Her mother said, “I’m glad you do. It’s nice. Your father and I, we hardly had a harsh word between us.”

“I know, Ma.” Mary also knew why. Her mother noticed everything and said nothing. If she didn’t complain, how could Pa have found fault with her? Mary wasn’t like that. She’d never believed in suffering in silence. If something was wrong, she let the world know about it. She didn’t always restrict herself to words, either, any more than her father had. She asked, “How are things here?”

“Oh, I get along,” Maude McGregor answered. “I’ve been getting along for years and years now. I expect I’m good for a little while longer.”

The farm lacked not only electricity but also running water and indoor plumbing. Mary had never noticed what was missing when she was growing up. She’d taken the pungency of the outhouse as much for granted as the different pungency of the barn. Kerosene lamps had always seemed good enough. So had the pot-bellied coal-burning stove. Now the stinks and the inconveniences, though still familiar, jolted her when she visited. Little by little, she’d got used to an easier life in town.

Even so, she said, “I’m going out to the barn for some chores.”

“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” her mother said quickly.

“It’s all right. I don’t mind.” Mary did intend to gather eggs and feed the animals while she was out there; she wasn’t dressed for mucking out the place. That wasn’t all she would do, though. Her mother knew as much, knew and worried. But, being who and what she was, she couldn’t bring herself to say much.

A motorcar rolled along the dirt track that ran in front of the McGregor farm as Mary went from the farmhouse to the barn. The dirt road didn’t see much traffic these days, though Mary remembered endless columns of soldiers in green-gray marching along it when she was a little girl: U.S. soldiers heading for the front that had stalled between Rosenfeld and Winnipeg. Then the front wasn’t stalled anymore, the Yanks got what they’d always wanted, and hard times descended on Canada. They weren’t gone yet.

The barnyard stink wasn’t as sharp and oppressive as the one from the privy. It made Mary smile instead of wrinkling her nose. Her shoes scrunched on straw as she walked back toward the chickens. She proved to herself that she still knew how to get eggs out of nests without ruffling feathers and without getting pecked. A few hens clucked complaints, but that was all. Smiling a self-satisfied smile, she put the eggs in a basket.

That done, she fed all the livestock. She could still handle a pitchfork, too. She didn’t have much need to do that in the apartment in Rosenfeld. Come to think of it, though, sometimes a pitchfork would come in handy for prodding Alec along in the right direction.

Off in one corner of the front of the barn lay an old wagon wheel. Its iron tire was red with rust. It had been lying there for at least twenty years, probably longer. Anyone who saw it would figure it was just a piece of junk nobody’d bothered getting rid of. Mary had thought the same thing for years.

Now, grunting, she shoved it off to one side and scraped away at the straw and dirt under it. Before long, her fingernails rasped against a board. She got the board free and looked down into the neat, rectangular hole in the ground it and the wagon wheel concealed.

Her father had dug out that hole to hide his bomb-making tools. The U.S. occupiers had long suspected him. They’d searched the farmhouse and the barn again and again. Despite their suspicions, they’d never found a thing. Arthur McGregor had known what he was doing, in explosives as in everything else.

These days, the bomb-making tools belonged to Mary. She hadn’t used them as often as her father had. But she’d bombed the general store in town (owned by a Yank), killed a traitor in Ontario (she thought of it that way, not as blowing up a woman and a little girl), and derailed a train not far from Coulee, the next town west of Rosenfeld. With Ohio lost, the United States depended on rail traffic through Canada. Doing the train had proved easier than she’d expected. She thought she would go in some other direction when she planted her next bomb.

She was so intent on her work, she didn’t hear the running feet till they were just outside the barn. She looked up in horror as half a dozen men in green-gray, some with pistols in their hands, others with rifles, burst in shouting, “Hold it right there! You’re under arrest, in the name of the United States of America!”

It was over. After all these years, it was over. Mary lifted one of the sticks of dynamite that had sat in her lap. “If you want to take the chance of shooting this instead of me-” she began. If the dynamite went up, the Yanks would go up with it-a good enough last exchange, as far as she was concerned.

But one of the riflemen said, “Ma’am, I’ve been on the national rifle team at ranges a lot longer than this-they didn’t know if they’d need a sharpshooter to take you. If I shoot, I won’t miss, and I won’t hit the explosives.”

He sounded coldly confident, confident enough to make Mary believe him. She set down the dynamite and slowly got to her feet. “Raise your hands!” two Americans shouted at the same time. She obeyed. Why not? Nothing mattered anymore. One of the Yanks said, “Out of the barn now. Slow and easy. Don’t do anything cute, or you won’t last long enough to stand trial.”

“Oh, yes. I’m sure you’re worried about that,” Mary said. They didn’t answer her. Why should they? They’d won.

When she got outside, she saw two more Yanks holding her mother back. They’d slapped a gag on her so she couldn’t scream and warn Mary. Two motorcars were parked by the side of the house. She thought one was the auto she’d seen driving along the dirt road. They must have been keeping an eye on her all along, then.

“Leave my mother alone,” she said dully. “She never had anything to do with this. It was all me.”

“We’ll see about that,” one of the Yanks said. But he turned to the men holding Maude McGregor. “Take the gag off her, Jack. She can yell her head off now. It won’t make any difference.”

As soon as Jack removed the gag, Mary’s mother said, “She’s lying to save me. I was the one who set the bombs.”

“That isn’t so!” Mary exclaimed. “How about that one the other side of Coulee, Ma? You don’t even drive.”

“I took the wagon,” her mother said with stubborn, hopeless defiance.

“And that’s how come we caught your daughter in there with dynamite in her lap, right?” said the Yank who seemed to be in charge of things. He waved to his men. “Get her into the auto. We’ll take her up to Winnipeg and tend to business there.”

As the other Americans obeyed, one of them asked, “How about the old broad?” Both Mary and her mother squawked irately. The Yanks ignored them.

“Leave her alone for now,” their boss said. “Looks to me like we’ve got the one we want.” They shoved Mary into a Chevrolet. As it sped off down the dirt road, she knew how right he was.

Chester Martin had known rejoining the U.S. Army would make his wife furious. He hadn’t known how furious. Rita had lost her first husband in the Great War, and seemed sure she would lose her second in this one. When Chester reupped, he’d asked for a month to get his affairs in order before he went in. The Army gave it to him; they weren’t conscripting middle-aged retreads, even if they were glad to have them, and so they’d acted accommodating as all get-out.

Now he wished he hadn’t asked for so long. It was the longest month of his life. “You said they’d shot you last time, and that was plenty for you!” Rita said over and over again. “You lied!” She might have accused him of falling off the wagon-or maybe falling into the arms of an old girlfriend came closer to the mark.

And maybe he was. He had no romantic illusions about war. Nobody who’d been a noncom in the trenches all the way through the Great War could possibly have any illusions about it. But he kept saying, “The country needs me,” and that was no illusion. The United States needed all the help they could get from anywhere.