things were, he made Dowling want to turn up the heat in the office even though the day was warm.
'Sir, you have been poking your nose into matters that do not concern you,' Abell said. 'We discourage that.'
We? You have a tapeworm? Dowling wondered. He remembered Irving Morrell talking about Abell during the war. At the time, he'd been sure Morrell was exaggerating. Now he found the other man had been speaking the gospel truth. He eyed the General Staff lieutenant colonel's lean, pallid countenance and picked his words with care: 'I don't believe Utah's affairs can fail to concern me, not when I was there so long.'
'If the War Department feels otherwise, why should you disagree?' Lieutenant Colonel Abell inquired.
'Because if I had anything to do with Utah, I could be useful to the Department,' Dowling answered. 'With what people have me doing now-I mean, not doing now-I'm useless. Useful is better.'
'Don't you trust the judgment of your superiors as to what is useful and what is not?' Abell asked silkily.
By the way spoke, he might have been one of those superiors, even if Dowling outranked him. General Staff officers, Dowling thought scornfully, and tried not to let his annoyance show. Even if Abell had a lower grade, he enjoyed much better connections. And so, still speaking carefully, Dowling said, 'A quartermaster sergeant could do most of what I've been doing since I came back here, whereas I've got some specialized knowledge no sergeant can match. Using me without using that knowledge is inefficient.'
'Possibly,' Abell said, which meant he wasn't about to admit it. 'A pleasure talking to you.' He got to his feet and started for the door. With a hand on the knob, he turned back. 'You know Colonel Morrell, don't you?'
'Oh, yes.' Dowling nodded. 'We worked together on the breakthrough that took Nashville.' That might have been impolitic, since the breakthrough had violated War Department doctrine on how to use barrels. Dowling didn't much care, since it had also gone a long way toward making the Confederates throw in the towel.
'How interesting,' Lieutenant Colonel Abell said with a smile that displayed a lot of expensive dentistry. And then, silent as a specter, he was gone. Dowling wondered if he ought to have his office exorcised.
He'd hoped Abell's questions would lead to something better in the way of work. For the next couple of weeks, his hopes were disappointed. He read about Irving Morrell's encounter with gun runners on the border between Texas and Houston in the newspapers. Nobody in the War Department asked him about it in any official way. He wondered why Abell had bothered confirming that they were acquainted. The better to blackball me, he thought.
But, somewhat to his surprise, he did see the General Staff officer again. When John Abell next appeared- materialized? — in his office, the lieutenant colonel's face bore a smile that seemed less than perfectly friendly. 'So you are friends with Colonel Morrell, are you?' Abell said, a note of challenge in his voice. 'And you've done the same sort of work, have you?'
Dowling hadn't said he was friends with Morrell. He admired Morrell's talent; what Morrell thought of him he wasn't nearly so sure. But, sensing that a yes would annoy Lieutenant Colonel Abell more than a no, he nodded defiantly and said, 'That's right.'
'Very well, Brigadier General Dowling. In that case, I have some orders for you.' Abell spoke as if washing his hands of him.
To Dowling, anything would have been better than what he was doing now. 'And those orders are…?' he asked eagerly.
Abell heard that eagerness. It made him blink. By the fruit salad on his chest, he'd stayed in Philadelphia through the Great War. He no doubt thought his role more important than those of soldiers who actually went out and fought the enemy, too. He might even have been right, but Dowling didn't care to dwell on that. 'Sir, you will be sent to Kentucky,' he said now. 'Your duty there will be similar to Colonel Morrell's in Houston: you will help control agitation against the government of the United States. This does also relate to your experience in Utah, would you not agree?'
'Yes, I'd say that's true,' Dowling answered cautiously. 'You're coming as close as you can without a real war to sending me into combat, aren't you?'
'Isn't that what you wanted?' Abell asked with sardonic satisfaction.
But that satisfaction slipped when Dowling gave him another yes instead of a no, saying, 'You bet it is. I've wanted to get into the field for years. They wouldn't take me away from Utah when we fought the Japs, dammit.'
'Well, you're going to get your wish.' Lieutenant Colonel Abell plainly thought he was out of his mind.
'When do I leave?' Dowling asked. 'Where exactly do I go? All over Kentucky, or somewhere in particular?'
'I don't have the precise details yet,' Abell said. 'I assure you, they will be passed on in good time. In the meanwhile, you are to continue with the duties you have already been assigned.'
'Thank you so much,' Dowling said sourly. The General Staff officer took no notice of his tone, which might have been just as well. Abell departed with a salute that mocked military courtesy instead of reinforcing it. Now Dowling was the one who ignored the slight. He would have ignored not only a slight but a large if that meant escaping from Philadelphia.
Knowing the speed at which the War Department moved, he expected in good time to mean a month or six weeks. In reality, he got his orders eleven days after Lieutenant Colonel Abell's visit. On reflection, he was less surprised than at first glance. The military bureaucrats in War Department headquarters were probably as glad to see him gone as he was to go. He'd been General Custer's right-hand man, after all, and Custer and the War Department had got along like rattlesnake and roadrunner-and who'd ended up eating whom was anybody's guess.
He was on a train the next day, bound for Kentucky. He could have left Philadelphia even sooner if he'd wanted to take an airliner. He was content to stay on the ground. When he was a boy, there'd been no such things as airliners. When he was a boy, there'd been no such things as aeroplanes (or airplanes, as he saw the word spelled more and more often in newspapers and magazines). If one of them could carry two dozen people in reasonable comfort three or four times as fast as a train or a motorcar ran… That's nice, Dowling thought. In an emergency, he would have flown. Without an emergency, no.
For one thing, trains boasted dining cars. Nothing he'd heard about food on airliners tempted him to sample it. The meals aboard the Pennsylvania Railroad's Cincinnati Limited, on the other hand, fully measured up to Dowling's exacting standards. He was sorry to have to leave the train and cross the Ohio into Kentucky.
It was late afternoon when a driver took him from Cincinnati over the bridges across the river and into Covington. A long line of northbound autos waited to cross the bridge. 'What's their trouble?' Dowling asked.
'They have to be searched, sir,' the driver answered. 'You're new here, aren't you? We don't want those Freedom Party bastards running guns and explosives up into the real United States.'
The real United States. Those four words spoke volumes. Dowling had ordered such precautions himself in Utah. He hadn't thought they would be necessary here, but maybe he'd been naive. You're new here, aren't you? That spoke volumes, too. This game was being played for keeps.
No one fired at his motorcar on the way to the local Army encampment. No one fired, but he got plenty of hints he was in hostile country just the same. The graffiti shouted freedom! or csa! They showed either a blue or a red St. Andrew's cross: quick takes on the Confederate battle flag and the Freedom Party banner based on it.
In Utah, the occupation authorities would have cracked down on people who scribbled such things. In Utah, though, the occupation authorities had been the only formal power in the land. Here… Here there was also the state government-and that was in the hands of the Freedom Party. The Army faced an uphill fight it hadn't had to worry about farther west.
'You want to hear something funny, sir?' the driver said as the green-gray Ford pulled up in front of BOQ.
'I,' Dowling answered most sincerely, 'would love to hear something funny.'
'You know who our biggest backers here are?' the soldier asked.
'From everything I saw, I wondered if we had any backers here,' Dowling said.
'Oh, we do, sir. There's one bunch of folks in this town-one bunch of folks in this whole goddamn state-who'd do anything in the world for us, anything at all. That's the niggers. They don't want one goddamn thing to do with the Confederate States, and can you blame 'em?'
'Not me,' Dowling admitted, but he couldn't see how they'd help much, either.
