IV
Colonel Irving Morrell was elbow-deep in the engine compartment of the new barrel when somebody shouted his name. “Hang on for a second,” he yelled back without looking up. To Sergeant Michael Pound, he said, “What do you think of this carburetor?”
“Whoever designed it ought to be staked out in the hot sun, with a trail of honey running up to his mouth for the ants to follow,” Pound answered at once. “Maybe another honey trail, too—lower down.”
“Whew!” Morrell shuddered. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Sergeant: I may come up with nasty ideas, but you have worse ones.”
Someone yelled his name again, adding, “You’re ordered to report to the base commandant immediately, Colonel! Immediately!”
That made Morrell look up from what he was doing. It also made him look down at himself—in dismay. He wore a mechanic’s green-gray coveralls whose front was liberally smeared and spattered with grease. He’d rolled up the coveralls’ sleeves, but that only meant his hands and forearms had got filthy instead. He wiped them on a rag, but that was hardly more than a token effort.
“Can’t I clean up a little first?” he asked.
The messenger—a sergeant—shook his head. “Sir, I wouldn’t if I were you. When Brigadier General Ballou said immediately, he meant it. It’s got to do with the mess down in Houston.”
Sergeant Pound, who’d kept on guddling inside the engine compartment, poked his head up at that. “You’d better go, sir,” he said.
He had no business butting into Morrell’s affairs, which didn’t mean he was wrong. After the war, the USA had made a United State out of the chunk of Texas they conquered from the CSA. Houston had always been the most reluctant of the United States, even more so than Kentucky, and looked longingly across the border toward the country from which it had been torn. Since the Freedom Party triumphed in the Confederacy, Houston hadn’t been reluctant—it had been downright insurrectionary. It had a Freedom Party of its own, which had swept local elections in 1934 and sent a Congressman to Philadelphia. Every day seemed to bring a new riot.
Tossing the rag to the ground, Morrell nodded to the messenger. “Take me to him. If it’s got to do with Houston, it won’t wait.”
Brigadier General Charles Ballou, the commandant at Fort Leavenworth, was a round little man with a round face and an old-fashioned gray Kaiser Bill mustache. Morrell saluted on coming into his office. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said. “I apologize for the mess I’m in.”
“It’s all right, Colonel,” Ballou said. “I wanted you here as fast as possible, and here you are. I believe you know Brigadier General MacArthur?”
“Yes, sir.” Morrell turned to the other officer in the room and saluted once more. “Good to see you again, sir. It’s been a while.”
“So it has.” Daniel MacArthur returned the salute, then sucked in smoke from a cigarette he kept in a long holder. He made an odd contrast to Ballou, for he was very long, very lean, and very craggy. He’d commanded a division under Custer during the war, which was where he and Morrell had come to know each other. He’d had a star on each shoulder even then; he was only a handful of years older than Morrell, and had been the youngest division commander and one of the youngest general officers in the U.S. Army. Since then, perhaps not least because he always said what he thought regardless of consequences, his career hadn’t flourished.
Brigadier General Ballou said, “MacArthur has just been assigned as military commandant of Houston.”
“That’s right.” Daniel MacArthur thrust out a granite jaw. “And I want a sizable force of barrels to accompany me there. Nothing like armor, I would say, for discouraging rebels against the United States. Who better than yourself, Colonel, to command such a force?”
His voice had a certain edge to it. He’d tried to break through Confederate lines with infantry and artillery alone. He’d failed, repeatedly. With barrels, Morrell had succeeded. Does he want me to fail now? Morrell wondered. But he could answer only one way, and he did: “Sir, I am altogether at your service. I wish I had more modern barrels to place at your disposal, but even the obsolete ones will serve against anything but other barrels.”
MacArthur nodded brusquely. He stubbed out the cigarette, then put another one in the holder and lit it. “Just so,” he said. “How many barrels and crews can you have ready to board trains and move south by this time three days from now? We are going to put the fear of the Lord and of the United States Army in the state of Houston.”
“Yes, sir.” Morrell thought for a bit, then said, “Sir, I can have thirty ready in that time. The limit isn’t barrels; it’s crews. The modern ones need only a third as many men as the old-fashioned machines.”
