Julia danced with other boys besides Ted Culligan. That helped ease McGregor's mind. His daughter was having a good time, which made him feel good. He danced a dance with Mary, whose head, he realized in surprise, came almost to the top of his shoulder. When had she grown so big?
There stood Julia, talking with Ted over a cup of the potent punch. Suddenly, McGregor didn't mind the weather at all. In the summertime, courting couples might slip out to a barn for a while. Doing that now invited frostbite, not romance.
McGregor shook hands with Ted Culligan's father when it was time to go home. He pretended not to see Ted kiss Julia on the cheek. That wasn't easy, not when she turned the color of a red-hot stove.
'I had a wonderful time,' she said over and over on the drive back to the farm. 'Simply wonderful.' She was young enough to forget for a while what had happened to her family and her country, and to enjoy the moment. McGregor wished he could do the same.
Back at the farmhouse, he lit a lamp in the kitchen. His wife and daughters went yawning upstairs to bed. He brought the lamp outside and set it on the wagon while he unhitched the horse. Then he picked up the lamp again and carried it in his left hand while leading the horse to the barn.
He put the beast in its stall and started out of the barn again. But he stopped after a couple of steps: stopped and held the lantern high, peering around in all directions. No, he wasn't wrong. Someone had been in the barn while the McGregors were at the dance.
Fear and ftiry warred inside him. At first, fear was uppermost. Whoever had pawed through his things hadn't bothered trying to conceal his presence. Tools weren't where they should have been. A couple of drawers under McGregor's work table were open; he knew he'd left them closed, for he always did.
Heart hammering in his throat, he went over to the old wagon wheel beneath which he hid his bomb-making paraphernalia. Holding the lamp close, he tried to see if the snooper had tampered with it. As far as he could tell, it was undisturbed. His secret remained safe.
When he realized that, fury overtook fear. 'God damn those sons of bitches,' he said softly. 'They do still figure I might be a bomber.' He was, if anything, more indignant than if he'd been innocent. The Yanks had paid-no, the Yanks had seemed to pay-no attention to him the past couple of years. He'd thought they'd forgotten about him. He'd been wrong.
But they hadn't found anything. They'd have been waiting here for him if they had. 'They're trying to rattle me,' he murmured. 'That's got to be it.' They couldn't prove he'd planted bombs, so they were showing their cards, trying to force him into a mistake. He shook his head. He didn't intend to oblige them.
By the time he went back to the farmhouse and upstairs to his bedroom, Maude was sound asleep. He shrugged. Even if she'd been awake, he wouldn't have said a word. He got ready for bed himself.
Before the presidential election, a lot of firms had put printed messages in their workers' pay envelopes. The one Chester Martin got had read, If Upton Sinclair is elected on Tuesday, don't bother showing up for work Wednesday morning. The capitalists had tried to the very end to keep the proletariat from voting its conscience and its class interest.
They'd tried those games before, too, though not so aggressively: up till this election, they hadn't been so worried about losing. Well, they'd lost anyhow. Martin laughed every time he thought about it. Come March 4, it would be out with the old and in with the new, and the United States would have their first Socialist president. He could hardly wait.
Here it was late December, too, and he hadn't been fired. He didn't expect to be fired any time soon, either, not unless he hauled off and punched his foreman or something of that sort. His foreman was an idiot. Everyone on the foundry floor knew as much. The foreman's boss didn't, though, and his was the only opinion that mattered. But work went on as usual, in spite of there being a Socialist president-elect.
'Did you really expect anything different?' Albert Bauer asked when Martin remarked on that one day at the Socialist hall near the steelworks.
'I don't know that I expected anything different,' Martin answered. 'I will say I wondered.'
'Mystification,' Bauer said scornfully. 'That's all it is- nothing but mystification. The capitalists tried to intimidate us, and tried to make us believe they had the power to get away with intimidating us. It didn't work, and now they'll have to learn how to walk a lot smaller.'
