XIII
Hipolito Rodriguez had never been a rich man. He was reasonably confident he would never be a rich man. But he was and always had been a proud man. The Confederate States were and always had been a proud nation. And Sonora and Chihuahua were and always had been states where pride counted for even more than it did elsewhere in the CSA. A poor man who could hold his head up often gathered more respect than a rich man who could not meet his neighbors’ eyes.
When Rodriguez brought his youngest son into Baroyeca, he strode along with pride unusual even for him. Pedro seemed a good deal more diffident than his father—or maybe his feet hurt. He had on the sturdy shoes he’d got from the Freedom Youth Corps. He hadn’t worn them much since getting out of the Corps a few months earlier; sandals were plenty good for farm work. But he didn’t want to seem like a peasant when he came into town.
“They will make a man of you,” Rodriguez said as he and Pedro started up the main street toward the alcalde’s residence.
“I thought the Freedom Youth Corps already did that,” his son replied. He was taller than Hipolito Rodriguez, and wider through the shoulders, too. Like his brothers, he spoke more English than Spanish these days—except, sometimes, with his mother.
“I have nothing bad to say about the Freedom Youth Corps,” Rodriguez told him. “But it is what its name says it is: it is a thing for youths. The Army of the Confederate States of America is a thing for men.”
He hadn’t thought about it that way when he was conscripted. He remembered as much, remembered very clearly. But times had changed. He’d gone into the Confederate Army in the middle of the Great War and been thrown straight into action, first against Red Negroes in Georgia and then against the USA in west Texas. His son would serve in peacetime. With luck, he would get his hitch out of the way and come back to the farm without ever firing a shot in anger. Rodriguez hoped so, anyhow. When you were shooting in anger, the people on the other side had a nasty habit of shooting back. He didn’t know how he’d come through the war unwounded. Luck, no doubt, luck and the Virgin watching over him.
Out of Jaime Diaz’s general store came Felipe Rojas. When Pedro saw the Freedom Youth Corps drillmaster, he automatically stiffened to attention right there in the middle of the street. Rojas’ smile showed several gold teeth. “You don’t need to do that today, Pedro,” he said. “I don’t give you orders any more.”
“Just as well that he stay in practice,” Hipolito Rodriguez said. “I’ve brought him into town to report, because he’s been conscripted.”
“Has he?” Rojas’ eyes widened. “How the years do get on. He would be old enough, of course, but still, it hardly seems possible. Not so long since we had rifles in our own hands, is it?”
“No, indeed. I was just thinking that,” Rodriguez said. Of course, they’d both had Tredegars in their hands a lot more recently than they’d been mustered out of the Army. They’d shown the big landowners who’d run things in Sonora for so long that the Freedom Party was the new power in the land, and that anyone who thought otherwise had better think again.
“A soldier.” Rojas slapped Rodriguez’s son on the back with a big, hard hand. “He’ll do well. What we showed him in the Youth Corps will help him, and he’s a fine young man. Yes, I’m sure he’ll do very well indeed.”
“We’d better go on to the alcalde’s residence,” Rodriguez said. “I wouldn’t want him to get in trouble for reporting late.”
“No, that wouldn’t be the right way to start,” Felipe Rojas agreed. He clapped Pedro on the back again. “Go with God, and God go with you. You’ll be fine. I know you will. Show them what we taught you. They’ll build on that.”
“Sí, señor. Gracias, señor,” Pedro said proudly.
Another youth and his father were also at the alcalde’s residence. He and Pedro started chattering. They’d gone to school together and served in the Freedom Youth Corps together, and now they were going into the Army together. Rodriguez shook his head. It hardly seems possible, Rojas had said, and wasn’t that the truth? No matter how it seemed, though, it was the truth. The years had a way of piling on whether you looked at them or not.
His son had to fill out most of the inevitable paperwork, but there was plenty for Hipolito, too, because Pedro was of course under twenty-one. He signed his name a dozen times, mostly without bothering to look at what he was signing. More than half the forms were in English, anyhow, and he read it less well than he spoke it.
