“Which means you don’t believe me,” Liggett said. “Well, that’s your privilege. You may even be right. I don’t think you are, but you may be.”
Dowling was by nature a pessimist. If he hadn’t been before, ten years under General Custer would have made him one. “I’ll do the best I can, sir, that’s all,” he said.
And what ever Pershing does to me,
by God, I’ll have eagles on my shoulder straps. That makes up for a lot.
General Liggett nodded. “As long as you do that, no one can ask any more of you.”
“All right, sir.” Dowling started to rise, then checked himself. “May I ask you one more thing, sir? It’s got nothing to do with Mormons.”
“Go ahead and ask,” Liggett told him. “I don’t promise to answer, not till I’ve heard the question.”
“I understand. What I want to know is, are we really cutting back on building new and better barrels?
I’ve heard that, but it strikes me as foolish.” Like most professional soldiers, Dowling had no use for the Socialist Party. There as in few other places, he agreed with the man under whom he’d served for so long. He would have expressed himself a lot more strongly had he been talking with General Leonard Wood, a lifelong Democrat and a friend of ex–President Theodore Roosevelt.
But Liggett nodded again, and didn’t sound happy as he answered, “We aren’t just cutting back, as a matter of fact. We’re gutting the program. No money in the budget any more. That outfit at Fort Leavenworth called the Barrel Works . . .” He slashed a thumb across his throat. “As our German friends would say,
kaputt
.”
“That’s—unfortunate, sir.” Dowling used the politest word he could. “Barrels won us the last war. They won’t count less in the next one.”
“Don’t be silly, Colonel. There’ll never, ever be another war. Just ask President Sinclair.”
He’s still a
soldier first, then,
Dowling thought.
Good.
Both men laughed. But for the bitter undertone in each one’s voice, the joke might have been funny.
A
nne Colleton was studying the
Wall Street Journal
when the telephone rang. She muttered something under her breath, put down the five-day-old newspaper, and went to answer the phone. Back in the days when she’d lived on the Marshlands plantation, her butler, Scipio, or one of the other Negro servants would have done that for her and spared her the interruption. These days, though, the Marshlands mansion was a burnt-out ruin, the cotton fields around it going back to grass and bushes. Anne lived in town, not that St. Matthews, South Carolina, was much of a town.
“This is Anne Colleton,” she said crisply. She was in her mid-thirties. With her sleek blond good looks, she could have lied ten years off her age with no one the wiser—till she spoke. Few people younger than she—few her own age, for that matter, but even fewer younger—could have so quickly made plain they put up with no nonsense at all.
“And a good day to you, Miss Colleton,” replied the man on the other end of the line. By the hisses and pops accompanying his voice, he was calling from some distance away. He went on, “My name is Edward C.L. Wiggins, ma’am, and I’m in Richmond.”
Long distance, sure enough,
Anne thought—he sounded as if he were shouting down a rain barrel.
“What is it, Mr. Wiggins?” she said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“No, ma’am, I haven’t had the pleasure,” he agreed, “but the Colleton name is famous all over the Confederate States.”
He doubtless meant that as pleasant flattery. Anne Colleton had heard enough pleasant flattery to last the rest of her life by the time she was sixteen—one consequence of her looks men seldom thought about.
“You can come to the point, Mr. Wiggins,” she said pleasantly, “or I’ll hang up on you no matter where you are.”
“Once upon a time, President Semmes sent me up to Philadelphia to see if I could dicker a peace with the Yankees, but they wouldn’t do it,” Wiggins said.
That wasn’t coming to the point, or Anne didn’t think it was, but it did get her attention. “This would have been fairly early on, before we finally had to quit?” she asked.
“That’s right, ma’am,” he said.
“I heard rumors about that,” she said. “With all the money I gave the Whigs in those days, I would have thought I deserved to hear something more than rumors, but evidently not. So you were representing President Semmes, were you?”
“Yes, ma’am, in an unofficial sort of way.”
“And whose representative are you now, in an unofficial sort of way? I’m sure you’re somebody’s.” Edward C.L. Wiggins chuckled. “I heard you were one clever lady. I guess I heard right.”
“Who told you so?” Anne asked sharply.
