another cup. Had she said she would go home with the student or she wouldn't? Try as he would, Moss couldn't tell. 'But I have trouble giving a damn. I have trouble giving a damn about almost everything.'
'Aha!' Fred Sandburg stabbed out a forefinger. He would make a formidable attorney: he listened. 'Almost everything, eh? All right, Johnny my boy, what do you give a damn about?'
Suddenly, Moss wished the coffee the waitress brought were whiskey. In the officers' clubs during the war, he'd had plenty of high-proof lubrication against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He'd needed it, too. He needed it now, needed it and didn't have it. At last, slowly, he said, 'Up in Ontario, in Canada, there was this girl, this woman…' He ran out of steam.
'Oho!' Sandburg laid that forefinger by the side of his nose. 'Was she pretty? Was she built?' His hands described an hourglass in the air.
'Yeah, I guess so,' Moss answered, a puzzled tone in his voice: he wasn't really quite sure. 'She was… interesting.' He nodded. That was the right word. He repeated it: 'Interesting.'
'Hell with whether she was interesting,' said Sandburg, a relentlessly practical man. 'Was she interested?'
'In me?' Moss laughed. 'Only to spit in my eye. Her name's Laura Secord. She's somehow related to the original who had the same name a hundred years ago, and played Paul Revere against the USA in the War of 1812. She hates Americans. She told me where to head in I don't know how many times. Besides,' he added morosely, 'she's got a husband.'
'Oh, bully.' Fred Sandburg made silent, sardonic clapping motions. 'You sure know how to pick 'em, don't you?'
'Sure do,' Moss said. 'Last time I saw her was just after the Canucks surrendered. I drove over from Orangeville, where our last aerodrome was, back to this little town called Arthur, where it had been. She was keeping a farm going there. She didn't know whether her husband was alive or dead. She hadn't heard from him in a long time-he was in the Canadian Army. But everything would be ready for him if he came down the road.'
'So if she was keeping the home fires burning for him, what did she say to you?' Sandburg asked.
Moss' face heated at the memory. 'She told me she never wanted to set eyes on me again. She told me she wished the Canucks had shot me down. She told me she wished her husband had fired the bullet that shot me down. She told me she hoped the train I took back to the USA went off the rails and smashed to bits. After that, she got angry.'
Fred Sandburg stared, then started to guffaw. 'And you call this broad interesting? Jesus Christ, Johnny my boy, you can go down to New Mexico and marry a rattlesnake and do it cheaper. You'll live happier, too.'
'Maybe,' Moss said. 'Probably, even.' His grin lifted up only one corner of his mouth, making it more grimace than smile. 'But I can't get her out of my mind.'
Sandburg was just warming to his theme: 'Or you could take to drinking absinthe to forget, or smoking cigarettes doped with opium or hashish. Then if she ever saw you again, she'd take pity on you because you were so pale and wasted and decadent-looking, and clutch you to her bosom.' He leaned forward and made as if to clutch Moss to his bosom.
'Funny,' Moss said, evading him. 'Funny like a crutch.' With so many veterans on one crutch or two these days, the cliche had taken on fresh life.
'All right, all right,' Sandburg said. 'But what are you going to do, moon about this woman the rest of your life? When you have grandchildren, you can talk about her the way fishermen go on: the one that got away. You're probably better off, you know. You're almost sure to be better off.'
'Yeah, I know,' Moss said. 'I've been telling myself the same thing ever since I got back to the States. Trouble is, I can't make myself believe it.'
'What are you going to do, then? Head back up to wherever it was in Canada you said she lived?' Sandburg shook his head. 'That sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go through to have some girl tell you to go to hell twice.' He glanced over toward the waitress, a pert brunette. 'She'll probably tell you to go to hell right here. And if she doesn't, what does this Canuck gal have that she's missing? They're all the same when the lamp goes out.'