At last, it was done. Essentially, he’d deeded his son to the Confederate States. He hugged Pedro and kissed him on both cheeks. “Be strong,” he said. “Do what they tell you and be strong.” Then he left the alcalde’s residence in a hurry, so neither the clerk there nor his son would see him cry.
He headed for La Culebra Verde. If he wasn’t entitled to drown some sorrows after giving his son to the Army, when could he? Not even Magdalena would complain about that … he hoped.
Before he got to the Green Snake, though, a couple of young men he’d never seen before came up to him. They were both dirty and ragged and weary-looking. One was barefoot; the other wore a pair of sandals that had more patches than original shoe leather. “Buenos días, señor,” the barefoot man said in Spanish. “Do you by any chance need someone to help you with your work?”
“No, for I have three strong sons, thank God,” Rodriguez answered in the same tongue. Out of curiosity, he switched to English: “Do you know this language?”
“No, señor. Lo siento mucho,” the stranger said. “Solamente español.”
Rodriguez had expected nothing different. Dropping back into Spanish himself, he asked, “From which province in the Empire of Mexico do you come?”
Both newcomers in Baroyeca looked alarmed. The man with the patched sandals, who was older and stockier than his friend, replied, “You have made a mistake, señor. Like you, we are citizens of los Estados Confederados.”
“Bullshit,” Rodriguez said in English. They couldn’t even understand that, and he couldn’t imagine a Sonoran or Chihuahuan who didn’t. He returned to Spanish: “Don’t tell me lies. Do you think I’m too stupid to know the difference? Times are hard here, but I know they’re worse south of the border.”
The ragged men sighed in equally ragged unison. That older fellow said, “Very well, señor. Usted tiene razón. We have come from near Mocorito in Sinaloa province.” Rodriguez nodded, unsurprised; Sinaloa lay just south of Sonora. The other man went on, “We have to have work, or we will starve. So will our families, if we cannot send them money.”
“It is as I told you—I have no work for you to do,” Rodriguez said. “If you keep looking, though, maybe you will find someone who does.”
He waited to see what would happen next. If the Sinaloans were hungry enough, desperate enough, or maybe just stupid enough, they might try to get his money without working. If they did, he aimed to fight back. But their shoulders slumped and they went on down the street. As they went, they exclaimed about how fine and fancy everything was. If that didn’t prove they weren’t from the CSA, Rodriguez couldn’t think of what would.
He wondered if they would find someone who’d pay them. They weren’t the first men from the Empire of Mexico he’d seen passing through Baroyeca. He was sure they wouldn’t be the last. Even though the town now boasted electricity, it was a backwater in Sonora, and Sonora was a backwater in the CSA. By the standards prevailing farther south, though, even a Confederate backwater seemed rich and bustling.
I have a dollar in my pocket, he thought. To those fellows, that makes me a rich man. God help them, poor devils.
He walked into La Culebra Verde. Robert Quinn sat at the bar, drinking a bottle of beer. “Hola, Señor Rodriguez,” he said. “What brings you to Baroyeca this morning?”
“Pedro reports to the Confederate Army today,” Rodriguez answered. “I came in with him to fill out papers and to say good-bye.”
“Congratulations to you and congratulations to him,” Quinn said in his deliberate Spanish. “This is a good time to be a young man in the Confederate States. We aren’t going to be pushed around any more.”
Rodriguez wasn’t so sure whether that made this a good time or a bad one. He almost said as much. Then he remembered the two men from Sinaloa who thought times in the CSA were better than those in the Empire of Mexico. He spoke of them instead, meanwhile sitting down beside the Freedom Party man and ordering a beer for himself.
Quinn nodded. “More and more men keep coming north,” he said. “Enough of them do find work to encourage others. We are trying to tighten things at the border, but”—he shrugged—“it is not an easy job.”
“If they do work no one else will or no one else can, I do not suppose it is so very bad,” Rodriguez said, sipping his beer. “But if they take jobs away from Confederates … That would not be good at all.”
“We have to take care of ourselves first,” Quinn agreed. After another pull at his beer, Hipolito Rodriguez began to laugh. Quinn cocked his head to one side, a quizzical look on his face. “What is the joke?”
“In other parts of the Confederate States, people worry the same way about Sonorans and Chihuahuans taking their jobs.”
