flier; she remembered the newspaper stories about him. Yes, better the bomb should have got him.

She was cutting up a chicken for stew in the kitchen when two trucks pulled to a stop in front of the diner. They looked like the sort of trucks in which U.S. Army soldiers rode, but they were painted a bluish gray, not the green-gray she'd known and loathed since she was a little girl. The men who piled out of the back of the trucks were in uniforms cut about the same as those U.S. soldiers wore-but, again, of bluish gray and not the familiar color. Mary wondered if the Yanks had decided to change their uniforms after keeping them pretty much the same for so long. Why would they do that?

The soldiers all tramped into the diner. That will make Mort happy, Mary thought. Soldiers ate like starving wolves. These days, they also paid their bills. The occupation was more orderly than it had been during the war and just afterwards. That made it very little better, not as far as Mary was concerned.

Forty-five minutes later, the soldiers came out and climbed into the trucks again. The engines started up with twin roars. Away the trucks went, beyond what Mary could see from the window. She reminded herself to ask Mort about the men when he came back to the flat, and hoped she wouldn't forget.

As things turned out, she needn't have worried about that. When her husband got home, he was angrier than she'd ever seen him. "What's the matter?" she asked; he hardly ever lost his temper.

"What's the matter?" he repeated. "Did you see those trucks a couple of hours ago? The trucks, and the soldiers in them?"

Mary nodded. "I wanted to ask you-"

He talked right through her: "Do you know who those soldiers were? Do you? No, of course you don't." He wasn't going to let her get a word in edgewise. "I'll tell you who they were, by God. They were a pack of Frenchies, that's who."

"Frenchies? From Quebec?" The news made Mary no happier than it had Mort. She was damned if she would call their home the Republic of Quebec, though, even if it had been torn away from Canada for twenty-five years now.

"That's right," Mort answered. "And do you know what else? They're going to be part of the garrison here. At least the United States beat us in the war. What did the Frenchies do? Nothing. Not one single thing. They don't even talk English, most of 'em. I swear to God, honey, I'd sooner have a pack of niggers watching over us than those people."

"What's even worse is, they're Canadians, too," Mary said. Her husband gave her a look. "Well, they are." Even to herself, she sounded defensive. "They used to be, anyhow."

"Maybe," Mort said. "They sure don't act like Canadians now, though. They sat there in the diner jabbering back and forth in French like a bunch of monkeys. The only one who spoke enough English to order anything for them was a sergeant who'd been in the Canadian Army once upon a time. And he sounded like the devil, too."

"That's terrible," Mary said, and Mort nodded. She asked him, "Why are there Frenchies here? Did you find out? Would they say?"

"Oh, yes. They aren't shy about talking, even if they don't do it very well," he answered. "Reason they're here is, some of the U.S. soldiers who've been on garrison duty are going back to the States."

"That doesn't explain anything," Mary said. "Why would the Yanks want to do a thing like that after all these years?" The USA had occupied Rosenfeld since she was a little girl. No matter how much she hated that, it was in a way part of the natural order of things by now.

"I don't know for sure. The Frenchies didn't say anything about that," Mort replied. "But I know what my guess would be-that the Yanks are starting to worry about that Featherston fellow down in the Confederate States."

"You think they're moving men to stop him?" Mary asked. Her husband nodded again. Excitement blazed through her. "If you're right, we've got a chance to be free!" And maybe this has been a war all along, and I don't have to think I'm a murderer. Maybe. Please, God.

Cincinnatus Driver watched a spectacle he had hoped he would never see, a spectacle he'd gone to Kentucky to keep from seeing: Confederate troops marching into Covington. He was, by then, just starting to get up on crutches and move around. He supposed he was lucky. The auto that hit him could easily have killed him. There were times, when he'd lain in the hospital and then back at his parents' house, that he wished it would have.

His mother took care of him as if he were a little boy. She plainly thought he was. All the years that had gone by since might as well not have happened. She didn't even realize anything was wrong. That, to Cincinnatus, was the cruelest part of her long, slow slide into senility.

And his father took care of both of them, with as much dignity as he could muster and without much hope. Some of the neighbors helped, as they found the chance. His mother wandered off a couple of times, but she didn't get far. People watched her more closely than they had till Cincinnatus got hit. That was funny, in a bitter way.

Getting out of the house for a little while felt good to Cincinnatus. He'd stared at the cracked, water-stained plaster of the ceiling for too long. He was weak as a kitten and he still got dreadful headaches that aspirin did nothing to knock down, but he was alive and he was upright. When a little more strength returned, he would figure out how to get himself and his father and mother back to the USA. Meanwhile…

Meanwhile, he stumped along the neglected sidewalks of the colored district of Covington toward the parade route. The whole district seemed even more rundown than it had when he came back to Covington. It also seemed half deserted, and so it was. A lot of Negroes had already fled to the United States.

He glanced over to his father, who walked beside him, ready to steady him if he stumbled. "You sure Ma be all right while we're gone?"

"I ain't sure o' nothin," Seneca Driver answered, "but I reckon so." He walked on for a few paces, then said, "One thing I ain't sure of is how come you wants to see these bastards comin' back."

Cincinnatus wasn't altogether sure of that himself. After a little thought, he said, "I got to remind myself why I want to git back to Iowa so bad, maybe."

"Maybe." His father sounded deeply skeptical.

Seneca had reason to sound that way, too. Only a handful of blacks headed for the parade route. Most of the people who came out to see this underscoring of the return of Confederate sovereignty were white men with Freedom Party pins in their lapels-or, if they didn't wear lapels, as many didn't, on the front of denim jackets or wool sweaters. Cincinnatus hadn't been the target of looks like the ones they gave him for many years. People in Des Moines thought Negroes curious beasts, not dangerous ones.

One of the blacks on the street was a familiar face: Lucullus Wood. He'd visited Cincinnatus at the hospital, and several times at his parents' house. As far as a Negro could be, Lucullus was a man to reckon with in Covington. A generation earlier, his father had been, too.

Seeing Cincinnatus and Seneca, Lucullus came across the street to say hello. "Ain't this a fine day?" he said. A Freedom Party man might have used the same words. A Freedom Party man might even have used the same tone of voice. But the words and the tone would have had a very different meaning in a Freedom Party man's mouth. Lucullus understood irony-blacks who'd been born in the CSA understood irony from the moment they could talk- and no Party stalwart ever would.

