Vic Crosetti started to say something-maybe agreement, maybe argument-but klaxons started hooting all over the ship, summoning the sailors to battle stations. Everyone ran, and ran hard. Sam ran as hard as he could. He'd never yet beaten Hiram Kidde to the five-inch gun they both served. Since the two of them were starting from the same place, and since he was younger than Kidde and had longer legs, he thought this was going to be the time.
It wasn't. Kidde stuck to him like a burr on the deck. Once they went below, the gunner's mate's broad shoulders and bulldog instincts counted for more than Sam's inches and youth. The "Cap'n" shoved men aside, and stuck an elbow in their ribs if they didn't move fast enough to suit him. He got to the sponson a couple of lengths ahead of Carsten.
The rest of the gun's crew tumbled in seconds later. "All right, we're ready," Luke Hoskins said, his hand on a shell, ready to heave it to Sam. "What do we do now?"
Kidde was peering out of the sponson, which gave a very limited field of view through a couple of slit windows. "I don't see anything," he said, "not that that proves one hell of a lot. Maybe somebody here or aboard one of the destroyers heard a submersible through the hydrophones or spotted a periscope."
"If they'd spotted a periscope," Sam said, "we'd be making flank speed, to get the hell away from it." Hoskins and the rest of the shell-heavers and gun-layers nodded emphatic agreement.
But Hiram Kidde spoke in thoughtful tones: "Maybe, maybe not. Remember how that aeroplane decoyed us out of Pearl and into that whole flock of subs? They might be letting us see one so we don't think they've got any more waiting up ahead."
"Mm, maybe," Sam said. "Wouldn't like to charge straight into a pack of 'em, and that's the Lord's truth." His wave encompassed the vast empty reaches of the Pacific. "This isn't the best place to get torpedoed."
Hoskins spoke with great authority: "Sam, there ain't no good place to get torpedoed." Nobody argued with that, either.
The klaxons stopped hooting. Commander Grady stuck his head into the sponson a moment later. "Good job, men," the commander of the starboard secondary armament said. "Only a drill this time."
Luke Hoskins let out a sigh of relief. Sam was relieved, too: relieved and angry at the same time. "Damnation," he said. "It's almost like the shore patrol raiding a cheap whorehouse when you're the next in line. I'm all pumped up and ready, and now I don't get to do anything."
"Don't you worry about that," Kidde said. "Nothing wrong with shore leave in Valparaiso, no sir. Nothing wrong in Concepcion farther south, either. There's some pretty, friendly-and pretty friendly, too," he amended, noting his own pause, "senoritas in Chile, and that's the truth."
In more than twenty years in the Navy, Kidde had been to just about every port where U.S. warships were welcome-and some where they'd had to make themselves welcome. He had considerable experience in matters pertaining to senoritas, and wasn't shy about sharing it.
Sam hadn't been so many places. His working assumption was that he'd be able to find something or other in the female line almost anywhere, though, and he hadn't been wrong about that very often. So, instead of asking about women, he said, "What's Valparaiso like?"
"Last time I was there was-let me think-1907, I guess it was," Kidde answered. "It was beat up then; they'd had themselves a hell of an earthquake the year before, and they were still putting things back together."
"That's the same year as the San Francisco quake, isn't it-1906, I mean?" Sam said.
"Now that I think about it, I guess it is." Kidde laughed. "Bad time to be anywhere on the Pacific Coast."
Luke Hoskins said, "What were the parts that weren't wrecked like?"
"Oh, it's a port town," the gunner's mate answered. "Good harbor, biggest one in Chile unless I'm wrong, but it's open on the north. When it blows hard, the way it does in winter down there-June through September, I mean, not our winter-the storms can chew blazes out of ships tied up there. I hear tell, though, they've built, or maybe they're building-don't know which-a breakwater that'll make that better'n it was."
"Not storm season now, then," Hoskins said.
"Not in Valparaiso, no," Kidde answered. "Not in Concepcion, either. Down by the Straits of Magellan, that's a different story."
"You know what I wish?" Sam said. "I wish there was a canal through Central America somewhere, like there is at Suez. That would sure make shipping a lot easier."
"It sure would-for the damn Rebs," Hiram Kidde said. "Caribbean's already a Confederate lake. You want them moving battleships through so they could come up the West Coast? No thanks."
"I meant in peacetime," Carsten said. For once, his flush had nothing to do with sunburn. He prided himself in thinking strategically; his buddies sometimes told him he sounded like an officer. But he'd missed the boat this time.
Kidde drove the point home: "I guess you were still a short-pants kid when the Confederates talked about digging a canal through Nicaragua or one of those damn places. President Mahan said the USA would go to war the minute the first steam shovel took a bite, and they backed down. Reckon he's the best president we had before TR."
Commander Grady peered into the sponson again. One of his eyebrows rose quizzically. "Not that much fun in here, boys," he remarked.
He might have broken a spell. The gun crew filed out. Hot and stuffy as the sponson was, Sam wouldn't have minded staying there a while longer. Now he'd have to go out in the sun again. Out of the entire crew of the Dakota, he might have been the only man looking forward to the Straits of Magellan.
Arthur McGregor hitched his horse to the rail not far from the post office. His boots squelched in mud till he got up to the wooden sidewalk. He scraped them as clean as he could before he went inside.
Wilfred Rokeby looked up from a dime novel. "Good day to you, Arthur," the postmaster said. "How are you?" He spoke cautiously. Everyone in Rosenfeld, like everyone in the surrounding countryside, knew of Alexander McGregor's execution. Arthur McGregor had been into town once since then, but he hadn't stopped at the post office.
"How am I, Wilf?" he said, and paused to think about it. That was probably a mistake, for it required him to come out with an honest answer in place of a polite one: "I'm right poorly, is how I am. How would you be, in my shoes?"
"The same, I expect." Rokeby licked his thin, pale lips. Lamplight glistened from the metal frames of the half-glasses he was wearing, and from the lenses that magnified his eyes without making them seem warm. "What can I do for you today, eh?"
"Want to buy some postage stamps," McGregor answered. "When I need beans, I'll go to Henry Gibbon." In a different tone of voice, it would have been a joke. As he said it, it was only a statement of fact. He'd seldom joked before Alexander was shot. He never joked now.
"Sure enough." Rokeby bent his head down and looked over the tops of those glasses as he opened a drawer. McGregor studied the part that ran down the middle of his crown, dividing the brown hair on one side from that on the other as if Moses had had a bit of a miracle left over after parting the Red Sea. To make sure none of his hairs got Egyptian tendencies, Rokeby slicked them all down with an oil reeking of spices. The odor was part of coming to the post office for McGregor, as it was for everyone in and around Rosenfeld. After taking out a sheet of stamps, Rokeby looked up at the farmer. "How many you need?"
"Let me have fifteen," McGregor answered. "That'll keep me for a while."