“Yes, they do, some. Not so much as they used to, I do not think,” Quinn answered seriously. “They have seen that people who come from these parts are good and loyal and work hard. And they have seen that los mallates are the worst enemies the Confederate States have.”
“Yes.” Rodriguez said the same thing in English—“Niggers”—just to show he knew it. “In this country, los mallates are nothing but trouble. They have never been anything but trouble. Los Estados Confederados would be better off without them.”
Quinn waved to the bartender. “Another beer for me, Rafael, and another for my friend here as well.” He turned back to Rodriguez. “It is because you understand this that you are a member of the Partido de Libertad.”
“Is it?” After thinking that over, Rodriguez shook his head. “No. I am sorry, but no. That is not the reason.”
The bartender set the beers in front of his customers. Robert Quinn gave him a quarter and waved away his five cents’ change. After a sip that left foam on his upper lip, he asked, “Why, then?”
“I’ll tell you why.” Rodriguez drank from his beer, too. “I joined the Freedom Party because it was the only one in Sonora that didn’t take me for granted. You really wanted to have me for a member. And you want vengeance against los Estados Unidos. Men from los Estados Unidos tried to kill me. I have not forgotten. I want vengeance against them, too.” But if Pedro fights them, they will shoot back. He took a big sip from his new beer. Life wasn’t simple, dammit.
“Ah, yes, the United States,” Quinn said, as if reminded of the existence of a nation he’d forgotten—and been glad to forget. “Well, my friend, you are right about that. Every dog has its day, but theirs has gone on for too long.”
“If we fight, can we beat them?” Rodriguez asked.
“I am no general,” the Freedom Party man replied. “But I will tell you this: if Jake Featherston says we can beat them, then we can.”
Somewhere up ahead—somewhere not very far up ahead—the state of Houston and the USA ended, and the state of Texas and the CSA began. Colonel Irving Morrell bounced along in a command car. Bounced was the operative word, too, for the command car’s springs had seen better years, while the roads in these parts went from bad to worse.
However bad its springs might have been, though, its pintle-mounted machine gun was in excellent working order. Morrell had carefully checked it before setting out. If it hadn’t been in excellent working order, he wouldn’t have got into the command car in the first place.
Above the growl of the engine, the driver, a weather-beaten private named Charlie Satcher, said, “Looks quiet enough.”
“It always looks quiet enough,” Morrell answered. “Then they start shooting at us.”
Satcher nodded. “Big country,” he remarked.
“Really? I hadn’t noticed,” Morrell said, deadpan. The driver started to say something, caught himself, and grunted out a little laughter instead.
It was a very big country indeed. The horizon seemed to stretch for ever and ever. The sun beat down out of a great blue bowl of a sky. The only motion in the landscape was the tan trail of dust the command car had kicked up, slowly dispersing in the breeze, that and— Morrell suddenly swung the machine gun to the right, and as suddenly took his hands off the triggers. That was only a roadrunner, loping through the dry brush with a lizard’s tail hanging out of the side of its mouth.
“Nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles,” Charlie Satcher said, as if he were the first one ever to bring out the line.
“Not quite nothing,” Morrell answered. “Somewhere out there, those Freedom Party fanatics are bringing guns and ammo into Houston.”
Calling them fanatics made him feel better. If he could paint them as villains, even if only in his own mind, he could do a better job of trying to deal with them. When he wasn’t thinking of them as fanatics, he had to think of them as tough, clever foes. Not all of them belonged to the Freedom Party. Nobody in the Confederate States had much liked losing Houston, and not many people in Houston liked being part of the USA, either. The people who did like it kept quiet. If they didn’t keep quiet, their neighbors made them pay.
“Miles and miles of miles and miles.” Satcher liked to hear himself talk.
Again, he wasn’t wrong. The Confederates put up a few border checkpoints between Texas and Houston, but only a few, and they mostly cared about things passing into Texas, not things leaving it. As far as they were concerned, things passing from Texas into Houston didn’t really cross a border. If the United States felt otherwise, then it was up to the United States to do something about it.
