V
"There are times when I'm stupid," Jonathan Moss said, "and then there are times when I'm really an idiot."
He looked around. The more he looked, the more this seemed like one of the times when he was really an idiot. Chicago winters were bad. He'd known about them. Winters up in Ontario were worse. He'd known about them, too. He'd shivered his way through three of them during the Great War. Hardly anything was more useless than the pilot of a flying scout in the middle of an Ontario winter.
"I can think of one thing, though," he said, and his breath blew out in a great icy cloud, "and that's a man who comes up here in December after a woman who can't stand him—a married woman who can't stand him, mind you."
If he hadn't done it, though, he would have wondered for the rest of his life. Now, one way or the other, he would know. He had his doubts about whether knowing would make him happy. It would make him sure, though, and that counted, too. So he'd told himself, at any rate, when he left law school.
Coming into the battered little town of Arthur now, he wondered. No town in Ontario through which the front had passed was anything but battered. The Canucks and the British had fought with dreadful intensity for every square foot of ground they'd held. In the end, that had done them no good at all. But the end came much slower and much, much harder than any American had dreamt it would before the war began.
People in heavy coats and fur hats stared at Moss' sturdy Bucephalus as he halted the motorcar in front of the general store. If he'd been driving a lightweight Ford, say, he didn't think he'd have been able to make his way north from Guelph; the road, such as it was, would have defeated him. Here he was, though, and Arthur, Ontario, and Laura Secord would have to make the best of it.
As he got out of the automobile, he wished for the furs and leathers in which he'd flown. He'd lived in them in wintertime. Under canvas, without even a proper roof over his head, they were the only things that had kept him from freezing to death. A cloth coat, even a cloth coat with a for collar, wasn't the same.
Inside the general store, a potbellied stove glowed a cheery red. The storekeeper was shoveling more coal into it as Moss came inside. He went from being too cold to too warm in the twinkling of an eye.
Setting down the coal shovel, the storekeeper said the same thing any small-town storekeeper in the USA might have said: "Help you, stranger?" Then his eyes narrowed. "No. Wait. You ain't a stranger, or not quite. You were one o' them Yank fliers at the aerodrome outside of town, weren't you?"
"Yes." Moss hadn't expected to be recognized. He didn't know whether that would make things easier or harder. The storekeeper would have been able to tell he was an American before long anyhow. Now the fellow knew which American, or which kind of American, he was. "How are you today, Mr. Peterson?"
"I've been better, but I've been worse, too," the Canuck allowed. He fixed Moss with a flinty stare. "Other thing is, I'm mindin' my business in the town where I've lived all my days. You can boil me for tripe before I figure out why the hell a Yank'd want to come back here. You all of a sudden recollect you left a collar stud over at the aerodrome, or what?"
All at once, Jonathan Moss felt very much alone. No American occupation forces were within miles. The troops had more important places to occupy than a little town in the middle of nowhere like Arthur. If he had an unfortunate accident here, nobody would ever find out anything about it except what the locals revealed. And if it turned out not to be quite so accidental as it looked... he would be in no position to explain.
Even so, he decided to grasp the nettle. He'd come here to ask this question. He'd planned on doing it a little later, but he'd seen no plan survived contact with the enemy. Straight ahead, then: "Did Laura Secord's husband come home safe from the war?"
Peterson the storekeeper gave him another long look. "You're that crazy Yank," he said at last. "She told me there was one who'd come sniffing around her that was peskier than all the rest. Don't reckon she ever thought you'd be pesky enough to come back here, though."
"You didn't answer my question, Mr. Peterson," Moss said. Peterson went right on not answering it, too. With a sigh, Moss dug in his pocket. He pulled out a twenty-dollar goldpiece. After examining the double eagle for a moment, he let it fall on the counter. It rang sweetly. "You didn't answer my question, Mr. Peterson," he repeated.
The storekeeper studied the coin as if he'd never seen any like it before. Likely he hadn't; not much U.S. gold would have got up here. The eagle in front of crossed swords on the reverse was close to the emblem with which U.S. aeroplanes flew. The legend below held one word: remembrance. Peterson scooped up the double eagle and stuck it in his pocket. "She never said you were a rich fool of a Yank."
