"Wait!" Dowling exclaimed.
"Why?" The Mormon was still polite, but implacable.
"Why? For the results of the election, that's why," the commandant of Salt Lake City answered. "If Smith beats Hoover, isn't it likely I'll have new orders after the first of next February?"
"Hmm." Heber Young had already taken his dark homburg by the brim. Now he hesitated: perhaps the first time Dowling had ever seen him indecisive. He set the hat back on the tree and returned to the chair across the desk from Dowling. "Now that is interesting, Colonel. That is very interesting. You would follow more liberal orders if you received them?"
"I am a soldier, sir. I am obliged to follow all legitimate orders I receive." Dowling didn't tell the Mormon leader he intended to vote for Hoover, or that he hoped the incumbent would trounce Al Smith. Young likely knew as much. But he had told the truth. As if to prove it, he said, "Didn't I try to get public-works jobs for Utah just after Hoover took over?" The president had forbidden the scheme, but Young couldn't say he hadn't tried.
"You did," Young admitted. He rubbed his square chin. Then, abruptly, he nodded; once he had made up his mind, he didn't hesitate. "All right, Colonel Dowling. I will wait and see what happens in the election. If Hoover wins a second term, that will be the end of that. If Smith wins… If Smith wins, I will see what happens next. Good day." Now he did take his hat. Tipping it, he left.
Dowling allowed himself a sigh of relief. If Heber Young walked away from talks with the occupying authorities, that in itself might have been enough to ignite Utah. Dowling's career wasn't where it would have been if he hadn't spent so many years as George Custer's adjutant, but he still had hopes for it. With a Utah uprising on his record, he would have been dead in the water as far as hopes of getting stars on his shoulders one day went.
The telephone in the outer office rang. His own adjutant answered it. A moment Liter, the telephone on Dowling's desk rang. "Abner Dowling," he said crisply into the mouthpiece. He listened and nodded, though no one was there to see it. "That's very good news. Thanks for passing it on." He hung up.
Captain Toricelli came into the inner office, his face alight. "Barrels!" he said. "They're really going to give them to us!"
"I only started shouting for them a year or so ago," Dowling said. "The way things work back in Philadelphia, they're on the dead run."
"We could all have been dead by the time they got here," Captain Toricelli said.
"If we had died, that's the one thing I can think of that would have got them here faster," Dowling said. His adjutant laughed. He wondered why. He hadn't been kidding.
Being promised the machines didn't mean getting them right away. When they did arrive, he was grievously disappointed. He'd been hoping for new barrels, and what he got were Great War retreads. They must have come from Houston; most of them still showed fresh bullet scars and other combat-related damage to their armor.
"I can move faster than one of these things," Dowling said scornfully. Since he was built like a rolltop desk, that was unlikely to be true. But it wasn't very false, either. A man in good shape could outrun one of these snorting monsters. Dowling eyed the crewmen, duffel bags on their shoulders, who dismounted from passenger cars. "They take a couple of squads' worth of men apiece, too," he grumbled; he remembered that very well from Great War days.
"Yes, sir," Captain Toricelli answered. "But they're better than nothing."
"I suppose so," Dowling said unwillingly. Then he brightened, a little. "I suppose new barrels are coming off the line. They'd have to be, eh? They must be going straight to Houston-and to Kentucky now, too."
"That makes sense to me." Toricelli sounded faintly aggrieved. What was the world coming to when a superior started making sense?
Three days later, a pair of barrels rumbled up Temple Street and took up positions in Temple Square. Dowling thought that would be the least inflammatory way he could use them. Temple Square had been under guard ever since the U.S. Army leveled the Mormon Temple and killed the last stubborn defenders there. Bits of granite from the Temple were potent relics to Mormons who opposed the government. That struck Dowling as medieval, which made it no less true. Soldiers had always had orders to shoot to kill whenever anyone tried to abscond with a fragment.
Dowling wasn't particularly surprised when Heber Young paid him a call a few days later. He did his best to pretend he was, saying, "And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company this time, Mr. Young?"
"Those… horrible machines." Young was furious, and making only the barest effort to hide it. "How dare you pollute Temple Square with their presence?"
"For one thing, we've had soldiers in the square for years. The barrels just reinforce them," Dowling answered. "For another, I want people here to know we have them, and that we'll use them if we need to. It might-prevent rashness, I guess you'd say."
Heber Young shook his head. "More likely to provoke than to prevent."
"No." Dowling shook his head. "I am very sorry, sir, but I cannot agree. To my mind, the safety of my men and the protection of U.S. interests in Utah must come first."
"Those infernal machines promote neither," the Mormon leader insisted.
They looked at each other. Not for the first time, they found they were both using English but speaking two altogether different languages. "I would be derelict in my duties if I did not use barrels," Dowling said.
"Using them is what makes you derelict." Young eyed him, then sighed. "I see I do not persuade you. I don't suppose I should have expected to. Yet hope does spring eternal in the human breast. I tell you, Colonel, no good will come from your using these machines."
"Do you threaten me, Mr. Young?"
"Colonel, if I tell you the sun will come up tomorrow, is that a threat? I would not say so. I would call it a prediction based on what I know of past events. I would call this the same thing." He stood up, politely challenging Dowling to arrest him for sedition after he'd come and put his head in the lion's jaws. Dowling couldn't, and he knew it. The word that Heber Young languished in a U.S. prison would touch off insurrection, regardless of whether the barrels in Temple Square did. As Young turned to go, he added, "If the government were generous enough to grant me the franchise, you may rest assured I would vote for Al Smith, in the hope that such discussions as this one would become unnecessary. Good day, Colonel Dowling." Out he went, a man whose moral force somehow made him worth battalions.
Four days later, one of the barrels caught fire on the way from the U.S. base to its turn at Temple Square. All eighteen crewmen escaped, and nobody shot at them as they burst from the doomed machine's hatches. Word came to Dowling almost at once. Cursing, he left the base in an auto and zoomed down Temple toward the blazing barrel.
By the time he got there, the fire had already started touching off ammunition. The fireworks display was spectacular, with red tracer rounds zooming in all directions. A fire engine roared up not long after Dowling arrived. It started spraying water on the barrel from as far away as the stream from the hose would reach. That struck him as being about as futile as offering last rites to a man smashed by a speeding locomotive, but he didn't think it could do any harm, so he kept quiet about it.
"How did this happen?" he demanded of the barrel's commander, a captain named Witherspoon.
"Sir, I don't know." Witherspoon nursed a burned hand.
He'll live, Dowling thought savagely. "Was it sabotage?" he asked.
"Sir, I don't know," Captain Witherspoon repeated. "It could have been, but…" He shrugged. "This machine has to be almost twenty years old. Plenty of things can go wrong with it any which way. A leak in a fuel line, a leak in an oil line…" Another shrug. He pointed toward the burning barrel, from which a thick cloud of black smoke rose. "We'll never know now, that's for damn sure."