And the United States hadn’t. Even with all the unrest—hell, the out-and-out rebellion—in Houston, the United States hadn’t. Morrell understood why. It would have cost too much, in money and in men. The USA would have had to put up barbed-wire emplacements the whole length of the border, and would have had to man them with an army. It would have been almost like a trench line from the Great War. No government, Democrat or Socialist, had been willing to do the work or deploy the manpower. And so the border remained porous, and so rebellion went right on simmering.
All that unhappy musing flew out of Morrell’s head the moment he spotted a plume of dust not much different from the one his command car was kicking up. This one, though, was coming from the east and heading west: heading straight into Houston. He had every reason to be where he was and doing what he was doing. Did that other auto? Fat chance, he thought.
He tapped Charlie Satcher on the shoulder. “You see that?” he said, pointing.
The driver nodded. “Sure as hell do, Colonel. What do you want to do about it?”
“Stop the son of a bitch,” Morrell answered.
“He may not want to stop,” Satcher observed.
“I know.” Morrell reached for the machine-gun triggers. “We have to persuade him he does want to after all—he just doesn’t know it quite yet.”
“Persuade him.” The driver’s grin showed a broken front tooth. “Right you are, sir.” He turned toward the motorcar that was raising the other dust trail.
Excitement flowered in Morrell. He was going into action, all on his own. He’d seen plenty of action in Houston, much of it brutal and unpleasant. Armored warfare against people who flung Featherston fizzes couldn’t very well be anything but brutal and unpleasant. This, though, this seemed different. This was fox and hound, cat and mouse. It was out in the open, too. Nobody could fling a bottle of flaming gasoline from a window and then disappear.
Before long, whoever was in the other motorcar spotted the one that held Morrell and his driver. Whoever he was, he kept on coming. Maybe that meant he was an innocent, though what an innocent would be doing sneaking over the border was beyond Morrell. More likely, it meant he hadn’t recognized the command car for what it was.
As the two machines got closer, Morrell’s driver said, “They’ve got a lot of people in there—and what’s that one bastard sticking out the window?”
A muzzle flash said it was a rifle. Nothing hit the command car—not for lack of effort, Morrell was sure. “Which side of the border is he on, do you think?” he asked.
“If he’s shooting at me, he’s on the side where I can shoot back,” Satcher answered without hesitation.
“I like the way you think,” Morrell said. The fellow with the rifle in the other motorcar fired again. This time, a bullet slammed into the command car. It must not have hit anything vital, because the machine kept running, and no steam or smoke or flame burst from its innards.
Morrell squeezed the machine gun’s triggers. Brass cartridge cases flew from the breech and clattered down around his feet. Tracers guided the stream of bullets towards and then into the other motorcar. Smoke immediately poured from its engine compartment. It skidded to a stop. The doors on the far side flew open. Several men got out and ran. A bullet knocked one of them down. Another man shot at Morrell from behind the automobile. Morrell hosed bullets back at him. The motorcar caught fire. The rifleman had to pull away from it. That made him an easier target. Down he went, too.
And once the auto started burning, it didn’t want to stop. As soon as the flames reached the passenger compartment, ammunition started cooking off. Some of the rounds were tracers. They gave the fire a Fourth of July feel.
“Ha!” Charlie Satcher said. “They were running guns.”
“Did you expect anything different?” Morrell asked. The driver shook his head.
A bullet cracked past Morrell’s head. That wasn’t one from the fireworks display in the motorcar—it had been deliberately aimed. He ducked, not that that would have done him any good had the round been on target. He’d known only a handful of men who could go through a fire fight without that involuntary reaction. It wasn’t cowardice, just human nature.
He tapped the driver on the back and pointed. “Go around there and give me a better shot at that fellow.”
“Right.” Satcher steered the car in the direction Morrell indicated. The rifleman from the auto coming out of Texas scrambled away, trying to keep the burning vehicle between the command car and himself.
That scramble proved his undoing. He was behind the trunk when either the fire or one of the rounds going off in the passenger compartment reached what the men from Texas had been carrying there. The explosion sent flaming chunks of motorcar flying in all directions. One slammed down about a hundred feet in front of the command car; Satcher almost rolled it steering clear.
