'Watching money these days means spending it as soon as you get it,' Reggie replied. 'If you do anything else, you watch it shrink, like you said.'
Foster sighed. 'Didn't used to be this way. How are we supposed to get on with our lives if we can't even save money? The Freedom Party's right, if you ask me-we've got to put a stop to things before the whole country goes down the water closet.'
'Yeah, we've got to put a stop to things,' Reggie said. 'That doesn't mean the Freedom Party is right. We heard those fellows going on and on when they were new as wet paint, remember? I thought they were crazy then, and I still think they're crazy.'
They'd come a long way into the northwestern part of town, to the public square at the corner of Moore and Confederate Street (it had been Federal before the War of Secession). In spite of the chilly weather, somebody was holding a rally in the square: Confederate flags whipped in the breeze, and a gesticulating speaker stood on a platform of fresh yellow pine.
'Is that the Freedom Party again?' Bartlett asked. Then he spotted the signs behind the platform. 'No, I see- it's the Radical Liberals. Want to listen, Bill?'
'Sure. Why not?' Foster said. 'They have some interesting ideas. If they don't go off the deep end, the way they did when they nominated Arango in ' 15,1 may vote for 'em for president in'21.'
'Me, too.' Reggie nodded. 'That fellow up there, whoever he is, he doesn't look like he's ever gone off the deep end of anything in his whole life.'
As he got closer, he noticed a placard identifying the speaker as Congressman Baird from Chihuahua. Waistcoated and hom-burged, Baird looked more like a banker than a Congressman. 'We have to face the facts,' he was saying as Reggie and Foster got close enough to hear. 'We are not the top dogs any more. Our friends are not the top dogs any more. We can stick our heads in the sand and pretend things still are the way they were in 1914, but that won't do us any good. The war has been over for almost a year and a half, and most of the people in this country don't really understand that things have changed.'
Bill Foster looked disgusted. '] take back what I said a minute ago. He wants us to go sucking up to the United States, and I'll see him and everybody else in hell before I lick Teddy Roosevelt's boots.'
'We've got to do something,' Reggie answered. 'If we don't, it's $500 beer next month, or maybe $5,000 beer. They licked us. You going to tell me they didn't?' As if to remind him, his shoulder twinged.
While they were talking, so was Congressman Baird. Reggie started listening to him again in midsentence: '-whole continent, north and south and west alike, might be better off if we dropped our tariff barriers and the USA did the same. I don't say we ought to do that all at once, but I do say it is something toward which we can work, and something liable to lead to greater prosperity throughout America. We share a heritage with the United States; in their own way, the Yankees are Americans, too. We fought a revolution against England, but England became the Confederacy's friend. Even though we have fought wars against the United States, they too may yet become our friends.'
'You want to hear any more of this, Reggie?' Foster asked. 'If the sign didn't say this fellow was from Chihuahua, I'd reckon he snuck in from California or Connecticut or one of those damn-yankee places.'
'Damnyankees aren't as bad as all that. They don't have horns and tails,' Reggie said. His friend gave him what was plainly meant for a withering look. He didn't wither, continuing, 'They doctored me as well as anybody could, when it would have been easier for them to give up and let me die. All you did was fight 'em. They had me in their hands.'
Foster was plainly unconvinced. But Congressman Baird got a bigger round of applause than Reggie Bartlett had really expected. Foster looked surprised at that, too. Grudgingly, he said, 'Some people here think the way you do. I still don't see it, but I'll listen a while longer/1
Buoyed by the cheers, Baird went on, 'I don't say for a moment that we should not try to regain as much of our strength as we can. We must be able to defend ourselves. But we must also bear in mind the colossus to our north and west, and that, as I said, our friends have fallen by the wayside. We are on our own, in a world that loves us not. We would be wise to remember as much.'
That made good sense to Reggie. The Whigs, who had dominated Confederate politics even more thoroughly than the Democrats had dominated those of the USA, still seemed stuck in the past without any notion of how to face the future. The Freedom Party and others of its ilk wanted to throw out the baby with the bathwater, although they quarreled over which was which. Baird, at least, had some idea of the direction in which he wanted the CSAtogo.
