any members, odds were it wasn't worth joining. No matter how good its ideas, they didn't matter if nobody could find out about them. Even the damned Socialists knew that much.
'Too bad,' he muttered. 'Too stinking bad.' Congressional elections were coming this fall. A shame the voters couldn't send the cheaters and thieves in the Capitol the right kind of message.
Back in the room-he'd had plenty of more comfortable bivouacs on campaign-he wrote for a while in a Gray Eagle scratchpad. He'd picked up the habit toward the end of the war. Over Open Sights, he called the work in progress. It let him set down some of his anger on paper. Once the words were out, they didn't fester quite so much in his mind. He might have killed somebody if he hadn't had a release like this.
When day came, he went out looking for work. Colored laborers weren't the only ones clearing rubble in Richmond, not by a long chalk. He hauled bricks and dirt and chunks of broken stone from not long after sunrise to just before sunset. The straw-boss, of course, paid off in paper money, though his own pockets jingled. Knowing the banknotes would be worth less tomorrow than they were today, Jake made a beeline for the local saloon and the free-lunch counter. He'd drawn better rations in the Army, too, but he was too hungry to care. As before, the barkeep gave him a reproachful look for making a pig of himself. As before, he bought a second beer to keep the fellow happy, or not too unhappy.
He was stuffing a pickled tomato into his mouth when the fellow with whom he'd talked politics the day before came in and ordered himself a shot. Then he made a run at the free lunch, too. They got to talking again; Featherston learned his name was Hubert Slattery. After a while, Jake mentioned the Freedom Party posters he'd seen.
To his surprise, Slattery burst out laughing. 'Oh, them!' he said. 'My brother took a look at those fellows, but he didn't want any part of 'em. By what Horace told me, there's only four or five of'em, and they run the whole party out of a shoebox.'
'But they've got posters and everything,' Jake protested, startled to find how disappointed he was. 'Not good posters, mind you, but posters.'
'Only reason they do is that one of 'em's a printer,' the other veteran told him. 'They meet in this little dive on Seventh near Canal, most of the way toward the Tredegar Steel Works. You want to waste your time, pal, go see 'em for yourself.'
'Maybe I will,' Featherston said. Hubert Slattery laughed again, but that just made him more determined. 'By God, maybe I will.'
Congresswoman Flora Hamburger clapped her hands together in delight. Dr. Hanrahan's smile was broader than a lot of those seen at the Pennsylvania Hospital. And David Hamburger, intense concentration on his face, brought his cane forward and then took another step on his artificial leg.
'How does it feel?' Flora asked her younger brother.
'Stump's not too sore,' he answered, panting a little. 'But it's harder work than I thought it would be '
'You haven't been upright since you lost your leg,' Dr. Han-rahan reminded him. 'Come on. Give me another step. You can do it.' David did, and nearly fell. Hanrahan steadied him before Flora could. 'You've got to swing the prosthesis out, so the knee joint locks and takes your weight when you straighten up on it,' the doctor said. 'You don't learn that, the leg won't work. That's why everybody with an amputation above the knee walks like a sailor who hasn't touched land in a couple of years.'
'But you are walking, David,' Flora said. She dropped from English into Yiddish: 'Danken Gott dafahr. Omayn.'
Seeing her brother on his feet-or on one foot of his and one of wood and metal and leather-did a little to ease the guilt that had gnawed at her ever since he was wounded. Nothing would ever do more than a little. After her New York City district sent her to Congress, she'd had the chance to slide David from the trenches to a quiet post behind the lines. He wouldn't have wanted her to do that, but she could have. She'd put Socialist egalitarianism above family ties… and this was the result.
Her brother shrugged awkwardly. 'I only need one foot to operate a sewing-machine treadle. I won't starve when I go home- and I won't have to sponge off your Congresswoman's salary, either' He gave her a wry grin.
As a U.S. Representative, Flora made $7,500 a year, far more than the rest of her family put together. She didn't begrudge sharing the money with her parents and brothers and sisters, and she knew David knew she didn't. He took a brotherly privilege in teasing her.
