thumb in her mouth, probably glad they weren't picking on her. Rodriguez didn't see Pedro, the youngest; he was probably taking a nap.
'Hola,' Rodriguez said to Magdalena, who sat patting tortillas into shape. His mouth watered again. As far as he was concerned, she made the best tortillas in the whole valley.
'Hola,' she answered, cocking her head to one side to study him. 'Como estas?'
He recognized that gesture, and straightened up in indignation. 'I'm not drunk,' he declared.
Magdalena didn't answer right away. After she'd finished studying him, though, she nodded. 'No, you're not,' she admitted. 'Good. And what's new in town?'
'It's still there,' he said, which, given the state of the silver mine, wasn't altogether a joke. He added, 'A wagon came into town from the mine while I was walking home.'
'Yes, I saw it go by,' Magdalena said. 'Who was at the cantina? What's the gossip?'
'I was mostly talking with Carlos,' he answered. 'We were going on about how you hear more and more English these days.' He spoke in Spanish; Magdalena was far more comfortable in it than in the other language.
She nodded even so. 'The way the older children bring it back from school, I wonder if their children will know any Spanish at all.'
'It's good they go to school, in English or Spanish,' Rodriguez said. 'Maybe then they won't have to break their backs and break their hearts every day, the way a farmer does.'
Magdalena raised an eyebrow. Rodriguez felt heat under his swarthy skin. He hadn't broken his back today. He spread his hands, as if to say, You want too much if you expect me to work hard every day. His wife didn't say anything. She didn't have to. The eyebrow had already done the job.
Rodriguez said, 'And we talked politics.'
'Ah.' Magdalena perked up. 'What will you do?' Here in Sonora, women's suffrage was a distant glow on the horizon, if that. She couldn't vote herself. But that didn't keep her from being interested.
'I don't know yet,' Rodriguez answered. 'I don't know, but I think I may just vote for the Freedom Party.'
B rakes squeaking a little, the Birmingham pulled up in front of the Freedom Party offices in Richmond. Jake Featherston's guards fanned out and formed a perimeter on the sidewalk. They were well armed and alert; they might have been about to clear the damnyankees out of a stretch of trench. Featherston's enemies inside the CSA weren't so obvious as U.S. soldiers in green-gray, but they probably hated him even more than the Yankees had hated their Confederate foes. Soldiering, sometimes, was just a job. Jake had also discovered politics was a serious business.
One of the guards nodded and gestured. As Jake came forward from the building, another guard opened the curbside door for him. 'Freedom!' the man said as he got into the motorcar.
'Freedom, Henry,' Featherston echoed. He settled himself on the padded seat. This beat the hell out of life as an artillery sergeant, any way you looked at it.
'Freedom!' the driver said, putting the Birmingham in gear.
'Freedom, Virgil,' Featherston answered. 'Everything ready at the other end?'
'Far as I know, Sarge.' Virgil Joyner made that sound as if he were addressing a general, not a noncom. Yes, this was a pretty good life, all right.
They went only a few blocks. When the driver pulled to a stop, Featherston scowled. 'What the hell?' he said angrily. A squad of Freedom Party guards were arguing with some Richmond policemen in old-fashioned gray uniforms. Several reporters scribbled in notebooks. A photographer's flash immortalized the moment. Featherston got out of the motorcar in a hurry. 'What's going on here?' he demanded.
'This is a polling place,' one of the cops said. 'No electioneering allowed within a hundred feet. Far as I'm concerned, they sure as hell count as electioneering.' He pointed to the armed guards.
'We're just here to protect Mr. Featherston,' one of the men in not-quite-Confederate uniform insisted. He sounded ready for business. The policemen looked nervous. Well they might-the Freedom Party guards outgunned them, and had proved to the CSA they weren't shy about mixing it up with the police, or with anyone else they didn't like.
Here, though, Jake judged it a good time to walk soft. 'It's all right, boys,' he said, as genially as he could. 'Don't reckon anybody'll take a shot at me while I go and vote.' He walked past the policemen and toward the doorway above which the Stars and Bars fluttered.
The guards didn't look happy. Like watchdogs, they wanted to stay with their master all the time. But, once he'd decided, they didn't argue. The cops didn't bother hiding their relief.
'Who you gonna vote for, Mr. Featherston?' a reporter shouted.
'Freedom-the straight ticket,' Jake answered with a wave and a grin.
Despite that cocky grin, he remained alert as he went to the polling place. If anybody wanted to take a shot at him, this was a hell of a good place to do it. If a rifle muzzle came out of that building, where would he jump? Or from that one? Or that one? He hadn't fought in the trenches-the First Richmond Howitzers had been in back of them-but he'd had plenty of bullets whip past his head. He knew everything that needed knowing about diving for cover.
No shots rang out. He strode into the polling place with grin intact. A man coming out of a curtained booth recognized him, did a double take, and grinned a grin of his own, a big, delighted one. 'Freedom!' the fellow blurted.
'Freedom,' Featherston said.
Somber, disapproving coughs from the officials at the polling place, four or five graybeards who might have fought in the Second Mexican War or maybe even the War of Secession, but surely not in the Great War. One of them said, 'No electioneering, gentlemen, if you please.'
'Right,' Jake said; he was doing this by the rules. He scrawled his name and address in their registry book, and went into the booth the fellow who'd recognized him had vacated. As he'd told the reporter he would, he put an X by the name of the Freedom candidates for Congress, for the Virginia Assembly and State Senate, and for the Richmond City Council. The last race was nominally nonpartisan, but everybody knew better. With the Whigs and Radical Liberals pretty evenly split in the district, he thought the Freedom Party man had a decent chance of sneaking home a winner, too.
After finishing the ballot, he went out and presented it to the election officials. One of them folded it and put it into the ballot box. 'Jacob Featherston has voted,' he intoned solemnly.
'Jacob Featherston is a murdering son of a bitch,' said a man who'd come out of his voting booth a moment after Jake emerged from his.
More coughs from the old men. 'None of that here,' one of them said. Another took the ballot. 'Oscar Herbert has voted,' he declared.
A few years earlier, when the Freedom Party was just getting off the ground, Jake Featherston would have mixed it up with Herbert right outside the polling place, or maybe here inside it. He was no less angry now, but he was shrewder than he had been. Some day soon, pal, somebody's gonna pay you a little visit, he thought. Your name's Oscar Herbert and you live in this precinct. We'll find you. You bet we will.
Herbert went one way, Featherston the other. He walked through the cops and out to his guards. With audible sighs of relief, they closed in around him. Photographers took more flash pictures. He waved to them.
'How many seats do you expect to lose this time?' a reporter called.
'What's that?' Jake cupped a hand behind his ear as he got into the Birmingham. 'Spent too long in the artillery, and my ears aren't what they ought to be.' He slammed the car door before the reporter could finish the question again. He had lost some hearing during the war, but not so much as that. Still, artilleryman's ear came in handy for avoiding questions he didn't want to answer.
'Back to headquarters, Sarge?' the driver asked.
'You bet,' Featherston answered. The car pulled away from the curb.
On the short ride over to Party headquarters, Jake contemplated the question he'd pretended not to hear. He liked none of the answers he came up with. His best guess was that Freedom would lose seats in the House of Representatives. He hoped the Party would hold its own, but he didn't believe it. And if he lost seats-he took everything personally, as he always had-how long would people keep finding him a force to be reckoned with?
'We were so close,' he muttered. 'So goddamn close.'
'What's that?' Virgil Joyner said.