“Thirty will do,” MacArthur said. “I’d expected you to say twenty, or perhaps fifteen. Now I expect you to live up to your promise. You may go, Colonel.” He’d always had the sweetness and charm of an alligator snapper turtle. But, if you needed someone to bite off a hand, he was the man for the job.
Fuming, Morrell left Brigadier General Ballou’s office. Fuming still, he had thirty-two barrels ready to load onto flatcars at the required time. Daniel MacArthur’s cigarette and holder twitched in his mouth when he counted the machines. He said not a word.
The trains left on time. People started shooting at them as soon as they passed from Kansas to Sequoyah, which had also belonged to the CSA before the war. Sequoyah had been a Confederate state; it was not a state in the USA. It was occupied territory. The United States did not want it, and the feeling was mutual.
Before long, Morrell put men back in the barrels as the train rattled south and west. They could use the machine guns to shoot back. More shots came their way in the east, where the Five Civilized Tribes had dominated life in Confederate times. The United States weren’t soft on Indians, as the Confederate States had been—especially not on Indians who’d looked to Richmond rather than Philadelphia.
But, bad as Sequoyah was, it didn’t prepare anybody for Houston. The train was two days late getting into Lubbock because of repeated sabotage to the tracks. Signs screamed out warnings: SABOTEURS WILL BE SHOT WITHOUT TRIAL! “Maybe they can’t read here,” Sergeant Pound suggested after one long, long delay.
Then they passed a trackside gallows with three bodies dangling from it. One of the bodies had a Confederate battle flag draped over it. That was what Morrell thought at first, anyhow. Then he realized the colors were reversed, which made it a Freedom Party flag, not one from the CSA.
He’d seen plenty of YANKS OUT! graffiti when he was stationed up in Kamloops, British Columbia. Those were as nothing next to the ones he saw as the train slowed to a stop coming into the Lubbock railroad yard. LEAVE US ALONE! was a common favorite. CSA! was quick and easy to write. So were the red-white-red stripes and the blue X’s that suggested Confederate flags. LET US GO BACK TO OUR COUNTRY! was long, and so less common; the same held true for HOUSTON WAS A TRAITOR! But the one word seemingly everywhere was FREEDOM!
“Good Lord, sir!” Sergeant Pound said, eyeing the graffiti with much less equanimity than he’d shown rolling past the hanged Houstonians. “What have we got ourselves into?”
“Trouble,” Morrell answered. That was the only word that came to mind.
“We will advance into downtown Lubbock,” Brigadier General MacArthur declared as the barrels came down off their flatcars. “I have declared full martial law in this state. That declaration is now being published in newspapers and broadcast over the wireless. The citizens of Houston are responsible for their own behavior, and have been warned of this. If anyone hinders your progress towards or through the city in any way, shoot to kill. Do not allow yourselves to be endangered. Is that clear?”
No one denied it. Daniel MacArthur climbed up onto the turret of one of the modern barrels (to Morrell’s relief, MacArthur didn’t choose his). He struck a dramatic pose, saying, Forward! without words. The barrels rumbled south, toward central Lubbock.
They couldn’t advance at much above a walking pace, because most of them were slow, flatulent leftovers from the Great War. Morrell knew the handful of modern machines could have got there in a third the time. Whether that would have done them any good was another question.
Lubbock didn’t look like a town that had seen rioting. It looked like a town that had seen war. Blocks weren’t just burnt out. They were shattered, either by artillery fire or bombardment from the air. The twin stenches of sour smoke and old death lingered, now weaker, now stronger, but never absent.
Not many people were on the streets. The eyes of the ones who were … In Canada, plenty of people had hated and resented American soldiers for occupying the country. Morrell had thought he was used to it. But, as with the graffiti, what was on the faces of the people here put Canada in the shade. These people didn’t just want him gone. They didn’t even just want him dead. They wanted him to suffer a long time before he died. If he ever fell into their hands, he would, too.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a shot rang out from an apartment building that hadn’t been wrecked. A bullet sparked off the barrel Daniel MacArthur was riding, about a foot from his leg.
At the sound of the shot, all the men and women on the street automatically threw themselves flat. They knew what was coming. And it came. Half a dozen barrels opened fire on that building, the old ones with their side-mounted machine guns, the new with turret cannon and coaxial machine guns. Windows vanished. So did a couple of big stretches of brick wall between the windows as cannon shells struck home. Glass and fragments of brick flew in all directions. People on the street crawled out of the way; they knew better than to get up and expose themselves to the gunfire.
