Colonel,' he said. 'If he prefers being ignominiously flung out of the Army he has served so well for so long to being allowed to retire and to celebrate his achievements as they deserve, that is his privilege.'
Dowling sucked in a long breath. President Sinclair had sent the right man up to Winnipeg to do this job. Thomas could be smooth, but under that smoothness he had steel, sharp steel. Dowling had not realized it till that moment. Like so many professional soldiers, he'd assumed any Socialist had to be soft.
Custer, evidently, had assumed the same thing. Hearing the cool contempt in Thomas' voice, he was discovering he'd made a mistake. He could hardly have looked more horrified. 'Mr. Thomas…' he began.
'Yes, General?' Once again, Thomas was the picture of urbanity.
'Perhaps I was a mite hasty, Mr. Thomas,' Custer said. He'd never willingly retreated in battle, but he was backpedaling now.
'Perhaps you were.' The assistant secretary of war let the slightest hint of scorn show in his agreement. Dowling eyed him with respect verging on alarm. He was a formidable piece of work, was N. Mattoon Thomas.
'Could-Could we arrange it so that I need not retire immediately?' Custer asked. Now he was grasping at straws. Soldiers in the USA had political power only when politicians chose to acknowledge it. By refusing to do that, Sinclair and Thomas left Custer nowhere to stand.
And Thomas, now that he'd won, was willing to let Custer have a straw. 'We could indeed,' he said. 'President Sinclair has instructed me that your retirement may take effect as late as the first of August-provided you give me a letter announcing your intention to retire before I leave this room.'
'Damn you,' Custer muttered. Thomas pretended not to hear. Dowling knew he was pretending, because he himself had no trouble hearing at all. The general pulled a piece of paper from a desk drawer and wrote rapidly-and furiously, if the way the pen scratched over the paper gave any clue. When he was done, he thrust the sheet at Thomas. 'There!'
The assistant secretary of war read it carefully before nodding. 'Yes, this appears to be satisfactory,' he said. 'I will announce it directly on my return to Philadelphia.' He folded it and put it into the envelope in which he'd brought President Sinclair's letter to Custer. 'And, now that the retirement is in order, you may, as I said before, mark it in any way you like. If you want to stop at every town between here and the U.S. border and parade through it with a brass band, go right ahead. When you reach Philadelphia, the president will lead the cheers for you.'
'Of course he will-it'll make him look good.' Now that the deed was done, Custer bounced back fast. He leaned forward across the desk toward N. Mattoon Thomas. 'And I'll tell you why he won't let me retire after August first, either-because he knows damn well it'll raise a stink, and he wants to make sure the stink dies down before the Congressional elections this fall'
'It could be,' Thomas answered. 'I'm not saying it is, mind you, but it could be.' He got to his feet. 'Whether it is or not, though, is neither here nor there. No, no need to escort me out, Lieutenant Colonel Dowling. Now that I have what I came for, my driver will take me back to the train station, and then I can return to my duties in Philadelphia. A very good day to you both, gentlemen.' Away he went, young, confident, powerful.
George Custer let out a long sigh. 'Well, Dowling, I think it may at last be just about over. I squeezed a couple of more years of active duty out of Teddy Roosevelt, and got what I really wanted from him, too, but you can't win all the time.'
'There can't be many who had a longer run, sir,' Dowling answered. He did his best to sound consoling while he wondered what his own career would look like once he finally got free of Custer.
He'd said the right thing. Custer nodded. 'Only one I can think of is Wilhelm I, Kaiser Bill's grandfather. He fought under Napoleon-imagine it! — and he was still German Kaiser when I licked Gordon in 1881, and for six or seven more years after that, too. He was up over ninety when he finally gave up the ghost.'
'That's… quite something, sir.' Dowling could easily imagine Custer up over ninety. He wouldn't go till they came and dragged him away-and neither would Libbie, come to that.
And now Custer was scheming again. 'A brass band in every town, that damn Red told me,' he said. 'I'll take him up on it, too-and if he thinks I aim to head straight south for the border from here, he can damn well think again, and so can Upton goddamn Sinclair. I aim to have the bulliest farewell tour in the history of the world.'