He also took a brotherly privilege in picking her brains: 'What's the latest on the peace with the Rebs?'
She grimaced for a couple of reasons. For one, he hadn't called the Confederates by that scornful nickname before he went into the Army. For another… 'President Roosevelt is still being very hard and very stubborn. I can understand keeping some of the territory we won from the CSA, but all he's willing to restore is the stretch of Tennessee south of the Cumberland we took as fighting wound down, and he won't give that back: he wants to trade it for the little piece of Kentucky the Confederates still hold.'
'Bully for him!' David exclaimed. He had been a good Socialist before he went off to war. Now, a lot of the time, he sounded like a hidebound Democrat of the Roosevelt stripe. That distressed Flora, too.
She went on, 'And he's not going to let them keep any battleships or submersibles or military aeroplanes or barrels, and he's demanded that they limit their Army to a hundred machine guns.'
'Bully!' This time, her brother and Dr. Hanrahan said it together.
Flora looked from one of them to the other in exasperation. 'And he won't come a dime below two billion dollars in reparations, all of it to be paid in specie or in steel or oil at 1914 prices. That's a crushing burden to lay on the proletariat of the Confederate States.'
'I hope it crushes them,' David said savagely. 'Knock on wood, they'll never be able to lift a finger against us again.' Instead of knocking on the door or on a window sill, he used his own artificial leg, which drove home the point.
Flora had given up trying to argue with him. He had his full share of the Hamburger family's stubbornness. Instead, she turned to Dr. Hanrahan and asked, 'How much longer will he have to stay here now that he's started to get back on his feet?'
'He should be able to leave in about a month, provided he makes good progress and provided the infection in the stump doesn't decide to flare up again,' Hanrahan said. Flora nodded; she'd seen he gave her straight answers. He finished with a brisk nod: 'We'll shoot for November first, then.'
After giving her brother a careful hug and an enthusiastic kiss, Flora left the Pennsylvania Hospital. Fall was in the air, sure enough; some of the leaves in the trees on the hospital grounds were beginning to turn. She flagged a cab. 'The Congressional office building,' she told the driver.
'Yes, ma'am.' He touched the shiny leather brim of his cap, put the Oldsmobile in gear, and went out to do battle with Philadelphia traffic. The traffic won, as it often did. Philadelphia had been the de facto capital of the USA since the Confederates bombarded Washington during the Second Mexican War, more than thirty-five years before. Starting even before then, a great warren of Federal buildings had gone up in the center of town. Getting to them was not always for the faint of heart.
'I have a message for you,' said Flora's secretary, a plump, middle-aged woman named Bertha. She waved a piece of paper. 'Congressman Blackford wants you to call him back.'
'Does he?' Flora said, as neutrally as she could. 'All right, I'll do that. Thank you.' She went into her inner office and closed the door after her. She didn't turn around to see whether Bertha was smiling behind her back. She hoped not, but she didn't really want to know.
Dakota, a solidly Socialist state, had been returning Hosea Blackford to the House since Flora was a girl. He was about twice her age now, a senior figure in the Party, even if on the soft side ideologically as far as she was concerned. And he was a widower whose Philadelphia apartment lay right across the hall from hers. He had left no doubt he was interested in her, though he'd never done anything to tempt her into defending herself with a hatpin. To her own surprise, she found herself interested in return, even if he was both a moderate and a gentile.
'Now,' she muttered as she picked up the telephone and waited for the operator to come on the line, 'is he calling about Party business or… something else?'
'Hello, Flora,' Blackford said when the call went through. 'I just wanted to know if you had seen the newspaper stories about strikes in Ohio and Indiana and Illinois.'
Party business, then. 'I'm afraid I haven't,' Flora said. 'I just got back from visiting David.'
'How is he?' Blackford asked.
'They've fitted the artificial leg, and he was up on it.' Flora shook her head, though Blackford couldn't see
