traitors first.'
Jeff applauded till his hard, horny hands were sore. Somebody not far away pulled out a flask of moonshine and passed it around. Pinkard took a swig. 'Son of a bitch!' he said reverently, his vocal cords for the moment nearly as charred as Briggs'. He passed the flask along, half sorry to see it go, half relieved it was gone.
Someone started singing 'Dixie.' Jeff roared out the words, a fiery fury in him that had surprisingly little to do with the whiskey he'd just drunk. The Freedom Party sang 'Dixie' at every meeting. Then someone else began 'Louisville Will Be Free.' That one dated from just after the Second Mexican War, and recounted the greatest fight of that war. With Louisville forced back into the USA in the Great War, it took on a poignancy now that it hadn't had then.
Tears ran down Jefferson Pinkard's face. They took him by surprise. He wondered if he was weeping for ravaged Louisville or for himself. A great determination filled him. Like his country, he'd paid for doing what he remained convinced was right Sooner or later, everyone else would pay, too.
'Freedom!'' he cried at the top of his lungs. 'Freedom! Freedom!'
Reggie Bartlett nodded in some surprise when Tom Brearley came into Harmon's drugstore. He hadn't seen much of Brearley since the ex-Navy man went down to South Carolina to talk with Anne Colleton. Reggie had been waiting for fireworks to spring from that meeting. He was still waiting.
Evidently, Brearley was getting tired of waiting. He said, 'All right, Mr. Bartlett, what's your next great idea for blowing the Freedom Party out of the water?'
'I haven't got another one,' Reggie admitted. 'Wish to heaven I did.'
'Well, I've got another one.' Brearley looked very determined. Reggie could easily picture him peering through a periscope at a U.S. cruiser. Oddly, he also looked much younger than he had before sticking out his chin. He said, 'If I can't get those bastards fighting among themselves, I'll just have to take the story to the newspapers.'
'Jesus,' Reggie said. 'Are you sure you want to do that? I wouldn't, not unless I had my life-insurance premiums all paid up.'
'As a matter of fact, I do,' Brearley said, doing a determined and pretty good best to sound unconcerned. 'I made sure they were before I went down to talk to Tom Colleton's sister, because I wasn't sure I'd be coming back. But by now Kimball has to know I've talked. He has to figure I'll talk more. That means he'll try and kill me sooner or later-likely sooner. I'm kind of surprised he hasn't tried it yet-him or some of the Freedom Party apes up here. I want to make sure the word gets out before he does.' He didn't sound unconcerned any more: just matter-of-fact, a man tackling a job he knew was dangerous.
Reggie understood that. He wouldn't have, not before the war. Going through the trenches-coming out of the trenches on command to attack-changed a man forever. He knew he would be afraid again, many times in his life. But fear would never paralyze him, as it might have done before. He had its measure now.
He said, 'If you're bound and determined to do it, you'd better think hard about which paper you go to. You don't want to head for the Sentinel, because-'
'Don't teach your grandpa to suck eggs,' Brearley said with a wry grin. 'Do I look that stupid? Half the time, I reckon Jake Featherston puts that rag out himself. Shame and a disgrace, the garbage it prints.'
'Why don't I just shut up?' Reggie said to nobody in particular.
'I don't want you to shut up,' Brearley told him. 'You go to political rallies for fun. You really think about this stuff, a lot more than I do. So I want your advice: you reckon I should talk to the Whig or the Examiner?'
'Go with the Whigs or the Radical Liberals?' Reggie stroked his chin. After a minute or so of silent thought, he said, 'That's an interesting one, isn't it? The Freedom Party's probably giving the Whigs a harder time-they were the ones who ran the country during the war. But I think the Radical Liberals are more afraid of Featherston and his gang, don't you? For one thing, they're farther away from the stand he takes, where some of the right-wing Whigs might as well start yelling 'Freedom!' themselves. And for another, the Rad Libs are running scared. If they don't get a break, the Freedom Party'll be number two in the country after this fall's election. You give them some dirt, they'll run with it.'