Through it all, Daniel MacArthur never moved a muscle. He had nerve and he had style. Based on what Morrell remembered from the Great War, none of that surprised him. Did MacArthur have brains? Morrell wasn’t so sure there.
Only after the front of the apartment building was wrecked did the brigadier general wave the barrels forward once more. They make a desert and they call it peace, Morrell thought. But no one fired any more shots before the armored detachment reached its perimeter in the center of town.
Once they got there, MacArthur summoned reporters from the Gazette and the Statesman, the two local newspapers. He said, “Gentlemen, here is something your readers need to know: if they interfere with the U.S. Army or disobey military authority, they will end up dead. And, having died, they will be buried in the soil of the United States, for they cannot and will not detach this state from this country. All they can do is spill their own blood to no purpose. Take that back to your plants and print it.”
They did. The same message went out over the wireless, and in the papers in El Paso and other towns in Houston. Contingents of Morrell’s barrels, along with infantrymen and state police, reinforced it. The rioting eased. Morrell was as pleased as he was surprised. Maybe Brigadier General MacArthur was pretty smart after all. Or maybe someone on the other side of the border had decided the rioting should ease for the time being. Morrell wished like hell that hadn’t occurred to him.
Miguel and Jorge Rodriguez stood side by side in the farmhouse kitchen. They both looked very proud. They wore identical broad-brimmed cloth hats, short-sleeved cotton shirts, sturdy denim shorts, socks, and stout shoes. They also wore identical proud smiles.
Hats, shirts, and shorts were of the light brown color the Confederate Army, for no reason Hipolito Rodriguez had ever been able to understand, called butternut. On the pocket above the left breast of each shirt was sewn a Confederate battle flag with colors reversed: the emblem of the Freedom Party.
“I will miss your work,” Rodriguez told his two older sons. “I will miss it, but the country needs it.”
“That’s right, Father,” Jorge said. “And they’ll pay us money—not a lot of money, but some—to do the work.”
“I’ll help you, Father,” Pedro—the youngest son—said. He wasn’t old enough to join the Freedom Youth Corps yet, and had been sick-jealous of his brothers ever since they did. Being useful on the farm wasn’t much consolation, but it was what he had, and he made the most of it.
“I know you will.” Rodriguez set a hand on his shoulder. “You’re a good boy. All of you are good boys.”
“Sí,” his wife said. She probably hadn’t followed the whole conversation, most of which was in English, but she got that. In Spanish, she went on, “I’ll miss you while you are gone.” The tears in her eyes spoke a universal language.
“Father was right,” Miguel said importantly. “The country does need us, so you shouldn’t cry. We’ll do big things for Sonora, big things for Baroyeca. I hear”—his voice dropped to an excited whisper—“I hear we are going to put in the poles to carry the wires to bring electricity down from Buenavista. Electricity!”
Instead of being impressed, Magdalena Rodriguez was practical: “We already have poles to bring the telegraph. Why not use those?”
Miguel and Jorge looked at each other. Plainly, neither one of them knew the answer. Just as plainly, neither one wanted to admit it. At last, Jorge said, “Because these poles are special, Mother.” He might not even have noticed switching back to Spanish to talk to Magdalena.
“Come on, boys,” Hipolito said. “Let’s go into town.” His sons had grumbled that they were almost grown men, that they were going off to do men’s work, and that they didn’t need their father escorting them to Baroyeca. He’d explained he was proud of them and wanted to show them off. He’d also explained he would wallop them if they grumbled any more. They’d stopped.
Before they left, he made sure his own Freedom Party pin was on his shirt. They trooped out of the farmhouse together. Neither the crow that fluttered up from the roof nor the two lizards that scuttled into a hole seemed much impressed. Before long, Rodriguez’s sons were less delighted, too. “My feet hurt,” Miguel complained. Jorge nodded.
“This happened to me when I went into the Army,” Rodriguez said. “Shoes pinch. Up till then, I hadn’t worn anything but sandals.” He looked down at his feet. He wore sandals now. They were more comfortable than shoes any day. But comfort wasn’t always the only question. “For some of what you do, for working in the mountains, sandals won’t protect your feet. Good shoes like those will.”
