“Mm, maybe so.” Stanley also got up. His mind quickly went to more immediately relevant matters:

“What time do you suppose the diner opens?”

“Six if we’re lucky, seven if we’re not.” Bushell unbuttoned his pyjama tops. “I intend to find out how lucky I am.”

His luck was in. He and Stanley systematically demolished their breakfasts, then sat at the table while they fortified themselves from a strong pot of English Breakfast tea. “Damned if I know how the Russians take it without milk all the time,” Stanley said, pouring a generous white stream into his cup. Bushell quoted Herodotus: “ ‘Custom is king of all.’ They’re used to it that way, so for them it tastes right.” He wondered if custom was all that bound the NAU to England. Had the American colonies broken away all those years ago, would they now think of their independence as natural and right?

He shook his head. It wasn’t the same thing.

The train pulled in to Regina at half past one. The airship was due to leave for Astoria at 2:05. “We’re not going to make it,” Stanley said as they recovered their bags and flagged a cab.

“The hell we’re not.” When the driver opened the boot of his steamer for their baggage, Bushell told him, “Ten quid - no, fifteen - if you get us to the airship port in time for the flight to Astoria.”

The cabbie touched a forefinger to the brim of his cap, then pulled out his pocket watch. He whistled softly. “Won’t be easy, gents, but I’ll do my damnedest. Hop in.”

Afterwards, Bushell decided Regina’s constables slept on the job. If they hadn’t, they would have cited the cab a dozen times, maybe more. He wondered if he was going to live through the wild ride to the southwestern outskirts of town. But the cab pulled up to the waiting airship at seven minutes of two. “I will be damned,” Samuel Stanley said reverently.

Over and above the fare, Bushell handed the cab man a green ten-pound note and a purple fiver. The fellow helped them carry their bags to the airship and gave them to the handler while a supercilious clerk declared, “You gentlemen are lucky this flight did not depart without you.”

“Don’t you take that uppity tone with us,” Stanley snapped. Had the clerk been white, he would have flushed. As it was, he stamped their tickets with altogether unnecessary force, thrust their stateroom keys at them, and pointed to the ladder without another word.

As soon as Bushell and Stanley climbed aboard, that ladder was moved away from the passenger gondola. Pumps were noisily sucking water ballast from the airship. “Welcome to the Prairie Schooner, gentlemen,” the steward said. If passengers arriving at the last possible minute upset him, he didn’t show it.

“Thanks,” Bushell said. “Is the bar to port or starboard?” The steward pointed to the left. To Stanley, Bushell added, “I’d say we’ve earned watching takeoff from there this time.”

Stanley swept off his fedora and bowed. “Motion seconded and passed by acclamation. First round is on me, too - I never thought we’d get here on time.”

“O ye of little faith,” Bushell said.

“If I had little faith, I never would have got in the cab with that madman. Come on.”

They’d just walked into the bar when, light as a feather, the Prairie Schooner floated away from the ground. The floor developed a list. Once on a stool, though, his feet resting on the brass rail, Bushell felt altogether at home. “Here’s to getting into Astoria at six tomorrow morning, and out again an hour later,”

he said, lifting his glass of Jameson high before he drank. Stanley joined him in the toast. The bartender raised a grizzled eyebrow. “Good luck, gents,” he said in a gravelly voice. Both RAMs ignored him.

Bushell watched prairie go by under the Prairie Schooner till it was time for supper, and then till it got too dark to see. The land was green and flat and dotted with lakes and ponds of every imaginable size and shape. “There must be ten thousand of them down there,” Stanley said.

“Easily,” Bushell agreed.

He went to bed in his stateroom reveling in the prospect of being able to sleep undisturbed till half past five. And, sure enough, at exactly that hour, a burst of static announced the ceiling speaker coming to life:

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We’re about thirty-five miles outside of Astoria, on our final approach to O’Hare Airship Port. I regret to have to inform you, though, that wireless traffic tells me all mooring masts at the airship port are currently occupied, and several airships are already floating above the port, awaiting their turn to land. Because O’Hare is so busy, these things do happen from time to time. We regret the inconvenience. We’ll get you down on the ground just as soon as we can, I promise you. Meanwhile, enjoy a little extra sleep. Thank you.”