"Never thought I'd see it," Cincinnatus agreed.

None of the plump, eager white men in earshot could have taken exception to his words or tone, either. In fact, one of them turned to another and said, "You see? Even the niggers is glad to have the damnyankees gone."

"They know they was well off before," his friend replied.

Cincinnatus didn't look at Lucullus. Neither of them looked at Seneca. He didn't look at them. None of them had any trouble knowing what the other two were thinking. Remarking on it would have been a waste of breath.

Off to the south, Cincinnatus heard a peculiar noise: partly musical, partly a low, mechanical rumble. Both pieces of the noise got louder as it came closer. Before too long, Cincinnatus recognized the music. A marching band was blaring out "Dixie," playing the tune for all it was worth.

"That there song used to be against the law here," Lucullus said. By the way he said it, he thought it was too bad "Dixie" had been illegal. Cincinnatus knew better. A casual listener-a white listener-wouldn't have.

"Wonder what ever happened to that Luther Bliss," Cincinnatus said. "Reckon he ain't never gonna show his face here no more. Don't miss him one damn bit." Since the former head of the Kentucky State Police had thrown him in jail, most of him meant that. The rest, though, couldn't help remembering how hard and how well Bliss had fought Confederate diehards-and anyone else he didn't care for.

"Reckon you's right," Lucullus answered. Cincinnatus sent him a sharp look. A casual listener wouldn't have heard anything wrong with his words there, either. Cincinnatus wondered if he knew more than he was letting on.

Here came the band. The Freedom Party men-and the smaller number of women with them-burst into applause. A lot of them began to sing. Cincinnatus couldn't applaud, not with his hands on the crutches. His father and Lucullus did. He couldn't blame them. Better safe than sorry.

Behind the band marched several companies of Confederate soldiers. Their uniforms didn't look much different from the ones C.S. troops had worn during the Great War, but there were changes. Most of them had to do with comfort and protection. The collars on these tunics were open at the neck. The cut was looser, less restrictive. Their helmets came down farther over the ears and the back of the neck than the Great War models had. They weren't the steel pots U.S. soldiers wore, but they weren't much different from them.

The rifles they carried… "Funny-lookin' guns," Cincinnatus said to Lucullus in a low voice.

"Gas-operated. Don't need to work the bolt to chamber a round after the first one in the clip." Lucullus spoke with authority. "They's new. Not everybody's got 'em. They is very bad news, though."

Not even all the parading soldiers carried the new rifles. Some had submachine guns instead. Cincinnatus didn't see any with ordinary, Great War-vintage Tredegars. The Confederate States couldn't arm as many men as the United States. They seemed to want to make sure the men they did have would put a lot of lead in the air.

The barrels that grumbled and clanked up the street were different from the ones Cincinnatus remembered from the Great War, too. They carried their cannon in a turret on top of the hull. They also looked as if they could go a lot faster than the walking pace that had been their top speed a generation earlier.

Trucks towed artillery pieces. Fighters and bombers with the C.S. battle flag on wings and tail roared low overhead. More marching soldiers finished the parade.

"Wonder what they think o' this on the other side of the Ohio," Cincinnatus said. The city that was nearly his namesake lay right across the river from Covington.

"If they's happy, they's crazy," Lucullus said after looking around to make sure no white was paying undue attention. "Jake Featherston, he promised there wouldn't be no Confederate soldiers in Kentucky for twenty-five years. He jump the gun just a little bit, I reckon."

Cincinnatus' father looked around, too. "We done seen the parade," he said. "What I reckon is, we better git back to our own part o' town."

He was bound to be right. Even Negroes who weren't doing anything to anybody were liable to be fair game in Covington. Moving on his crutches made Cincinnatus sweat with effort and pain in spite of the chilly day, but he moved anyhow. Once back inside the colored district, he said, "We got to get out of here. Ain't easy no more, now that this here is a Confederate state, but we got to."

"Best thing you kin do is jus' walk right across the bridge to Cincinnati," Lucullus said. "Ain't quite legal like it was, but the U.S. soldiers don't bother niggers much."

Since neither Cincinnatus nor his mother was up to much in the way of walking, he and his parents took a taxi to the nearest bridge two days later. His mother stared out the window as if she'd never been in an auto in her life. As far as she could remember, she hadn't.

They didn't get across. No one got across. To protest the Confederates' military occupation of Kentucky, the USA had sealed the border between the two countries. Cincinnatus thought of getting a boat and crossing the Ohio any way he could. He thought of it, but not for long. He remembered too many stories about Negroes trying to cross into the USA getting turned back at gunpoint or sometimes just shot. He couldn't take the chance, especially since his mother, with her wits wandering, was liable to give them away.

When U.S. forces pulled out of Kentucky, a consulate had opened in Covington. Hoping the official there might help, Cincinnatus visited the place. That turned out to be another wasted trip. A large sign on the window said, CLOSED INDEFINITELY DUE TO ILLEGAL CONFEDERATE ACTION. Frustrated and frightened, Cincinnatus went back to his parents' house.

"Dammit, I'm a citizen of the USA. I live in Iowa," he raged. "How come I can't get home?"

"Be thankful it ain't worse," his father said: the philosophy of a man who'd spent the early years of his life as a piece of property. No matter how bad things were, he could easily imagine them worse.

Not so Cincinnatus. "Bein' stuck here in Covington is as bad as it gits," he said.

But Seneca was right. A few days later, the Covington Courier ran what it called, A NOTIFICATION TO THE COLORED RESIDENTS OF THE CONFEDERATE state of Kentucky. It told them they had to be photographed for passbooks, "as is the accepted and required practice for Negroes throughout the Confederate States of America."

Seneca took the order in stride. "Had to do this afore the war, I recollects," he said.

That was so. Cincinnatus remembered his own passbook. But he said, "I done without one o' them things the last twenty-five years. Don't you recollect what it's like to be free?"

"I recollects the trouble you finds if you don't got one," his father answered.

"I ain't no Confederate nigger. I ain't gonna be no Confederate nigger, neither," Cincinnatus said. "I'm a citizen of the United States. What the hell I need a passbook for?"

"You don't want to get in trouble with them Freedom Party fellas, you better have one," his father answered.

