scrupulous precision of his phrasing. Young continued, 'One way to insure peace and quiet, of course, would be to grant us the liberties the citizens of the rest of the United States enjoy.'
'There are certain difficulties involved with that, you know,' Dowling said. 'Your people's conduct during the Second Mexican War, the Mormon revolt of 1915, the assassination of General Pershing… How long do you suppose it would be, Mr. Young, before Utah made Houston seem a walk in the park by comparison?'
'I recognize the possibility, Colonel,' Young replied, which was as much as he'd ever admitted. 'But if you do not grant us our due liberties, would you not agree we will always be vulnerable to provocateurs? And I will take the liberty of asking you one other question before I go: if these men are not yours, who does give them their orders? For I am quite sure someone does. Good day.' He got to his feet, set his somber homburg on his head, and departed.
Had Young been any other Mormon, Dowling would have called him back and demanded to know more. Dowling would have felt no compunctions about squeezing him if he'd denied knowing more, either. But Heber Young? No. His… goodwill was too strong a word. His tolerance toward the occupiers went a long way toward keeping the lid on Utah. Dowling didn't want to squander it.
And so Young left occupation headquarters in Salt Lake City undisturbed. But the question he'd asked before leaving lingered, and it disturbed Colonel Dowling more than a little. He hadn't been lying to Young when he said he had agents among the Mormons. The best of them, a man almost completely invisible, was a dusty little bookkeeper named Winthrop W. Webb. He seemed to know everything in the Mormon community, sometimes before it happened. If a rumor or an answer was floating in the air, he would find it and contrive to get it back to Dowling.
Getting hold of him, necessarily, was a roundabout business. Setting up a meeting was even more roundabout. Were Webb to be seen with Dowling, his usefulness-to say nothing of his life expectancy-would plummet. In due course, Dowling paid a discreet visit to a sporting house to which he was in the occasional habit of paying a discreet visit. Waiting for him in one of the upstairs bedrooms, instead of a perfumed blonde in frills and lace, was dusty little Winthrop W. Webb.
After they shook hands, Dowling sighed. 'The sacrifices I make for my country.'
'Don't worry, Colonel,' Webb said with a small smile. 'It'll be Betty again next time.'
'Yes, I suppose-' Dowling broke off. How the devil did Webb know who his favorite was? Better not to ask, maybe. Maybe. Profoundly uneasy, Dowling told the spy what he'd heard from Heber Young.
Winthrop Webb nodded. 'Yes, I know the people he's talking about- know of them, I should say. They're good at standing up at gatherings and popping off, and even better at disappearing afterwards. He's right. Somebody's backing them. I don't know who. No hard evidence. Like I say, they're good.'
'Any guesses?' Dowling asked.
'I'm here to tell you the truth-I really don't know,' Webb answered, deadpan.
For a moment, Dowling took him literally. Then he snorted and scowled and pointed south. 'You think the Confederates are behind them?'
'Who gets helped if Utah goes up in smoke?' the agent said. 'That's what I asked myself. If it's not Jake Featherston, I'll be damned if I know who it is.'
'You think these Mormon hotheads Heber Young was talking about are getting their orders from Richmond, then?' Dowling leaned forward in excitement. 'If they are-if we can show they are and make it stick-that'll make the president and the War Department move.'
'Ha, says I,' Winthrop Webb told him. 'Everybody knows the Freedom Party's turned up the heat in Houston, and are we doing anything about it? Not that I can see.'
'Houston's different, though.' Dowling had played devil's advocate for Custer many times. Now he was doing it for himself. 'It used to be part of Texas, part of Confederate territory. You can see why the CSA would think it still belongs to them and want it back. Same with Kentucky and Sequoyah, especially for the redskins in Sequoyah. You may not like it, but you can see it. It makes sense. But the Confederates have no business meddling in Utah. None. Zero. Zip. Utah's always belonged to the USA.'
