Dowling's head swung to the right. He had a brief moment to recognize the Canadian, an even briefer moment to think that, even if McGregor was here, it meant nothing-and then the Canuck threw something in the direction of the motorcar. How embarrassing-he was sure it was his last thought-the old boy was right all along.

Custer didn't whip out his pistol, as he'd been practicing. The bomb-Dowling saw the sizzling fuse-flew straight toward him. He caught it as a U.S. footballer might have caught a forward pass, then underhanded it back the way it had come.

Very clearly, Dowling saw the astonishment on Arthur McGregor's face. He lacked the time to feel any astonishment of his own. The bomb landed at McGregor's feet and blew up.

Dowling felt a sudden, sharp pain in his left arm. He looked down and discovered he had a torn sleeve and was bleeding.

So was Custer, from a wound on the outside of his thigh. If he noticed the injury, he gave no sign of it. "Stop the car!" he shouted to the chauffeur, and then, to the soldiers behind him, "See to the wounded." Now he drew his revolver. "And you and I, Dowling, we shall see to Mr. Arthur McGregor."

"I think, sir, you may have done that already." Dowling was astonished at how steady he sounded. He squeezed the fingers of his left hand. They worked. Like Custer, he'd taken only a minor wound. The men and women standing between McGregor and the motorcar had borne the brunt of the bomb and shielded the Americans from the worst.

Some of those people were down and screaming and thrashing, blood pouring from them. Blood poured from others, too, men and women who would not get up again. And there, flung against a wall like a bundle of rags, lay Arthur McGregor. His eyes were set and staring, his belly and groin a shredded, gory mass. Custer thrust the pistol back into his holster. "I don't need this-he did it to himself."

"No, sir." Abner Dowling spoke more humbly than he ever had in his life. "You did it to him. You were ready for anything."

Custer shrugged. "He cut his fuse just a bit too long- otherwise, we'd look like that now." His tone was one of dispassionate criticism of another man's work. "He had a good run, but no one man can lick the United States of America. Sooner or later, his luck had to give out. And I've paid Tom back, too, by God-in person."

"Yes, sir." Dowling said what needed saying: "How does it feel to be a hero-again?"

Custer drew himself up as straight as he had stood in the limousine. The dramatic pose he struck came straight out of the nineteenth century. "Dowling, it feels bully!"

Summer in Ontario wouldn't last much longer. Jonathan Moss knew that very well. Before long, the idea of sitting out on the grass with an attractive woman would have been an absurdity. Better, then, to enjoy such times while they lasted and not to worry about the snow surely only weeks away.

Laura Secord didn't make that easy. In all the time he'd known her, Laura Secord had never made anything easy. Now she said, "I wish that brave man had managed to blow your famous General Custer higher than the moon."

"I don't suppose I should be surprised," Moss answered. "If you want to know what I think, though, somebody who hides bombs or throws them and doesn't care if he kills innocent bystanders isn't much of a hero. Pass me that plate of deviled eggs, will you? They're good."

"I'm glad you like them." But, after she'd passed him the eggs, she returned to the argument: "I think anyone who keeps up the struggle against impossible odds is a hero."

"If the odds are impossible, anyone who keeps up the struggle against them is a fool," Moss returned.

"Canada still has a few fools left," Laura Secord said. She leaned forward and picked up a deviled egg herself.

"One fewer now." Law school and his practice had sharpened Moss' wits and made his comebacks quicker than when he'd been here as a pilot.

"We won't just turn into pale copies of Americans and of the United States," Laura said. "We won't."

Moss nodded. "That's easy enough to say. I don't know how easy it will be to do. The fellow who threw the bomb at General Custer thought the same way you do. Now he's dead. There's no revolution up here. And you're feeding a Yank a picnic lunch. Have I told you that you make really good pickles?"

She glared at him. "If you keep going on like this, I won't ask you to come back."

"I'm still not sure I should be coming up here at all," Moss answered. "For me, coming to picnics with you is what going to an opium den is for somebody who can't shake the poppy." He spoke lightly, which didn't mean he wasn't telling the truth.

Laura Secord raised an eyebrow. "Is that a compliment or an insult?"

"Probably," he answered, which startled a laugh out of her. Maybe he would have done better to stay down in Berlin and meet some nice girl there. But he hadn't met any girls there-or women, either, as Laura was unquestionably a woman-who'd struck his fancy. And so, still with the fragments of what was, without a doubt, an obsession left over from the Great War, he'd started driving up to Arthur. He didn't know what would come of this. He didn't know if he wanted anything to come of it.

She waved her hand, a wave encompassing the farm she'd stubbornly kept going on her own. "I don't know whether I ought to be inviting you here, either," she said, her voice troubled. "It feels a lot like giving aid and comfort to the enemy. But you were the one who aided me, after all." Was she trying to convince herself, as Moss tried to convince himself coming here was all right?

He said, "I don't know about aid, but I'm certainly comforted." He lay back on the grass. A couple of cows grazing twenty or thirty yards away looked at him with their large, dark eyes, then went back to their own lunches. He thumped his belly to show how comforted he was. The waist of his trousers felt pleasantly tight.

"I'm glad of that." Laura reached for a pewter pitcher. "More tea?"

"All right," Moss answered. "One thing I will say for tea: it makes a better cold drink than coffee does."

"It makes a better hot drink than coffee does, too," she said. Moss shrugged. She made as if to pour the pitcher over his head before filling his tumbler. "You Yanks have no taste."

"I suppose not," he said, watching puffy white clouds drift across the blue sky. The weather wouldn't stay good that much longer. He thought about how bad it could get. That made him smile, and then laugh.

"And what's so funny?" Laura Secord asked. "That you Yanks have no taste?"

"As a matter of fact, yes." He sat up and sipped at the tea she'd given him. "I was just thinking about the snowstorm I drove through three years ago to come up here and visit you. If that doesn't prove I've got no taste, I don't know what would."

She made a face at him. "The only thing it proves is that you're mad. I'd already had a pretty fair notion of that from the way you behaved during the war."

"Mad about you," he said, which made her blush and look down at the grass. Jonathan Moss knew-had known for years-that was metaphorically true. He'd also wondered a good many times if it was literally true, in the alienist's use of the word mad.

"My mad Yank." Laura Secord spoke with a curious mixture of affection and bemusement. "Till you stood up for that poor fellow done out of his property-done out of the property where you had your office-I didn't think I should ever want to see you again."

Maybe it would have been just as well for both of us if you hadn % Moss thought. Here he was, when he would have been almost anywhere else with almost anyone else. All his friends from down in Chicago-a lot of his friends from down in Berlin-would have called him a fool. He called himself a fool a lot of the time. He kept coming back here.

"Would you like anything else here?" Laura Secord asked him. He finished the glass of tea she'd given him, then shook his head. "All right," she said, and started loading things back into the picnic hamper. As he always did when he came up to her farm, he tried to help. As she always did, she refused to let him. "You'll just make a hash of things."