That was all too likely to be true. Cincinnatus raged against it anyhow. Raging against it did him exactly no good. For the time being, he was stuck here in Kentucky. Sooner or later, he expected things to get back to normal and the border between the CSA and the USA to open up again. He also expected to get the cast off his leg and to learn to walk without crutches once more. And he expected to take his father and mother back to Des Moines with him. He always had been an optimist.

For a long time, Dr. Leonard O'Doull had been satisfied-no, more than satisfied, happy-to live in a place like Riviиre-du-Loup. The world forgetting, by the world forgot. He couldn't remember where he'd seen that line of poetry, but it suited the town very well. And it had suited him, too.

But, however much he sometimes wanted to, he couldn't quite forget that he was an American, that he came from a wider world than the one in which he chose to live. Reading about the gathering storm far to the south-even reading about it in French, which made it seem all the farther away-brought that home to him. In an odd way, so did the passing of his father-in-law.

To Leonard O'Doull, Lucien Galtier had stood for everything he admired about Quebec: a curious mix of adaptability and a deeper stubbornness. Now that the older man was gone, O'Doull felt as if he'd lost an anchor that had been mooring him to la belle Rйpublique.

His wife, of course, had other feelings about the way her father had died: one part shock, O'Doull judged, to about three parts mortification. "Did it have to be there?" she would say, over and over again. "Did he have to be doing that?"

"Coronary thrombosis comes when it comes," O'Doull would reply, as patiently and sympathetically as he could. "The exertion, the excitement- they could, without a doubt, help bring it on."

Patience and sympathy took him only so far. About then, Nicole would usually explode: "But people will never let us live it down!"

Knowing how places like Riviиre-du-Loup and the surrounding farms worked, O'Doull suspected she was right. Even so, he said, "You worry too much. Many of the people I've talked to say they're jealous of such an end."

"Men!" Nicole snarled. "Tabernac! What do you know?" That was unfair to half the human race, not that she cared. Then she went on, "And what of poor Йloise Granche? Is she jealous of such an end?"

That, unfortunately, wasn't unfair, and was very much to the point. Йloise wasn't jealous. She was horror-stricken, and who could blame her? To have to watch someone die at such a moment… How would she ever forget that? How could she ever want to get close to another man as long as she lived?

O'Doull said, "Your father didn't leave us… unappreciated." He needed to pause there to pick the right word. After another moment, he went on, "Would you rather it had happened while he was mucking out the barn?"

"I'd rather it didn't happen at all," Nicole answered. But that wasn't what he'd asked, and she knew it. Now she hesitated. At last, she said, "Maybe I would. It would have been more, more dignified."

"Death is never dignified." O'Doull spoke with a doctor's certainty. "Never. Dignity in death is something we invent afterwards to make the living feel better."

"I would have felt better if it had happened while Papa was in the barn," Nicole said. "Whether he-" She broke off, not soon enough, and burst into tears. " 'Osti! Do you see? Even I'm starting to make jokes about it. And if I do, what's everyone else doing?"

"The same thing, probably," O'Doull said. "People are like that."

"It's not right!" Nicole said. "He wouldn't have wanted to be remembered- this way." She cried harder than ever.

Although Leonard held her and patted her and did his best to comfort her, he was far from sure she was right. He'd known his father-in-law for a quarter of a century. Wouldn't Lucien Galtier have taken a certain wry pride in the reputation that grew out of his end? Lucien might even have taken a pride that wasn't so ordinary. Any number of ways to go. To how many, though, was it given to go like a man?

Which brought him back to the question Nicole had asked. What about Йloise? She was wounded, no doubt about it, and Lucien wouldn't have wanted that. He'd cared for her, even if he hadn't necessarily loved her. But would things have been any easier for her if he'd dropped dead while they were dancing, not after they'd gone back to her farmhouse? Maybe a little. Maybe a little, yes, but not much.

One of these days, O'Doull told himself, yes, one of these days, I'll have to pour a few drinks into Georges and find out what he really thinks about this. The time wasn't ripe yet. He knew that. But it would come. A lot of things for which the time hadn't been ripe looked to be coming. Most of them were a lot less appetizing than lying down with a nice woman and being unlucky enough not to get up again.

That evening, the newscaster on the wireless gave an account of a speech President Smith had made at Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. "The president of the United States spoke with just anger regarding the Confederate States' violation of their pledge not to send soldiers into Kentucky and the state formerly known as Houston." The French-speaker made heavy going of the place names. He continued, "The president of the United States also reminded the president of the Confederate States that he had pledged himself to ask for no more territorial changes on the continent of North America. If he ignores this solemn undertaking, President Smith said, he cannot seriously expect the United States to return to him the portions of Virginia, Arkansas, and Sonora to which he has referred." He had trouble pronouncing Arkansas, too. And why not? Arkansas was a long, long way from the Republic of Quebec.

Al Smith finally seemed to have decided he couldn't trust Jake Featherston. As far as O'Doull could see, the U.S. president had taken longer than he might have to figure that out. He had it down now, though. More than what he'd said, where he'd made the speech spoke volumes. Almost eighty years ago now, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had crushed McClellan's Army of the Potomac at Camp Hill, ensuring that the Confederate States would triumph in the War of Secession. No president of the United States would have anything to do with the place these days unless he wanted to tell his own people, We're in trouble again.

Nicole didn't understand any of that. Neither did little Lucien, who was anything but little these days. O'Doull found himself envying his wife and son for being so thoroughly Quebecois. He also found himself reminded that, no matter how long he'd lived here, he was at bottom an American. He'd sometimes wondered about that. He didn't any more.

When he went to his office the next morning, newsboys were hawking papers by shouting about President Smith's speech. Papers in Quebec always seemed to back the USA to the hilt: more royalist than the king, more Catholic than the Pope. Again, why not? The Great War had touched lightly here, which it hadn't anywhere else between Alaska and the Empire of Mexico.

O'Doull's receptionist was already at the office when he got there. She smiled at him and said, "Bonjour, monsieur. Зa va?"

"Pas pire, merci," he answered, which made her smile. Nobody who spoke Parisian French would have said, Not bad, thanks, like that. O'Doull had put down deep roots here, and he knew it. He went on, "When is the first appointment?"

"Half an hour, Doctor," she said.

