“Uh-huh,” the Confederate major said again. “Well, if you had been his wife and weren’t any more, you might say the same thing, but I reckon-” He didn’t say exactly what he reckoned, but it didn’t seem like anything bad for Nellie. “Maybe you can tell me what sort of friends he has, then.”
“Next friend of his I know about will be the first,” Nellie said.
Edna giggled. The major started to smile, then stopped, as if remembering he was on duty. He said, “This here Reach tells more stories than Uncle Romulus, and that’s a fact. Some of them, ma’am, we have to check.” He chuckled. “We’re going to send him to a place where nobody listens to his stories for a long, long time.”
“If you think I’m going to miss him, Major, you can think again.” Nellie sounded as prim and righteous as she did when taking the high line with Edna. The Rebel tipped his hat to her and went on his way.
“That wasn’t so bad, Ma,” Edna said. “Way he was asking after you, though, heaven only knew what he wanted.”
“You’re right,” Nellie said. You don’t know how right you are.
She went back across the street to the shoe-repair shop. The bell jangled. Mr. Jacobs looked up-warily-from his work. Her enormous smile said everything that needed saying. He set down the little hammer, came around the counter, and took both her hands in his. To her astonishment, she leaned forward and kissed him full on the mouth. She hadn’t done that with a man since well before her husband died. His arms went around her, and he kissed her, too. She enjoyed it. That hadn’t happened since well before her husband died, either.
“Some good out of Bill Reach after all,” she murmured to herself.
Hal Jacobs stiffened. “Out of who?” he barked, his voice too loud, his mouth too near her ear. She explained, sure he’d misheard. He sagged away from her, his face pale as whitewash. “I wondered what was wrong,” he gasped. “Hadn’t heard from him in too long. Bill runs-ran, maybe-our whole organization here. And he’s caught? Good God!”
“Good God!” Nellie said, too, for very different reasons. All at once, she wondered if she was backing the wrong side.
X
“Not much further now,” Lucien Galtier told his horse as he rode up the fine American-paved road toward Riviere-du-Loup. In the back of the wagon, several hens clucked, but they were not a true part of the conversation. He and the horse had been discussing things for years. The hens’ role, though they did not realize it, was strictly temporary.
Off to the east, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, a steam whistle shouted as a train hurried up toward the town. “Tabernac,” Galtier muttered under his breath: a Quebecois curse. The soldiers on the train, no doubt, would cross the St. Lawrence and then try to push on toward Quebec City. The Americans, worse luck, were making progress, too, for the artillery from the north bank of the river sounded farther off than it had when the campaign was new. The newspapers extolled every skirmish as one Bonaparte would have admired (clumsy propaganda, in a province that had never reconciled itself to the French Revolution), but anyone who believed all the newspapers said deserved nothing better than he got.
The whistle screamed again. The horse twitched his ears in annoyance. The chickens squawked and fluttered in their cages. No, they were not suited for serious talk-too flighty.
Cannon by the riverbank started going off-wham, wham, wham! The horse snorted. The chickens went crazy. Lucien Galtier raised a dark eyebrow. “Those are quick-firing guns,” he told the horse, “the kind they use when trying to shoot down an aeroplane. And so-”
Through the cannons’ roar, he picked up a rapidly swelling buzz. Then he spotted the winged shapes. Before the war, he had never seen an aeroplane. Here, now, were two at once, flying hardly higher than the treetops. They both carried blue-white-red roundels on their wings and flanks. The red was in the shape of a maple leaf.
“There, what did I yell you?” Lucien said to the horse. “And not just any aeroplanes, but Canadian aeroplanes.” He reined in to watch.
In front of the pilots, machine guns hammered. He wondered how the men managed to fire through the propellers without shooting themselves down. However they did it, they shot up the troop train, spun in the air like circus acrobats, and then shot it up again. Then, still low, they streaked back toward the free side of the St. Lawrence.
Galtier expected the train to streak toward Riviere-du-Loup. Instead, it came to a ragged halt. Maybe the aeroplanes had killed the engineer, and the brakeman was doing what he did best. Maybe they had filled the boiler with so many holes, it was either kill the pressure inside or explode.
“It could even be-both,” Galtier said, not altogether unhappily.
Soldiers started spilling out of the train. Some of them came running his way. He scowled and thought himself a fool for having stopped to watch the spectacle. But if he tried to leave now, those soldiers would not be pleased with him. And they had rifles.
“Frenchie! Hey, Frenchie!” they shouted as they got closer. “Bring your wagon on over here. We got wounded.”
“Mauvais tabernac,” Lucien snarled. No help for it, though. As he pulled the wagon off the road and bounced toward the track, he felt a curious mixture of joy at having the enemies of his country wounded and sorrow at having young men who had never personally done him wrong wounded.
The chickens did not approve of the rough ride he was giving them. “Be still, you fools,” he told them, for the first time including them in his…He groped for a word. In my salon, he thought, pleased with himself. “This will keep you alive a little longer.”
Ahead, soldiers in green-gray were sometimes helping out of the train, sometimes carrying from it other soldiers in green-gray extravagantly splashed with red. “How many can you hold?” a captain called to Lucien as he drew near. “Four, maybe five?”
“Yes, it could be,” the farmer had replied. Exposure had improved his English-to a point. When he turned to indicate the chickens and their cages in the wagon bed, he was reduced to a helpless wave and a single word: “But-”
“Here.” The American captain dug in a trouser pocket and tossed something to Galtier, who automatically caught it. “That ought to cover them.” He looked down to see what he had: a twenty-dollar U.S. goldpiece.
He took off his hat in salute. “Oui, monsieur. Merci, monsieur.” The American could simply have had the chickens thrown out onto the ground. He’d expected the Boche americain to do just that. Instead, the fellow had given him more than a fair price for them. Lucien jumped down and piled the cages in a wobbly pyramid, then hurried to help the Americans land their comrades in the space thus vacated. A service for a service, he thought.
“Here, pal,” an unwounded U.S. soldier said. “Careful with Herb here. He’s a damn good fellow, Herb is.” As gently as he could, Lucien arranged the damn good fellow so he could sit against the side of the wagon. Herb had a rough bandage, rapidly soaking through with blood, on his right leg. He also had a streak of blood running down his chin from one corner of his mouth; he must have bitten through his lip against the pain.
The horse snorted and tried to shy, uneasy at the stink of blood. One of the American soldiers caught his head and eased him back toward something approaching calm. There was no earthly reason Americans should not be good with horses. Nonetheless, Lucien felt almost as betrayed as if his wife had been unfaithful with a man who wore green-gray.
“We came past a hospital back there, didn’t we?” the captain asked. “I thought I saw it through the window.”
“Yes, sir,” Galtier answered. “It is, in fact, on my land.” The American didn’t notice the resentment with which he said that. Well, the fellow had paid him. One surprise of a day was plenty; with two, nothing would have seemed certain any more. In the memory of the one surprise, Galtier added, “And my daughter works as a nurse’s helper there.”