The speaker crackled again, then fell silent. Bushell got out of bed with an oath. He dressed fast enough to satisfy the most irascible training sergeant and dashed for the lounge. Sam Stanley burst in not thirty seconds behind him.

The newly risen sun shone off farmland and forest, and reflected brilliantly from Lake Michigan. Astoria’s never-sleeping factories threw columns of smoke into the air. A light breeze from out of the east brought the harsh smell of industry to the Prairie Schooner. With it came a barnyard reek; along with its factories, Astoria was a great livestock center.

As the airship neared the port, Bushell spied half a dozen fat cigar shapes hanging in the sky, decked out in the varying bright colors of their airship lines. He wished desperately for them to disappear. A steward approached with two pots and some cups on a silver tray. “Would you like tea or coffee?”

he asked the two RAMs.

“What I’d like is to land,” Bushell said. “Have you got that in a pot?” The steward beat a quick retreat. Land the Prairie Schooner did, at twenty past seven. By then, another handful of airships had queued up behind it. As soon as their feet hit the ground, Bushell and Stanley rushed for the transfer agent, who’d set up a podium near the tail of the dirigible. With his longer legs, Stanley got there first. “Do we still have time to catch the Six Nations Special?” he gasped, panting. The transfer agent gave him a bright, meaningless professional smile. “I’m afraid not, sir,” she said. “The Six Nations Special is the airship that departed from this mooring mast so the Prairie Schooner could land.”

Bushell and Stanley looked at each other in dismay. They would be late to Doshoweh after all. VIII

The airship company and its representatives did everything they could for the RAMs. Later, Bushell would have admitted as much. At the time, converting airship tickets to ones for the railroad, making his way by cab from the O’Hare Airship Port to the La Salle Street Station in the middle of the morning rush hour, and then settling down to wait until the train pulled out at a quarter past twelve all aggravated his liver.

After loading his pockets with so much change that he jingled when he walked, he telephoned the RAM

office and local constables in Doshoweh to warn them he’d been delayed. Making long-distance calls from public phones was an exasperating process at the best of times, too. You stood there drumming your fingers against the glass of the booth, waiting for your call to be transferred from one operator to another. Calling into the Six Nations added a new layer of frustration, for some of the operators seemed to have only an imperfect grasp of English. But at last he managed to leave his messages, one after the other. He fed shillings and florins and heavy silver crowns into the public telephone until the local operator pronounced herself satisfied.

The Twentieth-Century Limited rolled through the provinces of Tippecanoe and Miami. Doshoweh lay ten hours away. As soon as Bushell left the dining car after a luncheon of chicken pot pie and apricot and almond custard, he pulled out his pocket watch, glowered at it, and said, “If we’d caught the Six Nations Special, we’d be there by now.”

“I know,” Samuel Stanley said, and wisely let it go at that.

Bushell sat down and stayed in his seat, making himself hold still though he wanted to get up and pace. Every so often, the train rolled through another industrial town with smokestacks vomiting forth the waste of the factories that made the NAU one of the marvels of the world. To compensate for that smoke, almost every motorcar on the roads was a clean electric.

Stanley noticed that, too. “Good thing towns are packed so close together hereabouts,” he said.

“Electrics are fine for the short haul, but steamers have it all over them when it comes to going a long way.” He looked out the window, drummed his fingers on the table. “If it weren’t for all the electricity from the big grids in the coal-mining provinces, this part of the NAU would be too dirty for anyone to want to live here.”

“That’s true,” Bushell said. “But Pennsylvania and western Virginia and eastern Franklin are filthier than they would be otherwise, to make up for it.”

After cutting across the neck of the Huron Peninsula, they reached Toledo on the shore of Lake Erie a little before six o’clock. From then on, they had the lake on their left hand as they steamed east toward Doshoweh. After a brief pause there, the Twentieth-Century Limited would swing inland through the Six Nations and then into New York province, pulling into New York City twenty hours after leaving Astoria.