"Good. I'll see what I can catch up on till then." He went into his private office to skim through medical journals. He wished he had time to do more than skim. He had never known-had never imagined-such an exciting age in medicine. Back when he was a boy, immunization and sanitation had begun to cut into death rates, which had kept on falling ever since. Now, though, some of the new drugs on the market were doing what quack nostrums had promised since the beginning of time: they really were curing diseases that could easily have been fatal. How many times had he watched someone die of infection after surgery that would have succeeded without it? More than he cared to recall, certainly. Now, with luck, he-and his patients-wouldn't have to go through that particular hell any more.

And here was an article about some new medicine that was said to be-even more effective than the sulfonamides, which had been the last word for the past year or two. Drugs that killed germs without poisoning people were, to him, far more exciting than fighters that flew twenty miles an hour faster and five thousand feet higher than previous models.

Not everybody thought so, though, which meant new models of fighters came out more often and got more fanfare than new drugs did. They were liable to be used, too, which worried him.

"Madness," he muttered, and went back to reading about this fungus with what seemed a miraculous ability to murder microbes.

His first patient was a pregnant woman due in about six weeks. He'd always liked working with women who were going to have babies. Their condition was obvious, and usually had a happy outcome. He only wished the rest of what he did were as easy and rewarding.

Then he saw a child with mumps. He couldn't do anything about that despite the new drugs in the medical journal. The little boy was very unhappy, but he would get better in a few days.

A man with a bad back came in next. "I'm sorry, Monsieur Papineau," he said, "but aspirins and liniment and rest are the most I have to offer you."

"Tabernac!" Papineau said. "Can't you cure it? If you could put me under the knife for it, I would go in a minute. I can't pick up my children or make love to my wife without feeling I'm breaking in two."

Dr. O'Doull considered. Papineau was younger than he was, and might not be shocked at a suggestion. On the other hand, he might. Riviиre-du-Loup was a straitlaced place in a lot of ways. Still, worth a try… "Since you mention it, monsieur, it could be that you might have less pain during intimacy if your wife were to assume the, ah, superior position."

There. That sounded properly medical. Was it too medical for Papineau to understand? Evidently not, for he turned red. "What? You mean her on top? Calisse!"

"I didn't mean to offend," O'Doull said hastily. "I offered the suggestion only for reasons of health and comfort. You were the one who mentioned the, ah, difficulty, after all."

"Well, so I did." His patient looked thoughtful. "For reasons of health, maybe. I wonder what Louise would say." Papineau left the office rubbing his chin. O'Doull managed to hold in a snort of laughter till he was gone. Then it came out.

He was still smiling when his next patient, a little old lady with arthritis, came in. "What's funny, Doctor?" she asked suspiciously.

"Nothing to do with you, Madame Villehardouin," he assured her. "I was just… remembering a joke I heard last night." She gave him a fishy stare, but couldn't prove he was lying. He had only aspirins and liniment to offer her, too. As far as things had come in the past few years, they still had at least as far to go.

A few days later, he ran into Papineau in a grocery. As usual, the man moved in a gingerly way, but he greeted O'Doull with a smile. "That was a wonderful prescription you gave me, Doctor," he said. "Wonderful!"

"Well, I'm glad it did you some good," O'Doull said. Papineau nodded enthusiastically. O'Doull was pleased at helping him, and his pleasure diminished only a little when he reflected that Hippocrates could have given the same advice. Yes, medicine still had a long way to go.

The ground unrolled beneath Jonathan Moss. His fighter dove like a falcon- dove, in fact, far faster than any falcon could dream of diving. He was coming out of the sun. The young hotshot calmly tooling along in the other fighter had no idea he was there-till he zoomed past. Had it been a dogfight, his opponent never would have known what hit him.

His wireless set let out a burst of static, and then a startled squawk: "Son of a bitch! How the hell did you do that? Uh, over."

Moss started to make a joke, to say something like, Clean living. But the smile and the words died unspoken. He thumbed his own wireless and answered, "Son, I did that because I wanted it more than you." He thought he'd stopped, but his mouth kept going: "I want it more than anybody does." A long, long pause followed before he remembered to add, "Over."

Wasn't all that the Lord's bitter truth? He did want it more than anybody else, and what he'd known since the war was over. Ever since he got his law degree, he'd done everything he could to make things better, make them more tolerable, for Canadians. He'd married a Canadian patriot. He'd had himself a half-Canadian little girl.

And what thanks had he got? Some other Canadian, someone who no doubt thought of himself as a patriot, had blown up everything in the world that mattered to him. Wherever that other Canadian lived, he was bound to be laughing and cheering these days. He'd settled his score with a Yank, all right. He sure had.

I wasted twenty years of my life. The only thing Moss wanted more than sitting in this fighter was to be able to pilot the biggest bomber the United States had. He wanted to fly it at random over some good-sized Canadian town, open the bomb-bay doors, and pour out a couple of tons of death, the way that Canadian had sent Laura and Dorothy death through the mail. He wanted that so badly, he could all but taste it. He could practically feel the bomber jump and get livelier as its heavy load of explosives fell away. Hallucination? Of course. It seemed very real just the same.

Maybe the bombs had been meant for him. Maybe, but he didn't think so. People in his family didn't open mail unless it was addressed to them. Had the bomb had his name on it, his wife and daughter would have left it alone. And they might still be alive, and I wouldn't. He'd had that thought the day the bomb went off.

Why would anyone want to kill a woman and a little girl? That ate at Moss. Could somebody have been angry enough at Laura for marrying an American to want to see her dead? Moss knew some of the people who wanted Canada free once more were a fanatical lot, but that fanatical? It seemed excessive, even for them. And most of them were willing to admit he'd done a few useful things in his time there. He'd had some threats, but they'd never amounted to anything-not till now.

What he'd done here didn't matter any more. He'd had his life rearranged for him. The sooner he got out of Canada now, the happier he'd be.

The wireless crackled again. The other fighter pilot said, "I'm going back to the airstrip now, Major. Over."

"I'll follow you," Moss answered. "Over and out." He'd put the uniform back on as soon as he'd buried Laura and Dorothy. He hadn't asked for the promotion from the rank he'd held in the Great War. They'd seemed eager to give it to him, though, and acted afraid he wouldn't come back to flying. The way things were looking along the border with the CSA and out in the Pacific, they were anxious to grab all the warm bodies they could.

He wondered what he would have done had Laura lived. Chucking his practice to fly for the USA might have meant chucking his marriage, too. Well, he didn't have to worry about that now.

