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.
A chilly, nasty rain fell on Augusta, Georgia. Scipio didn't like the rain. He had to put on a long coat and rubber overshoes and to carry an umbrella to protect the tuxedo he had to wear at the Huntsman's Lodge. Newsboys hawking their papers doubtless liked the rain even less. They got their copies of the Constitutionalist wrapped in yellow wax paper, but it didn't always keep them dry. Customers who bought a newspaper with the consistency of bread soaked in milk were apt to say unkind things-and to demand a fresh copy without forking over another five cents.
"Election today!" the newsboys shouted from under their umbrellas. "President Featherston seeking second term!"
Scipio didn't buy a paper. Why would he want a Constitutionalist when Jake Featherston was violating everything the Confederate Constitution had stood for since before the first shot was fired in the War of Secession? Oh, Featherston had rammed through the amendment that let him run again, but so what? Even a blind man could see that was a put-up job.
And even a blind man could see the election was a put-up job, too. Yes, the Whigs and the Radical Liberals had nominated candidates, but they had only a slightly better chance of winning than Scipio would have if he'd run against the incumbent president. The Freedom Party dominated the wireless web and the newspapers; the other candidates got only brief and unflattering mention. Despite the rain, Freedom Party stalwarts prowled outside polling places. Freedom Party officials would count most of the votes. Jake Featherston wouldn't lose.
With a snort, Scipio walked past another newsboy. As if elections applied to him or the likes of him anyway! He'd never had any choice in who ruled the Confederate States, and he never would. He wondered how many of the black men who'd earned the franchise fighting for the CSA in the Great War still had the nerve to try to use it. He also wondered how many of those who tried succeeded.
Not many and even fewer, unless he missed his guess.
As usual, he got to the Huntsman's Lodge in good time. He shed the coat and galoshes with sighs of relief, and hung the umbrella on a peg so it dripped down onto the rug in a hallway. Then he went into the kitchen to remind himself of the day's specials. At least this was Tuesday, not Monday. They wouldn't be making specials out of whatever hadn't moved over the weekend.
"Evening, Xerxes," Jerry Dover said. "How are you?"
"Tolerable, suh," Scipio told the manager. "I's tolerable. How you is?"
"Not bad," Dover answered. "Can we talk a little?"
"Yes, suh. What you want?" Scipio did his best not to sound too alarmed. Whenever a boss said something like that, it usually meant trouble.
Dover said, "You're a hell of a good worker, Xerxes, don't get me wrong. You read and write and cipher better than most white men I know. What I want to ask you is, do you have to talk the way you do?"
"This heah onliest way I knows how to talk," Scipio answered. That, of course, wasn't true, as Bathsheba could have testified. If he hadn't been able to sound like an educated white man, they and their children would have died in the riots after the Freedom Party took power.
But if he talked that way without direst need, some white man or other who heard him would connect his voice with the Marshlands plantation and Anne Colleton-whereupon, very shortly, he would be dead.
"Would you be willing to take lessons?" Jerry Dover asked, not knowing he could have given them instead.
"Once upon a time, I try dat," Scipio lied. "It don't do no good. I still sounds like dis."
"I could make it worth your while," Dover said. "Menander the head-waiter's going to retire before too long-he's been sickly for a while now, you know. You'd be the perfect fellow to take his place-if you didn't talk like such a nigger. Everything else? I know you can do it. But you got to sound better."
Scipio wondered if he could fake the lessons and end up sounding a little better than he did now, but not a lot. He had his doubts. Dover wasn't wrong: unless he sounded like a college-trained white (which the restaurant manager didn't know he could do at all), he sounded like someone who'd come straight from the swamps by the Congaree. That wouldn't do for a headwaiter. Compromise between the two dialects? He saw none. He also saw danger in sounding even a little like the way he had at Marshlands. He couldn't afford to be recognized, not after he'd been a spokesman for the Congaree Socialist Republic. He'd been coerced into playing that role, but who would care? No one at all.