“They’ll give us blisters,” Jorge said. Now Miguel was the one who nodded in agreement.
“For a little while, yes,” Rodriguez answered. “Then your feet will toughen up, and you’ll be fine.” He could afford to say that. His feet weren’t the ones suffering.
When they came to Baroyeca—Jorge limping a little and trying not to show it, for his shoes pinched tighter than Miguel’s—Rodriguez led them to the town square between the alcalde’s house and the church, as he’d been instructed to do. There he found most of the boys in the area, all standing solemnly in ranks that weren’t so neat as they should have been. One of the new members of the guardía civil, a man who’d been a sergeant during the war, was in charge of them.
“¡Libertad, Hipolito!” he called. “These are your boys?”
“My older ones, Felipe,” Rodriguez answered. “¡Libertad!”
“They’ll do fine,” Felipe Rojas said. “They won’t have too much nonsense to knock out of them. Some of these little brats …” He shook his head. “Well, you can guess which ones.”
“A lot of them will be ones whose fathers don’t belong to the Party,” Rodriguez predicted. Felipe Rojas nodded. Rodriguez eyed the youths. He couldn’t tell by the uniforms; those were all the same. But the stance gave away who was who a lot of the time, that and whether a boy looked eager or frightened.
The bell in the church struck nine. Rodriguez let out a sigh of relief. He’d been told to get here before the hour. He hadn’t realized he’d cut it so close.
A few minutes later, another boy tried to join the ranks in the square. Rojas ran him off, shouting, “You don’t deserve to be here! You can’t even obey orders about when to come. You’re a disgrace to your uniform. Get out! Get out!”
“But, señor—” protested his father, who was not a Party man.
“No!” Rojas said. “He had his orders. He disobeyed them. You helped, no doubt. But anyone who doesn’t understand from the start that the Freedom Youth Corps is about obedience and discipline doesn’t deserve to be in it. Get him out of here, and you can go to the devil with him.” The boy slunk away, his face a mask of misery. His father followed, hands clenched into impotent fists. He was not the least important man in Baroyeca, but he’d been treated as if he were.
Robert Quinn came into the square, pushing a wheelbarrow full of shovels. “Hello, boys,” he said. “¡Libertad!”
“¡Libertad!” they echoed raggedly. Some of them were still looking after the youngster who’d been sent away.
“These are your spades,” Quinn said in his accented but fluent Spanish. “You will have the privilege of using them to make Sonora a better place.” Most of them smiled at that, liking the idea.
“These are your spades,” Felipe Rojas echoed. “You will have the privilege of taking care of them, of keeping them sharp, of keeping them shiny, of keeping their handles polished. You will take them everywhere you go in the Freedom Youth Corps. You will sleep with them, por Dios. And you will enjoy sleeping with them, more than you would with a woman. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? Answer when I talk to you!”
“Sí, señor,” they chorused in alarm.
Now Hipolito Rodriguez smiled, and he wasn’t the only man his age who did. Rojas’ rant sounded much like what sergeants had said at the training camp during the war, except they’d been talking about rifles, not spades. Rojas took a shovel from the wagon and tossed it, iron blade up, to the closest youth. The boy awkwardly caught it. Another shovel flew, and another, till every boy had one.
“Attention!” Rojas shouted. They came to what they imagined attention to be. There were as many versions as there were boys. Rodriguez smiled again. So did the rest of the fathers and other men in the square. They’d been through the mill. They knew what attention was, even if their sons didn’t.
Felipe Rojas took a shovel from a youngster and showed the boys of the Freedom Youth Corps how to stand at attention, the tool lightly gripped in his right hand. More or less clumsily, the boys imitated him. He tossed the shovel back to the youth, who also came to attention.
Another sharp command (all of these were in English): “Shoulder—spades!” Again, the boys made a hash of it. One of them almost brained the youngster beside him. Hipolito Rodriguez didn’t laugh at that. He remembered what a deadly weapon an entrenching tool could be.
Again, Rojas took the shovel from the boy. He stood at attention with it, then smoothly brought it up over his shoulder. After demonstrating once more, he returned it.