There was the airstrip, with the snow bulldozed off it. Some airplanes here landed on skis instead of wheels during the winter, but his didn't have them. He lowered his landing gear and bumped to a stop.

Groundcrew men came up to take charge of the fighter. Wearily, Moss pushed back the canopy and got out. The fur and leather of his flying gear kept him warm on the ground in wintertime. He remembered the way that had worked from the days of the Great War. Ever since he'd lost Laura and Dorothy, those days seemed more real, more vivid, more present in his mind than much of what had happened since.

A young lieutenant emerged from one of the buildings flanking the airstrip and struggled through the snow till he got to the cleared runway. Then he could hurry, as young lieutenants were supposed to do. Saluting, he told Moss, "The base commandant's compliments, sir, and he'd like to see you in his office right away."

"Well, then, I'd better get over there, hadn't I?" Moss said.

Ambiguity permeated his relations with Captain Oscar Trotter. He'd got on fine with Major Finley, Trotter's predecessor. They'd both been Great War veterans, and understood each other. The new commandant was a younger man. He'd never seen combat, never drunk himself blind three or four nights in a row so he wouldn't have to think about friends going down in flames three or four dreadful days in a row, never drunk himself blind so he wouldn't have to think about going down in flames himself. And, of course, Trotter was only a captain. Even though he was in charge of the field outside of London, he had trouble giving Moss orders now that Moss had put the uniform back on and wore golden oak leaves on his shoulder straps.

Moss saw no point in making things worse than they were already. "Reporting as ordered," he said when he walked into Trotter's office. That let the commandant know he was willing to take his orders, even if he didn't call him sir or salute first.

Trotter nodded. He didn't salute, either. "Have a seat, Major," he said, acknowledging Moss' rank that way so he also didn't have to say sir. He waved the older man into the chair in front of his desk. It creaked when Moss sat down in it. It always did.

"What's up?" Moss asked.

Trotter lit a cigarette before he answered. He shoved the pack of Raleighs across the desk so Moss could have one, too. As Moss lit up, the commandant pushed a sheet of paper across the desk after the Raleighs. "Your orders have come through."

Was that relief in his voice? Moss wouldn't have been surprised. Base commandants didn't like ambiguity, and with reason: it weakened their authority. If Trotter got Moss out of his hair, he could go back to being senior officer here in every sense of the term.

The cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, Moss reached for the paper. It bore the embossed eagle in front of crossed swords that had symbolized the USA since the revival after the Second Mexican War. He read through the orders, then looked up at Captain Trotter. "You have an atlas of the United States here, sir? Where the hell is Mount Vernon, Illinois?"

"I thought you were from Illinois," Trotter answered, pulling a book off a shelf behind his chair.

"I'm from Chicago," Moss replied with dignity. "Downstate is all the back of beyond, as far as I'm concerned." He might have been talking about darkest Africa.

Captain Trotter opened the atlas, then pointed. "Here it is." He turned the book around so Moss could see, too. "Right in the middle of the pointy end that goes down to where the Ohio and the Mississippi meet."

"Uh-huh," Moss said. "Hell of a nice place to fly missions into Kentucky from, looks like to me."

"Or to defend if the Confederates start flying missions out of Kentucky," Trotter agreed.

"I don't want to defend. To hell with defending," Moss said savagely. "If those bastards think they can start a new war, I want to go out and tear 'em a new asshole so they'll goddamn well think twice."

That made Captain Trotter grin. "No wonder you're still a good pilot. You've got the killer instinct, all right."

Moss knew he should have smiled, too. Try as he would, he couldn't. Yes, he had a killer instinct. He'd been thinking about that while he was up in the fighter. But he hadn't thought about it in terms of the Confederates then. He'd thought about Canadians, people he'd been dealing with-hell, people he'd liked, people he'd loved-for more than twenty years.

Trotter might have picked that out of his head. "Maybe getting away from these parts will do you good," he said.

"Will it? I have my doubts," Moss answered. "It won't bring Laura and Dorothy back to life. It won't make me stop wanting to blow Canada to hell and gone."

The commandant shifted uneasily in his swivel chair. He didn't seem to know what to make of that. Moss could hardly blame him. He hadn't known what an explosive mixture grief and rage and hate could be till it overwhelmed him. For a moment, he wondered if the damned Canuck who'd sent Laura the bomb had had that same hot, furious blend blazing in him. Only for a moment. Then Moss shoved the thought aside. To hell with what the damned Canuck had been thinking. If I knew who it was… Regretfully, Moss shoved that thought aside, too. He didn't know. From what U.S. investigators said, it wasn't likely he ever would.

"Well," Trotter said, "any which way, you will be going back to the States. Your orders say, 'as quickly as practicable.' How soon can you be on a train?"

If Moss hadn't had tragedy strike him, he knew he wouldn't have got that much consideration. The other officer would have said, Be on the train at seven tomorrow morning, and off he would have gone. Here, though, even if he didn't think getting away would do much for him, he was far from sorry to put Canada behind him. "I don't have much left to do here," he said. "I've been settling affairs ever since… since it happened. After my apartment got blown to hell, it's not like I've got much left to throw in a suitcase. If it wasn't for your kindness, I wouldn't have a suitcase to throw my stuff in, either."

"I'd say we owe you more than a suitcase, Major Moss," Trotter told him. "I've taken the liberty of checking the train schedules…" He paused to see if that would annoy Moss. It didn't; he knew the commandant was only doing his job. When he nodded, Trotter continued, "Next train from Toronto to Chicago gets into London at 4:34 this afternoon."

"That's what the schedule says, anyway," Moss observed dryly. If the train was within half an hour of that, it would be doing all right.

Trotter nodded. "Yeah, that's what it says. And a train from Chicago to Mount Vernon goes out at half past nine tomorrow night. You'll have to kill some time in Chicago, but if you're from there it shouldn't be too bad."

"Maybe," Moss said. He didn't want to see his family. He'd had enough trouble with them at the funeral. But Captain Trotter didn't need to know about his difficulties there. His family had thought he was crazy to marry Laura Secord, and they'd seemed offended when the union didn't fall apart in short order. But he could find ways to spend time in Chicago without having anything to do with them. He could, and he intended to.

"Good luck," Trotter said.

Moss didn't laugh in his face. For the life of him, he couldn't figure out why. If he'd had anything remotely approaching good luck, his wife and daughter would still be alive, and he wouldn't be wearing U.S. uniform again. But he hadn't, they weren't, and he was. "Thanks, Captain," he said, very much as if he meant it.

