Price, the Mormons in Provo had the nasty habit of letting U.S. soldiers overrun their positions, then turning around and shooting them in the back. Paul summed it up as best he could: 'If you're a Mormon in Utah, you hate the USA.'
'Isn't that the sad and sorry truth?' Hinshaw said. 'Only people who give us any sort of assistance at all are the ones the Mormons call gentiles- and they assassinate them whenever they get the chance.' He snorted. 'Even the sheenies in Utah are gentiles, if you can believe it.'
'I'd believe anything about this damn place,' Paul said. 'Anybody who's seen what we've seen getting this far would believe anything.'
Back of the line, back behind the train station, U.S. artillery opened up on Brigham Young College again. Up above, an aeroplane buzzed, spotting for the guns. The Mormons shot at it, but it was too high for their machine guns to reach.
Hinshaw looked up at the aeroplane. 'Good for him,' he said. 'He'll find out where the bastards are at, and we'll blow 'em up. I like that. The more of 'em we kill, the less there are left to kill.'
'You said it, sir,' Paul agreed. 'They do fight harder than the Rebs, every damn one of 'em.'
'Amen to that,' the captain said. 'The Rebs, they're sons of bitches, but they're soldiers. When the war comes through, the civilians get the hell out of the way like they're supposed to. Here, though, anybody over the age of eight, boy or girl, is an even-money bet to be a franctireur. I heard tell they planted an explosive under a baby, and when one of our soldiers picked up the kid — boom'.'
Mantarakis wondered if that was true, or something somebody had made up for the sake of the story, or something somebody had made up to keep the troops on their toes. No way to tell, not for certain. That it was even within the realm of possibility said everything that needed saying about the kind of fight the Mormons were putting up.
As if to remind him what kind of fight that was, the Mormons in the front-line foxholes and shelters in the rubble opened up again on the U.S. positions south of Center Street. Rifle fire picked up all along the line as government soldiers started shooting back. Machine guns began to bark and chatter. Here and there, wounded men shrieked.
'Be alert out there!' Paul shouted to his men as he got to his feet. 'They're liable to rush us.' The Mormons had done that to another regiment in the brigade, down near the town of Spanish Fork. Farmers and merchants in overalls and sack suits, a couple even wearing neckties, had thrown the U.S. soldiers back several hundred yards, and captured four machine guns to boot.
That regiment had had its colors retired in disgrace; it was off doing prisoner-guard duty somewhere these days, being reckoned unfit for anything better. Mantarakis didn't want the same ignominy to fall on his unit.
But the religious fanatics — religious maniacs was what Mantarakis thought of them, even if that did make him seem unpleasantly like Gordon McSweeney to himself-didn't charge. They weren't eager about battling their way through barbed wire, not any more. A few gruesome maulings at the hands of troops more alert than that one luckless regiment had pounded that lesson into them. Even if they didn't have uniforms, they were beginning to be have more like regular troops than they had: the effect, no doubt, of fighting the U.S. regulars for some weeks.
They still had more originality left in them than most regulars, though. Something flew through the air and crashed into the foxholes and trenches behind Mantarakis. He shook his head in bemusement. It had looked like a bot tle. He wondered what was in it. Not whiskey, that was for sure-the poor stupid damn Mormons were even drier than the desert in which they lived.
Another bottle hurtled toward the U.S. lines. The Mormons had used some sort of outsized slingshot arrangement to fling makeshift grenades at the soldiers battling to crush their rebellion; Paul would have bet they were throwing their bottles the same way. But why?
A trail of smoke followed that second one. It smashed maybe twenty yards from Mantarakis, and splashed flame into the bottom of the trench. 'Jesus!' he yelled, and crossed himself. 'They've got kerosene in there, or something like it.'
'That's a filthy way to fight,' Captain Hinshaw said. Half walking, half waddling, he started down the trench line. 'Let me get to a field telephone. We'll teach them to play with fire, God damn me to hell if we don't.'