"Thanks so much," Moss replied. "Now will you please answer what I asked you?"
"Nope," Peterson said. For a moment, Moss thought that meant he wouldn't answer. The American wondered if he could get back his goldpiece without killing the storekeeper. As he was making up his mind to try, Peterson slowly went on, "No, Isaac ain't come back. That should make her fall right straight into your arms, don't you reckon?"
"Nope," Moss said, imitating him. What Laura Secord had said the last time he'd seen her still scorched his memory. What was he doing here, anyway? Without another word, he spun on his heel and went back out to his automobile.
Winter slapped him in the face as soon as he opened the door to the general store. The sweat the red-hot stove had brought out on his forehead promptly started to freeze. He got into the Bucephalus and stabbed the starter button, silently thanking God he didn't have to stand in the snowy street cranking the engine to life.
He drove out to the aerodrome; it was from there that he knew how to get to the farm Laura Secord had been running. He had some trouble finding the base from which he and his comrades had flown against the Canadians and British. They'd lived under canvas, and the canvas had moved along with the front. But he'd served in these parts through a winter, and so the ground began to look familiar after a while. One field, plainly rutted despite the snow on it, sent chills through him that had nothing to do with the weather. He'd jounced along there any number of times, taking off on missions and coming back afterwards. Now—how strange!—it was only a field again.
It was the field he needed, though. Instead of casting about, he drove confidently once he'd found it. Five minutes later, he pulled off a road even more rutted than the field and up a narrow lane that led to a farmhouse and barn and a couple of smaller outbuildings. The Bucephalus' brakes reluctantly brought him to a halt not far from a stump with a hatchet driven into it. By that, and by the stains on the wood, he guessed it did duty for a chopping block.
He got out of the motorcar. Before he could head for the farmhouse door as he intended, a figure muffled to the eyes walked out of the barn. "Who's coming to see me in a fancy automobile?" The demand was sharp and curious at the same time.
Hearing Laura Secord's voice for the first time in a year and a half sent a shiver through him, as if he'd taken hold of a live electrical wire. The first time he tried to answer, all that came out was a hoarse cough. He felt sixteen years old again, calling on a girl for the first time. His hands and feet couldn't suddenly have grown large and clumsy, but they felt as if they had. He took a deep breath and spoke again: "It's Jonathan Moss, Miss Secord."
He'd forgotten her married name—done his best to blot it from his mind. He wondered if she'd forgotten him altogether. He hadn't seen her that many times, and he'd been far from the only American flier who'd seen her. But her sharp gasp said she remembered. "The mad Yank!" she exclaimed.
"I don't think so," he said, his breath steaming with every word.
"Well, you most certainly are," she said. "Not mad for being a Yank—I don't suppose you can help that—but mad for coming up here again. Why on earth did you? No matter how daft you are, you can't have wanted to see this part of the world again—or can you?"
"No, I didn't come here for that." Moss took another deep breath. He wished he could take a drink, too. "I came up here to see you."
"Oh, dear God," Laura Secord said quietly. She gathered herself. "Didn't you listen to a word I told you the last time you came here? If that's not madness, I don't know what is. You should have stayed wherever you were and gone on doing whatever you were doing."
"I did that," Jonathan Moss said. "For more than a year, I did that. When I couldn't do it any more, I came." He hesitated, then went on, "I heard in Arthur that your husband didn't come home. I'm very sorry, for whatever that may be worth to you."
"You decided to come up here without even knowing that?" she said in open astonishment, and he nodded. Maybe he was mad after all. She remarked, "He would have shot you, you know. He was very good with a rifle even before he went into the Army." Moss didn't say anything. He could think of nothing to say. Had she told him to go then, he would have got back into his motorcar and driven away without another word. Instead, she continued, "Come inside and have a cup of tea. I wouldn't turn out a mongrel dog in this weather before he had a cup of tea."
That did not strike him as the warmest commendation of his personal charms, if any, but it was kinder than anything she'd said to him the last time he was here. He followed her up the stairs and into the farmhouse. The stove was going in the kitchen, but not like the one in Peterson's general store. Laura Secord shoveled in more coal, filled the teapot from a bucket, and set it on the stove. As she busied herself in readying cups and tea. she kept shaking her head. Doing his best to make light of things, Moss said, "I really am a harmless fellow."