For supper, the dining car offered a lobster a la Newburg that would have done a Boston seaside restaurant proud. Cream and sherry and noodles and sweet chunks of lobster meat helped soften Bushell’s resentment at being delayed. When he lighted a cigar afterwards, he was, if not at peace with the world, at least willing to declare a temporary cease-fire.

Thanks to the lobster, the very good Le Montrachet that went with it, and, most of all, what seemed like an endless stream of days on the road, Bushell was yawning when the train pulled to a stop in Doshoweh a few minutes after eleven. The conductor announced the stop not only in English but also, reading from a card, in the Iroquois language. Most of the people who got up to leave the train along with Bushell and Stanley had straight black hair and coppery skins, though they dressed like anyone else. In most respects, the train station was a train station, and might have been in any part of the NAU or, indeed, in any part of the British Empire. But underneath the English-language signs directing passengers, people waiting to pick up passengers, and visitors were what Bushell guessed to be their equivalents in Iroquois.

Samuel Stanley nodded toward one of those signs. “Doesn’t seem quite right,” he remarked, his voice so low only Bushell heard him. “They’re part of the Empire; they should use English.”

“So long as they’re loyal, I don’t think the King-Emperor cares what language they speak,” Bushell answered.

“Can’t fault ‘em for that. The Iroquois Scouts rank right up there with the Gurkha Rifles,” Stanley said: a soldier’s assessment. His mouth twisted as he went on, “They aren’t like the Frenchies in Quebec, giving aid and comfort to the Holy Alliance every chance they get. Good thing the Sons of Liberty can’t stand the idea of Frenchies in their new, ever-so-free country; if the Sons would have ‘em, they’d sure as hell join, and make our lives even more miserable.”

He left off grumbling then. Two white men and an extraordinarily well dressed Iroquois stood together talking; one of the whites was holding up a cardboard sign that read, TOM SAM. Bushell nodded approval as he walked up to greet them: his last name had been bandied about in the newspapers altogether too much lately. Tom and Sam, though, might be anyone.

The two white men were local RAMs, a captain and a lieutenant named Sylvanus Greeley and Charles Lucas. Greeley, who wore a mustache waxed to handlebar perfection, said, “And let me introduce you to Major Shikalimo of the Doshoweh constabulary.” He noticed Bushell’s surprise at being presented to a local major instead of the other way around, and added, “Shikalimo here is nephew to Otetiani, the Tododaho - the Grand Sachem, you might say - of the Iroquois.”

As far as Bushell was concerned, that explained why Shikalimo had made major at such an early age he couldn’t have been much past twenty-five - but not much more. The Iroquois, though, accepted the order of the introductions as if he’d imagined nothing else.

He was gracious enough, saying, “Delight to make your acquaintance, gentlemen,” in an accent that shouted Oxford or Cambridge and made Bushell feel decidedly - and unexpectedly - colonial. Yet despite the cool elegance of his speech, his black homburg, and his pinstriped suit and waistcoat, he had a twinkle in his eye and a smile that flashed all the brighter because of his dark skin.

“You chaps will be about done in, I expect,” Greeley said when the introductions were done. “We’ve booked you into the Hotel Ahgusweyo, which is conveniently close to our headquarters, and also to the constabulary station.”

“The Better Hotel, you would say in English,” Shikalimo said, flashing that dazzling smile again. “We leave it partly in our language to make it seem exotic for sightseers. We get a good many here, some curious about us, others about Niagara Falls. If you like, gentlemen, I should be delighted to drive you to the hotel.”

“If it’s no trouble - “ Bushell began.

Shikalimo waved that aside. “It would be an honor, not an inconvenience. We of the Hodenosaunee the Iroquois, as you call us - take the theft of The Two Georges most seriously, I assure you; it is a blow at us no less than at the white citizens of the North American Union. Any assistance we can render in its safe return will be a privilege, not a duty.” His face went grim. “I was outraged to learn the Sons of Liberty may be secreting the painting here. That our land was used to abet this crime in an insult that cries out to be avenged.”

