They got to their feet as he approached. 'Featherston?' the taller one asked. Jake nodded. In a twanging Texas accent, the fellow went on, 'I'm Willy Knight of the Redemption League, and this here is Amos Mizell, who heads up the Tin Hats.'
'Pleased to meet you gents,' Jake said, shaking hands with both of them. He wasn't sure how pleased he was to meet Knight; the Freedom Party was growing only slowly west of the Mississippi, not least because the Redemption League spouted similar ideas there. Supper with Amos Mizell was a feather in his cap, though. The Tin Hats were far and away the largest ex-soldiers' organization in the CSA.
Mizell sipped from a whiskey glass in front of him. He was about forty, and missing the little finger on his left hand. He said, 'I think all three of us are going in the same direction. I think all three of us want to see the country going in the same direction, too. What we want to do is make sure nobody sidetracks anybody else.'
'That's right.' Knight nodded. He was blond and handsome and wore an expensive suit, all of which made Jake jealous. 'That's just right,' he went on. 'If we bang heads, the only ones who win are the damnyankees.'
'Fair enough.' Jake smiled, as he might have smiled over a bad poker hand. Knight reminded him of an officer, which in his book was another black mark against the Redemption League man. 'We might have been smarter not to talk till after the Congressional elections, though. Then we'd have a better notion of who's strong and who isn't.'
Almost imperceptibly, Willy Knight winced. Featherston grinned at him, the fierce grin of defiance he threw at everyone who got in his way. The Freedom Party was stronger than the Redemption League, at least for now. It had its base in the more populous eastern part of the Confederate States and was reaching west, where only a relative handful of people on this side of the Mississippi belonged to the Redemption League.
Again, Mizell played peacemaker: 'One thing certain is, we're stronger together than we are apart.' The Tin Hats weren't a political party, so he wasn't a direct rival to either of the men at the table with him. But if he tipped to one or the other of them, his influence would not be small.
They paused when the waiter came up. Knight ordered a beefsteak, Mizell fried chicken, and Jake a ham steak. 'I'm shooting for ten Congressmen next session,' he said, though he expected perhaps half that many would win seats. 'How about you, Knight?'
'We'll win Dallas-I'm pretty sure of that,' the leader of the Redemption League said. 'They can see the Yankees up in Sequoyah and over in that damned new state of Houston from there. We may take a couple of other seats, too. I'll tell you what we will do, though, by God: we'll scare the Radical Liberals clean out of their shoes.'
'No arguments there,' Amos Mizell said. He raised the drink to his lips again. 'I wish more of the new leaders who think along our lines would have joined us here tonight. The Tennessee Volunteers, the Knights of the Gray, and the Red-Fighters all have ideas we might find worthwhile, and they aren't the only ones.'
'There's plenty of people angry with the way things are going now,' Jake allowed. 'A couple of years ago, the Freedom Party wasn't anything more than a few people sitting around in a saloon grousing.' He drew himself up straight with pride. 'We've come a long ways since then.'
'That you have,' Mizell said. Knight nodded once more. Now he looked jealous. The Freedom Party had come further and faster than the Redemption League. Mizell continued, 'I know for a fact that a lot of Tin Hats are Freedom Party men, too.'
'I never thought we could get away with breaking up the soft parties' rallies,' Will Knight said, and looked jealous again. 'But you've gone and done it, and you've gone and gotten away with it, too.'
'You bet we have,' Jake said. 'If you reckon the cops love the Whigs and the Radical Liberals and the niggers, you can damn well think again. And'-he lowered his voice a little-'if you reckon the soldiers love the traitors in the War Department, you can damn well think again about that, too.'
'Some of the things you've said about the War Department have been of concern to me,' Amos Mizell said. 'I don't care to bring disrepute down on men who served so bravely against the foe. Traitor is a hard word.'
Featherston fixed him with that savage grin. 'Jeb Stuart III was my commanding officer,' he said. 'Pompey, his nigger servant, was ass-deep in the rebellion. He shielded that nigger from Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence. His old man, Jeb, Jr., shielded him when it turned out he'd been wrong all the time. If that doesn't make him a traitor to his country, what the hell does it do?'