'Yes, sir,' Dowling said, knowing full well who would have to plan that tour.
'A good morning to you, Arthur,' Wilfred Rokeby said as Arthur McGregor walked into the post office in Rosenfeld, Manitoba.
'Morning to you, too, Wilf,' McGregor answered. He thrust a hand into the pocket of his overalls. Coins jingled. 'Need to buy a mess of stamps.'
'That's what I'm here for,' Rokeby said. 'This have to do with Julia and Ted Culligan? Congratulations. I expect they'll be happy together.'
'Hope so,' McGregor said. 'The Culligans are nice folks, and Julia's so happy, she thinks she invented Ted. If she still feels that way ten years from now, they'll have done it up right. For now, though, Maude and me, we've got invitations to write.'
'You can have some of your kinfolk come out here for a change,' Rokeby said, 'instead of you going back to Ontario.'
'That's right,' McGregor said. Since he hadn't been in Ontario as Rokeby thought, that was liable to get awkward, but he figured he could slide through it. And he wasn't about to give the postmaster any hint that he'd actually been in Winnipeg. He didn't think Wilf Rokeby told the Yanks things they didn't need to know, but he didn't want to find out he was wrong the hard way.
He bought a dollar's worth of stamps, about as many as he'd bought at one crack in his life. 'Thank you kindly,' Wilfred Rokeby said. Maybe because McGregor had been such a good customer, he slid a copy of the Rosenfeld Register across the counter to him. 'You can have this, too, if you like. I'm done with it.'
'Thanks, Wilf. That's nice of you.' Because an American was putting out the new Register, McGregor didn't like to buy it. He'd read it, though, if he got the chance. As it had in the old days, the Register reserved the top right part of the front page for important news from out of town. The headline leaped out at McGregor. He pointed to it. 'So Custer's finally going back to the USA, is he? Good riddance.' He didn't mind saying that to the postmaster; most Canadians would likely have said worse.
Rokeby nodded so emphatically, a lock of hair flopped down on his forehead despite the spicy-scented oil he used to plaster it down. The smell of that hair oil was to McGregor, as to other folks for miles around Rosenfeld, part of the odor of the post office.
'He's celebrating more triumphs than imperial Caesar while he's doing it, too,' Rokeby said. 'Just have a look at the story there.'
McGregor did. The more he read, the longer his face got. 'He'll be parading through every town where his train stops?' he said, shaking his head in wonder. 'He doesn't think he's imperial Caesar, Wilf. He thinks he's God Almighty.'
'He's a vain old man,' the postmaster said. 'Pretty soon he'll meet God Almighty face-to-face, and I guarantee you'll be able to tell the difference between the two of them.'
'That's the truth,' McGregor said. Had he had any luck at all, the devil would already be roasting Custer over a slow fire. He wondered if Custer would parade through Rosenfeld on his way back to the United States, and made a silent vow: if the American general came into town, he wouldn't go out again.
Wilfred Rokeby sighed. 'Wish to Jesus I could go back to selling stamps with the portrait of the King, God bless him, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. You have to get along the best way the big fish let you if you're only a little fish yourself.'
'I suppose you're right,' McGregor said. The big fish-the big Yank fish-hadn't let him get along. But he could still bite. He'd show them he could still bite. His features revealed none of that. Nodding to the postmaster, he went on, 'Thanks for the stamps, and thanks for the paper, too.'
'Any time, Arthur,' Rokeby said. 'And congratulations again for your daughter. She's a nice gal; I've always thought so. She deserves to be happy.'
She d have been a lot happier if the Yanks hadn 't come up over the border. But McGregor kept that to himself. He'd kept a lot of things to himself since Alexander was shot. With a last nod to the postmaster, he headed across the street to Henry Gibbon's general store.
Snow crunched under his boots. The calendar said it would be spring any day, but the calendar didn't know much about Manitoba. As he walked, he thought hard. If Custer came to Rosen-feld… If Custer paraded through Rosenfeld… If he did, McGregor was going to try to kill him, and that was all there was to it.
