This time, he got something better than applause. He got delighted silence, followed by a low, excited buzz. The mine had been closed ever since the collapse, and the railroad had stopped coming to Baroyeca not much later. Rodriguez wondered what had made the authorities change their minds after so long.
Two men sitting in the next row back answered the question for him. One of them remarked, "Need plenty of plata to fight a war."
"Sн, sн," the other agreed. "And where there's a little silver, there's always a lot of lead. Need plenty of lead to fight a war, too."
"Ahh," Rodriguez murmured to himself. He liked seeing how things worked. He always had. Maybe the authorities hadn't decided to reopen the mine from the goodness of their hearts alone. Maybe they'd seen that they would need silver and especially lead.
Well, what if they had? It would still do the town a lot of good. If the railroad came back, prices at Diaz's general store would drop like a rock. Shipping goods in by truck on bad roads naturally made everything cost more. After the train line shut down, the storekeeper had been lucky to stay in business at all. Plenty of other places in town hadn't.
"Three cheers for Seсor Quinn!" somebody shouted. The cheers rang out. Quinn stood there, looking suitably modest, as if the news hadn't been his doing at all. Maybe it really hadn't, not altogether. But he deserved some credit for it.
When the Party meeting did end, several men headed over to La Culebra Verde to celebrate. Rodriguez thought of what Magdalena would say if he came home drunk. Sometimes, after he had that thought, he had another one: I don't care. Then he would go off to the Green Snake and see how much cerveza or, more rarely, tequila, he could pour down. When he did that, Magdalena had some very pointed things to say the next morning, things a headache often did not improve.
Tonight, he just started out into the countryside beyond Baroyeca. The new line of poles supporting the wires that carried electricity made sure he couldn't get lost even if he were drunk. The sky was black velvet scattered with diamonds. A lot of stars seemed to be out tonight.
One of them, a bright red one, startled him by moving. Then he heard the faint buzz of a motor overhead. "Un avion," he muttered in surprise. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen an airplane above Baroyeca. It was flying south. He wondered where it was going. Off to scout the border with the Empire of Mexico? That seemed most likely. But wouldn't it do better to scout the border with the USA?
Maybe other airplanes were doing that. Rodriguez hoped so. When he fought up in west Texas, the only airplanes he'd seen had belonged to the United States. The Confederate States, stretched too thin, hadn't been able to deploy many on that distant, less than vital front.
Would things be any different in a new war? Yes, los Estados Confederados had Kentucky and Houston back again, so that Texas was whole once more. Maybe they'd even get back the other territory they had lost in the Great War. But that map on the wall of Freedom Party headquarters still said los Estados Unidos were bigger, and bigger still meant stronger in a long, drawn-out fight.
Maybe Jake Featherston knew something he didn't. He hoped so. He couldn't see what it might be, though. With one son in the Army, with two more likely to be called up, he also couldn't help worrying.
When he got back to the farmhouse, he smiled at the fine white electric light shining out through the windows. Magdalena had left a lamp burning- no, not burning: she'd left a lamp on-for him. She'd waited up for him, too. He didn't say anything about the growing threat of war. Instead, he talked about the silver mine's reopening and the likely return of the railroad to Baroyeca.
His wife smiled. She nodded. And then she said, "This is all very good, but I still hope there will be peace with los Estados Unidos."
Rodriguez realized he wasn't the only one worrying.
Chester Martin passed a newsboy on his way to the trolley stop. The kid had a stack of the Los Angeles Times in front of him as tall as the bottoms of his knickers. He waved a paper at Chester and shouted out the morning's headline: "Smith says no!"
Usually, Chester walked right past newsboys. That was enough to stop him, though. "Oh, he does, does he? Says no to what, exactly?"
The newsboy couldn't tell him. They'd told the kid what to yell before they turned him loose, and that was it. He yelled it again, louder this time. "Smith says no!" For good measure, he added, "Read all about it!"
"Give me one." Chester parted with a nickel. The newsboy handed him a paper. He carried it to the stop. As soon as he got there, he unfolded it and read the headline and the lead story. Al Smith had said no to Jake Featherston. The Confederates weren't going to get back the pieces of Sonora and Arkansas and Virginia they'd lost in the war-or Sequoyah, either.
Smith was quoted as saying, "The president of the Confederate States personally promised me that he would make no more territorial demands on the North American continent. He has taken less than a year to break his solemn word. No matter what he may feel about his promise, however, I am resolved to hold him to it. These territories will remain under the administration and sovereignty of the United States."
"About time!" Martin said, and turned the paper over to read more.
Just then, though, the trolley came clanging up. Chester threw another nickel in the fare box and found a seat. His was far from the only open copy of the Times as the streetcar rattled away.
A man of about Martin's age sitting across the aisle from him folded his newspaper and put it in his lap with an air of finality. "There's going to be trouble," he said gloomily.
The woman sitting behind him said, "There'd be worse trouble if we gave that Featherston so-and-so what he wants. How soon would he be back trying to squeeze something else out of us?"
"Lady, I spent three stinking years in the trenches," the man answered. "There isn't any trouble worse than that." He looked over at Chester for support. "Aren't I right? Were you there?"
"Yeah, I was there," Martin said. "I don't know what to tell you, though. Looks to me like that guy is spoiling for a fight. The longer we keep ducking, the harder he's going to hit us when he finally does."
"Yikes!" The man jerked in surprise. He sent Martin a betrayed look. "Who cares about those lousy little chunks of land?"
"Well, I don't, not much," Chester admitted. "But suppose we give them back to him and then he jumps on us anyway? We'd look like a bunch of boobs, and we'd be that much worse off, too."
"Why would he jump on us if he's got everything he wants?" the man demanded.
Before Chester could say anything, the woman who'd been arguing beat him to it: "Because somebody like that never has everything he wants. As soon as you give him something, he wants something else. When you see a little kid like that, you spank him so he behaves himself from then on."
"How do you spank somebody who'll shoot back if you try?" the man asked.
"If we don't spank him, he'll shoot first," Chester said. The woman in back of the other man nodded emphatically. They all kept on wrangling about it till first the woman and then the other man got off at their stops.
Chester kept on going down into the South Bay. The area was growing fast; builders wanted to run up lots of new houses. The construction workers' union was doing its best to stop them till they met its terms. This tract in Torrance had been carved from an orange grove. The trees had gone down. The houses weren't going up, or not very fast, anyway.