dispassionate criticism of another man's work. 'He had a good run, but no one man can lick the United States of America. Sooner or later, his luck had to give out. And I've paid Tom back, too, by God-in person.'
'Yes, sir.' Dowling said what needed saying: 'How does it feel to be a hero-again?'
Custer drew himself up as straight as he had stood in the limousine. The dramatic pose he struck came straight out of the nineteenth century. 'Dowling, it feels bully!'
Summer in Ontario wouldn't last much longer. Jonathan Moss knew that very well. Before long, the idea of sitting out on the grass with an attractive woman would have been an absurdity. Better, then, to enjoy such times while they lasted and not to worry about the snow surely only weeks away.
Laura Secord didn't make that easy. In all the time he'd known her, Laura Secord had never made anything easy. Now she said, 'I wish that brave man had managed to blow your famous General Custer higher than the moon.'
'I don't suppose I should be surprised,' Moss answered. 'If you want to know what I think, though, somebody who hides bombs or throws them and doesn't care if he kills innocent bystanders isn't much of a hero. Pass me that plate of deviled eggs, will you? They're good.'
'I'm glad you like them.' But, after she'd passed him the eggs, she returned to the argument: 'I think anyone who keeps up the struggle against impossible odds is a hero.'
'If the odds are impossible, anyone who keeps up the struggle against them is a fool,' Moss returned.
'Canada still has a few fools left,' Laura Secord said. She leaned forward and picked up a deviled egg herself.
'One fewer now.' Law school and his practice had sharpened Moss' wits and made his comebacks quicker than when he'd been here as a pilot.
'We won't just turn into pale copies of Americans and of the United States,' Laura said. 'We won't.'
Moss nodded. 'That's easy enough to say. I don't know how easy it will be to do. The fellow who threw the bomb at General Custer thought the same way you do. Now he's dead. There's no revolution up here. And you're feeding a Yank a picnic lunch. Have I told you that you make really good pickles?'
She glared at him. 'If you keep going on like this, I won't ask you to come back.'
'I'm still not sure I should be coming up here at all,' Moss answered. 'For me, coming to picnics with you is what going to an opium den is for somebody who can't shake the poppy.' He spoke lightly, which didn't mean he wasn't telling the truth.
Laura Secord raised an eyebrow. 'Is that a compliment or an insult?'
'Probably,' he answered, which startled a laugh out of her. Maybe he would have done better to stay down in Berlin and meet some nice girl there. But he hadn't met any girls there-or women, either, as Laura was unquestionably a woman-who'd struck his fancy. And so, still with the fragments of what was, without a doubt, an obsession left over from the Great War, he'd started driving up to Arthur. He didn't know what would come of this. He didn't know if he wanted anything to come of it.
She waved her hand, a wave encompassing the farm she'd stubbornly kept going on her own. 'I don't know whether I ought to be inviting you here, either,' she said, her voice troubled. 'It feels a lot like giving aid and comfort to the enemy. But you were the one who aided me, after all.' Was she trying to convince herself, as Moss tried to convince himself coming here was all right?
He said, 'I don't know about aid, but I'm certainly comforted.' He lay back on the grass. A couple of cows grazing twenty or thirty yards away looked at him with their large, dark eyes, then went back to their own lunches. He thumped his belly to show how comforted he was. The waist of his trousers felt pleasantly tight.
'I'm glad of that.' Laura reached for a pewter pitcher. 'More tea?'
'All right,' Moss answered. 'One thing I will say for tea: it makes a better cold drink than coffee does.'
'It makes a better hot drink than coffee does, too,' she said. Moss shrugged. She made as if to pour the pitcher over his head before filling his tumbler. 'You Yanks have no taste.'
'I suppose not,' he said, watching puffy white clouds drift across the blue sky. The weather wouldn't stay good that much longer. He thought about how bad it could get. That made him smile, and then laugh.
'And what's so funny?' Laura Secord asked. 'That you Yanks have no taste?'
'As a matter of fact, yes.' He sat up and sipped at the tea she'd given him. 'I was just thinking about the snowstorm I drove through three years ago to come up here and visit you. If that doesn't prove I've got no taste, I don't know what would.'
She made a face at him. 'The only thing it proves is that you're mad. I'd already had a pretty fair notion of that from the way you behaved during the war.'
'Mad about you,' he said, which made her blush and look down at the grass. Jonathan Moss knew-had known for years-that was metaphorically true. He'd also wondered a good many times if it was literally true, in the alienist's use of the word mad.
'My mad Yank.' Laura Secord spoke with a curious mixture of affection and bemusement. 'Till you stood up for that poor fellow done out of his property-done out of the property where you had your office-I didn't think I should ever want to see you again.'
Maybe it would have been just as well for both of us if you hadn % Moss thought. Here he was, when he would have been almost anywhere else with almost anyone else. All his friends from down in Chicago-a lot of his friends from down in Berlin-would have called him a fool. He called himself a fool a lot of the time. He kept coming back here.
'Would you like anything else here?' Laura Secord asked him. He finished the glass of tea she'd given him, then shook his head. 'All right,' she said, and started loading things back into the picnic hamper. As he always did when he came up to her farm, he tried to help. As she always did, she refused to let him. 'You'll just make a hash of things.'
'Roast-beef hash, by choice,' Moss said.
With a snort, Laura got to her feet. Moss stood up, too. As she always did, she consented that he carry the hamper back to the farmhouse. She rubbed that in, too: 'I really would have no trouble with it, you know. It's not nearly as heavy as a bale of hay, and I haul those all the time.'
'Well, up till you said that, I did feel useful,' Moss confessed. 'But don't worry about it-you've cured me.'
She muttered something under her breath. Moss thought it was Mad Yank again, but couldn't be sure. She hurried on ahead of him and opened the kitchen door. He set the picnic basket on the counter next to the tin sink, which was full of water. She put the dirty dishes and bowls and glasses in the water, saying with her back to him, 'They'll be frightful to clean if I let them dry.'
'All right,' he answered; that was also part of her routine.
When the picnic basket was empty, she turned and took a step toward him. He took a step toward her, too, which brought him close enough to put his arms around her. She was reaching for him, too, her face tilted up, her mouth waiting for his.
The first time that had happened, he'd taken her right there on the kitchen floor. They'd both been mad then. He was sure he'd hurt her, ramming home like a pile driver, again and again. She hadn't acted as if it hurt, though. She'd clawed his back to ribbons and yowled like a cat on a back fence and finally screamed out his name loud enough to rattle the windows. She'd gone without for a long time, and had done her best to make up for it all at once.
They weren't quite so frantic now, but they were hurrying when they went to her bedroom, hurrying when they undressed, hurrying when they lay down together. His hand closed on her breast. He teased her nipple with his thumb and forefinger. She sighed and pulled his head down to follow his fingers. Her breath sighed out. 'Oh, Jonathan,' she whispered.
She took him in hand, more roughly than any other woman he'd ever known. 'Careful there,' he gasped, both because he was afraid she'd hurt him and because he'd spurt his seed out onto her breasts and belly if she didn't ease up.
His own hand slid down to the joining of her legs. She was already wet and wanton, waiting for him. A few picnics hadn't come close to fully sating her, not when she hadn't seen her husband since early in the war. He wondered what he would have been like after abstaining for so long. He couldn't imagine. He couldn't come close. He knew women were different, but even so…
She pulled him over onto her. It wasn't the wild bucking and plunging of the first time they'd joined, but it was a long way from calm and sedate and gentle. She bit his shoulder hard enough to make him yelp. His hands dug