When Hipolito Rodriguez walked into Freedom Party headquarters in Baroyeca, the first thing he saw was a new map on the wall. It showed the Confederate States as they were now, with Kentucky and what had been called Houston back in the fold. The lands the United States had seized in the Great War and not yet returned-chunks of Virginia, Arkansas, and Sonora-had a new label: Unredeemed Territory. That same label was applied to Sequoyah, even though the plebiscite there had gone against the CSA.

Part of Rodriguez-the part that had hated los Estados Unidos ever since their soldiers tried to kill him during the Great War-rejoiced to see that label on Sequoyah. A lingering sense of fairness made him wonder about it, though. Pointing to the map, and to Sequoyah in particular, he asked Robert Quinn, "Is that truly the way it should be?"

"Sн, Seсor Rodriguez. Absolutamente," the local Freedom Party leader answered. "The election in Sequoyah was a shame and a sham. Since the war, los Estados Unidos sent so many settlers into that state that the result of the vote could not possibly be just. Since they had no business occupying the land in the first place, they had no business settling it, either."

"Is this what Seсor Featherston says?" Rodriguez asked.

Quinn nodded. "It certainly is. And it is something more than that. It is the truth." A priest celebrating the Mass could have sounded no more sure of himself.

Rodriguez eyed the map again. Slowly, he nodded. But he could not help saying, "If Seсor Featherston tells this to the United States, they will not be happy. They thought the plebiscite settled everything."

"Are you going to lie awake at night flabbling about what the United States think?" Quinn dropped the English slang into the middle of a Spanish sentence, which only strengthened its meaning.

But Hipolito Rodriguez gave back a shrug. "It could be that I am, seсor," he said. "Please remember, I have a son who is in the Army. I have two more sons who could easily be conscripted." Since he was only in his mid-forties himself, he was not too old to put the butternut uniform on again, but he said nothing about that. He was not afraid for himself in the same way as he was afraid for his boys.

"How long have you wanted revenge against the United States?" Quinn asked softly.

"A long time," Rodriguez admitted. "Oh, sн, seсor, a very long time indeed. But now it occurs to me, as it did not before, that some things may be bought at too high a price. And is it not possible that what is true for me may also be true for the whole country?"

"Jake Featherston won't let anything go wrong." Quinn spoke with utmost confidence. "He's been right before. He'll keep on being right. We'll have our place in the sun, and we'll get it without much trouble, too. You wait and see."

Rodriguez let that certainty persuade him, too-certainty, after all, was a big part of what he'd been looking for when he joined the Freedom Party. "Bueno," he said. "I hope very much that you are right."

"Sure I am," Quinn said easily. "Why don't you just sit down and relax, and we'll go ahead with the meeting."

Falling back into that weekly routine did help ease Rodriguez's mind. Robert Quinn went through the usual announcements. There were more of those than there had been in the old days, for the Party had more members in Baroyeca now. Rodriguez and the other veterans of the hard times couldn't help looking down their noses a little at the men who had joined because joining suddenly looked like the way to get ahead. No denying, though, that some of the newcomers had proved useful.

Once the announcements were done, the Party men sang patriotic songs, mostly in Spanish, a few in English. As they always did, they finished with "Dixie." Then Quinn said, "Now there is something I want you men to think about when you go home tonight. It is possible-not likely, mind you, but possible-that los Estados Unidos will give us a hard time about our rightful demands against them. If that does happen, we may have to take a very firm line with them. If we do, they'll be sorry. You can bet your bottom dollar on that. And you can bet los Estados Confederados won't back down again."

Applause filled the crowded room. Rodriguez joined it, even though that wasn't exactly what Quinn had told him before the formal meeting started. Then he'd sounded as if he didn't think the United States would fight. Of course, he was a politician, and politicians had a habit of telling people what they wanted to hear. But Rodriguez hadn't thought Freedom Party men did that sort of thing.

Then Quinn said, "I'll tell you something else, too, friends. During the last war, the mallates stabbed us in the back. We would have licked los Estados Unidos then if those black bastards hadn't betrayed us. Well, that isn't going to happen this time, por Dios. Jake Featherston will clamp down on them good and hard to make sure it doesn't."

He got another round of applause, a louder one this time. Rodriguez pounded his callused palms together till they hurt. He didn't care what happened to the Confederacy's Negroes, as long as it was nothing good. He'd got his baptism by fire against the black rebels in Georgia in 1916, before his division went to fight the damnyankees in Texas. He'd hardly seen a Negro since he got out of the Army. If he never saw another one, that wouldn't break his heart.

"As long as we stand behind Jake Featherston a hundred percent, nothing can go wrong," Quinn said. "He knows what's what. This country will be great again-great, I tell you! And every one of you, every one of us, will help."

More applause. Again, Hipolito Rodriguez joined it. Why not? Seeing the Confederate States back on their feet was another reason he'd joined the Freedom Party. One more was that Robert Quinn had never treated him like a damn greaser, an English phrase he knew much too well. The Party had nothing against men from Sonora and Chihuahua. It saved all its venom for the mallates.

Why shouldn't it? Rodriguez thought. They deserve it. We never tried to hurt the country. We've been loyal. He scorned the men from the Empire of Mexico who sneaked into the CSA trying to find work, too. If any people deserved to be called greasers, they were the ones.

Robert Quinn held up a hand. "Before we call it a night and go home, I've got one more announcement to make. I've been trying to push this through for a long time, but I haven't had any luck till now. I heard from the state Party chairman the other day. Now it's certain: the silver mine in the hills outside of town is going to open up again next month. And, even though this part isn't so sure, it does look like the railroad will be coming back to Baroyeca." He grinned at the Freedom Party men. "Remember, you heard it here first."

This time, he got something better than applause. He got delighted silence, followed by a low, excited buzz. The mine had been closed ever since the collapse, and the railroad had stopped coming to Baroyeca not much later. Rodriguez wondered what had made the authorities change their minds after so long.

Two men sitting in the next row back answered the question for him. One of them remarked, "Need plenty of plata to fight a war."

"Sн, sн," the other agreed. "And where there's a little silver, there's always a lot of lead. Need plenty of lead to fight a war, too."