Tom Brearley looked at him as if he'd never seen him before. 'You're wasting your time shoving pills across a counter, Bart-lett. You should have been a lawyer, something like that. You think straight. You think real straight.'
'Maybe I do,' Reggie said. 'You're the one who's not thinking straight now, I'll tell you that. Where the devil am I going to get the money to study law? Where am I going to get the money to get the education I'd need so I could study law? If I'd had a million dollars before the war, it might have been a different story.'
Brearley shrugged. 'If you want something bad enough, you can generally find a way to get it. What I want right now is to torpedo the Freedom Party. I tried one way. It didn't work. All right-I'll try something else. The Examiner it'll be. Thanks, Bartlett.' He sketched a salute and left.
Jeremiah Harmon came up from the back of the drugstore. 'I overheard some of that,' he said, sounding apologetic- astonishing in a boss. 'None of my business, but anybody who goes up against a machine gun without a machine gun of his own is asking for a whole peck of trouble. You ask me, the Examiner's a popgun, not a machine gun. Wish I could say different, but I can't.'
'Where do you find a machine gun to fight the Freedom Party?' Reggie asked.
'Haven't the foggiest notion,' the druggist replied. 'Don't know if there is any such animal. But if I didn't have one, I think I'd stay down in my dugout and hope no big shell caved it in.'
He hadn't been to the front. He'd passed the war in Richmond, making pills and salves and syrups. He never pretended otherwise. But the vocabulary of the trenches had come to be part of everyone's day-to-day speech in the CSA. An awful lot of men had passed through the fire. Reggie wasted a moment wondering if expressions from the front line filled the sharp-sounding English of the United States, too.
Harmon went back to whatever he'd been doing when Tom Brearley came into the drugstore. He didn't waste a lot of time banging a drum for what he thought. If you agreed with him or decided he had a point, fine. If you didn't, he wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
And it wasn't just an interesting discussion to Reggie Bartlett. He'd signed his name to the letter that had gone down to Tom Colleton. If Freedom Party thugs came after Tom Brearley, they were liable to come after him, too.
All at once, he wished he'd told Brearley to keep the hell away from newspapers. Part of him wished that, anyhow. The rest realized such worries came far too late. The cat had been out of the bag ever since he touched pen to paper.
He started watching the newspapers, especially the Richmond Examiner, like a hawk. Day followed day with no banner headline about a U.S. destroyer sunk after the Confederate States asked for quarter. Maybe Brearley had got cold feet and hadn't bent a reporter's ear after all. In a way, that disappointed Reggie down to the depths of his soul. In another way, one that left him ashamed, it relieved him. Maybe Brearley had talked, and the reporter hadn't believed him. Reggie almost hoped that was so. It would have given him the best of both worlds.
And then one day with March approaching, and with it the first inauguration of a Socialist president of the USA, that banner headline did run in the Examiner, WAR CRIMINAL HIGH IN FREEDOM PARTY CIRCLES! For a moment, Reggie hoped the story under the headline would be about some other war criminal; he wouldn't have been surprised to learn the Freedom Party sheltered battalions of them under its banner.
But it wasn't. The reporter didn't name Tom Brearley-citing concerns for his informant's safety-but he did name Roger Kimball, the Bonefish, and the USS Ericsson. Reggie hadn't known exactly what kind of secret Brearley was keeping. Now he did. Now everybody did. He nodded to himself. Brearley hadn't been stretching things-it was a big one.
The reporter made it sound as if several members of the submersible's crew had confirmed what Brearley said, too. Maybe that was camouflage, to make the story seem more authoritative and to take some of the heat off Brearley. Maybe he really had checked with other crewmen, and that was why the story had waited so long to run.
However that worked, the story made the Freedom Party hopping mad. The very next day, a blistering denunciation ran in the Sentinel. What it amounted to was that the damnyankees had had it coming, and that anyone betraying a Confederate officer who'd done his duty as he saw it deserved whatever happened to him. It didn't quite declare open season on Tom Brearley, but it didn't miss by much. Reggie was glad he didn't figure in the piece in any way.
Jeremiah Harmon said, 'Now your friend gets to find out what sort of whirlwind he reaps.'