'Look out, Captain!' Paul shouted. The Mormons must have been saving up bottles, because they had a lot of them. Here came another one. Hinshaw ducked. That didn't help him. It hit him in the back and shattered, pouring burning kerosene up and down his body.
He screamed. He thrashed. He rolled on the ground, trying to put out that fire. It didn't want to go out. It wasn't just the kerosene burning any more, but also his uniform and his flesh. The harsh, acrid stink of scorched wool warred with a sweet odor a lot like that of roasting pork. Had Mantarakis smelled that odor under other circumstances, he might have been hungry. Now he just wanted to heave up his guts into the bottom of the trench.
He lacked the luxury of time in which to be sick. He jumped on top of Captain Hinshaw, smothering the flames with his body, beating at them with his hands, and then shovelling dirt onto them.
Hinshaw kept on screaming like a damned soul. Mantarakis remembered he'd asked God to damn him. Even as the Greek battled the fire burning his captain, he shivered. When you said something like that, you were asking for trouble.
A couple of other soldiers came running up and helped Mantarakis extin guish Hinshaw. More kerosene-filled bottles kept dropping all around. More men screamed those horrid screams, too.
Captain Hinshaw was still smoking, but he didn't seem to be burning anywhere, not any more. He sat up. That gave Mantarakis and the other two men the first look at his face they'd had since the bottle hit him. Mantarakis wanted to look away. 'Jesus,' one of the other soldiers said softly. It wasn't a live man's face any more, but a skull covered here and there with bits of charred meat.
In a voice eerily calm, Hinshaw said, 'Will one of you please take your weapon and kill me? Believe me, you'd be doing me a favour.'
'We can't do that, sir,' Mantarakis answered through numb lips. He raised his voice to shout for stretcher- bearers. Trying to sound soothing, he went on, 'They'll have morphia for you, sir.'
'Morphia?' Hinshaw's laugh made Paul's hair stand on end. The officer groped for his own pistol, and got it out of the holster. Mantarakis knew he ought to stop him, but crouched, frozen. Neither of the other two soldiers moved. Hinshaw's hand was burned, too, but not too burned to pull the trig ger. He fell over, mercifully dead.
A few minutes later, artillery stopped pounding Brigham Young College and started hammering the Mormons in the front-line positions. A couple of shells fell short, too, ploughing up the ground too close to Paul for comfort.
Whistles shrilled. For once, Mantarakis was glad to go over the top, glad to struggle through paths in the wire that weren't paths enough-anything to get away from the roast-meat horror Captain Hinshaw had become. Beside that, the bullets cracking past him were nuisances, distractions, nothing more. By the way his men were shouting as they rushed the Mormon lines, they felt the same as he did.
He sprang down into a length of trench. The Mormons fought hard. They always fought hard. Hardly any of them threw down their rifles, even in the face of death. That didn't matter, not today it didn't. He hadn't planned on taking prisoners, anyhow.
From an upstairs bedroom came the insistent clanging of a bell. 'I'll speak further to you later, Griselda,' Scipio said. The servant, who'd given Anne Colleton rancid butter, looked suitably downcast, but he hadn't quite turned away before she stuck out her tongue at him.
She would have to go, he realized as he hurried up the staircase. Whether that meant another situation indoors somewhere else or work out in the fields, he didn't know, but such insubordination could not be tolerated. And then, around three steps higher, he remembered he was part of a revolutionary movement that, if it succeeded, would sweep away Negro servitude forever. Until it succeeded, though, the most he could do to help it was to make everything seem as normal as he could. Yes, Griselda would have to go.
'Coming, Captain Colleton,' he called, for the bell went on and on and on. He had been too well-trained ever to look like someone in a hurry, but he was walking very fast by the time he got to Jacob Colleton's bedroom.
'Took you long enough,' Colleton said in a slurring rasp. That didn't spring from the effects of the gas alone; he was drunk, as he was most of the time: a cut-glass whiskey decanter, nearly all the whiskey it had once held now decanted, sat on a table by the chair in which he perched.