No more aimed shots came, though Morrell needed a little while to be sure of that, because rounds did keep cooking off every now and then with a pop-pop-pop that would have been merry if he hadn’t known what caused it. He got a look at the Texan who’d been shooting at him, and wished he hadn’t. The rear bumper had torn off the man’s head and his left arm.
The grim sight didn’t unduly upset his driver. “For all I care, they can bury the bastard in a jam tin,” Satcher said, “either that or leave him out for the buzzards. If I was a buzzard, I’d sooner eat skunk any day of the week.”
His words seemed to come from a long way off. Firing the machine gun left Morrell’s ears temporarily stunned. He hoped the stunning was temporary, anyhow. Some of it probably wasn’t. He knew he didn’t hear as well as he had when he was younger. Would he go altogether deaf in another ten or twenty years? He shrugged. Not much he could do about that. It wasn’t the rarest ailment among soldiers.
“Sir?” Charlie Satcher said.
“What is it?” Morrell’s own voice seemed distant, too.
“I heard you had balls,” the driver answered. “The guy who told me, though, he didn’t know the half of it.”
Morrell shrugged. The motion told him how tense his shoulders had got in the fire fight. He didn’t think of himself as particularly brave. When the shooting started, he didn’t think much at all. Reaction took over. “They started it, Charlie,” he answered.
“Yeah,” Satcher said admiringly. “And you sure as hell finished it.”
“I wonder which side of the border we’re on.” Morrell shrugged again. “Doesn’t matter much, not when their auto went up like that. Nobody can say they weren’t running guns into Houston.”
“Damn well better not try,” the driver said. “Me, I thought I was gonna shit myself when that goddamn back seat landed in front of us.”
“Back seat? Is that what it was?” Morrell said. Charlie Satcher nodded. Morrell managed a laugh. “I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t notice. I was busy just then. You did a hell of a job getting around it. I noticed that.”
“Neither one of us would’ve been real happy if I hit it,” Satcher said. Morrell couldn’t very well argue with that. The driver asked, “Shall we head on back to Lubbock, sir?”
“I think we’d better,” Morrell replied. “I want to report to General MacArthur, and he’ll want to report to the War Department. I suppose they’ll report to the president, or maybe to the State Department. Somebody will have to figure out how loud we squawk.”
“Squawk, hell,” Satcher said. “We don’t scream our heads off, they deserve to roll like that last Confederate fucker’s.”
Morrell only shrugged. “I won’t tell you you’re wrong, but the people in Philly are liable to. Because I can tell you what Richmond’s going to say. Richmond’s going to say they didn’t know anything about these fellows, they didn’t have anything to do with them, and they aren’t responsible for them.”
“My ass,” Charlie Satcher said succinctly.
“Now that you mention it, yes,” Morrell agreed, and the driver laughed. But Morrell went on, “You know it’s crap, I know it’s crap, and Jake goddamn Featherston knows it’s crap, too, but how do you go about proving it’s crap?”
“Screw proving it,” Satcher said. “Blow the bastards to hell and gone anyway.”
“I do like the way you think,” Morrell said.
Brigadier General Abner Dowling remembered George Armstrong Custer. There had been times—a great many times—when Dowling’s dearest wish would have been to forget entirely the officer whose adjutant he’d been for so long. Things didn’t seem to work that way, though. All those years with Custer had marked him for life. Scarred him for life, he would have been inclined to say in his less charitable moments. This was one of those days.
When Dowling thought of Custer nowadays, he thought of the general after the Great War, when Custer had come back to Philadelphia to fill an office and count corks and write elaborate reports on the best deployment of paper clips in the U.S. Army. With nothing real, nothing important, to do, Custer had wanted to jump out of a window. Dowling often thought the only thing that stopped him was his office’s being on the ground floor.
And now Dowling knew exactly how his superior had felt. Since coming back from Salt Lake City after the occupation of Utah ended, he’d filled an office and written elaborate reports on the best way to transport rubber bands to combat units. That was how it seemed, anyhow. He was on the shelf, and he was damned if he knew how to get off again.
If he was going to be stuck in Philadelphia, he’d hoped the War Department might at least channel reports of what was going on in Utah through him. He’d spent a lot of years—a lot of thankless years—in the state. He wondered if Winthrop W. Webb was still in business, or if the Mormons had figured out who Webb’s real bosses were and arranged an accident for him.
