'Yes, your Honor, I do,' the lawyer-Chesterfield-said. When he glanced over to Sylvia, he looked as if he'd bitten down hard on a lemon. 'May it please the court, your Honor, the state must recognize the extraordinary circumstances that prompted the defendant to act as she has admitted acting. In light of the fact that the decedent did cause the death of the defendant's husband not during wartime but after he knew combat had ended, the state is willing'-he looked none too willing himself-'to further the cause of international understanding and amity by not pressing charges in this case, provided that the defendant leave the Confederate States on the first available transportation north and solemnly swear never to return to our nation again, on pain of rearrest and the charges' being reinstituted.'
'How say you, Mr. Magrath?' the judge inquired.
'I am in complete accord with my learned colleague, your Honor,' Magrath said placidly. 'I should also like to note for the record that the government of the United States has formally requested clemency for my client from both the government of the Confederate States and the government of the sovereign state of South Carolina. It now rests in your hands, your Honor.'
Things were happening too fast for Sylvia. They weren't just arranged-they were nailed down tight. 'How say you, Mrs. Enos?' the judge asked her. 'If set at liberty, will you quit the Confederate States of America, never to return?'
Bish Magrath had to nod before she could stammer, 'Y-Yes, sir.'
Bang! Down came the gavel. 'So ordered,' the judge declared. 'Mrs. Enos, you will be on a northbound train before the sun sets this evening.' Numbly, Sylvia nodded. She had her life back. Now she would have to figure out what to do with it.
Lieutenant Lije Jenkins sorted through the mail that had come into the barrel unit at Fort Leavenworth. He held out an envelope to Irving Morrell. 'Letter from Philadelphia for you, Colonel.'
'War Department?' Morrell asked, not that he had much doubt. Jenkins nodded. Morrell took the envelope. 'Well, let's see what kind of birthday present they have for me today.' His birthday still lay a month away, but he thought about it more than he had before he got married, because Agnes' came only a week afterwards. Have to get into Leavenworth and do some shopping for her, he thought, and laughed under his breath. Amazing, the small domestic things in which he took pleasure these days because he was doing them for the woman he loved.
He opened the envelope and unfolded the letter it held. As his eyes went back and forth across the typewritten page, he stiffened. Colonel Morrell, the letter read, Having completed work on the test vehicle for a new-model barrel and having also completed evaluation of optimum strategic utilization of barrels ir-regardless of model, you are ordered to terminate the program you now head at Fort Leavenworth and to report to the War Department Personnel Office here in Philadelphia no later than I March 1923 for reassignment. Each day earlier than the aforesaid date for the closure of the project will be greatly appreciated due to reduced expenditures as a result thereof
Only after he'd gone through the letter twice did he notice who had signed it: Lieutenant Colonel John Abell, the adjutant to General Hunter Liggett, who'd replaced Leonard Wood as U.S. Army Chief of Staff a few months into President Sinclair's administration.
'Well, well,' Morrell said softly. A pigeon had come home to roost. He'd spent some time as a General Staff officer during the Great War, and had not got on well with John Abell. Abell was a brilliant man, everything a military administrator should be and then some. Morrell had always made it plain he would sooner have been out in the field fighting. When he'd got out in the field he'd smashed the enemy. And now he was going to pay for it.
'Something wrong, sir?' Lieutenant Jenkins asked.
'No good deed goes unpunished,' Morrell answered.
'Sir?' Jenkins said. Morrell handed him the letter. He read it, then stared at his superior. 'Close down the Barrel Works? They can't do that!'
'They can. They are. Whether they ought to or not is a different question, but not one that's mine to answer,' Morrell said. 'You see why they're doing it-they need to save money.' He saw no point to saying anything about John Abell. If personal animosity had dictated where the savings would come from… If that had happened, it wouldn't be the first time.
'But you haven't finished your work with the test model, sir,' Jenkins protested.
'In a way, I have,' Morrell told him. 'I've done about everything I can do with one machine. If they'd coughed up the money for more than one, I could have done a lot more than I did. I just wish they were passing the Barrel Works on to someone else instead of closing it down'
'Yes, sir!' Jenkins' face was red with anger. 'They might as well be telling us we've wasted all the time and work we put in here.' He didn't think about what he would do next himself. In Morrell's book, that made him a good soldier.
'That's probably what they think,' Morrell told him. He remembered how Abell had looked at him during the war when he'd agreed with Custer that the barrel doctrine the General Staff had developed needed changing. He might have been an atheist ripping into Holy Writ.
That he'd been right hadn't made things better. It might have made things worse.
'What are you going to do?' Jenkins asked.
'Obey the order,' Morrell said with a sigh. 'What else can I do? They have the test model. They have my reports. They can go on from there. Things won't disappear. They'll just stop for a while.' That might prove as bad, but he didn't care to dwell on such gloomy possibilities.
He left the office to break the news to the men who had worked so hard for so long with the test model. The first one he ran into was Sergeant Michael Pound. 'What's the matter, sir?' the barrel gunner asked. 'You look ready to chew bolts and spit rivets.'
'We're out of business, that's what,' Morrell said, and went on to explain how and why-or what he understood of why-they were out of business.
Pound frowned. With his thick body, wide shoulders, and broad face, he could easily have looked like a lout. He didn't; his features were clever and expressive. 'That's-very shortsighted, isn't it, sir?' he said when Morrell had finished. 'The point is to stay ahead of everybody else, after all. How are we going to do that if we drop out of the race?'
'I don't know the answer to that question, Sergeant,' Morrell replied. 'I do know I've received a legal order to shut down the Barrel Works and report to Philadelphia once I've done it. I have to obey that order.'
'Yes, sir, I understand,' Pound said. 'I hope you raise some hell when you get to Philadelphia, though.'
'I intend to try, anyhow,' Morrell said. 'How much good that will do, God only knows. Now-what about you, Sergeant? Do you have any new assignment in mind? I'll do what I can to help you get it.'
'That's very kind of you, sir.' Pound scratched his brown mustache as he thought. 'I suppose I'd better go back to the regular artillery, sir. Whether we have barrels or not, we'll always need guns.'
'That's true. It's a sensible choice,' Morrell said. He got the idea that most of Pound's choices were sensible. 'I'll see what I can arrange. I hate to say it, but it's liable to be a better choice than staying in barrels, the way things are.'
'If we do get in trouble again, we'll wish we'd done more now,' Pound said with a massive shrug. 'We'll all be running around trying to do what we should have done in years in a few weeks.'
That was also likely to be true. Trying not to dwell on how likely it was, Morrell slapped Sergeant Pound on the shoulder and went on to find the rest of the test model's crew. They took the news hard, too. Then he had to break it to the crews of the other barrels, the Great War machines that also tested tactics, and to the mechanics who kept all the big, complex machines running. Little by little, he realized what a mountain of paperwork he'd have to climb by the first of March.
After he'd spread the word to the soldiers it affected, he went to tell the other person who needed to know: his wife. He found Agnes ironing clothes. 'What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?' she said in surprise. Something in her smile as he kissed her told him what she hoped he was there for.
But he hadn't come home for that, however much he would have enjoyed it. He told her why he had come home. The explanation came out smooth as if he'd rehearsed it. As a matter of fact, he had rehearsed it, going over it again and again with his men.
Agnes pursed her lips. She was an Army wife, and had taken on many of the attitudes of her officer husband (she'd probably had some of those attitudes already, her first husband also being a soldier). She said, 'They should be giving you all the tools you need to do the job right, not taking away the ones they did let you have.'
