He went through his wife’s letters one by one, starting with the earliest. He got more gossip from Riviere-du-Loup, and a different view of a small scandal involving a greengrocer and the butcher’s wife. Georges had treated the whole thing as a joke. To Nicole, the butcher was a brute and his wife looking for happiness wherever she could find it. O’Doull himself knew all the people involved, but not well. He wouldn’t have cared to judge where, if anywhere, the rights and wrongs lay.

Nicole didn’t talk about the Canadian uprising till her next to last letter. Then she wrote, There is a bill in the House of Deputies to extend military service. I am lighting candles and praying it does not pass.

“So am I, sweetheart,” O’Doull muttered, and then, “Moi aussi.” He’d seen news about that bill, too. The United States were doing everything they could to get the Republic of Quebec to contribute more men to quelling the revolt north of the forty-ninth parallel. That way, the United States wouldn’t have to pull so many of their own men off the fighting front against the Confederates, or even out of rebellion-wracked Utah.

But if the Republic of Quebec did contribute more soldiers, one of them was much too likely to be a young man named Lucien O’Doull. One of the great advantages of living in Quebec was that the country was technically neutral, even if it inclined toward the USA. Leonard O’Doull hadn’t had to worry about his boy’s becoming a soldier. He hadn’t had to-but now he did.

Nicole, naturally, kept a close eye on the bill’s progress. Her latest letter reported that it had come out of committee. I do not know anyone who favors this bill, not a single soul, she wrote bitterly. It moves forward anyway. It moves forward because the politicians are afraid of what the United States will do to us if it fails.

She was bound to be right about that. Without the United States, there wouldn’t have been a Republic of Quebec. The Republic’s economy had very strong ties to the USA, as strong as the Americans could make them. If Quebec made the United States unhappy, the USA could make the Republic unhappier.

O’Doull swore under his breath. He understood both sides, but, because of Lucien, hoped the Republic’s politicians would show some backbone. All politics is personal, he thought.

After getting everything off her chest, his wife went back to family chatter and the nine-days’ wonders of Riviere-du-Loup. It was as if she didn’t want to look at what she’d written about the bill, either. Only one more sentence at the end of the letter betrayed her worry: I wish you were home.

“I wish I was home, too, dammit,” O’Doull muttered. But he damn well wasn’t, and whose fault was that? No one’s but his own. The United States were his country, and he’d volunteered to help them in a way that best matched his skills and talents. And so here he was in a white-painted train, rumbling along toward more trouble. “Happy day.”

He wondered how the United States could find more trouble than they already had. With Japan bearing down on the Sandwich Islands, with the Confederates raising hell in Ohio and heading for Pennsylvania, with the Mormons still kicking up their heels in Utah and the Canucks north of the border, that looked as if all the troubles in the world, or at least on the continent, had come home to roost.

Back before the Great War, people had talked about how encircled the United States were, with the CSA, Canada, Britain, and France all keeping a wary eye on the giant they’d tied down. The country had burst its bounds in the war, and dominated North America for a generation. Now everybody else was trying to get the ropes back on again.

If Canada broke away from U.S. occupation, if British influence returned to the northern part of the continent, how long could the Republic of Quebec stay independent? That had to be on the minds of the politicians in Quebec City. It was on Leonard O’Doull’s mind, too. But so was his son, and his son counted for infinitely more.

Engine puffing, iron wheels screeching against the track and throwing up sun-colored sparks, the train stopped. O’Doull opened the curtains in front of the window and looked out. They were, as far as he could tell, in the middle of nowhere. Something had gone wrong up ahead, but he couldn’t make out what.

The conductor was a Medical Service corporal. O’Doull hoped he made a better corpsman than conductor, because he wasn’t very good at his secondary role. But he did have an answer when the doctor asked him what had happened farther west: “Sabotage.” He seemed to take a certain somber pleasure in the word.

“ ’Osti!” O’Doull burst out, which made the noncom give him a curious look. O’Doull looked back in plain warning. The other man decided walking down the corridor would be a good idea.

O’Doull shook his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the corporal. No, the trouble was just the opposite. As long as Confederate operatives sounded reasonably Yankeelike, they could hide in plain sight till they went off to work mischief in the middle of the night.

No doubt U.S. operatives were doing the same thing on the other side of the border, and helping C.S. Negroes in their sputtering civil war against Jake Featherston’s government. O’Doull hoped they were, anyhow. But that didn’t do him, or this train, any good at all.

Three hours later, after a repair crew filled in a crater and laid new track across it, the train got rolling again. By then, the sun was going down in the west and O’Doull was going up in smoke. If he was going to be useful, he wanted to be useful. He couldn’t do a damn thing stuck here on a train track.

Unlike most trains, this one rolled through the night all lit up. Trains full of soldiers and weapons and raw materials sneaked along, trusting to darkness to hide them from Confederate aircraft. This one showed its true colors, and the enemy left it alone.

">There were whispers that the Confederates sometimes used the Red Cross to disguise troop movements. O’Doull hoped that wasn’t so. It would make C.S. raiders want to disregard the symbol when the USA used it, and it would make the United States distrust even legitimate Confederate uses. Things were hard enough as they were. Did they have to-could they-get even worse?

Back when Cincinnatus Driver lived in Confederate Covington before the Great War, he hadn’t liked going to the zoo. Animals in cages had reminded him too strongly of the black man’s plight. Then when he moved up to Des Moines after the war, he’d been able to take his kids to the zoo there and enjoy it himself. He’d felt freer there-and, to be fair, Des Moines had a much fancier zoo than Covington’s.

Now things had come full circle. Here he was, back in Covington. Here he was, back in the CSA. And here he was, caged.

When the barbed-wire perimeter around the colored quarter went up, a few blacks figured it was just for show, to let colored people know who was boss without really intending to imprison them. Cincinnatus could have told them they were fools. The Freedom Party lied about plenty of things, but not about what it thought of Negroes. Some of the optimists tried to slip between the strands or attacked them with wire cutters, right there where the guards could see them.

Cincinnatus had known for years what automatic-weapons fire sounded like. Hearing it again saddened him without greatly surprising him. The guards’ callousness afterwards did surprise him. They left the bodies they’d shot where they fell, so the sight and, after a day or two, the stench would intimidate the Negroes inside the perimeter.

He didn’t talk to Lucullus about the odious and odorous events. For one thing, visiting Lucullus probably put him on some kind of list. The powers that be in Covington already had too many reasons to put him on a list. And, for another, Lucullus remained in a state of shock at being closed off from the outside world. Cincinnatus had never dreamt the barbecue cook could stay downcast for so long, but that seemed to be what was going on.