Bushell would not have wanted Shikalimo interested in taking vengeance on him. He had a florid way of speaking, but seemed a fine figure of a man all the same. Bushell decided to take him up on his invitation:

“If you’re sure it’s no bother, I thank you very much.”

“No trouble at all.” Shikalimo pointed toward one of the exit doors. “If you bring your baggage there, I’ll go reclaim my steamer from the carpark and meet you in a moment.” Without waiting for a reply, he hurried away.

“He’s bloody sure of himself, isn’t he?” Samuel Stanley remarked when Shikalimo had got out of earshot. “By his manner, you’d think he was the Grand Sachem’s son, not just his nephew.”

Sylvanus Greeley and Charles Lucas exchanged glances. “My dear sir - “ they began together, and both laughed. “Go ahead, Charlie,” Greeley said.

“Thanks, Captain,” the younger man replied. He turned to Stanley and Bushell. “The Iroquois, they do things differently. Captain Greeley and I, we’ve been here a while, and we’re used to it. Sometimes we forget outsiders aren’t. The Iroquois, they reckon descent through the mother. The Tododaho’s sons, they aren’t of his clan: they belong to the one his wife is in. But the Sachem’s sister’s son, now, he’s - “

“He’s the heir, you’re saying,” Bushell put in, fitting the puzzle pieces together. “Well. No wonder he acts as if he’s someone, then. He is”

“Yeah, and we’d better not keep him waiting, either.” Samuel Stanley picked up a suitcase. “Come on.”

No sooner had they stepped outside than Shikalimo pulled up in a Supermarine saloon so low and rakish, it looked ready to spit fire. The Iroquois nobleman - or so Bushell classified him - didn’t seem unduly impressed with his own importance: he helped the RAMs load their luggage into the boot and held the passenger-side doors open so they could get in.

The Supermarine glided away from the kerb. Shikalimo was an expert driver, going through the gears so smoothly, Bushell had trouble noticing the shifts. He wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to such things in any case. He’d never been in the Six Nations before, and wondered how Doshoweh differed from the town it might have been had Englishmen built it.

He couldn’t see much difference. The people on the street - not many, at an hour marching toward midnight - wore clothes that wouldn’t have been out of place on a warm summer night in New Liverpool, although he wouldn’t have spotted men wearing earrings there. The buildings looked like buildings, not wigwams. Only the bilingual signs really told him he was in an unusual part of the NAU. Shikalimo said, “I want you to know, Colonel, Captain, it’s an honor for me to be working so closely with you. I expect to learn a great deal from this. Your techniques are a model of what investigation should be. If we here had access to facilities like yours in Victoria -“ He let out a long, envious sigh. Bushell realized that, while he was trying to isolate what made the Six Nations unique, Shikalimo was looking out from his limited perspective toward the wider, more cosmopolitan world of the NAU as a whole, which Bushell took as much for granted as Shikalimo did the narrow view from Doshoweh. What you wanted to see depended on where you were standing.

He said, “We’ll cooperate with you in any way we can, Major. Having someone so prominent in the community here working alongside us will help make witnesses more willing to talk.”

To his surprise, Shikalimo lifted one hand off the steering wheel, then angrily slammed it down again.

“Greeley and Lucas are good enough fellows in their way, but they talk too bloody much,” he said. “I hope you will not be offended when I say I have noted this flaw regrettably often in white men.”

“Doesn’t offend me one bit,” Samuel Stanley said with a chuckle.

“A distinct point, Captain Stanley.” Shikalimo laughed, too. But he quickly grew serious again: “I wish your fellow RAMs had not gone into detail about my social rank here, as opposed to that in our constabulary, because I want you to think of me as a colleague to be judged like any other colleague. Social rank and ability do not necessarily go hand in hand.”

“Seems to me your people are doing things the same way the royal family does,” Bushell said. “Give the heir something worthwhile to do before he gets stuck with the top job and he’ll generally handle that one pretty well, too.”