"If you really were a harmless fellow, you would have been shot down," she retorted. Then she pointed to a chair by the table. "Sit, if you care to. I can get you bread and butter." He sat and nodded. She served him, then tended to the tea when the pot started whistling.
No matter what he might have expected, the tea wasn't particularly good. It was hot. He gulped it, savoring the warmth it brought. It helped unfreeze his tongue, too: he said, "I came to tell you that, if there's ever anything you need—anything at all— let me know, and I'll take care of it."
"A knight in shining armor?" Her eyebrows rose.
Moss shook his head. "I thought of myself like that at the start of the war: a knight of the air, I mean. It didn't last, of course. War's a filthy business no matter how you fight it. But I'll do that for you. So help me God, I will. You're—special to me. I don't know how else to put it." He was more afraid of saying love than he had been of facing machine-gun bullets from a Sopwith Pup.
"You'd better go now," Laura Secord said. She wasn't reviling him, as she had the last time he'd come to her, but there was no give in her voice, either. "You mean to be kind; I'm sure you mean to be kind. But I don't see how I can take you up on. .. any part of that generous offer. When I see you, I see your country, too, and your country has destroyed mine. Find yourself an American girl, one who can forgive you for that." She laughed. "Melodramatic, isn't it? But life is sometimes."
He got to his feet. He'd known from the beginning the odds were against him—to put it mildly. "Here." He pulled a scrap of paper and pencil from his pocket and scrawled down three lines. "This is my address. What I said still goes. If you ever need me, let me know." He turned and left as fast as he could, so he wouldn't have to watch her crumple up the paper and throw it away. Soon he was driving back toward Arthur, and then back past Arthur, toward the life he'd done his best to toss out the window. He kept telling himself he was lucky. He had a devil of a time making himself believe it.
"This feels good," Reggie Bartlett said to Bill Foster as the two of them strolled through Richmond. "We haven't done it as much lately as we used to."
"Time has a way of getting on," Foster said, and Reggie nodded. His friend went on, "And we'd stop in a saloon for a beer afterwards, too. When a beer costs twenty-five dollars instead of five cents, stopping in a saloon doesn't seem like such a bully idea any more. My pay's gone up, sure, but it hasn't gone up as fast as prices have."
"It never does," Bartlett said with mournful certainty. This time, Bill Foster nodded. Reggie added, "And you've got to watch your money nowadays. After all, you're going to be a married man this time next month, and Sally's the sort of girl who deserves the best."
"I only hope I'll be able to give it to her." Foster's voice held worry. "How am I supposed to watch my money? All I can do is watch it go away. A dollar I put in the bank at the start of the year isn't worth a quarter now, even with interest."
"Watching money these days means spending it as soon as you get it," Reggie replied. "If you do anything else, you watch it shrink, like you said."
Foster sighed. "Didn't used to be this way. How are we supposed to get on with our lives if we can't even save money? The Freedom Party's right, if you ask me—we've got to put a stop to things before the whole country goes down the water closet."
"Yeah, we've got to put a stop to things," Reggie said. "That doesn't mean the Freedom Party is right. We heard those fellows going on and on when they were new as wet paint, remember? I thought they were crazy then, and I still think they're crazy."
They'd come a long way into the northwestern part of town, to the public square at the corner of Moore and Confederate Street (it had been Federal before the War of Secession). In spite of the chilly weather, somebody was holding a rally in the square: Confederate flags whipped in the breeze, and a gesticulating speaker stood on a platform of fresh yellow pine.
"Is that the Freedom Party again?" Bartlett asked. Then he spotted the signs behind the platform. "No, I see—it's the Radical Liberals. Want to listen, Bill?"
"Sure. Why not?" Foster said. "They have some interesting ideas. If they don't go off the deep end, the way they did when they nominated Arango in ' 15,1 may vote for 'em for president in'21."
"Me, too." Reggie nodded. "That fellow up there, whoever he is, he doesn't look like he's ever gone off the deep end of anything in his whole life."
