worry.'
'We walk small as long as we have to,' Featherston said. 'I hate it, but I don't know what else to tell you. We build up our strength every chance we get, though, and before too long we get to tell the damnyankees to leave us alone unless they want a sock in the nose.'
That made sense to Anne. She couldn't see what else the CSA could do, in fact, except become a supine U.S. puppet. She said 'So you want to get the Negroes out of the towns and factories and back to the fields, do you?' Would keeping Marshlands be worthwhile? No, she judged. Featherston had more on the ball than she'd expected, but the Freedom Party remained very new and raw. It sought power; it wasn't about to lay claim to much yet.
Featherston answered, 'That's about right, Miss Colleton.' He eyed her again. Did he guess the calculation she was making? She wouldn't have been surprised.
Her gaze flicked over to Tom. That did surprise her; she rarely relied on anyone to help her decide. Her brother shrugged, ever so slightly. He was leaving it up to her. He did that more often than not. She wished he wouldn't have, not here. Featherston waited. He had more patience than she would have thought.
He had more of quite a few things than she'd thought. She wasn't easy to impress, but he'd impressed her. She said, 'I think we're traveling in the same direction, Mr. Featherston. I suspect you could use some help along the road, too.'
'We sure could,' he said. 'We sure could. When I joined the Freedom Party, it operated out of a cigar box. We're better off than that now, but not a whole lot.' Contempt washed over him, as if poured from a bucket. 'Most rich folks don't dare change what made 'em rich. They'll go on sucking up to the Whigs and the Radical Liberals while the country goes down the drain. Always good to find somebody who zigs when most folks zag.'
He couldn't have paid her a compliment she appreciated more if he'd tried for a week. 'I think I may be able to help some,' she said. 'How much depends on any number of things.'
Featherston got to his feet, as if getting up on the stump. 'Put those niggers back in the fields where they belong!' His voice filled the apartment with a raspy thunder that didn't enter it when he was speaking in ordinary tones. That took Anne by surprise again, and for a moment almost took her breath away. She nodded, recognizing the good bargain she'd made. She held out her hand. Jake Featherston shook it. You give the speeches, she thought. Yes, you call the tune-after I whistle it to you.
Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling stared out across the prairie from General Custer's third-story offices in Winnipeg. He'd been there with the general since winter, and the view on a clear day never ceased to astonish him. Today, he managed to put that astonishment into words: 'My God, sir, it's flatter than Kansas!''
'It is, isn't it?' Custer agreed. 'You can see forever, or if you can't, it certainly seems as though you can. Makes you think God pressed an iron to the countryside hereabouts, doesn't it?'
'Yes, sir.' Dowling nodded. 'Although, from what I've read, it wasn't an iron at all. It was a great whacking sheet of ice that pressed the land down flat and didn't pull back or melt or whatever it did till not so very long ago.'
'I can believe that.' Custer shivered melodramatically. 'By the way the weather felt when we got to this place, I'd say the glacier had been gone about a day and a half-two days, tops.'
Dowling laughed. Custer rarely joked. Here, he might well have been kidding on the square. During several days that winter, the temperature never had managed to creep above zero, nor even get very close to it. There was a word for a place more than three hundred miles north of Minneapolis: Siberia.
But people lived here. Before the war, something like 150,000 of them had lived here. In Abner Dowling's considered opinion, they'd been out of their minds. Oh, from May to September the weather was good enough, but that left a lot of time out of the bargain.
Nowhere near so many people were left in Winnipeg now. A lot had fled during the two and a half years in which Canadian and British forces had held the U.S. Army away from the critical rail junctions here. A lot more had fled when they realized the Canucks and limeys could hold the Americans no more. And a lot had died when the city finally fell.
One of the reasons Dowling could see so far was that the building housing Custer's headquarters was one of the few in town to come through the war intact. Had it ever had any taller neighbors, they were rubble now. Nothing got in the way of the view.
A lot of the new houses that were starting to go up in Winnipeg these days were made from the wreckage of older structures. One construction outfit even advertised itself as BEST REBUILDERS IN TOWN. The company had plenty of material with which to work.
Custer said, 'I feel as though I can see all the way to the Rockies.'
'I wish we could see all the way to the Rockies from here, sir,' Dowling said. 'It would make our jobs a lot easier-and that's where a lot of our problems lie, anyhow.'
'The broom didn't sweep clean,' Custer said. 'That's what the problem is. That's why they sent me up here to set things to rights.'
For as long as Dowling had known him, Custer had had a remarkable gift for revising events so they fit neatly into a scheme of things sometimes existing only in his own mind. The first part of his statement, though, was objectively true. The U.S. broom had not swept clean, nor even come close. The USA had conquered Ontario and Quebec, severed eastern Canada from the vast West by-finally-seizing Winnipeg, and struck north into the Rockies to break the rail links with the Pacific. That had been enough to win the war. But it had also left a couple of million square miles unvisited by U.S. troops.
A lot of those square miles, especially in the far north, didn't have enough people on them to make anyone worry. But the cities of the Canadian prairie-Regina and Saskatoon, Calgary and Edmonton-resented having been handed over to the United States when no soldier in green-gray had got anywhere near them during the war. They seethed with rebellion. So did the farms for which they gave markets. So did the logging and mining towns of British Columbia. So did the fishermen of Newfoundland. So, for that matter, did a great many people in the areas the United States had taken by force.
'Confound it, Lieutenant Colonel, how am I supposed to control half a continent without the soldiers I should have lost during one medium-sized battle in the Great War?' Custer demanded. 'Every time there's a new little uprising somewhere, I have to rob Peter of troops to pay Paul so Paul can put it down. And then twenty minutes later Peter needs the men back again '
'We have kept the railroads hopping, haven't we, sir?' Dowling shook his head at the understatement. 'The way the budget's going in Congress, we ought to count ourselves lucky that we still have as many soldiers up here as we do. It won't get any better next year, either.'
'Socialists!' As Custer usually did, he turned it into a swearword. 'I tell you, Dowling, the machine gun's most proper use is for shooting down the Socialist blockheads who want to cut our country off at the knees. Blow enough of them to kingdom come and the rest might come to their senses-if they have any sense to come to, which I am inclined to doubt.'
'Yes, sir,' Dowling said resignedly. He was a rock-solid Democrat himself, but not, he thought with a certain amount of pride, a political fossil like his superior.
Custer said, 'If things get any worse, we'll have to start borrowing soldiers from the Republic of Quebec, damn me to hell if I lie.'
Dowling started to laugh: for Custer to make two jokes in one day was well-nigh unprecedented. Then he realized Custer wasn't joking. For a moment, he was inclined to scorn. Then, all at once, he didn't feel scornful any more. Every so often, Custer came up with an interesting notion, sometimes without even realizing he'd done it.
'Do you know, sir, I'd bet the Frenchies over there would lend them to us,' Dowling said. 'And do you know what else? I'd bet the soldiers from Quebec'd have a high old time clamping down on the Englishmen who sat on them for so long. That really might be worth looking into.'
'Take care of it, then,' Custer said indifferently. No, he hadn't known that was a good idea. He'd just been talking to hear himself talk, something he was fond of doing.
Dowling scribbled a note to himself 'Have to make Quebec pay for the troops they send, too,' he said. 'That will make Congress happy. It might not make Quebec happy, but I won't lose any sleep over that. If we can't twist Quebec's arm, whose can we twist? If it weren't for the United States, that wouldn't even be a country today.' As far as he was concerned, it wasn't much of a country, but nobody in Quebec had gone out looking for his
