Blood and iron ae-1 Read online

  "Something to that, no doubt about it," Moss admitted. He finished his coffee and waved to the waitress for another cup. Had she said she would go home with the student or she wouldn't? Try as he would, Moss couldn't tell. "But I have trouble giving a damn. I have trouble giving a damn about almost everything."

  "Aha!' Fred Sandburg stabbed out a forefinger. He would make a formidable attorney: he listened. "Almost everything, eh? All right, Johnny my boy, what do you give a damn about?"

  Suddenly, Moss wished the coffee the waitress brought were whiskey. In the officers' clubs during the war, he'd had plenty of high-proof lubrication against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He'd needed it, too. He needed it now, needed it and didn't have it. At last, slowly, he said, "Up in Ontario, in Canada, there was this girl, this woman…" He ran out of steam.

  "Oho!" Sandburg laid that forefinger by the side of his nose. "Was she pretty? Was she built?" His hands described an hourglass in the air.

  "Yeah, I guess so," Moss answered, a puzzled tone in his voice: he wasn't really quite sure. "She was… interesting." He nodded. That was the right word. He repeated it: "Interesting."

  "Hell with whether she was interesting," said Sandburg, a relentlessly practical man. "Was she interested?"

  "In me?" Moss laughed. "Only to spit in my eye. Her name's Laura Secord. She's somehow related to the original who had the same name a hundred years ago, and played Paul Revere against the USA in the War of 1812. She hates Americans. She told me where to head in I don't know how many times. Besides," he added morosely, "she's got a husband."

  "Oh, bully." Fred Sandburg made silent, sardonic clapping motions. "You sure know how to pick 'em, don't you?"

  "Sure do," Moss said. "Last time I saw her was just after the Canucks surrendered. I drove over from Orangeville, where our last aerodrome was, back to this little town called Arthur, where it had been. She was keeping a farm going there. She didn't know whether her husband was alive or dead. She hadn't heard from him in a long time-he was in the Canadian Army. But everything would be ready for him if he came down the road."

  "So if she was keeping the home fires burning for him, what did she say to you?" Sandburg asked.

  Moss' face heated at the memory. "She told me she never wanted to set eyes on me again. She told me she wished the Canucks had shot me down. She told me she wished her husband had fired the bullet that shot me down. She told me she hoped the train I took back to the USA went off the rails and smashed to bits. After that, she got angry."

  Fred Sandburg stared, then started to guffaw. "And you call this broad interesting? Jesus Christ, Johnny my boy, you can go down to New Mexico and marry a rattlesnake and do it cheaper. You'll live happier, too."

  "Maybe," Moss said. "Probably, even." His grin lifted up only one corner of his mouth, making it more grimace than smile. "But I can't get her out of my mind."

  Sandburg was just warming to his theme: "Or you could take to drinking absinthe to forget, or smoking cigarettes doped with opium or hashish. Then if she ever saw you again, she'd take pity on you because you were so pale and wasted and decadent-looking, and clutch you to her bosom." He leaned forward and made as if to clutch Moss to his bosom.

  "Funny," Moss said, evading him. "Funny like a crutch." With so many veterans on one crutch or two these days, the cliche had taken on fresh life.

  "All right, all right," Sandburg said. "But what are you going to do, moon about this woman the rest of your life? When you have grandchildren, you can talk about her the way fishermen go on: the one that got away. You're probably better off, you know. You're almost sure to be better off."

  "Yeah, I know," Moss said. "I've been telling myself the same thing ever since I got back to the States. Trouble is, I can't make myself believe it."

  "What are you going to do, then? Head back up to wherever it was in Canada you said she lived?" Sandburg shook his head. "That sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go through to have some girl tell you to go to hell twice." He glanced over toward the waitress, a pert brunette. "She'll probably tell you to go to hell right here. And if she doesn't, what does this Canuck gal have that she's missing? They're all the same when the lamp goes out."

  "I never thought so," Moss said. He'd never thought of going back to Arthur, Ontario, again, either, not seriously. In musing tones, he went on, "Maybe I should. I'd get her out of my system, anyhow."