As he got closer, he noticed a placard identifying the speaker as Congressman Baird from Chihuahua. Waistcoated and hom-burged, Baird looked more like a banker than a Congressman. "We have to face the facts," he was saying as Reggie and Foster got close enough to hear. "We are not the top dogs any more. Our friends are not the top dogs any more. We can stick our heads in the sand and pretend things still are the way they were in 1914, but that won't do us any good. The war has been over for almost a year and a half, and most of the people in this country don't really understand that things have changed."
Bill Foster looked disgusted. "] take back what I said a minute ago. He wants us to go sucking up to the United States, and I'll see him and everybody else in hell before I lick Teddy Roosevelt's boots."
"We've got to do something," Reggie answered. "If we don't, it's $500 beer next month, or maybe $5,000 beer. They licked us. You going to tell me they didn't?" As if to remind him, his shoulder twinged.
While they were talking, so was Congressman Baird. Reggie started listening to him again in midsentence: "—whole continent, north and south and west alike, might be better off if we dropped our tariff barriers and the USA did the same. I don't say we ought to do that all at once, but I do say it is something toward which we can work, and something liable to lead to greater prosperity throughout America. We share a heritage with the United States; in their own way, the Yankees are Americans, too. We fought a revolution against England, but England became the Confederacy's friend. Even though we have fought wars against the United States, they too may yet become our friends."
"You want to hear any more of this, Reggie?" Foster asked. "If the sign didn't say this fellow was from Chihuahua, I'd reckon he snuck in from California or Connecticut or one of those damn-yankee places."
"Damnyankees aren't as bad as all that. They don't have horns and tails," Reggie said. His friend gave him what was plainly meant for a withering look. He didn't wither, continuing, "They doctored me as well as anybody could, when it would have been easier for them to give up and let me die. All you did was fight 'em. They had me in their hands."
Foster was plainly unconvinced. But Congressman Baird got a bigger round of applause than Reggie Bartlett had really expected. Foster looked surprised at that, too. Grudgingly, he said, "Some people here think the way you do. I still don't see it, but I'll listen a while longer/1
Buoyed by the cheers, Baird went on, "I don't say for a moment that we should not try to regain as much of our strength as we can. We must be able to defend ourselves. But we must also bear in mind the colossus to our north and west, and that, as I said, our friends have fallen by the wayside. We are on our own, in a world that loves us not. We would be wise to remember as much."
That made good sense to Reggie. The Whigs, who had dominated Confederate politics even more thoroughly than the Democrats had dominated those of the USA, still seemed stuck in the past without any notion of how to face the future. The Freedom Party and others of its ilk wanted to throw out the baby with the bathwater, although they quarreled over which was which. Baird, at least, had some idea of the direction in which he wanted the CSAtogo.
His supporters in the crowd raised a chant: "Radical Liberals! Radical Liberals!' Whigs would never have done anything so undignified. But the Whigs didn't have to do anything undignified. They often seemed to think they didn't have to do anything at all. That, Reggie thought, was what holding power for half a century did to a party.
And then, from behind, another chant rose, or rather a furious howl: "Traitors! Filthy, stinking, goddamn traitors!" Reggie spun around. Charging across the yellowed grass were a couple dozen men armed with clubs and bottles and a variety of other improvised weapons. They all wore white shirts and butternut trousers. "Traitors!" they howled again, as they smashed into the rear of Congressman Baird's crowd. They howled something else, too, a word that made Bartlett's hair try to stand on end: "Freedom!"
The Congressman's voice rose in well-modulated indignation: "What is the meaning of this uncouth interruption?"
No one answered him, not in so many words. But the meaning was obvious even so—the newcomers were breaking up his rally, and breaking the heads of the people who'd been listening to him.
"Fight!" Reggie shouted. "Fight these bastards!"
A club whizzed past his ear, swung by a thick-necked, thick-shouldered chap screaming "Freedom!" at the top of his lungs. Reggie kicked him in the side of the knee as he ran past. Then, as the man started to crumple, he kicked him in the belly. He'd learned to fight fair once upon a time, and had to unlearn it in a hurry when he got to the trenches.
He grabbed the muscular goon's club after the fellow lost interest in holding it, then started swinging it at everybody in a white shirt he could reach. Some of the others at the rally were fighting back, too. Most Confederate white men had done a tour in the Army. They'd seen worse fights than this. But the attack force from the Freedom Party had size, ferocity, youth, and surprise on their side. They also had a joyful zest for the brawl unlike anything Reggie had encountered in the trenches.