“Now you try,” he told the youths. “Shoulder—spades!” They did their best. Rojas winced. “That was terrible,” he said. “I’ve seen burros that could do a better job. But you’ll improve. We’ll practice it till your right shoulders grow calluses. You’ll find out.” His voice, like the voice of any proper drill sergeant making a promise like that, was full of gloating anticipation.
He showed them left face, right face, and about-face. He marched them, raggedly, across the square. No one hit anyone else with a shovel as they turned and countermarched. Why nobody hit anybody else Rodriguez couldn’t have said. He thought he ought to go light a candle in the church to show his gratitude to the Virgin for the miracle.
“I have one last piece of advice for you,” Felipe Rojas said when the boys had got to their starting place without casualties. “Here it is. You’ve been fooling your fathers and talking back to your mothers ever since you found out you could get away with it. Don’t try it with me, or with any other Freedom Youth Corps man. You’ll be sorry if you do. You have no idea how sorry you’ll be. But some of you will find out. Boys your age are damn fools. We’ll get rid of some of that, though. You see if we don’t.”
Some of them—most of them—didn’t believe him. No boys of that age believed they were fools. They thought they knew everything there was to know—certainly more than the idiot fathers they had the misfortune to be saddled with. They’d find out. And, in the Freedom Youth Corps, they wouldn’t have to bang heads with their fathers while they were finding out. That might make the Corps worthwhile all by itself.
Robert Quinn drifted over to Rodriguez. “Two boys going in, eh, señor? Good for you, and good for them. They’re likely-looking young men.”
“They aren’t young men yet,” Rodriguez said. “They just think they are. That’s why the Freedom Youth Corps will be good for them, I think.”
“I think you are right, Señor Rodriguez,” the Freedom Party organizer said. “This will teach them many of the things they will need to know if, for example, they are called into the Army.”
Rodriguez looked at the English-speaker who’d come from the north. “How can they be called into the Army, Señor Quinn? There has been no conscription in los Estados Confederados since the end of the Great War.”
“This is true,” Quinn said. “Still, the Freedom Party aims to change many things. We want the country strong again. If we are not allowed to call up our own young men to serve the colors, are we strong or are we weak?”
“Weak, señor, without a doubt,” Hipolito Rodriguez replied. “But los Estados Unidos are strong now. What will they do if we begin conscription once more?”
“This is not for you to worry about. It is not for me to worry about, either,” Quinn said. “It is for Jake Featherston to take care of. And he will, Señor Rodriguez. You may rely on that.” He spoke as certainly as the priests did of Resurrection.
And Rodriguez said, “Oh, I do.” He meant it, too. Like so many others in the CSA, he wouldn’t have joined the Freedom Party if he hadn’t.
“Well, well,” Colonel Abner Dowling said, studying the Salt Lake City Bee. “Who would have thought it, Captain?”
“What’s that, sir?” Angelo Toricelli asked.
Dowling tapped the story on page three with his fingernail. “The riots in Houston,” he told his adjutant. “They just go on and on, now up, now down, world without end, amen.” He was not a man immune to the pleasure of watching someone else struggle through a tough time. Serving under General George Custer, he’d had plenty of tough times of his own. He’d come to savor those that happened to other people, not least because they sometimes ended up getting him off the hook.
Captain Toricelli said, “Of course they go on and on. The Freedom Party in the CSA keeps stirring things up there. If we could seal off the border between Houston and Texas, we’d be able to put a lid on things there.”
“I wish that were true, but I don’t think it is,” Dowling said. Toricelli looked miffed. Dowling remembered looking miffed plenty of times when General Custer said something particularly idiotic. Now the shoe was on the other foot. He’d been stuck then. His adjutant was now. And he didn’t think he was being an idiot. He explained why: “The way things are these days, Captain, don’t you believe the Confederates could pull strings just as well by wireless?”
“Pretty hard to smuggle rifles in by wireless,” Toricelli remarked.
“If not from Texas, Houston could get them from Chihuahua,” Dowling said. “To stop the traffic, we’d really need to seal our whole border with the Confederate States. I’d love to, but don’t hold your breath. There’s too much land, and not enough people to cover it. I wish things were different, but I don’t think they are.”
Toricelli pondered that. At last, reluctantly, he nodded. “I suppose you’re right, sir,” he said with a sigh. “If we can’t seal off Utah, we probably won’t be able to seal off Houston, either.”