"Ahh," Rodriguez murmured to himself. He liked seeing how things worked. He always had. Maybe the authorities hadn't decided to reopen the mine from the goodness of their hearts alone. Maybe they'd seen that they would need silver and especially lead.

Well, what if they had? It would still do the town a lot of good. If the railroad came back, prices at Diaz's general store would drop like a rock. Shipping goods in by truck on bad roads naturally made everything cost more. After the train line shut down, the storekeeper had been lucky to stay in business at all. Plenty of other places in town hadn't.

"Three cheers for Seсor Quinn!" somebody shouted. The cheers rang out. Quinn stood there, looking suitably modest, as if the news hadn't been his doing at all. Maybe it really hadn't, not altogether. But he deserved some credit for it.

When the Party meeting did end, several men headed over to La Culebra Verde to celebrate. Rodriguez thought of what Magdalena would say if he came home drunk. Sometimes, after he had that thought, he had another one: I don't care. Then he would go off to the Green Snake and see how much cerveza or, more rarely, tequila, he could pour down. When he did that, Magdalena had some very pointed things to say the next morning, things a headache often did not improve.

Tonight, he just started out into the countryside beyond Baroyeca. The new line of poles supporting the wires that carried electricity made sure he couldn't get lost even if he were drunk. The sky was black velvet scattered with diamonds. A lot of stars seemed to be out tonight.

One of them, a bright red one, startled him by moving. Then he heard the faint buzz of a motor overhead. "Un avion," he muttered in surprise. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen an airplane above Baroyeca. It was flying south. He wondered where it was going. Off to scout the border with the Empire of Mexico? That seemed most likely. But wouldn't it do better to scout the border with the USA?

Maybe other airplanes were doing that. Rodriguez hoped so. When he fought up in west Texas, the only airplanes he'd seen had belonged to the United States. The Confederate States, stretched too thin, hadn't been able to deploy many on that distant, less than vital front.

Would things be any different in a new war? Yes, los Estados Confederados had Kentucky and Houston back again, so that Texas was whole once more. Maybe they'd even get back the other territory they had lost in the Great War. But that map on the wall of Freedom Party headquarters still said los Estados Unidos were bigger, and bigger still meant stronger in a long, drawn-out fight.

Maybe Jake Featherston knew something he didn't. He hoped so. He couldn't see what it might be, though. With one son in the Army, with two more likely to be called up, he also couldn't help worrying.

When he got back to the farmhouse, he smiled at the fine white electric light shining out through the windows. Magdalena had left a lamp burning- no, not burning: she'd left a lamp on-for him. She'd waited up for him, too. He didn't say anything about the growing threat of war. Instead, he talked about the silver mine's reopening and the likely return of the railroad to Baroyeca.

His wife smiled. She nodded. And then she said, "This is all very good, but I still hope there will be peace with los Estados Unidos."

Rodriguez realized he wasn't the only one worrying.

Chester Martin passed a newsboy on his way to the trolley stop. The kid had a stack of the Los Angeles Times in front of him as tall as the bottoms of his knickers. He waved a paper at Chester and shouted out the morning's headline: "Smith says no!"

Usually, Chester walked right past newsboys. That was enough to stop him, though. "Oh, he does, does he? Says no to what, exactly?"

The newsboy couldn't tell him. They'd told the kid what to yell before they turned him loose, and that was it. He yelled it again, louder this time. "Smith says no!" For good measure, he added, "Read all about it!"

"Give me one." Chester parted with a nickel. The newsboy handed him a paper. He carried it to the stop. As soon as he got there, he unfolded it and read the headline and the lead story. Al Smith had said no to Jake Featherston. The Confederates weren't going to get back the pieces of Sonora and Arkansas and Virginia they'd lost in the war-or Sequoyah, either.

Smith was quoted as saying, "The president of the Confederate States personally promised me that he would make no more territorial demands on the North American continent. He has taken less than a year to break his solemn word. No matter what he may feel about his promise, however, I am resolved to hold him to it. These territories will remain under the administration and sovereignty of the United States."

"About time!" Martin said, and turned the paper over to read more.

Just then, though, the trolley came clanging up. Chester threw another nickel in the fare box and found a seat. His was far from the only open copy of the Times as the streetcar rattled away.

A man of about Martin's age sitting across the aisle from him folded his newspaper and put it in his lap with an air of finality. "There's going to be trouble," he said gloomily.

The woman sitting behind him said, "There'd be worse trouble if we gave that Featherston so-and-so what he wants. How soon would he be back trying to squeeze something else out of us?"

"Lady, I spent three stinking years in the trenches," the man answered. "There isn't any trouble worse than that." He looked over at Chester for support. "Aren't I right? Were you there?"

"Yeah, I was there," Martin said. "I don't know what to tell you, though. Looks to me like that guy is spoiling for a fight. The longer we keep ducking, the harder he's going to hit us when he finally does."

"Yikes!" The man jerked in surprise. He sent Martin a betrayed look. "Who cares about those lousy little chunks of land?"

"Well, I don't, not much," Chester admitted. "But suppose we give them back to him and then he jumps on us anyway? We'd look like a bunch of boobs, and we'd be that much worse off, too."

"Why would he jump on us if he's got everything he wants?" the man demanded.

Before Chester could say anything, the woman who'd been arguing beat him to it: "Because somebody like that never has everything he wants. As soon as you give him something, he wants something else. When you see a little kid like that, you spank him so he behaves himself from then on."

"How do you spank somebody who'll shoot back if you try?" the man asked.

"If we don't spank him, he'll shoot first," Chester said. The woman in back of the other man nodded emphatically. They all kept on wrangling about it till first the woman and then the other man got off at their stops.

Chester kept on going down into the South Bay. The area was growing fast; builders wanted to run up lots of new houses. The construction workers' union was doing its best to stop them till they met its terms. This tract in Torrance had been carved from an orange grove. The trees had gone down. The houses weren't going up, or not very fast, anyway.

When Martin walked into the union tent across from the construction site, the organizer who kept an eye on things during the night, a tough little guy named Pete Mazzini, wore a worried expression. "What's up?" Chester asked, grabbing the coffee pot that perked lazily over the blue flame of canned heat.

"I hear they really are gonna sic the goddamn Pinkertons on us today," Mazzini said.

