A dog barked. Somebody called, "Who's there?" Silence, except for the barking. A moment later, a yelp punctuated it, along with the sound of a kick. "Stupid dog," Don Joaquin's sentry muttered. Rodriguez waited. One of his friends was going forward.

The brief sound of a scuffle. No shouts-only bodies thrashing. A fresh voice called, "Come on." The Freedom Party men hurried past a body.

There stood Don Joaquin's house. The grandee had only two sons and a daughter, but his dwelling was four or five times the size of Hipolito Rodriguez's. And the stable and barn not far away were even bigger. How much livestock did he have? How much did any one man need? A guard paced around the barn. He paced, yes, but he wasn't looking for trouble. It found him all the same. Silent as a serpent, a raider sneaked up behind him and clapped a hand over his mouth. He let out only a brief, horrified gurgle as the knife went home.

When the raider let the body sag to the ground, another man ran forward with gasoline. He splashed it on the wooden doors and the wall of the barn, then stepped back, lit a cigarette, and flipped it into the pool of gas that had run down from the doors. Yet another Freedom Party man gave the stables the same treatment.

Flames leaped and roared. Through their growing din, Rodriguez heard horses and mules and cattle and sheep neighing and braying and bellowing in terror. He also heard Don Joaquin's guards shouting in alarm. Their booted feet pounded on gravel and dirt as they ran to see what they could do.

He'd been waiting for that, waiting behind a boulder that gave him splendid cover. Almost of itself, the Tredegar leaped to his shoulder. He hadn't fired one in a long time, but he still knew what to do. The range was ridiculously short, and the flames lit up his targets for him. If only things were so easy during the Great War, he thought, and squeezed the trigger.

One of the targets fell. He tried to think of them like that, as he had during the war. He wasn't the only Freedom Party man shooting. Another guard toppled, and another, and another. The guards had fought against the USA, too. They dove for whatever hiding places they could find, and started shooting back. The cracks of their pistols seemed feeble beside the Tredegars' roars. But, when one of their bullets pinged off the stone behind which Rodriguez crouched, he reminded himself any gun could kill.

"Away!" Carlos Ruiz called. No shouts of Freedom! here. Don Joaquin might suspect who'd done this, but what could he do, what would he dare do, without proof? He had to know the raiders could as easily have burned his house, with him and his family in it.

Rodriguez slipped back to another sheltering boulder, and then to one behind that. Then he was far enough from the blazing buildings to stop worrying about the flames giving him away. Before too long, people would be scouring the countryside, looking for him and his friends. He intended to be back in bed by then. Magdalena and his children would say he'd been there all night. And Don Joaquin would know better than to tell people with guns of their own how to vote.

AmericanEmpire: TheCenterCannotHold

S pring in Dakota was a riot of burgeoning green and of glorious birdsong. It was one of the most beautiful things Flora Blackford had ever seen. She would have given a great deal not to be seeing it now. If Hosea had won the election… But he hadn't. He'd got trounced. How badly he'd got trounced still ate at Flora.

The shock of President-elect Coolidge's death, less than a month before he was to take office, had jolted her no less than the rest of the American political world. After that, though, the pain returned. Her husband had to go down to Washington to hand over the reins of power to a man who hadn't even beaten him in November-one more humiliation piled on all the rest.

As soon as Herbert Hoover took the oath of office, the Blackfords had gone on what the papers called an extended holiday. The papers, for once, were polite. Hosea Blackford had gone back to his home state to lick his wounds, and taken his family with him.

Flora turned away from the farm window that showed Great Plains spring to such good advantage. "When do you think we should go back East?" she asked.

Her husband set down his coffee cup. He managed a crooked smile. "Are the wide open spaces starting to get on your nerves?"

"Yes!" Flora's vehemence startled even her. Hosea had put it better than she'd managed to, even in her own mind. "I grew up in New York City, remember, on the Lower East Side. Even Philadelphia seems roomy."

"I'm so sorry for you." Hosea Blackford sighed. "And I'm sorry, but I really don't feel like going back yet. People here leave me alone. Nobody in Philadelphia or Washington leaves you alone. I think it's against the law there."

"But the country's in trouble. We need to do something," Flora said.

He sighed again. "I spent the last four years doing everything I knew how to do. None of it seemed to help much. I'm willing to let someone else worry about it for a while-especially since the people have shown they aren't willing to let me worry about it any more."

He sounded tired. Worse, he sounded old. Flora had seen how cruelly he'd aged in four hard years in Powel House. He was, she reminded herself, past his seventieth birthday. When they'd married, his being close to twice her age hadn't bothered her. It still didn't, not in most ways. But this loss of vigor, of resiliency, troubled her. She was sure that when she'd first come to know him, when she'd first fallen in love with him, he would have bounced back stronger and faster.

On the other hand, nobody who'd spent three years in the trenches during the Great War came out afterwards the same man he'd been when he went in. Hosea had spent four years in the presidential trenches, and he'd lost the war. She didn't suppose expecting him to stay unchanged was fair.

"When we do go back," she said, "I wonder if I ought to take a flat in the Fourteenth Ward."

"Aha!" her husband said, and smiled. "Something makes me think you want to go back to Congress."

"I'm thinking about it," Flora said. "I don't like seeing my old district in the hands of a Democrat. I don't like seeing a lot of our districts in the hands of Democrats."

"Neither do I." Hosea Blackford's smile was sour. "I don't think any of our candidates will ask me to hit the campaign trail for them next year, though. They'd probably want me on the stump for their opponents instead."

"It's not that bad," Flora insisted.

"No-odds are it's worse," Hosea answered. "I can't think of anything less welcome in a political party than a president who's just lost an election. After a while, I'll get to be an elder statesman, but right now I'm nothing but a nuisance." With a mournful shake of the head, he added, "By the the time I get to be an elder statesman, I'll probably be so elder, I'm dead."

"God forbid!" Flora exclaimed. No one in her family, no one among the immigrant Jews of the Lower East Side, spoke of death straight on like that. Words had power; to speak of something was to help bring it into being. The rational part of her mind knew that was nonsense, but the rational part of her mind went only so deep. Down underneath it, superstition still flourished.

"It's true," her husband said. "We both know it's true, even if you don't want to talk about it. I don't need to take out pencil and paper to know how old I am. I get reminded whenever I look in the mirror. I'd like to stay around long enough to see Joshua grow up, but how likely is that? I've already beaten the odds by lasting as long as I have."

"That's nothing but-" Flora began.

"The truth," Hosea finished for her. "You know it as well as I do, too. And if you don't, ask the next insurance salesman you happen to run into. He'll tell you what the actuarial tables say."