Somebody behind Rodriguez asked, "How much good can Mexico do us?"
"Against los Estados Unidos, los Estados Confederados need men," Quinn replied. "We have the factories to give them helmets and rifles and boots and everything else they require. But getting more soldados up to the front can only help."
"If they don't run away as soon as they get there," Rodriguez whispered to Carlos Ruiz. His friend nodded. Neither of them had much faith in the men who followed Francisco Jose II, the new Emperor of Mexico.
Quinn went on, "But that is not the only news I have for you tonight, mis amigos. I am delighted to be able to tell you that I have a copy of President Featherston's important new book, Over Open Sights, for each and every one of you." He picked up a crate and set it on the table behind which he sat. "You can get it in Spanish or English, whichever you would rather."
An excited murmur ran through the Freedom Party men. Rodriguez's voice was part of it. People had been talking about Over Open Sights for years. People had been talking about it for so long, in fact, that they'd begun to joke about whether Featherston's dangerous visions would ever appear. But here was the book at last.
Only a few men asked for Over Open Sights in English. Rodriguez wasn't one of them. He spoke it fairly well, and understood more than he spoke. But he still felt more comfortable reading Spanish. Had his sons been at the meeting, he suspected they would have chosen the English version. They'd had more schooling than he had, and more of it had been in English.
"Pay me later, as you have the money," Quinn said. "Some of the price from each copy will go to helping wounded soldiers and the families of those who die serving their country. Senor Featherston, el presidente, was a soldier himself. Of course you know that. But he has not forgotten what being a soldier means."
Hipolito Rodriguez wasn't the only one who nodded approvingly. Now that Jake Featherston was rich and famous, he could easily have forgotten the three dark years of the Great War. But Quinn was right; he hadn't.
The local Freedom Party leader went on, "At the end of the last war, our own government tried to pretend it didn't owe our soldiers anything. They'd fought and suffered and died-por Dios, my friends, you'd fought and suffered and died-but the government wanted to pretend the war had never happened. It had made the mistakes, and it blamed the men for them. That's one of the reasons I'm so glad we finally came to power. What the Whigs did then, the Freedom Party will never do. Never!"
More nods. Some people clapped their hands. But the applause wasn't as strong as it might have been. Rodriguez could see why. Instead of giving Senor Quinn all their attention, men kept opening their copies of Over Open Sights here and there and seeing just what Jake Featherston had to say. The President would never come to Baroyeca, especially not now, not with a war on. But here, in his book, Featherston was setting out all his thoughts, all his ideas, for his country to read and to judge.
Rodriguez held temptation at bay only long enough to be polite. Then he, too, opened Over Open Sights. What did Jake Featherston have to say? The book began, I'm waiting, not far behind our line. We have niggers in the trenches in front of us. As soon as the damnyankees start shelling them, they'll run. They don't want anything to do with U.S. soldiers-they'd sooner shoot at us. I'd like to see the damnyankees dead. But I'd rather see those niggers dead. They aim to ruin this country of ours. And most of all, I want to pay back the stupid fat cats who put rifles in those niggers' hands. I want to, and by Jesus one of these days I will.
And he had. And he was paying back the mallates, and he was paying back the damnyankees, too. Rodriguez had always thought Jake Featherston was a man of his word. Here once again he saw it proved.
Quinn laughed. He said, "I am going to ask for a motion to adjourn. You are paying more attention to the President than you are to me. That's all right. That's why Jake Featherston is the President. He makes people pay attention to him. He can do it even in a book. Do I hear that motion?" He did. It passed with no objections. He went on, "Hasta la vista, senores. Next week, if it pleases you, we will talk about some of what he has to say."
The Freedom Party men went out into the night. Some of them headed for home, others for La Culebra Verde. After a brief hesitation, Rodriguez walked to the cantina. He didn't think people would wait for next week's meeting to start talking about what was in Over Open Sights. He didn't want to wait that long himself. He could read and drink and talk-and then, he thought with a smile, drink a little more.
Dr. Leonard O'Doull was not a happy man. He found that all the more strange, all the more disheartening, because he'd been so happy for so long. He'd come up to Quebec during the Great War to work at the hospital the U.S. Army had built on a farmer's land near the town of Riviere-du-Loup. He'd ended up marrying the farmer's daughter, and he and Nicole Galtier had come as close to living happily ever after as is commonly given to two mortals to do. Their son, Lucien, named for his grandfather, was a good boy, and was now on the edge of turning into a good young man.
Oh, they'd had their troubles. O'Doull had lost his father, a physician like himself, and Nicole had lost both her mother and her father in the space of a few years. But those were the sorts of things that happened to people simply because they were human beings. As a doctor, Leonard O'Doull understood that better than most.
He'd made a good life, a comfortable life, for himself in the Republic of Quebec. He'd spoken some French before he ever got up here. These days, he used it almost all the time, and spoke it with a Quebecois accent, not the Parisian one he had of course learned in school. There had been times when he could almost forget he was born and raised in Massachusetts.
Almost.
He'd been reminded his American past still stayed a part of him when war clouds darkened the border between the United States and the Confederate States. To most people in Riviere-du-Loup-even to his relatives by marriage-the growing strife between the USA and the CSA was like a quarrel between strangers who lived down the street: interesting, but nothing to get very excited about.
Now that war had broken out, the locals still felt the same way. The Republic of Quebec was helping the USA with occupation duty in English-speaking Canada, but the Republic remained neutral, at peace with everyone even when most of the world split into warring camps.
As Leonard O'Doull walked from his home to his office a few blocks away, he did not feel at peace with the rest of the world. Far from it. He was a tall, lean man, pale as his Irish name suggested, with a long, lantern-jawed face, green eyes that usually laughed but not today, and close-cropped sandy hair now grayer than it had been. He didn't feel fifty, but he was.
People nodded to him as he walked by. Riviere-du-Loup wasn't such a big town that most folks didn't know most others. And O'Doull stood out on account of his inches and also on account of his looks. He didn't look French, and just about everybody else in town did. Most people were short and dark and Gallic, the way their ancestors who'd settled here in the seventeenth century had been.
Oh, there were exceptions. Nicole's brother, Georges Galtier, was as tall as O'Doull, and twice as broad through the shoulders. But Georges looked like a Frenchman, too; he just looked like an oversized Frenchman.
Here was the office. O'Doull used one key to open the lock, another to open the dead bolt. His was one of the few doors in Riviere-du-Loup to have a dead bolt. But he was a careful and reputable man. He kept morphine and other drugs in here, and felt an obligation to make them as hard to steal as he could.