"Your wife finally raised a stink that was big enough for me to notice it," Darrow answered. "It took her a while, because people in the USA don't want to notice a colored woman even when she's screaming her head off. But she kept at it. Remarkable woman. Stubborn as a Missouri mule."
"Yes, suh," Cincinnatus said happily. "God bless Elizabeth, too." Clarence Darrow let out a long, rasping sigh. Cincinnatus took no notice of it. He went on, "But even if you knew I was in trouble, how'd you get Luther Bliss to turn loose o' me? That's one ornery man."
"That's one first-class son of a bitch, is what that is," Darrow said. "Even after I got the court order, he kept denying he'd ever heard of you. But I managed to persuade a judge otherwise-and here you are."
"Here I am," Cincinnatus agreed. Seeing farms and woods out the window, not stone and concrete and barbed wire, made him feel like a new man. But the new man had old problems. "What do I owe you, suh?" Lawyers didn't come cheap; he knew that. Even so… "Whatever it is, I pays it. May take me a while, you understand, but I pays it."
Darrow's grin displayed crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. "Your wife told me you'd say that. You don't owe me a dime-I did your case pro bono publico." He saw the Latin meant nothing to Cincinnatus, and added, "For the public good."
"That's mighty kind of you, suh, but it ain't right," Cincinnatus said. "I want to pay you back. I owe you."
"Your wife said you'd say that, too," Clarence Darrow told him. "But there's no need-I'll make more from publicity than you could pay. If you must, pay the favor forward-do something good for someone else. Bargain?"
"Yes, suh-so help me God," Cincinnatus said.
"More of that claptrap." Darrow sighed. "Well, never mind. I hope you know better than to stick your nose back into Kentucky again?"
"Long as my folks ain't poorly for true, sure," Cincinnatus answered. "That's what got me here before. I be more careful 'bout the message nowadays, but if I reckon it's so, what choice have I got but to come?"
Clarence Darrow gave him a long, measuring stare. The lawyer delivered his verdict in one word: "Fool."
C oal smoke pouring out the stack, the train hurried toward the Salt Lake City station. Sparks flew as the brakes ground its iron wheels against the iron rails that carried it. Colonel Abner Dowling would rather have been somewhere, anywhere, else than on the platform waiting for that train to pull in. By the expression on his mustachioed face, General Pershing felt the same way.
"No help for it, though," Dowling murmured, more than half to himself.
He hadn't been quiet enough. But Pershing only nodded and said, "He has earned the right to do as he pleases."
"I know that, sir," Dowling answered. "I just wish he would have pleased to do something-anything-else."
"Yes." Pershing nodded again. "There is that, isn't there?"
The train stopped right at the platform. Dowling had irrationally hoped against hope that it wouldn't, but would keep right on going. The leader of the military band gathered on the platform caught Pershing's eye. Pershing looked as if he wished the fellow hadn't. At last, reluctantly, he nodded. The band leader either didn't notice the reluctance or thought it wise to pretend he didn't. With a proud flourish, he began to wave his baton. The band struck up "The Stars and Stripes Forever."
No sooner had the vaunting music begun to blare forth than the door to one of the Pullman cars opened. Out came a bent ancient whose mustache and what Dowling could see of his hair-he always wore a hat, to keep the world from knowing he was bald-were a peroxided gold, defying time. A woman of about the same years followed him onto the platform.
"Well, Autie," she sniffed, "they are giving you a proper welcome, anyhow."
"What's that, Libbie?" The old man cupped a hand behind his ear.
"I said, they're giving you a proper welcome," she repeated, louder this time.
"Can't hear a thing over that music. At least they're giving me a proper welcome."
Colonel Dowling and General Pershing both stepped forward. They both saluted. They chorused, "Welcome to Utah, General Custer." Dowling was lying in his teeth. He would have bet Pershing was doing the same.
"Thank you. Thank you both," Custer said. He stiffly returned the salute, even though, having at last retired from the U.S. Army after more than sixty years of service, he wore a somber black suit and homburg. Three years before, he'd been as vigorous as a man in his eighties could be. Now… Dowling found himself surprised, dismayed, and surprised at being dismayed. He'd always thought-sometimes despairingly-that George Armstrong Custer was the one unchanging man on the face of the earth.
Here at last, he saw it wasn't so. The retired general was visibly slower, visibly more feeble. Some spark had gone out of him since his retirement, and he seemed to know it.
Libbie Custer, by contrast, remained as she always had. "Hello, Colonel Dowling," she said with a smile that showed white false teeth. "It's good to see you again. Now that Autie and I are civilians, may I call you Abner?"
"Of course," Dowling answered, though he'd always hated his Christian name.
Meanwhile, General Pershing was shaking hands with Custer and exchanging polite and, no doubt, insincere compliments. During the Great War, Pershing's command had been just to the east of Custer's. Pershing's Second Army had captured Louisville and generally pushed south faster than Custer's First-till Custer decided he knew more about barrels than anyone in the War Department… and, against all odds, turned out to be right. From things Pershing had said since Abner Dowling came to Utah, he still couldn't figure out how Custer had pulled that off.
At the time, Dowling had been sure Custer's lies to Philadelphia would get the general-and, not so incidentally, himself-court-martialed and sent to Leavenworth to do hard labor for the rest of their lives. Instead, his superior had ended up the USA's greatest military hero since George Washington, and Dowling, by reflected glory, had ended up a minor hero himself.
Custer said, "Are you keeping the Mormons here on a tight rein, General? I hope to heaven you are, because they will cause trouble if they get half a chance."
"Things have been tolerably quiet, anyway," Pershing answered. "They don't shoot at our men any more. Taking hostages worked pretty well for the Germans in Belgium, and for us in Canada and the CSA, and it works here, too. The Mormons may want us dead, but they don't want their friends and neighbors and sweethearts going up against a wall with a blindfold."
"And a cigarette," Custer added automatically, but he shook his head before anyone could correct him. "No, the Mormons don't even have that to console themselves. Poor devils. Nothing wrong with tobacco."
Libbie sniffed. Custer had been smoking and drinking and cursing ever since the disappointments of the Second Mexican War, and she still hated all three.
"It does work, cigarette or no," Pershing said. "We even quelled trouble with polygamists down in Teasdale by taking several hundred hostages and making it ever so clear we'd do what we had to do if trouble broke out."
Dowling wanted to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand and go, Whew! because of that. He didn't, but he wanted to. Instead, he said, "General, Mrs. Custer, your limousine is waiting just outside the station. If you'd be kind enough to come with me…"
They came. They didn't remark upon-perhaps they didn't notice-the sharpshooters on the roof of the station. More riflemen were posted in the buildings across the street. Custer had served as General Pope's right arm in the U.S. occupation of restive Utah during the Second Mexican War. Mormons had long memories, as everyone had found out in their uprising during the Great War. Someone might still want to take a potshot or two at Custer for what he'd done more than forty years before, no matter how many hostages' lives it cost his people.