He knocked two or three of them flat even so. But then somebody hit him from behind. He staggered and fell. A couple of people—one of them was Bill Foster, who was trying, with no luck at all, to play peacemaker—stepped on him, someone else kicked him in the ribs, and he decided to stay down, lest something worse happen to him.
The ruffians had just about completed routing the rally when police at last appeared. Haifa dozen men in old-fashioned gray took billy clubs off their belts. Their leader blew a whistle and shouted, "That will be quite enough of that!"
"Freedom!" the goons bawled. All of them still on their feet rushed straight at the cops. They had one other thing Reggie Bartlett noticed only while prone: more than a little discipline. They fought like soldiers after a common goal, not like individual hellraisers. The startled policemen went down like wheat under the blades of a reaper. Had one of them drawn a pistol.. . Had one of the Radical Liberals drawn a pistol . .. But no one had. The ruffians, or most of them, got away.
Slowly and painfully, Reggie dragged himself to his feet. He looked around for Bill Foster, and spotted him holding a handkerchief to a bloody nose. A couple of the fallen Freedom Party fighters were also rising. Reggie stooped to grab the club, though quick movement hurt. But showing he was ready to fight meant he didn't have to. The goons lifted a comrade who couldn't get up on his own and, with his arms draped over their shoulders, left the public square.
From up on the platform, Congressman Baird kept saying "This is an outrage! An outrage, I tell you!" over and over again. Nobody paid much attention to him. He wasn't wrong. That didn't make what he had to say useful.
"They break your nose, Bill?" Reggie asked.
"Don't think so." Foster felt of it. "No, they didn't. I just got hit, not clubbed or stomped."
"Bastards," Reggie said. That didn't seem nearly strong enough. He tried again: "Goddamn fucking sons of bitches." That didn't seem strong enough, either, but it came closer. He looked around for his hat, and discovered it had got squashed during the brawl. Picking it up, he asked, "Still like what the Freedom Party stands for?"
Foster suggested the Freedom Party do something illegal, immoral, and anatomically unlikely. His hat, when he found it, was in worse shape than Reggie's. Sadly, he dropped it back onto the grass. Then he said, "The thing is, though, plenty of people will like it. Damn hard to stomach anybody saying anything good about the United States. A couple of times, I wouldn't have minded walloping Baird myself"
"Thinking about it's one thing," Bartlett said. "Doing it, though. .." He shook his head. "People won't be able to stomach that. No way in hell will people be able to stomach that." Bill Foster thought it over, then nodded. "People just aren't so stupid," Reggie said, and his friend nodded again.
Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling sat at his desk—because of his protruding belly, sat some distance behind his desk—clacking away at a typewriter. He would have starved to death in short order had he had to try to make his living as a secretary, but he was a good typist for an Army officer.
He wished he were out in the field instead of banging out a report no one would ever read here in a War Department office in Philadelphia. He'd wished he were in the field instead of back of the lines at First Army headquarters all through the Great War. He could have commanded a battalion, maybe a regiment— maybe even a brigade, considering how fast front-line officers
went down. Of course, he might have gone down himself, but that was the chance you took.
"Dowling!" At the howl from behind him, he made a typographical error. Save that it held the sounds of his name, the howl might have burst from the throat of a trapped wolf.
"Coming, sir." He pushed the chair back far enough to let himself rise, then hurried into the larger, more spacious office behind his own. Sleet beat on the window that gave a blurry view of downtown Philadelphia. Even though it was freezing out there, a steam radiator kept the office warm as toast. Saluting, Dowling asked, "What can I do for you this morning, General Custer?"
Custer stared at him, through him. Dowling had seen that stare before. It meant Custer had been into the bottle he didn't know Dowling knew he had in a desk drawer. No: after a moment, Dowling realized the stare held more than that. Custer's pale, red-tracked eyes roamed the office. Again, he might have been a wild beast in a cage.
"What can I do for you, sir?" his adjutant repeated.
"Do for me?" Custer said slowly; he might have forgotten he'd summoned Dowling in the first place. "You can't do anything for me. No one can do anything for me, no one at all."