  "That's the spirit." Sandburg raised his coffee mug in salute. "The hell with courses. The hell with examinations. If you can only see this woman who hates your guts one more time, you'll die happy. I expect they'll make a moving picture about it, and every organ player in the country can milk the minor chords for all they're worth."

  "Oh, shut up," Moss said. But the more his friend ridiculed the idea, the more it appealed to him. If he felt like going up to Ontario, he could do that, provided the occupation authorities didn't give him any trouble. Had he not come from a family with money, he wouldn't have been studying law at Northwestern in the first place. Leaving for a semester wouldn't be hard.

  He wondered what his parents would say. Variations on the theme of You 're out of your mind occurred to him. Maybe he'd be wiser just to tell them he was going up to visit someone he'd met during the war, without going into too many details. They might think he meant an Army buddy. He'd have a lot less to explain afterwards if he came home unsuccessful.

  He was not a fool. I'm not a fool except about this, he thought. No matter how foolish he was when he thought about Laura Secord, he understood the odds weren't in his favor. The odds weren't always in his favor when he played poker, either. Of course, he generally lost money when he played poker, which meant he didn't play it very often.

  "Come on," Sandburg said after a look at his pocket watch. "We've got Bricker's lecture on courtroom defense and cross-examination tactics to go to, and he's worth listening to. Besides, he hasn't lost a case in years, and if that doesn't prove he knows what he's talking about, I don't know what would."

  Moss laid a quarter on the table to cover his two cups of coffee. The waitress brought back fifteen cents' change; he left her a nickel tip. As he was heading out the door, he said, "I'm glad we're not down at Clemson or one of those other Confederate universities. If we were, we'd be paying five bucks for coffee, not five cents."

  "Yeah, but we'd be somewhere close to millionaires-in Confederate dollars, anyhow," Fred Sandburg said. He shook his head. "Before the war, their dollar was at par with ours. God only knows when it will be again."

  "They're giving us their specie and letting the printing presses run for themselves," Moss said. "You let that go on for a while and pretty soon you take five pounds of bills to the grocery store and trade 'em for five pounds of beans."

  "Either that or the bills start getting crowded on account of all the extra zeros they have to put on each one," Sandburg agreed. He checked his watch again. "Come on. Shake a leg. We're going to be late "

  By shaking a leg, they got to Swift Hall on time. Moss liked the campus, with its buildings scattered among emerald-green lawns and the deeper tone of trees. Lake Michigan beyond could almost have been the sea.

  As Fred Sandburg had said, Professor Bricker was an impressive lecturer. Not only was he a strikingly handsome man, with broad shoulders and a thick head of black hair, he also had a deep and musical voice and a presence an actor might have envied. Moss could see how juries would believe anything he said; no wonder he'd been a burr under the saddle of local district attorneys for years.

  And yet, however fine a lecturer Bricker was, Jonathan Moss had trouble paying attention to him today. His thoughts kept wandering up to Canada, wondering what Laura Secord was doing, wondering what she would say when she saw him again.

  He would find out. No doubt that was stupid. He recognized as much. But he was sure-almost sure-he'd do it anyway.

  Anne Colleton's broker looked like the very unhappy man he was. "It was good of you to come up to Columbia when I asked," he said. "I
do appreciate it, believe me. I wanted to tell you in person that, as of August first, I shall no longer be able to represent you."

  "I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. Whitson," Anne said, not altogether truthfully. "Are you retiring altogether from your profession?" Whitson was not a young man, but not so old as that, either.

  "Yes, and not voluntarily," he answered, his voice bitter. "As of that date, I shall be declaring bankruptcy to protect myself from my creditors. I doubt very much whether you or anyone else would have any use for a bankrupt broker."

  "I'm sorry to hear of your misfortune." But Anne could not resist getting in a shot of her own: "You might have done better if you'd invested along the lines I chose-the lines about which you had some unkind things to say when I presented them to you."