His supporters in the crowd raised a chant: 'Radical Liberals! Radical Liberals!' Whigs would never have done anything so undignified. But the Whigs didn't have to do anything undignified. They often seemed to think they didn't have to do anything at all. That, Reggie thought, was what holding power for half a century did to a party.
And then, from behind, another chant rose, or rather a furious howl: 'Traitors! Filthy, stinking, goddamn traitors!' Reggie spun around. Charging across the yellowed grass were a couple dozen men armed with clubs and bottles and a variety of other improvised weapons. They all wore white shirts and butternut trousers. 'Traitors!' they howled again, as they smashed into the rear of Congressman Baird's crowd. They howled something else, too, a word that made Bartlett's hair try to stand on end: 'Freedom!'
The Congressman's voice rose in well-modulated indignation: 'What is the meaning of this uncouth interruption?'
No one answered him, not in so many words. But the meaning was obvious even so-the newcomers were breaking up his rally, and breaking the heads of the people who'd been listening to him.
'Fight!' Reggie shouted. 'Fight these bastards!'
A club whizzed past his ear, swung by a thick-necked, thick-shouldered chap screaming 'Freedom!' at the top of his lungs. Reggie kicked him in the side of the knee as he ran past. Then, as the man started to crumple, he kicked him in the belly. He'd learned to fight fair once upon a time, and had to unlearn it in a hurry when he got to the trenches.
He grabbed the muscular goon's club after the fellow lost interest in holding it, then started swinging it at everybody in a white shirt he could reach. Some of the others at the rally were fighting back, too. Most Confederate white men had done a tour in the Army. They'd seen worse fights than this. But the attack force from the Freedom Party had size, ferocity, youth, and surprise on their side. They also had a joyful zest for the brawl unlike anything Reggie had encountered in the trenches.
He knocked two or three of them flat even so. But then somebody hit him from behind. He staggered and fell. A couple of people-one of them was Bill Foster, who was trying, with no luck at all, to play peacemaker-stepped on him, someone else kicked him in the ribs, and he decided to stay down, lest something worse happen to him.
The ruffians had just about completed routing the rally when police at last appeared. Haifa dozen men in old- fashioned gray took billy clubs off their belts. Their leader blew a whistle and shouted, 'That will be quite enough of that!'
'Freedom!' the goons bawled. All of them still on their feet rushed straight at the cops. They had one other thing Reggie Bartlett noticed only while prone: more than a little discipline. They fought like soldiers after a common goal, not like individual hellraisers. The startled policemen went down like wheat under the blades of a reaper. Had one of them drawn a pistol… Had one of the Radical Liberals drawn a pistol… But no one had. The ruffians, or most of them, got away.
Slowly and painfully, Reggie dragged himself to his feet. He looked around for Bill Foster, and spotted him holding a handkerchief to a bloody nose. A couple of the fallen Freedom Party fighters were also rising. Reggie stooped to grab the club, though quick movement hurt. But showing he was ready to fight meant he didn't have to. The goons lifted a comrade who couldn't get up on his own and, with his arms draped over their shoulders, left the public square.
From up on the platform, Congressman Baird kept saying 'This is an outrage! An outrage, I tell you!' over and over again. Nobody paid much attention to him. He wasn't wrong. That didn't make what he had to say useful.
'They break your nose, Bill?' Reggie asked.
'Don't think so.' Foster felt of it. 'No, they didn't. I just got hit, not clubbed or stomped.'
'Bastards,' Reggie said. That didn't seem nearly strong enough. He tried again: 'Goddamn fucking sons of bitches.' That didn't seem strong enough, either, but it came closer. He looked around for his hat, and discovered it had got squashed during the brawl. Picking it up, he asked, 'Still like what the Freedom Party stands for?'
Foster suggested the Freedom Party do something illegal, immoral, and anatomically unlikely. His hat, when