Dowling had heard Custer in a great many moods before, but never despairing. "What's wrong, sir?" he asked. "Is there anything I can do to help?"
"No, you can't help me, Major—uh, Lieutenant Colonel." Custer's wits weren't particularly swift, but he hadn't started turning forgetful. As the general continued, Dowling realized that was part of the problem: "I entered West Point in July 1857. July 1857, Lieutenant Colonel: sixty-two years ago come this summer. I have served in the United States Army longer than most men have been alive."
"And served with distinction, sir," Dowling said, which in its own strange way was true. "That's why you have four stars on each shoulder strap, sir; that's why you're here now, still serving your country, at an age when most men"—are dead, but he wouldn't say that—"are sitting in a rocking chair with pipe and slippers."
"What do you think I'm doing now, Dowling?" General Custer demanded. "I've been in the army almost sixty-two years, as I say, and in an active command during nearly the whole of that time." He waved a plump, age-spotted hand. "Where is my active command now, pray tell?"
He was feeling trapped, Dowling realized. Custer's adjutant picked his words with care: "Sir, there aren't a lot of active commands with the country at peace and our foes beaten. And your assignment here—"
"Is only sound and fury, signifying nothing," Custer broke in. "I have no duties: no duties that matter, at any rate. Evaluate the transmission of orders from corps headquarters to divisions and regiments, they told me. Jesus Christ, Dowling, it's a job for a beady-eyed captain, not for me!"
He had a point, a good point. To try to cheer him up, his adjutant had to ignore it. "No doubt they want the benefit of your long experience."
"Oh, poppycock!" Custer snapped. "Nonsense! Drivel! They've put me out to pasture, Lieutenant Colonel, that's what they've done. They don't give two whoops in hell whether I ever write this goddamn evaluation. Even if I do, no one will ever read it. It will sit on a shelf and gather dust. That's what I'm doing now: sitting on a shelf and gathering dust. They got all they could out of me, and now they've put me on the shelf."
"Everyone is grateful for what you did, General," Dowling said. "Would you have headed last year's Remembrance Day parade if that weren't so?"
"So Teddy Roosevelt was generous enough to toss an old dog one last bone," Custer said, a distinct sneer in his voice. "Ha! If he lives long enough, he'll go into the dustbin of the outmoded, too. And if the election returns from last November are any guide, he may get there faster than I have."
Dowling didn't know what to say to that. He judged Custer was likely to be right. The general formerly commanding First Army did have a makework assignment here in Philadelphia. But what else could he expect? He was going to be eighty at the end of the year. He couldn't very well hope to be entrusted with anything of real importance.
He could. He did. "Barrels!" he said. "That's where I want to be working. Sure as hell, Lieutenant Colonel, the Rebs are plotting ways to make theirs better even as we speak. I know they're not going to be allowed to have any, but they're plotting just the same. We'll fight another round with them, see if we don't. I may not live till then, but you will, I expect."
"Wouldn't surprise me if you were right, sir," Dowling said. No one in the U.S. Army trusted the Confederate States, no matter how peaceful they tried to make themselves seem.
"They need me on barrels," Custer said. "Those chowder-heads didn't know what to do with what they had till I showed them. They won't know how to make barrels better, either, you mark my words."
"Sir, there I don't really know if you're right or not," Dowling said, by which he meant Custer was talking through his hat. "Colonel Morrell is doing good work out in Kansas. I've seen a couple of the analyses he's sent in. They're first-rate. I was very impressed." He meant that. The more he had to do with Morrell, the more he was convinced the former commander of the Barrel Brigade would wear four stars long before his late seventies.
"Oh, Morrell's a sound lad, no doubt about that," Custer said, by which he meant Morrell had given him the victories he'd craved. "But he's only a colonel, and he's only a lad. Will they read his analyses, or will they just shelve them alongside of mine? They aren't soldiers here, Dowling; they're nothing but a pack of clerks in green-gray."
That held enough truth to be provocative, not enough to be useful. Dowling said, "Colonel Morrell will make himself noticed, one way or another."
Custer's thoughts were running down their own track, as they often did. He hardly noticed his adjutant's words. "Nothing but a pack of clerks in green-gray," he repeated. "And now they're making me a clerk, too. How am I supposed to turn into a clerk, Dowling, when I've spent the past sixty years as a fighting man?"