  "Go ahead-rub it in," Whitson muttered. Anne did not dislike him enough to do any more gloating, so she pretended not to hear. He went on, "I must admit, your ideas proved sounder than mine. I am, as I say, bankrupt, with holdings in worthless stocks. Your financial position is not as it was before the war-"

  "Whose is, in the Confederate States?" Anne asked harshly.

  "Not many folks', I'll tell you that," the broker said. "But you are merely poorer than you were. In the CSA, and especially here in South Carolina, that's an impressive accomplishment. Most plantation owners have long since gone belly up. You're still in the fight"

  "Who else is?" Anne asked, interested in the competition.

  "Importers," Whitson answered. "Steel men. Petroleum men in Texas and Louisiana-they're thriving, because Sequoyah's gone. Some of the Sonoran copper kings: the ones whose mines the Yankees didn't reach. But anybody who grew anything with Negro labor-cotton, tobacco, rice, sugarcane, indigo-has troubles the way a stray dog has fleas."

  "Can't trust 'em, not any more," Anne said. "That's never going to be the same again. That's why I've still got Marshlands like a millstone around my neck. Who would want the place now? What would anyone do with it if he bought it?"

  "I haven't the faintest idea," Whitson said, "but I don't know what that proves, either." His mouth tightened to a thin, pale line. "The ideas I have had haven't been good ones."

  "The whole country is having a rough time," Anne said with more sympathy than she'd thought she would show. "It's hard for anyone to prosper. We need to put some heart back into ourselves, but I don't know how."

  "This inflation is eating us out of house and home," the broker said. "Before long, everybody will be a millionaire and everybody will be broke."

  / told you so trembled on the edge of being spoken, but Anne held her tongue. She had told Whitson so, and he hadn't listened, and now he was paying the price. Because she'd converted her holdings into currencies that still meant something in terms of gold, she'd come through pretty well. When the upturn finally arrived, she would be rich again-if she could wait long enough.

  Whitson said, "If you like, Miss Colleton, I can recommend a new broker for you. I know several very able men who-"

  Anne got to her feet. "No, thank you. I hope you will forgive me for saying so, but your recommendation does not strike me as the ideal warrant for a man's quality."

  Whitson bit his lip. "I deserve that."

  "Maybe you'll have better luck in times to come. I hope you do," Anne said, telling more of the truth than not-she had nothing personal against the luckless broker. "I see you have all my papers here. Please give them to me now."

  "Very well." Whitson sighed as he handed them to her. "I should have been listening to your investment advice, not the other way round. The world has turned upside down since the end of the war."

  "Since the beginning of the war," Anne said. "But you're right. The Confederate States were on top, and now we're on the bottom. Some people are going to be content to stay on the bottom, too. Some are going to try to see how to get back on top again. What will you do, Mr. Whitson?"

  She didn't wait for an answer, but swept the papers into her valise and left the broker's office. As she turned around to close the door, she saw him staring after her. She let out a tiny sigh. Whitson was going to be one of the ones who stayed on the bottom for a long time.

  His office stood only a few blocks away from the Capitol. Anne thought about going over to see the governor, but sighed again. She didn't have the influence she'd enjoyed before the war, either. Not only had her fortunes suffered, she'd called in too many favors fighting the black Reds who lurked in the swamps by the Congaree long after their revolt was stamped out elsewhere. She'd almost had to seduce the governor to pry a machine gun loose for the militia.

  "God damn you, Cassius," she muttered. The former chief hunter at Marshlands had proved a far more stubborn and resourceful foe than she'd imagined any Negro could. She'd underestimated the blacks at Marshlands time and again, underestimated them and let them fool her.

  "It won't happen again," she muttered as she hurled the valise into the back seat of her beat-up Ford. Before the Negro uprising, she'd driven a powerful Vauxhall. When the revolt broke out, she'd driven it up from Charleston toward Marshlands. South of the front-the Negroes of what they called the Congaree Socialist Republic had been able to hold a regular front for a while-a militia officer had confiscated the Vauxhall for use against the black rebels. She'd never seen it again. She wondered how many bullet holes scarred the fine coachwork these days.

