And so it was Maude who said, "They've come over the border, eh?"
"They have." Arthur McGregor sighed. "After Winnipeg, I've no doubt." Only a slight difference in accent, an extra tincture of Scots that made the last word sound like "doat," told him from one of the Americans he despised and feared. "They take the town, they cut the country in half, they do."
Maude turned and looked southward, as if in fear of locusts, though soldiers from the United States were liable to prove even more destructive. Under her bonnet, she wore her red hair tightly pinned down against her head, but it was so fine, wisps kept escaping the pins and springing out in front of her face. She brushed them back from her gray eyes with work-roughened hands: like her husband, she'd never known an easy day in her life. "The devil's own lot of them down there," she said, her voice worried.
"Don't I know it? Don't we all know it?" McGregor sighed again. "Sixty, sixty-five million of them, maybe eight million up here." By the way he spoke, he expected everyone in the United States, young or old, man or woman, to parade past the farmhouse in the next few minutes.
"We're not alone, eh?" Maude said; maybe she was seeing sixty or sixty- five million angry Americans in her mind's eye, too. "We've England with us, and the Confederacy, and the Empire of Mexico."
" England 's going to be busy close to home," her husband answered with the ingrained pessimism of a man who'd been wrestling with a stubborn Mother Nature for a living since before he needed to shave. " Mexico 's nothing, maybe less, and the Yanks outweigh the Confederates two to one or more, too. They can fight them and have plenty to spare for us."
Maude peered south again, this time as if looking past the USA to the CSA. "I don't know I much care for having those people on our side, when you get down to it. The way they treat their colored people, they might as well be-"
"Russians?" Arthur McGregor suggested wryly. "The Czar's on our side, too. The Yanks are no bargain, either; we'd never have had conscription up here if they didn't start it first, and these days down there, from what the newspapers say, you fill out a form for this, you fill out a form for that, you fill out a form for the other thing, same as you would if the Kaiser was running things. Only free land on the continent is where we're standing, seems to me."
"Pa! Pa!" His son Alexander came running toward the house, his voice cracking in excitement as any fourteen-year-old's was apt to do. "There's soldiers coming, Pa!" He pointed to the north.
Arthur, his mind focused on the threat from the United States, hadn't looked back toward Winnipeg in a while. Now he did. Sure enough, as his son had said, here came a cavalry troop, small in the distance, down toward the border with Dakota. Alexander jumped up and down, waving frantically at the soldiers. Arthur McGregor waved, too, but in a more measured way. He had a much better idea than his son of what war actually entailed.
The troopers waved back. Then, to McGregor's surprise, one of them peeled off from the rest and guided his chestnut toward the farmhouse at a fast trot. He reined in just in front of the porch: a little sallow fellow with waxed mustache who lifted his cap to Maude before nodding gravely to Arthur and less gravely to Alexander, who was all but hopping out of his overalls.
"Good day, my friends," the cavalryman said with a French accent that explained his swarthiness. "I am Pierre Lapin, lieutenant"-his fingers brushed the single pip on his shoulder board-"of the horse. Is it that my men and I could use your well for the purpose of watering ourselves?"
"Yes, sir, go right ahead, all of you." McGregor had to make a conscious effort not to stiffen to attention. The couple of weeks he spent drilling every year made him give an officer automatic deference.
"You are gracious. Merci," Lapin said, and waved to his men. They all followed the path he had taken.
"Dipper's in the bucket," Maude McGregor said, pointing to the well. Lieutenant Lapin tipped his hat to her again, which made her flush and giggle like a schoolgirl.
Unlike Lapin, who carried a pistol on his officer's Sam Browne belt, his troopers wore carbines slung on their backs and had sabers fixed to the left side of their saddles. They queued up at the well, chattering in the odd mix of English and French McGregor remembered from his own days in the Army. Not so long ago, as such things went, Canadians who used French and those who spoke English had disliked and distrusted one another. But with both groups disliking and distrusting their giant neighbor to the south even more, the older rivalry was less remembered.
McGregor went up to Lapin, who was waiting for his men to finish before he drank himself. Quietly, so Maude wouldn't hear, the farmer asked, "Will they get this far?" "When the cavalry lieutenant didn't answer, he went on, "I've got a rifle in the house-use it for hunting. I'll hunt things in green-gray if I have to."
Lapin's shoulders went up and down in a Gallic shrug. "Whether they will come so far I cannot say with certainty. I will say, though, if they do come so far and you have not been called to the colors to resist them, be cautious with that rifle. The Americans, they take their lessons from the Baches'" — his curled lip said what he thought of that-"and the Boches, in the war with France in the last century, were harsh against francstireurs."
"Thank you, sir. I'll bear that in mind," McGregor said. "But if they invade your country and you're defending your home, shouldn't matter whether you're in uniform or not."
"What should matter and what does matter, monsieur, are not one and the same thing, I regret to say," Lapin answered with another shrug.
A muttering in the distance, almost too deep, almost too soft, almost too far to hear. Thunder, a long ways off, McGregor thought. But it wasn't thunder, not on this fine, bright day-he realized that with the thought hardly formed. "That's artillery," he said, his voice flat and harsh.
"Vous avez raison," Lieutenant Lapin agreed. "I could wish you were wrong, but-" Yet another shrug. "And so perhaps it grows more likely the Americans will reach this place. But if they do, they will have paid a stiff price."
"Good," McGregor said. "What price will you have paid, though?"
"That is of no consequence, not to my country," Lapin replied. His turn at the well came at last. He drained the dipper dry, refilled it, and drained it again. "It is the price I agreed to pay when I joined the Army." He touched the brim of his cap in half a salute. "I thank you for the water, and I wish you the best of fortune in the hard days that surely lie ahead." He swung up onto his horse, calling on his men to hurry and remount. They soon rode away.
More of what wasn't thunder came from the south. It didn't sound closer, but it was louder: more guns in action, or bigger guns. Both, most likely, McGregor judged. Now that the fight had started, the Americans, the Canadians, and the men of the mother country would throw everything they had into it.
With that growing rumble in the background, McGregor's satisfaction in his fields of amber grain evaporated. With his country and the United States harvesting the fruits of longtime enmity, any chance he'd have to bring in his own harvest seemed small and dim.
Instead of watching the waving wheat, he kept gazing southward, after the cavalrymen. Before long, he saw motion on the road coming up from the south. Without turning his head, he said, "Fetch me the rifle, Alexander."
"Yes, Pa," his son answered. The boy thundered up the stairs two at a time and returned a moment later holding the pump-action Winchester with the careful confidence of someone long used to guns. Arthur McGregor checked to make sure he had a cartridge in the chamber, then stood and waited to see what sort of onslaught was coming.