"Sir, I know this isn't your first tour at the War Department," Dowling said. "How did you manage before?"
"God only knows," Custer answered gloomily. "I sat behind a desk, the same as I'm sitting behind a desk now. Then, though, I had an Army to help reform. I had wars to look forward to. I had a purpose that helped me forget I was—stuck here. What have I got now? Only the desk, Lieutenant Colonel. Only the desk." His sigh ruffled his bushy mustache.
Exasperation. Fury. Scorn. Occasional astonished admiration. Horror. Those were the emotions Custer usually roused in Abner Dowling. That he should pity the ancient warrior had never crossed his mind till now. Setting Custer to makework was like harnessing an old, worn-out ex-champion thoroughbred to a brewery wagon. He still wanted to run, even if he couldn't any more.
Quietly, Dowling asked, "Can I get you anything, sir? Anything at all that might make you more comfortable?" Even if Custer told him he wanted an eighteen-year-old blonde—and Custer's asking for something along those lines would not have unduly surprised his adjutant, for he still fancied himself a ladies' man, especially when Libbie wasn't around—Dowling resolved to do his best to get him one.
But the general asked for nothing of the sort. Instead, he said, "Can you get me the president's ear? We still have soldiers in action, enforcing our rule on the Canadian backwaters we didn't overrun during the Great War. Even a command like that would be better than sitting around here waiting to die. And, by God, I still owe the Canucks more than a little. The British bastards who killed my brother Tom rode down out of Canada almost forty years ago. Even so late as this, revenge would be sweet."
Dowling wished he'd kept his mouth shut. He had no great desire to go traipsing up into the great American Siberia, no matter what Custer wanted. But, seeing the desperate hope on the old man's face, he said, "I don't know whether I can get President Roosevelt's ear or not, sir. Even if he hears me, I don't know whether he'll listen to me, if you know what I mean."
"Oh, yes." Custer nodded and looked shrewd. "It might be interesting to find out whether Teddy would enjoy keeping me here under his eye and useless better than he would knowing he's sent me to the ends of the earth. Yes, I do wonder how he'd decide there." Reluctantly, Dowling nodded. Teddy Roosevelt would be making exactly that calculation.
Even more reluctantly, Custer's adjutant telephoned Powel House, the president's Philadelphia residence. He was not immediately put through to Theodore Roosevelt. He hadn't expected to be. He left his name—and Custer's name, too—and how to reach him. If the president decided to call back, he would. If he decided not to . . . well, in that case, Dowling had made the effort.
Two days later, the telephone rang. When Dowling answered, a familiar gravelly voice on the other end of the line said, "This is Theodore Roosevelt, Lieutenant Colonel. What can I do for you and what, presumably, can I do for General Custer?"
"Yes, Mr. President, that's why I called," Dowling said, and explained.
A long silence followed. "He wants me to send him up there?" Roosevelt sounded as if he couldn't believe his ears.
"Yes, sir," Dowling answered. "He feels useless here at the War Department. He'd rather be doing something than vegetating. And he wants to rule the Canadians with a rod of iron, you might say, because of what happened to his brother during the Second Mexican War." Loyally, Dowling refrained from offering his own opinion of a transfer to Canada.
"If Tom Custer hadn't got killed, we probably would have lost the battle by the Teton River, because our Gatling guns would have been wrongly placed," Roosevelt said. "But that's neither here nor there, now, I admit." The president paused. Dowling could almost hear the wheels going round inside his head. At last, he said, "Well, by jingo, if that's what General Custer wants, that's what he shall have. Let no one ever say I put my personal differences with him in the way of fulfilling the reasonable desires of the most distinguished soldier the United States have known since George Washington."
"Thank you, your Excellency, on General Custer's behalf," Dowling said. "You have no idea how pleased he'll be at going back under the saddle again."
"Our old warhorse." Roosevelt chuckled, a sound Dowling wasn't sure he liked. "Tell him to pack his long Johns—and you pack yours, too, Lieutenant Colonel."
"Yes, sir." Dowling did his best to sound cheerful. His best, he feared, was far from good enough.