“Well, now, I was just getting to that. I—”
Anne did hang up then. She wasted not a minute getting back to work. With her finances in the state they were, they needed all the time she could give them. They needed more than that, too: they needed something close to a miracle. She wasn’t a pauper, as so many prewar planters were these days. But she wasn’t rich enough not to have to worry, either, and she didn’t know if she ever would be.
A few minutes later, the phone rang again. Anne picked it up. “Why, Mr. Wiggins. What a pleasant surprise,” she said before whoever was on the other end of the line could speak. If it wasn’t Wiggins, she would have to apologize to someone, but she thought the odds were good enough to take the chance.
And it was. “Miss Colleton, if you would let me explain myself—” She cut him off, though she didn’t—quite—hang up on him once more. “I gave you two chances to do that. You didn’t. If you think I’m in the habit of wasting my time on strange men who call me out of the blue, you’re mistaken—and whoever told you what you think you know about me hasn’t got the faintest notion of what he’s talking about.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Wiggins’ voice was dry. “He told me you were sharp as a tack but a first-class bitch, and that doesn’t seem so far out to me.”
“I’m sure he meant it as an insult, but I’ll take it for a compliment,” Anne said. “Last chance, Mr.
Wiggins—who told you that?”
“Jake Featherston.”
Anne had expected almost any other name than that of the Freedom Party leader. Something she didn’t want to call alarm shot through her. She took Jake Featherston very seriously. That didn’t mean she wanted anything to do with him. She’d backed him for a while, yes, but she backed winners, and he didn’t look like one any more. Trying to gain time to recover her composure, she asked, “If you used to work for the Whigs, why are you calling me for Featherston now?”
“On account of what I saw when I went to Philadelphia, ma’am,” he replied. “The United States don’t respect you when you’re weak. If you’re down, they’ll kick you. But if you’re strong, they have got to sit up and take notice. That’s a fact.”
“I agree with that. I think everyone in the Confederate States agrees with that,” Anne said.
“Well, there you are,” Wiggins said cheerily. “If you agree with that, the Freedom Party is really and truly the only place for you, because—”
“Nonsense.” Anne didn’t care about his reasons. She had reasons of her own: “The Freedom Party has about as much chance of electing the next president as I do of getting elected myself. I have no intention of giving Jake Featherston one more dime. Every since that madman of a Grady Calkins murdered President Hampton, it’d take a special miracle for anyone from the Freedom Party to get himself elected dog catcher, let alone anything more. I don’t spend my money where it does me no good.”
“I don’t think the clouds are as black as you say, ma’am,” Wiggins replied. “Yes, we lost a couple of seats in the election last November, but not as many as people said we would. We’ll be back—you wait and see if we aren’t. Folks don’t have much in the way of memory—and besides, ma’am, we’re
right
.”
“If you can’t win an election, whether you’re right or not doesn’t matter,” Anne pointed out.
“We will.” Wiggins sounded confident. She got the idea he sounded confident all the time. He went on,
“I want to say a couple of other things, and then I’m through. First one is, Mr. Featherston, he knows who’s for him, and he knows who’s against him, and he never, ever, forgets the one or the other.” He was, without question, right about that. Featherston was as relentless as a barrel smashing through one line of trenches after another. Anne didn’t intimidate easily, but Jake Featherston had done the job.
That just gave her more reason to harden her voice and say, “I’ll take my chances.” Edward C.L. Wiggins chuckled. “He told me you were near as stubborn as he is himself, and I see he’s right. One more thing, and then I’m through, and I won’t trouble you any more.”
“Go ahead,” Anne said. “Make it short.”
I’ve already wasted more than enough time on you.
“Yes, ma’am. Here’s what I’ve got to say: there’s only one party in the CSA that’s got any notion at all about what the devil to do about the nigger problem in this country, and that’s the Freedom Party. And now I’m done. Good-bye.” He surprised her by hanging up.
Slowly, she put the mouthpiece back on its hook and set down the telephone. She said a word she was unlikely to use in public, one that would have made strong men gasp and women of delicate sensibilities blush and faint. Wiggins had known how to get through to her, after all. No one was likely to forget the Red Negro uprising that had tied the Confederacy in knots late in 1915 and early in 1916. No one knew how much it had helped the USA win the war, but it couldn’t have hurt. The Freedom Party stood foursquare for vengeance, and so did Anne Colleton.