Try as Dowling would, he couldn’t find out. Somebody in the War Department was surely tending to affairs in Utah. Whoever it was, it wasn’t Dowling. He couldn’t even find out who it was. The only thing his efforts to find out got him was a visit from Lieutenant Colonel John Abell.
The more Dowling saw the General Staff officer, the less he liked him, even though Abell had been the one who’d told him he’d made general-officer grade. The man was slim and pale—downright bloodless, in fact. Had the U.S. Army been made up of ghosts rather than men, he would have been one of the handsomest ones in it. As things were, he made Dowling want to turn up the heat in the office even though the day was warm.
“Sir, you have been poking your nose into matters that do not concern you,” Abell said. “We discourage that.”
We? You have a tapeworm? Dowling wondered. He remembered Irving Morrell talking about Abell during the war. At the time, he’d been sure Morrell was exaggerating. Now he found the other man had been speaking the gospel truth. He eyed the General Staff lieutenant colonel’s lean, pallid countenance and picked his words with care: “I don’t believe Utah’s affairs can fail to concern me, not when I was there so long.”
“If the War Department feels otherwise, why should you disagree?” Lieutenant Colonel Abell inquired.
“Because if I had anything to do with Utah, I could be useful to the Department,” Dowling answered. “With what people have me doing now—I mean, not doing now—I’m useless. Useful is better.”
“Don’t you trust the judgment of your superiors as to what is useful and what is not?” Abell asked silkily.
By the way spoke, he might have been one of those superiors, even if Dowling outranked him. General Staff officers, Dowling thought scornfully, and tried not to let his annoyance show. Even if Abell had a lower grade, he enjoyed much better connections. And so, still speaking carefully, Dowling said, “A quartermaster sergeant could do most of what I’ve been doing since I came back here, whereas I’ve got some specialized knowledge no sergeant can match. Using me without using that knowledge is inefficient.”
“Possibly,” Abell said, which meant he wasn’t about to admit it. “A pleasure talking to you.” He got to his feet and started for the door. With a hand on the knob, he turned back. “You know Colonel Morrell, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes.” Dowling nodded. “We worked together on the breakthrough that took Nashville.” That might have been impolitic, since the breakthrough had violated War Department doctrine on how to use barrels. Dowling didn’t much care, since it had also gone a long way toward making the Confederates throw in the towel.
“How interesting,” Lieutenant Colonel Abell said with a smile that displayed a lot of expensive dentistry. And then, silent as a specter, he was gone. Dowling wondered if he ought to have his office exorcised.
He’d hoped Abell’s questions would lead to something better in the way of work. For the next couple of weeks, his hopes were disappointed. He read about Irving Morrell’s encounter with gun runners on the border between Texas and Houston in the newspapers. Nobody in the War Department asked him about it in any official way. He wondered why Abell had bothered confirming that they were acquainted. The better to blackball me, he thought.
But, somewhat to his surprise, he did see the General Staff officer again. When John Abell next appeared—materialized?—in his office, the lieutenant colonel’s face bore a smile that seemed less than perfectly friendly. “So you are friends with Colonel Morrell, are you?” Abell said, a note of challenge in his voice. “And you’ve done the same sort of work, have you?”
Dowling hadn’t said he was friends with Morrell. He admired Morrell’s talent; what Morrell thought of him he wasn’t nearly so sure. But, sensing that a yes would annoy Lieutenant Colonel Abell more than a no, he nodded defiantly and said, “That’s right.”
“Very well, Brigadier General Dowling. In that case, I have some orders for you.” Abell spoke as if washing his hands of him.
To Dowling, anything would have been better than what he was doing now. “And those orders are … ?” he asked eagerly.
Abell heard that eagerness. It made him blink. By the fruit salad on his chest, he’d stayed in Philadelphia through the Great War. He no doubt thought his role more important than those of soldiers who actually went out and fought the enemy, too. He might even have been right, but Dowling didn’t care to dwell on that. “Sir, you will be sent to Kentucky,” he said now. “Your duty there will be similar to Colonel Morrell’s in Houston: you will help control agitation against the government of the United States. This does also relate to your experience in Utah, would you not agree?”
