"Got a couple boxes for you from Mistuh Conroy," Cincinnatus said, coming up close so nobody else could hear.
The fat cook nodded. "Felix!" he bawled. "Lucullus!" Two youths with his looks but without his bulk came hurrying up to him. He jerked a thumb at Cincinnatus. "He got the packages we been waitin' fo'."
His sons-for so Cincinnatus figured them to be-hurried outside and carried the boxes into a back room of the restaurant. One of them gave Cincinnatus a package wrapped in newspapers through which grease was starting to soak. "Best ribs in town," he said.
"I know that already," Cincinnatus said. "Obliged."
He drove Conroy's wagon back to the general store, then walked home.
The smell of the ribs tormented him all the way there. When he opened the door, Elizabeth started to yell at him for being late. That savoury package started the job of calming her down. The five-dollar gold piece finished it.
Because of the Yankee curfew, nights were usually quiet. The sound of banging — not gunfire, but something else-woke Cincinnatus a couple of times. When he headed for the docks the next morning, every other telegraph pole and fence post was adorned with a full-color poster of Teddy Roosevelt leading a detachment of U.S. soldiers, all of them wearing German-style spiked helmets, each one with a baby spitted on the bayonet of his rifle, peace, the poster said, freedom.
In his mind's eye, Cincinnatus saw lots of Negro boys with hammers and nails running here and there, putting up posters in the dead of night. With his real eyes, he saw U.S. soldiers tearing them down. He didn't know for certain he'd had anything to do with that. Doing his best to take no notice of the angry U.S. troops, he kept on walking toward the docks.
Once upon a time, Provo, Utah, had probably been a pretty town. Mountains towered to the east and northeast; to the west lay Utah Lake. The streets were wide, and shade trees had lined them. This July, as far as Paul Mantarakis was concerned, the place was nothing but a bottleneck, corking the advance of U.S. forces toward Salt Lake City. The trees had either been blasted to bits by artillery fire or cut down to form barricades across the broad streets. Thanks to the mountains and the lake, you couldn't go around Provo. You had to go through it.
Mantarakis scratched his left sleeve. He was probably lousy again. The only notice he took of the third stripe on that sleeve was that the double thickness of cloth made scratching harder.
Captain Norman Hinshaw — a captain because of casualties, the same rea son Mantarakis was a sergeant-squatted down in a foxhole beside him. He pointed ahead. "The big set of buildings-that big set of ruins, I should say- that's what's left of Brigham Young College. That's where the damned Mor mons have all their machine guns, too. That's what keeps us from taking the whole town."
"Yes, sir," Mantarakis said. He knew where the Mormons had their ma chine guns, all right. They'd killed enough Americans with them. Deadpan, he went on, "Of course, it's just a few goddamn fanatics doing all the fighting. The rest of the Mormons all love the USA."
Hinshaw's narrow, sour face looked even narrower and more sour than usual. "They're still feeding that tripe to the people back home," he said. "Some of them may even still believe it. Only soldiers who still believe it are the ones who got shot right off the train."
"That's about the size of it, sir," Mantarakis agreed. As he spoke, he checked right, left, and to the rear. As in Price, the Mormons in Provo had the nasty habit of letting U.S. soldiers overrun their positions, then turning around and shooting them in the back. Paul summed it up as best he could: "If you're a Mormon in Utah, you hate the USA."
"Isn't that the sad and sorry truth?" Hinshaw said. "Only people who give us any sort of assistance at all are the ones the Mormons call gentiles- and they assassinate them whenever they get the chance." He snorted. "Even the sheenies in Utah are gentiles, if you can believe it."
"I'd believe anything about this damn place," Paul said. "Anybody who's seen what we've seen getting this far would believe anything."
Back of the line, back behind the train station, U.S. artillery opened up on Brigham Young College again. Up above, an aeroplane buzzed, spotting for the guns. The Mormons shot at it, but it was too high for their machine guns to reach.
Hinshaw looked up at the aeroplane. "Good for him," he said. "He'll find out where the bastards are at, and we'll blow 'em up. I like that. The more of 'em we kill, the less there are left to kill."
"You said it, sir," Paul agreed. "They do fight harder than the Rebs, every damn one of 'em."
"Amen to that," the captain said. "The Rebs, they're sons of bitches, but they're soldiers. When the war comes through, the civilians get the hell out of the way like they're supposed to. Here, though, anybody over the age of eight, boy or girl, is an even-money bet to be a franctireur. I heard tell they planted an explosive under a baby, and when one of our soldiers picked up the kid — boom'."
Mantarakis wondered if that was true, or something somebody had made up for the sake of the story, or something somebody had made up to keep the troops on their toes. No way to tell, not for certain. That it was even within the realm of possibility said everything that needed saying about the kind of fight the Mormons were putting up.
As if to remind him what kind of fight that was, the Mormons in the front-line foxholes and shelters in the rubble opened up again on the U.S. positions south of Center Street. Rifle fire picked up all along the line as government soldiers started shooting back. Machine guns began to bark and chatter. Here and there, wounded men shrieked.
"Be alert out there!" Paul shouted to his men as he got to his feet. "They're liable to rush us." The Mormons had done that to another regiment in the brigade, down near the town of Spanish Fork. Farmers and merchants in overalls and sack suits, a couple even wearing neckties, had thrown the U.S. soldiers back several hundred yards, and captured four machine guns to boot.
That regiment had had its colors retired in disgrace; it was off doing prisoner-guard duty somewhere these days, being reckoned unfit for anything better. Mantarakis didn't want the same ignominy to fall on his unit.
But the religious fanatics — religious maniacs was what Mantarakis thought of them, even if that did make him seem unpleasantly like Gordon McSweeney to himself-didn't charge. They weren't eager about battling their way through barbed wire, not any more. A few gruesome maulings at the hands of troops more alert than that one luckless regiment had pounded that lesson into them. Even if they didn't have uniforms, they were beginning to be have more like regular troops than they had: the effect, no doubt, of fighting the U.S. regulars for some weeks.
They still had more originality left in them than most regulars, though. Something flew through the air and crashed into the foxholes and trenches behind Mantarakis. He shook his head in bemusement. It had looked like a bot tle. He wondered what was in it. Not whiskey, that was for sure-the poor stupid damn Mormons were even drier than the desert in which they lived.
Another bottle hurtled toward the U.S. lines. The Mormons had used some sort of outsized slingshot arrangement to fling makeshift grenades at the soldiers battling to crush their rebellion; Paul would have bet they were throwing their bottles the same way. But why?
A trail of smoke followed that second one. It smashed maybe twenty yards from Mantarakis, and splashed flame into the bottom of the trench. "Jesus!" he yelled, and crossed himself. "They've got kerosene in there, or something like it."
"That's a filthy way to fight," Captain Hinshaw said. Half walking, half waddling, he started down the trench line. "Let me get to a field telephone. We'll teach them to play with fire, God damn me to hell if we don't."
"Look out, Captain!" Paul shouted. The Mormons must have been saving up bottles, because they had a lot of them. Here came another one. Hinshaw ducked. That didn't help him. It hit him in the back and shattered, pouring burning kerosene up and down his body.