'Not the way the Mormons tell it,' Webb said dryly. 'But anyway, it's not that simple. These people who speak up and start trouble, they aren't from Richmond. They don't go back to some dingy sporting-house room'-he winked-'and report to somebody from Richmond. Whoever's behind this knows what he's doing. There are lots of links in the chain. The hotheads- hell, half of them never even heard of the goddamn Confederate States of America.'
Dowling laughed, not that it was funny. 'All right. I see what you're saying. What can we do, then, if we can't prove the Confederates are back of these fools?' He drummed his fingers on his thigh. 'Not like there isn't a new hothead born every minute here. Maybe more often than that-Mormons have big families.'
'They aren't supposed to drink, they aren't supposed to smoke, they aren't even supposed to have coffee. What the hell else have they got to do but screw?' Winthrop W. Webb said, which jerked more startled laughter from Dowling. The spy went on, 'I don't know what we can do except hold the lid down tight and hope the bastards on the other side make a mistake. Sooner or later, everybody does.'
'Mm.' Dowling didn't much care for that, but no better ideas occurred to him, either. And then, as he was getting up to leave, one did: 'I'll warn Heber Young some of the hotheads-provocateurs, he called them-are liable to be Confederate sympathizers.'
'You think he'll believe you?' Webb asked, real curiosity in his voice. 'Or will he just think you're looking for another excuse to sit on that church of his-you know, the one that officially doesn't exist?'
'I… don't know,' Abner Dowling admitted after a pause. He and Young had a certain mutual respect. He thought he could rely on Young's honesty. But did the Mormon leader feel the same about him? Or was he, in Young's eyes, just the local head of the government that had spent the past fifty years and more oppressing Utah? 'I've got to try, though, any which way.'
When he went downstairs, the madam smiled as if he'd spent his time with Betty. Why not? He'd paid her as if he had. The girls in the parlor looked up from their hands of poker and bridge and fluttered their fingers at him as he left. But he'd never gone out the door of the sporting house less satisfied.
Everything in the white part of Augusta, Georgia, seemed normal. Autos and trucks chugged along the streets. A sign painter was putting a big sale! sign in a shoe store's front window. A man came out of a saloon, took two steps, and then turned around and went back in. A workman with a bucket of cement carefully smoothed a square of sidewalk.
None of the white people on the sidewalk-or those who dodged into the street for a moment to avoid the wet cement-paid Scipio or the other Negroes among them any special attention. The riots that had leveled half the Terry were over, and the whites had put them out of their minds.
Scipio wished he could. His family was still sleeping in a church, and he knew how lucky he was. He still had a family. Nobody'd been killed. Nobody'd been worse than scratched. They'd even got their money out of the apartment before the building burned.
Luck.
Scipio walked past a wall plastered with election posters. snow for congress! they said. vote freedom! Still four months to November, but Ed Snow's posters, featuring his plump, smiling face and a Freedom Party flag, were everywhere. A few Whig posters had gone up at about the same time. They'd come right down again, too. No new ones had gone up to take their place. Scipio had never seen any Radical Liberal posters this year.
Maybe nobody from the Rad Libs wanted to run against the Freedom Party. Maybe nobody dared run against it.
A cop coming down the street gave Scipio a hard stare. 'You, nigger!' he snapped. 'Let me see your passbook.'
'Yes, suh.' Scipio handed it over. For a while after the end of the Great War, nobody'd much worried about whether a black man had a passbook. Things had tightened up again before too long, though, and they'd got even worse after Jake Featherston won the presidency.
The cop made sure Scipio's photo matched his face. 'Xerxes.' He made a mess of the alias, but Scipio didn't presume to correct him. He looked Scipio up and down. 'Why the hell you wearin' that damn penguin suit, boy, when the weather's like this?' His own gray uniform had darker gray sweat stains under the arms and at the collar.
'Suh, I waits tables at de Huntsman's Lodge,' Scipio answered. Getting called boy by a man half his age