“Yes, I’d say that’s true,” Dowling answered cautiously. “You’re coming as close as you can without a real war to sending me into combat, aren’t you?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Abell asked with sardonic satisfaction.
But that satisfaction slipped when Dowling gave him another yes instead of a no, saying, “You bet it is. I’ve wanted to get into the field for years. They wouldn’t take me away from Utah when we fought the Japs, dammit.”
“Well, you’re going to get your wish.” Lieutenant Colonel Abell plainly thought he was out of his mind.
“When do I leave?” Dowling asked. “Where exactly do I go? All over Kentucky, or somewhere in particular?”
“I don’t have the precise details yet,” Abell said. “I assure you, they will be passed on in good time. In the meanwhile, you are to continue with the duties you have already been assigned.”
“Thank you so much,” Dowling said sourly. The General Staff officer took no notice of his tone, which might have been just as well. Abell departed with a salute that mocked military courtesy instead of reinforcing it. Now Dowling was the one who ignored the slight. He would have ignored not only a slight but a large if that meant escaping from Philadelphia.
Knowing the speed at which the War Department moved, he expected in good time to mean a month or six weeks. In reality, he got his orders eleven days after Lieutenant Colonel Abell’s visit. On reflection, he was less surprised than at first glance. The military bureaucrats in War Department headquarters were probably as glad to see him gone as he was to go. He’d been General Custer’s right-hand man, after all, and Custer and the War Department had got along like rattlesnake and roadrunner—and who’d ended up eating whom was anybody’s guess.
He was on a train the next day, bound for Kentucky. He could have left Philadelphia even sooner if he’d wanted to take an airliner. He was content to stay on the ground. When he was a boy, there’d been no such things as airliners. When he was a boy, there’d been no such things as aeroplanes (or airplanes, as he saw the word spelled more and more often in newspapers and magazines). If one of them could carry two dozen people in reasonable comfort three or four times as fast as a train or a motorcar ran … That’s nice, Dowling thought. In an emergency, he would have flown. Without an emergency, no.
For one thing, trains boasted dining cars. Nothing he’d heard about food on airliners tempted him to sample it. The meals aboard the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Cincinnati Limited, on the other hand, fully measured up to Dowling’s exacting standards. He was sorry to have to leave the train and cross the Ohio into Kentucky.
It was late afternoon when a driver took him from Cincinnati over the bridges across the river and into Covington. A long line of northbound autos waited to cross the bridge. “What’s their trouble?” Dowling asked.
“They have to be searched, sir,” the driver answered. “You’re new here, aren’t you? We don’t want those Freedom Party bastards running guns and explosives up into the real United States.”
The real United States. Those four words spoke volumes. Dowling had ordered such precautions himself in Utah. He hadn’t thought they would be necessary here, but maybe he’d been naive. You’re new here, aren’t you? That spoke volumes, too. This game was being played for keeps.
No one fired at his motorcar on the way to the local Army encampment. No one fired, but he got plenty of hints he was in hostile country just the same. The graffiti shouted FREEDOM! or CSA! They showed either a blue or a red St. Andrew’s cross: quick takes on the Confederate battle flag and the Freedom Party banner based on it.
In Utah, the occupation authorities would have cracked down on people who scribbled such things. In Utah, though, the occupation authorities had been the only formal power in the land. Here … Here there was also the state government—and that was in the hands of the Freedom Party. The Army faced an uphill fight it hadn’t had to worry about farther west.
“You want to hear something funny, sir?” the driver said as the green-gray Ford pulled up in front of BOQ.
“I,” Dowling answered most sincerely, “would love to hear something funny.”
“You know who our biggest backers here are?” the soldier asked.
“From everything I saw, I wondered if we had any backers here,” Dowling said.
“Oh, we do, sir. There’s one bunch of folks in this town—one bunch of folks in this whole goddamn state—who’d do anything in the world for us, anything at all. That’s the niggers. They don’t want one goddamn thing to do with the Confederate States, and can you blame ’em?”
“Not me,” Dowling admitted, but he couldn’t see how they’d help much, either.