I have a dollar in my pocket, he thought. To those fellows, that makes me a rich man. God help them, poor devils.
He walked into La Culebra Verde. Robert Quinn sat at the bar, drinking a bottle of beer. 'Hola, Seсor Rodriguez,' he said. 'What brings you to Baroyeca this morning?'
'Pedro reports to the Confederate Army today,' Rodriguez answered. 'I came in with him to fill out papers and to say good-bye.'
'Congratulations to you and congratulations to him,' Quinn said in his deliberate Spanish. 'This is a good time to be a young man in the Confederate States. We aren't going to be pushed around any more.'
Rodriguez wasn't so sure whether that made this a good time or a bad one. He almost said as much. Then he remembered the two men from Sinaloa who thought times in the CSA were better than those in the Empire of Mexico. He spoke of them instead, meanwhile sitting down beside the Freedom Party man and ordering a beer for himself.
Quinn nodded. 'More and more men keep coming north,' he said. 'Enough of them do find work to encourage others. We are trying to tighten things at the border, but'-he shrugged-'it is not an easy job.'
'If they do work no one else will or no one else can, I do not suppose it is so very bad,' Rodriguez said, sipping his beer. 'But if they take jobs away from Confederates… That would not be good at all.'
'We have to take care of ourselves first,' Quinn agreed. After another pull at his beer, Hipolito Rodriguez began to laugh. Quinn cocked his head to one side, a quizzical look on his face. 'What is the joke?'
'In other parts of the Confederate States, people worry the same way about Sonorans and Chihuahuans taking their jobs.'
'Yes, they do, some. Not so much as they used to, I do not think,' Quinn answered seriously. 'They have seen that people who come from these parts are good and loyal and work hard. And they have seen that los mallates are the worst enemies the Confederate States have.'
'Yes.' Rodriguez said the same thing in English-'Niggers'-just to show he knew it. 'In this country, los mallates are nothing but trouble. They have never been anything but trouble. Los Estados Confederados would be better off without them.'
Quinn waved to the bartender. 'Another beer for me, Rafael, and another for my friend here as well.' He turned back to Rodriguez. 'It is because you understand this that you are a member of the Partido de Libertad.'
'Is it?' After thinking that over, Rodriguez shook his head. 'No. I am sorry, but no. That is not the reason.'
The bartender set the beers in front of his customers. Robert Quinn gave him a quarter and waved away his five cents' change. After a sip that left foam on his upper lip, he asked, 'Why, then?'
'I'll tell you why.' Rodriguez drank from his beer, too. 'I joined the Freedom Party because it was the only one in Sonora that didn't take me for granted. You really wanted to have me for a member. And you want vengeance against los Estados Unidos. Men from los Estados Unidos tried to kill me. I have not forgotten. I want vengeance against them, too.' But if Pedro fights them, they will shoot back. He took a big sip from his new beer. Life wasn't simple, dammit.
'Ah, yes, the United States,' Quinn said, as if reminded of the existence of a nation he'd forgotten-and been glad to forget. 'Well, my friend, you are right about that. Every dog has its day, but theirs has gone on for too long.'
'If we fight, can we beat them?' Rodriguez asked.
'I am no general,' the Freedom Party man replied. 'But I will tell you this: if Jake Featherston says we can beat them, then we can.'
Somewhere up ahead-somewhere not very far up ahead-the state of Houston and the USA ended, and the state of Texas and the CSA began. Colonel Irving Morrell bounced along in a command car. Bounced was the operative word, too, for the command car's springs had seen better years, while the roads in these parts went from bad to worse.
However bad its springs might have been, though, its pintle-mounted machine gun was in excellent working order. Morrell had carefully checked it before setting out. If it hadn't been in excellent working order, he wouldn't have got into the command car in the first place.
Above the growl of the engine, the driver, a weather-beaten private named Charlie Satcher, said, 'Looks quiet enough.'
'It always looks quiet enough,' Morrell answered. 'Then they start shooting at us.'
Satcher nodded. 'Big country,' he remarked.
'Really? I hadn't noticed,' Morrell said, deadpan. The driver started to say something, caught himself, and grunted out a little laughter instead.
It was a very big country indeed. The horizon seemed to stretch for ever and ever. The sun beat down out of a great blue bowl of a sky. The only motion in the landscape was the tan trail of dust the command car had kicked up, slowly dispersing in the breeze, that and- Morrell suddenly swung the machine gun to the right, and as suddenly took his hands off the triggers. That was only a roadrunner, loping through the dry brush with a lizard's tail hanging out of the side of its mouth.
'Nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles,' Charlie Satcher said, as if he were the first one ever to bring out the line.
'Not quite nothing,' Morrell answered. 'Somewhere out there, those Freedom Party fanatics are bringing guns and ammo into Houston.'
Calling them fanatics made him feel better. If he could paint them as villains, even if only in his own mind, he could do a better job of trying to deal with them. When he wasn't thinking of them as fanatics, he had to think of them as tough, clever foes. Not all of them belonged to the Freedom Party. Nobody in the Confederate States had much liked losing Houston, and not many people in Houston liked being part of the USA, either. The people who did like it kept quiet. If they didn't keep quiet, their neighbors made them pay.
'Miles and miles of miles and miles.' Satcher liked to hear himself talk.
Again, he wasn't wrong. The Confederates put up a few border checkpoints between Texas and Houston, but only a few, and they mostly cared about things passing into Texas, not things leaving it. As far as they were concerned, things passing from Texas into Houston didn't really cross a border. If the United States felt otherwise, then it was up to the United States to do something about it.
And the United States hadn't. Even with all the unrest-hell, the out-and-out rebellion-in Houston, the United States hadn't. Morrell understood why. It would have cost too much, in money and in men. The USA would have had to put up barbed-wire emplacements the whole length of the border, and would have had to man them with an army. It would have been almost like a trench line from the Great War. No government, Democrat or Socialist, had been willing to do the work or deploy the manpower. And so the border remained porous, and so rebellion went right on simmering.
All that unhappy musing flew out of Morrell's head the moment he spotted a plume of dust not much different from the one his command car was kicking up. This one, though, was coming from the east and heading west: heading straight into Houston. He had every reason to be where he was and doing what he was doing. Did that other auto? Fat chance, he thought.
He tapped Charlie Satcher on the shoulder. 'You see that?' he said, pointing.
The driver nodded. 'Sure as hell do, Colonel. What do you want to do about it?'
'Stop the son of a bitch,' Morrell answered.
'He may not want to stop,' Satcher observed.
'I know.' Morrell reached for the machine-gun triggers. 'We have to persuade him he does want to after all-he just doesn't know it quite yet.'
'Persuade him.' The driver's grin showed a broken front tooth. 'Right you are, sir.' He turned toward the motorcar that was raising the other dust trail.
Excitement flowered in Morrell. He was going into action, all on his own. He'd seen plenty of action in Houston, much of it brutal and unpleasant. Armored warfare against people who flung Featherston fizzes couldn't very well be anything but brutal and unpleasant. This, though, this seemed different. This was fox and hound, cat and mouse. It was out in the open, too. Nobody could fling a bottle of flaming gasoline from a window and then