"Shit," Chester said, and the other man nodded. "Pinkertons are bad news." Mazzini nodded again. Martin hadn't seen Pinkerton goons since the steel-mill strikes in Toledo after the Great War. In a way, fighting them was even worse than fighting cops. A fair number of cops were fundamentally decent guys. Anybody who'd sign up to use a club or a blackjack or a pistol for the Pinkertons had to be a son of a bitch.

"At least I found out." Mazzini jerked a thumb toward the building site. "Dumb night watchmen over there don't think about how voices carry once everything quiets down."

"Good." Martin had never got more than three stripes on his sleeve during the war, but he'd commanded a company for a while. Now he had to think not like a captain, but like a general. "We've got to let the pickets know as soon as they start showing up. They'll be ready, because we've had word the builders might pull this. We've got to bring in as many weapons as we can. Not just sticks for the signs, either. We'll need knives. Guns, too, if we can get 'em in a hurry."

"We start shooting, that gives the cops all the excuse they need to land on us with both feet," Mazzini said.

He wasn't wrong. All the same, Chester answered, "If we let the goons break us, we're screwed, too. If they break us, we might as well pack it in. You want that?"

"Hell, no," Mazzini said. "I just wanted to make sure you were thinking about it."

"Oh, I am. Bet your ass I am." Martin scratched his chin. "I'm going to call somebody from the Daily Breeze. Torrance papers aren't down on unions the way the goddamn Times is. We ought to have an honest witness here. I think I'll talk to the Torrance cops, too. The builders don't have them in their pocket, like in L.A. If they know the Pinkertons are going to raise hell ahead of time, maybe they can step on 'em."

Pete Mazzini looked as if he would have laughed in anybody else's face. "Good luck," he said. His shrug declared that he washed his hands of dealing with all police anywhere. "I don't suppose it can make things any worse."

Yawning, he agreed to hang around and warn the incoming pickets of the trouble ahead while Chester went to talk with the man from the Daily Breeze and the police and make other arrangements. When Chester got back, he said, "Thanks, Pete. You can go home and get your forty winks now."

Mazzini gave him a look. "Hell, no. If there's gonna be a brawl, I want in on it. Those bastards aren't going to lick us as easy as they think they are." He yawned again, and fixed himself what had to be his millionth cup of coffee.

The reporter from the Daily Breeze showed up an hour or so later. He had a photographer with him, which gladdened Chester's heart. Meanwhile, union backers came up to the men on the picket line, slipped them this or that, and then went on their way. Martin and Mazzini exchanged knowing glances. Neither said a word.

At twenty past eleven, half a dozen autos with Torrance cops in them pulled up by the building site. Martin wondered if they'd known what would go on before he told them. When a reporter from the Times showed up five minutes later, he stopped wondering. They had.

At twenty to twelve, two buses that had seen a lot of better years pulled up around the corner. "Here we go," Chester said softly. It had been a long, long time-half a lifetime-since he'd shot at anybody, but he knew he could. Nobody who'd been through the Great War was likely to forget what gunplay was all about.

Here came the Pinkerton men. They looked like goons: drunks and toughs and guys down on their luck who'd take anybody's money and do anything because they hadn't had any real work for such a long time. They carried a motley assortment of iron bars and wooden clubs. One guy even had what Martin belatedly recognized as a baseball bat, something far, far from its New England home. Others, grim purpose on their faces, kept one hand out of sight. Knife men and shooters, Martin thought, and made sure he could get at his own pistol in a hurry.

"We don't want any trouble, now," said a Torrance policeman with the map of Ireland on his face. He and his pals formed a thin line between the advancing goons and the picketers, who were shaping a line of their own: a skirmish line. Chester warily watched the scabs on the site. If they took his men from behind while the Pinkertons hit them from the front… He grimaced. That wouldn't be good at all.

As if reading his mind, Mazzini said, "I told a couple of our guys to start shooting at the scabs if they even take a step towards us. Some bullets go past their heads, I don't think they've got the balls to keep coming."

Chester laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. "Good. Thanks."

A short, scrawny, ferret-faced man in a loud, snappy suit seemed to be the Pinkertons' commander. "Time to teach these damn Reds a lesson," he said in a voice that carried. Low growls rose from his men, as if from a pack of angry dogs. He pointed. "Go get 'em!"

Instead of growling, the goons roared and charged. Some of the Torrance cops swung their billy clubs. Most of them let the Pinkertons go by. The union men roared, too. They were outnumbered, but not too badly. Some of them ran forward to meet the goons head on. A few others hung back, watching the scabs.

"Here we go!" Chester said, an odd note of exultation in his voice. He snatched up a club and waded into the brawl. He didn't want to start shooting first, but he had nothing at all against breaking a few heads.

He almost got his broken as soon as he started fighting. A goon carrying an iron bar with a chunk of concrete on the end swung it for all he was worth. It hummed past Chester's ear. He clobbered the Pinkerton before the fellow could take another swing at him.

That scrawny guy in the sharp suit didn't mix it up along with the strikebreakers he'd brought. He stayed out of the fight and yelled orders. Martin pointed at the man with his club. "Get him!" he yelled to one of the Torrance cops, who'd managed to whack his way clear and was standing on the sidewalk as if it were the sideline of a football game. The cop paid him no attention.

But when the union men started getting the better of the strikebreakers, their boss was the one who first pulled a pistol out of his pocket. Chester tried to shift his club to his left hand so he could grab his own gun, but a goon had hold of his left arm. In desperation, he threw the club instead. He got lucky. It caught the fellow in the sharp suit right in the bridge of the nose.

He let out a howl that pierced the shouts and curses of the brawling men in front of him, dropped the pistol, and clapped both hands to his face. When he took them away a moment later, he had a mustache made of blood.

He bent for the pistol. But the Daily Breeze photographer, not content to stay neutral, dashed up and grabbed it. Screaming, "You fucker!" the Pinkertons' boss jumped on him. They had their own private brawl till the reporter from the local paper weighed in on the photographer's side. Then the little guy with the gaudy clothes took his lumps.

So did his goons. Thanks to Martin and that photographer, nobody started shooting. Chester knew how lucky that was. The union men drove the toughs back to their buses in headlong retreat. A rock smashed the windshield on one of the buses. Both drivers got out of there a lot faster than they'd come.

The next morning, the Times called it "a savage labor riot." The Daily Breeze knew better. So did Chester. He also knew the union had won a round. They wouldn't see the Pinkertons for a while-but when they did, the other side would be loaded for bear.