'Yeah,' Martin said, and then, 'How much do you think Sinclair will be able to do once he gets in?'
'Don't know,' Bauer answered. 'We've got a majority in the House, and I think the Socialists and Republicans and progressive Democrats make a majority in the Senate. The courts are full of reactionaries. They'll give us trouble.'
'If they give too much trouble, we'll stop listening to them,' Martin said. 'Let's see them get their way if everybody ignores them. Or let's see them get their way if the worst reactionaries start having accidents.'
Bauer laughed at him. 'This from the man who used to be a Democrat? I've heard people who've been revolutionaries since before you were born who didn't sound half as fierce as you do.'
'In for a penny, in for a pound,' Chester Martin said, shrugging. 'Besides, nobody who's been through the trenches is going to fuss about killing a judge or two. Once you've had practice, killing looks pretty easy.'
'Something to that, I shouldn't wonder.' Bauer looked thoughtful. 'The capitalists might not have realized what they were doing when they started the war, but they helped create opponents who wouldn't back away from meeting force with force when they had to.'
Martin nodded. 'After artillery and poison gas and machine guns, cops are nothing special,' he said, a thought he'd had before. He paused, then asked, 'What do you think of this Freedom Party down in the CSA, Al? They're another bunch that doesn't seem like it's afraid of mixing things up with anybody they don't like.'
'Reactionary maniacs,' Bauer said with a toss of the head. 'They want to turn back the clock to the way things were before the Great War. You can't turn back the clock, and you have to be a fool to think you can.'
'That's about what I thought,' Martin said. 'You believe the papers, though, a lot of people like what they're saying. Stupid damn Rebs.'
'Stupid damn Rebs,' Bauer agreed. 'But if we'd lost the war, imagine how fouled up our politics would be. There'd be a bounty on Socialists now. You'd better believe there would- they'd be hunting us in the streets. And they'd go on electing Democrats president for the next fifty years. So maybe we shouldn't blame the Rebs-too much-for being stupid.'
'Hmp,' was all Chester Martin said to that. He'd spent three years with the Confederates shooting at him. Hell, they hadn't just shot at him-they'd shot him. He had the Purple Heart to prove it, and the note of sympathy signed by Theodore Roosevelt, too. Even with the war almost three and a half years behind him, he wasn't inclined to feel charitable toward the former enemy.
Bauer slapped him on the back. 'Go on, get out of here. Go home. Go Christmas shopping. Go somewhere. I keep having to tell you that. You've got a case of the mopes, looks like to me. You won't do yourself any good till you get over 'em. You won't do the Party any good, either, so go on. Scram.'
Martin didn't argue with him. He buttoned his overcoat and headed out of the Socialist hall. The trolley stop was a couple of blocks away. His breath smoked around him. The one thing he envied the Confederate States was their mild winter weather. Summer in Virginia, on the other hand, was a pretty fair approximation of hell. Of course, summer in Toledo wasn't all that far removed from hell, either.
Shops shiny with tinsel and bright with electric lights beckoned to people walking past them on the street, BIG SALE! signs in the window shouted. Some of them might even have meant it. But Martin had gone into more than a few shops, and had yet to see much in the way of price cutting. The signs were just a come-on, like the tinsel and the bright lights.
He would have to get presents for his father and his mother and his sister. He wanted to get something for Albert Bauer, too, though Bauer was the least sentimental man he'd ever known off the battlefield. Maybe some shaving soap, he thought. That would be thoughtful and useful at the same time.
'Shaving soap,' he said several times. A woman walking past gave him an odd look. He didn't care, or not too much. Saying something out loud helped him remember it.
Coins jingled in his trouser pocket: only a faint noise through the thick wool of his coat. He wasn't broke, as he had been through the labor strife after the war. With a Socialist administration, maybe there wouldn't be any more labor strife. That had been his hope as he'd made an X in the square beside the names of Upton Sinclair and Hosea Blackford. The capitalists had had everything their way for a long time. Now, he thought, it's labor's turn.