  After cranking the Ford's engine to rough, noisy life, she climbed in and drove south down the Robert E. Lee Highway, from which she would eventually turn left to get to St. Matthews. She was about thirty miles away from home: a little more than an hour, if she didn't have a puncture or a breakdown. If she did, the time might double, or it might go up by some much larger factor.

  What struck her as she rattled along in the decrepit motorcar was how still and empty the countryside felt. Cotton and tobacco should have been ripening in the fields, and Negro laborers should have been tending both crops. Here and there, they were. But so many fields were a rank tangle of weeds and vines and shrubs, with no one even trying to bring in a crop on them.

  It wasn't the way it had been. It would never again be the way it had been. Tears stung her eyes, so that she had to slow down till they cleared-not that the Ford could go very fast anyhow. The cotton fields at Marshlands looked like this these days.

  Colletons had thrived on the plantation since the end of the eighteenth century. Even so, she was ever more tempted to cut her losses on it, quit paying the exorbitant taxes, and let the state of South Carolina take it off her hands. As far as she was concerned, the state of South Carolina was welcome to it.

  The Lee Highway crossed the Congaree on a steel suspension bridge. The Red rebels had damaged the bridge, but hadn't managed to destroy it. Well before she came to the river and the swamps to either side of it, Anne took a revolver from the valise and laid it on the seat, where she could grab it in a hurry. As a force for rebellion against the government of South Carolina and that of the CSA, the Congaree Socialist Republic was dead. Not quite all the Negroes had been hunted out of the swamps yet, though. Some still made a living of sorts as bandits.

  If bandits were lurking there, they gave no sign. She spotted a couple of pickaninnies fishing and passed an old black man leading a skinny, swaybacked mule laboring along under some enormous burden tied to its back. She thought about stopping and making the old man show her what the mule carried. How many rifles and pistols had traveled through the CSA in bundles like that before the uprising of 1915? Too many, surely.

  In the end, she drove on. She felt bad about it afterwards, but one person could do only so much. If the old man was moving guns or explosives, what was she supposed to do with him? Arrest him? Driving with one hand on the wheel and one on the pistol didn't appeal to her. Shoot him on the spot? That did appeal to her, powerfully, but it wasn't so simple as it would have been before the war, either. She would certainly have to go to court about it, which wouldn't have been certain at all before 1914. The number of Negro veterans enrolled on
the South Carolina voting lists remained tiny. The uprising during the war, though, showed how dangerous ignoring Negro opinion could be.

  When she got into St. Matthews, she smiled. Several women on the street were wearing trousers. She'd started that fashion herself, getting Aaron Rosenblum the tailor to make her several pairs so she could go into the swamps to fight the Reds in clothing more convenient than an ankle-length skirt. These women didn't wear pants because they intended to hunt Reds. They wore them because one of the most prominent women in Calhoun County did.

  Tom Colleton chuckled when she remarked on that. "I had noticed it myself, as a matter of fact," he said. "Gives a whole new kick to watching a pretty girl."

  "Does it?" Anne wasn't sure whether to be angry or amused. She ended up a little of both. "That's not why I got them, you know."

  "I never said it was," her brother answered. "That doesn't make what I did say any less true, though." While Anne digested that and finally nodded, Tom went on, "Have we got any money left?"

  "All things considered, we're doing well-as well as we can be, anyhow." With a certain amount of malicious pleasure, she added, "We're doing a lot better than clever Mr. Whitson," and explained how he'd gone bankrupt.

  "So the broker's broke, is he?" Tom said.

  Anne made a face at him. Then she started to laugh. "That's the sort of thing you would have said back before the war. You're usually more serious these days."

  "I can laugh when somebody else falls on his face in the mud," Tom told her. "Laughing when I'm down there myself is harder. Laughing when the whole country's down there is hardest of all. I still don't know how we're going to get back on our feet, Sis."

  "Neither do I, not with the damnyankees standing over us with a club," Anne said. "Sooner or later, though, they'll ease up. They have troubles of their own, what with all their strikes and trying to hold the Canadians down and Socialists yelling their heads off. When they get too busy at home, that's when we'll find somebody who can help us get moving again." She sighed. "I wish it would happen faster, though."