And why not?
she thought.
One brother dead, my plantation wrecked, me almost murdered . . . Oh,
yes, I owe those black bastards just a little. The whole country owes them just a little, whether the
Whigs and the Radical Liberals want to admit it or not.
She repeated that word, louder this time. Behind her, her surviving brother burst out laughing. She whirled around. “Confound it, Tom,” she said angrily, “I didn’t know you were there.” Tom Colleton laughed harder than ever. “I’ll bet you didn’t,” he answered. “If you had, you would have said something like, ‘Confound it,’ instead.” He was a couple of years younger than Anne, and a little darker, with hair light brown rather than gold. He’d gone into the war an irresponsible boy and come out of it a lieutenant-colonel and a man, something of which Anne still had to remind herself now and again.
She shrugged now. “I probably would have. But I meant what I did say.”
“Who was on the telephone?” he asked.
“A man named Edward C.L. Wiggins,” Anne replied. “He wanted money from us for the Freedom Party.”
Tom frowned. “Those people don’t take no for an answer, do they?”
“They never have,” Anne said. “It’s their greatest strength—and their greatest weakness.”
“Did you find out why he travels with a herd of initials?” her brother asked. She shook her head. Tom went on, “What did you tell him?”
“No, of course,” Anne answered. “The way things are now, I’d sooner cozy up to a cottonmouth than to Jake Featherston.”
“Don’t blame you a bit,” Tom Colleton said. “He’s an impressive man in a lot of ways, but. . . .” He shook his head. “He puts me in mind of a time bomb, wound up and waiting to go off. And when he does, I don’t think it’ll be pretty.”
“There were times when I thought he had all the answers,” Anne said. “And there were times when I thought he was a little bit crazy. And there were times when I thought both those things at once. Those were the ones that scared me.”
“Scared me, too,” Tom agreed, “and we don’t scare easy.”
“No. We’d be dead by now if we did,” Anne said, and Tom nodded. She eyed him. “And speaking of looking pretty, you’re fancier than you need to be for staying around here. Is that a necktie?” She thought its gaudy stripes of crimson and gold excessive, but declined to criticize.
Her brother nodded again. “Sure is. Bought it from what’s-his-name, the Jew tailor. And I’m going to pay a call on Bertha Talmadge in a little while.”
Before the war, Anne would have discouraged such a call—with a bludgeon, if necessary. The Muncies, Bertha’s parents, were grocers, and their daughter no fit match for a planter’s son. These days . . . Well, grocers never starved. And Bertha Talmadge, though a widow whose husband, like so many others, had died in the trenches, was reasonably young, reasonably pretty, reasonably bright.
Anne nodded approval. “Have a nice time. You should find yourself a wife, settle down, have yourself some children.”
He didn’t get angry at her, as he would have before the war. In fact, he nodded again himself. “You’re right. I should. And, as a matter of fact, so should you.”
“That’s different,” Anne said quickly.
“How?”
Because he was her brother, she told him: “Because my husband would want to try to run everything, because that’s what men do. And odds are he wouldn’t be as good at it as I am. That’s why.”
“And even if he was, you wouldn’t admit it,” Tom said.
That was also true. Anne Colleton, however, had not the slightest intention of admitting it. Giving her brother her most enigmatic smile, she went back to the
Wall Street Journal
.
M
ary McGregor was only thirteen years old, but her course in life was already set. So she told herself, anyhow, and also told her mother and her older sister as they sat down to supper on their farm outside Rosenfeld, Manitoba: “The Yankees killed my brother. They killed my father, too. But I’m going to get even—you see if I don’t.”
Fright showed on her mother’s careworn face. Maude McGregor touched the sleeve of her woolen blouse to show Mary she still wore mourning black. “You be careful,” she said. “If anything happened to you after Alexander and Arthur, I don’t think I could bear it.” She didn’t tell Mary not to pursue vengeance against the Americans occupying Canada. Plainly, she knew better. That would have been telling the sun not to rise, the snow not to fall. Ever since the Americans arrested her older brother during the war on a charge of sabotage, lined him up against a wall, and shot him, she’d hated them with an altogether unchildlike ferocity.