That stung. Dowling wished the USA would have been able to keep contraband out of the state where he was stationed. While he was at it, he wished for the moon. The Mormons had their caches of rifles. The reason they didn’t use them was simple: enough soldiers held down Utah to make any uprising a slaughter. Even the locals understood that. However much they hated the U.S. Army, they knew what it could do.
“May I see the story, sir?” Captain Toricelli asked, and Dowling passed him the Bee. He zipped through; he read very fast. When he was done, he looked up and said, “They’ve got plenty of barrels down there, and it sounds like they’re doing a good job. I wish we had some.”
Dowling’s experience with barrels during the Great War had not been altogether happy. Wanting to mass them against War Department orders, Custer had had him falsify reports that went in to Philadelphia. Custer had succeeded, and made himself into a hero and Dowling into a hero’s adjutant. Custer had never thought about the price of failure. Dowling had. If things had gone wrong, they’d have been court-martialed side by side.
Maybe not thinking about the price of failure was what marked a hero. On the other hand, maybe it just marked a damn fool.
Still, despite Dowling’s mixed feelings about barrels, Toricelli had a point. “We could use some here,” Dowling admitted. “I’ll take it up with Philadelphia. I wonder if they have any to spare, or if they’re using them all in Houston.”
“They’d better not be!” his adjutant exclaimed. That didn’t mean they weren’t, and both Dowling and Toricelli knew it.
That afternoon, Heber Young came to call on the commandant of Salt Lake City. The unofficial head of the proscribed Mormon church looked grave. “Colonel, have you provocateurs among the … believers of this state?” he asked, not naming the faith to which he couldn’t legally belong.
“I have agents among them, certainly. I’d be derelict in my duty if I didn’t,” Dowling replied. “But provocateurs? No, sir. Why do you ask?”
“Because … certain individuals … have been urging a … more assertive course on us in our efforts to … regain our freedom of conscience.” Young picked his words with enormous, and obvious, care. “It occurred to me that, if we become more assertive, the occupying authorities might use that as justification for more oppression.”
If we get out of line even a little, you’ll squash us. That was what he meant. Being a scrupulously polite man, he didn’t quite come out and say it. Abner Dowling’s jowls wobbled as he shook his head. “No, sir. I give you my word of honor: I have not done any such thing. My desire—and it is also my government’s desire—is for peace and quiet in the state of Utah. I do not wish to do anything—anything at all—to disturb what peace and quiet we already have.”
Heber Young eyed him. “I believe I believe you,” he said at last, and Dowling couldn’t help smiling at the scrupulous precision of his phrasing. Young continued, “One way to insure peace and quiet, of course, would be to grant us the liberties the citizens of the rest of the United States enjoy.”
“There are certain difficulties involved with that, you know,” Dowling said. “Your people’s conduct during the Second Mexican War, the Mormon revolt of 1915, the assassination of General Pershing … How long do you suppose it would be, Mr. Young, before Utah made Houston seem a walk in the park by comparison?”
“I recognize the possibility, Colonel,” Young replied, which was as much as he’d ever admitted. “But if you do not grant us our due liberties, would you not agree we will always be vulnerable to provocateurs? And I will take the liberty of asking you one other question before I go: if these men are not yours, who does give them their orders? For I am quite sure someone does. Good day.” He got to his feet, set his somber homburg on his head, and departed.
Had Young been any other Mormon, Dowling would have called him back and demanded to know more. Dowling would have felt no compunctions about squeezing him if he’d denied knowing more, either. But Heber Young? No. His … goodwill was too strong a word. His tolerance toward the occupiers went a long way toward keeping the lid on Utah. Dowling didn’t want to squander it.
And so Young left occupation headquarters in Salt Lake City undisturbed. But the question he’d asked before leaving lingered, and it disturbed Colonel Dowling more than a little. He hadn’t been lying to Young when he said he had agents among the Mormons. The best of them, a man almost completely invisible, was a dusty little bookkeeper named Winthrop W. Webb. He seemed to know everything in the Mormon community, sometimes before it happened. If a rumor or an answer was floating in the air, he would find it and contrive to get it back to Dowling.