Before either Mizell or Knight could answer, the waiter returned with their suppers. They ate in silence for a while. Knight was the first to break it. 'Suppose what you say is true. If you say it too loud and too often, don't you figure the Army is going to land on your back?'
'I reckon the generals'd love to,' Jake answered with his mouth full. 'But I don't reckon they'd have an easy time of it, even now, on account of the soldiers who got the orders wouldn't be happy about following 'em. And the longer they wait, the harder it'll be.'
'You may be right about the second part of that,' Mizell said. 'I've got my doubts about the first, I have to tell you. You might be smarter to take a step back every now and then so you can take two forward later on.'
'The Freedom Party doesn't back up.' Featherston eyed Mizell, but was really speaking more to Knight. 'You talk about people who want to straighten out the mess we're in and you talk about us first. Everybody else comes behind us.'
'You go on like that, why'd you bother coming down here at all?' Knight asked. 'What have we got to talk about?'
That was a good question. Jake did not want to negotiate with the Redemption League. Negotiating implied he reckoned Knight his equal, which he did not care to do. But he did not dare risk antagonizing the Tin Hats. If Amos Mizell started saying harsh things about him and about the Freedom Party, it would hurt. But he was not about to admit that, either.
Picking his words with more care than usual, he replied, 'We're on the way up. You want to come with us, Knight, you want to help us climb, that's fine. You want to fight, you'll slow us down. I don't say anything different. But you won't stop us, and I'll break you in the end.' That wasn't party against party. It was man against man. The only thing Featherston knew how to do when threatened was push back harder than ever. Knight was a man of similar sort. He glared across the table at Jake.
'We're here to stop these brawls before they hurt all of us,' Amos Mizell said. 'If we work things out now, we don't have to air our dirty linen in public and waste force we could aim at our enemies. That's how I see it.'
'That's how I see it, too,' Jake said. 'If the Redemption League was bigger than the Freedom Party, I'd ease back. Since it's the other way round-'
'You're the one who gets to talk that way,' Willy Knight said. Jake only smiled. He knew he was lying-he would have done anything to get ahead of a rival-but nobody could prove it.
'It appears to me, things being as they are, that our best course is to use the Freedom Party as the spearhead of our movement and the Redemption League and other organizations as the shaft that helps give the head its striking power,' Mizell said. 'How does it appear to you, Mr. Knight?'
Featherston felt like kissing Amos Mizell. He couldn't have put the leader of the Redemption League on the spot like that himself. Knight looked like a man who'd found a worm-no, half a worm-in his apple. Very slowly, he replied, 'I think we can work with the Freedom Party, depending on who's stronger in any particular place.'
'That's a bargain,' Jake answered at once. 'We'll pull a couple of our candidates in Arkansas, where you look to have a better chance, and we'll throw our weight behind you. There are some districts in Alabama and Mississippi and one in Tennessee I can think of where I want you to do the same.'
Even more slowly, Knight nodded again. If the Freedom Party outperformed the Redemption League in this election, support would swing Featherston's way, leaving Knight in the lurch. He could see that. He couldn't do anything about it, though.
He'd want a high post if the Redemption League got folded into the Freedom Party. Jake could already tell as much. He'd give Knight a good slot, too. That way, he could keep an eye on him. The CSA, he thought, had been stabbed in the back. He didn't intend to let that happen to him.
Jonathan Moss slid out of his Bucephalus and stumbled toward his Evanston apartment building. He was glad he'd managed to get home without running over anybody. After his last course, he and Fred Sandburg and several other people-he couldn't recall how many right now-had found a friendly saloon and done their best to drink it dry. Why not? he thought. It was a Friday night. He wouldn't need his brains again till Monday morning.
His breath smoked. The wind off Lake Michigan blew the smoke away. It was chilly, despite the antifreeze he'd poured into his pipes. 'Not as chilly as it would be up in Ontario,' Moss said, as if someone had asserted the