'I never thought so,' Moss said. He'd never thought of going back to Arthur, Ontario, again, either, not seriously. In musing tones, he went on, 'Maybe I should. I'd get her out of my system, anyhow.'
'That's the spirit.' Sandburg raised his coffee mug in salute. 'The hell with courses. The hell with examinations. If you can only see this woman who hates your guts one more time, you'll die happy. I expect they'll make a moving picture about it, and every organ player in the country can milk the minor chords for all they're worth.'
'Oh, shut up,' Moss said. But the more his friend ridiculed the idea, the more it appealed to him. If he felt like going up to Ontario, he could do that, provided the occupation authorities didn't give him any trouble. Had he not come from a family with money, he wouldn't have been studying law at Northwestern in the first place. Leaving for a semester wouldn't be hard.
He wondered what his parents would say. Variations on the theme of You 're out of your mind occurred to him. Maybe he'd be wiser just to tell them he was going up to visit someone he'd met during the war, without going into too many details. They might think he meant an Army buddy. He'd have a lot less to explain afterwards if he came home unsuccessful.
He was not a fool. I'm not a fool except about this, he thought. No matter how foolish he was when he thought about Laura Secord, he understood the odds weren't in his favor. The odds weren't always in his favor when he played poker, either. Of course, he generally lost money when he played poker, which meant he didn't play it very often.
'Come on,' Sandburg said after a look at his pocket watch. 'We've got Bricker's lecture on courtroom defense and cross-examination tactics to go to, and he's worth listening to. Besides, he hasn't lost a case in years, and if that doesn't prove he knows what he's talking about, I don't know what would.'
Moss laid a quarter on the table to cover his two cups of coffee. The waitress brought back fifteen cents' change; he left her a nickel tip. As he was heading out the door, he said, 'I'm glad we're not down at Clemson or one of those other Confederate universities. If we were, we'd be paying five bucks for coffee, not five cents.'
'Yeah, but we'd be somewhere close to millionaires-in Confederate dollars, anyhow,' Fred Sandburg said. He shook his head. 'Before the war, their dollar was at par with ours. God only knows when it will be again.'
'They're giving us their specie and letting the printing presses run for themselves,' Moss said. 'You let that go on for a while and pretty soon you take five pounds of bills to the grocery store and trade 'em for five pounds of beans.'
'Either that or the bills start getting crowded on account of all the extra zeros they have to put on each one,' Sandburg agreed. He checked his watch again. 'Come on. Shake a leg. We're going to be late '
By shaking a leg, they got to Swift Hall on time. Moss liked the campus, with its buildings scattered among emerald-green lawns and the deeper tone of trees. Lake Michigan beyond could almost have been the sea.
As Fred Sandburg had said, Professor Bricker was an impressive lecturer. Not only was he a strikingly handsome man, with broad shoulders and a thick head of black hair, he also had a deep and musical voice and a presence an actor might have envied. Moss could see how juries would believe anything he said; no wonder he'd been a burr under the saddle of local district attorneys for years.
And yet, however fine a lecturer Bricker was, Jonathan Moss had trouble paying attention to him today. His thoughts kept wandering up to Canada, wondering what Laura Secord was doing, wondering what she would say when she saw him again.
He would find out. No doubt that was stupid. He recognized as much. But he was sure-almost sure-he'd do it anyway.
Anne Colleton's broker looked like the very unhappy man he was. 'It was good of you to come up to Columbia when I asked,' he said. 'I do appreciate it, believe me. I wanted to tell you in person that, as of August first, I shall no longer be able to represent you.'
'I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. Whitson,' Anne said, not altogether truthfully. 'Are you retiring altogether from your profession?' Whitson was not a young man, but not so old as that, either.
'Yes, and not voluntarily,' he answered, his voice bitter. 'As of that date, I shall be declaring bankruptcy to protect myself from my creditors. I doubt very much whether you or anyone else would have any use for a bankrupt broker.'
'I'm sorry to hear of your misfortune.' But Anne could not resist getting in a shot of her own: 'You might have