Getting hold of him, necessarily, was a roundabout business. Setting up a meeting was even more roundabout. Were Webb to be seen with Dowling, his usefulness—to say nothing of his life expectancy—would plummet. In due course, Dowling paid a discreet visit to a sporting house to which he was in the occasional habit of paying a discreet visit. Waiting for him in one of the upstairs bedrooms, instead of a perfumed blonde in frills and lace, was dusty little Winthrop W. Webb.
After they shook hands, Dowling sighed. “The sacrifices I make for my country.”
“Don’t worry, Colonel,” Webb said with a small smile. “It’ll be Betty again next time.”
“Yes, I suppose—” Dowling broke off. How the devil did Webb know who his favorite was? Better not to ask, maybe. Maybe. Profoundly uneasy, Dowling told the spy what he’d heard from Heber Young.
Winthrop Webb nodded. “Yes, I know the people he’s talking about—know of them, I should say. They’re good at standing up at gatherings and popping off, and even better at disappearing afterwards. He’s right. Somebody’s backing them. I don’t know who. No hard evidence. Like I say, they’re good.”
“Any guesses?” Dowling asked.
“I’m here to tell you the truth—I really don’t know,” Webb answered, deadpan.
For a moment, Dowling took him literally. Then he snorted and scowled and pointed south. “You think the Confederates are behind them?”
“Who gets helped if Utah goes up in smoke?” the agent said. “That’s what I asked myself. If it’s not Jake Featherston, I’ll be damned if I know who it is.”
“You think these Mormon hotheads Heber Young was talking about are getting their orders from Richmond, then?” Dowling leaned forward in excitement. “If they are—if we can show they are and make it stick—that’ll make the president and the War Department move.”
“Ha, says I,” Winthrop Webb told him. “Everybody knows the Freedom Party’s turned up the heat in Houston, and are we doing anything about it? Not that I can see.”
“Houston’s different, though.” Dowling had played devil’s advocate for Custer many times. Now he was doing it for himself. “It used to be part of Texas, part of Confederate territory. You can see why the CSA would think it still belongs to them and want it back. Same with Kentucky and Sequoyah, especially for the redskins in Sequoyah. You may not like it, but you can see it. It makes sense. But the Confederates have no business meddling in Utah. None. Zero. Zip. Utah’s always belonged to the USA.”
“Not the way the Mormons tell it,” Webb said dryly. “But anyway, it’s not that simple. These people who speak up and start trouble, they aren’t from Richmond. They don’t go back to some dingy sporting-house room”—he winked—“and report to somebody from Richmond. Whoever’s behind this knows what he’s doing. There are lots of links in the chain. The hotheads—hell, half of them never even heard of the goddamn Confederate States of America.”
Dowling laughed, not that it was funny. “All right. I see what you’re saying. What can we do, then, if we can’t prove the Confederates are back of these fools?” He drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Not like there isn’t a new hothead born every minute here. Maybe more often than that—Mormons have big families.”
“They aren’t supposed to drink, they aren’t supposed to smoke, they aren’t even supposed to have coffee. What the hell else have they got to do but screw?” Winthrop W. Webb said, which jerked more startled laughter from Dowling. The spy went on, “I don’t know what we can do except hold the lid down tight and hope the bastards on the other side make a mistake. Sooner or later, everybody does.”
“Mm.” Dowling didn’t much care for that, but no better ideas occurred to him, either. And then, as he was getting up to leave, one did: “I’ll warn Heber Young some of the hotheads—provocateurs, he called them—are liable to be Confederate sympathizers.”
“You think he’ll believe you?” Webb asked, real curiosity in his voice. “Or will he just think you’re looking for another excuse to sit on that church of his—you know, the one that officially doesn’t exist?”
“I … don’t know,” Abner Dowling admitted after a pause. He and Young had a certain mutual respect. He thought he could rely on Young’s honesty. But did the Mormon leader feel the same about him? Or was he, in Young’s eyes, just the local head of the government that had spent the past fifty years and more oppressing Utah? “I’ve got to try, though, any which way.”
When he went downstairs, the madam smiled as if he’d spent his time with Betty. Why not? He’d paid her as if he had. The girls in the parlor looked up from their hands of poker and bridge and fluttered their fingers at him as he left. But he’d never gone out the door of the sporting house less satisfied.