Shikalimo glanced over to him. “That is precisely the paradigm my uncle cited, Colonel,” he said, respect in his voice.

Otetiani sounded like a sensible chap. Bushell couldn’t figure out how to say so without seeming to make too much of himself. He covered his brief confusion with brusqueness: “To business. You’ve had a couple of days now to search for the Sons of Liberty here. Any luck?”

“None to speak of, unfortunately,” Shikalimo answered. “Somewhere between a fourth and a third of the populace of Doshoweh is white. With such a large haystack to sift through, we’ve yet to come across our poisoned needle.”

“Have a care as you sift,” Samuel Stanley warned. “If you want to learn from us, for God’s sake learn that. The Sons will hurt you badly if you run up against them unprepared.”

“For this word of caution I thank you, and I shall convey it to my comrades and superiors,” Shikalimo said. He pulled to a stop in front of the Hotel Ahgusweyo, which, unlike the other buildings Bushell had seen, did have the look of a longhouse writ large, in stone and concrete rather than wood and bark. Shikalimo remarked, “Sightseers expect certain things of us. We make an effort to satisfy them, even if their expectations do not always match modern reality.”

A servant came with a cart to take the baggage from the boot of Shikalimo’s Supermarine. Recognizing the driver, he nodded deferentially and murmured something in his own language, to which Shikalimo responded. Bushell concluded not all the old ways of the Iroquois had fallen into desuetude. As had that of the Skidegate Lodge, the lobby of the Hotel Ahgusweyo tried to show the traveler he had came to someplace out of the ordinary. Colorful dried ears of maize were displayed on the walls, along with war clubs, tobacco pipes, and baskets and medicine masks of dried ash splints. A dugout canoe hung from the ceiling on stout chains.

When he got up to his room and flipped on the light, the first thing he noticed was a large print of The Two Georges hanging over the bed. It surprised a snort of laughter out of him. “What is funny, sir?” the bellhop asked, setting his suitcases down on the floor.

He pointed to the print. “That. Anywhere else in the NAU, I would have expected it. But here - “

“George Washington is very important to the Hodenosaunee, too, sir,” the bellhop said, sounding indignant Bushell had doubted it. “Those of us who follow Hawenneyu, the Great Spirit, and not your Christian God” - with a slight motion of his hand, he included himself among that number - “we say Washington is the only white man who has joined Hawenneyu in his heaven.”

“The rest of us are in hell?” Bushell asked, bemused.

But the bellhop shook his head. “No, sir. Hawenneyu takes no notice of you, for good or ill. But Washington was such a noble man, the Great Spirit smiled on him no matter what his color.”

“Is that a fact?” Bushell said. It wasn’t a fact, of course; it was a theological opinion, than which nothing was less susceptible to proof. But it was a theological opinion that stuck his fancy. He tipped the bellhop a pound, twice the going rate. The man bowed and slipped away.

On the wall across from the bed hung a smaller print, this one of a man with dark, Red Indian features and extraordinarily intelligent, probing eyes. There were letters underneath the print. Walking up to it, Bushell saw that they spelled out what looked like an Iroquois name: Sosehawa. He wished the bellhop hadn’t left. Most bellhops knew where the good restaurants were or how to find a companion for the evening if you were so inclined. This fellow had seemed well informed about other matters as well.

Bushell shrugged. Shikalimo would know who Sosehawa was. All that could wait till morning. He unpacked his pyjamas, put them on, and went to bed.

Samuel Stanley stared at the breakfast menu with a dismay Bushell found incomprehensible. “Hommony cakes!” Stanley exploded. “In this day and age they expect people to eat hommony cakes - and pay hotel prices to do it? They won’t get ‘em from me, by God!”

“What the devil are hommony cakes?” Bushell asked, once the offending item was identified.

“Hommony is maize treated with lye to hull it and then ground into flour. You can make it into cakes or you can serve it up as porridge - but you’d better not, not if you want to keep your Negro trade,”

Stanley said.

“Sorry, Sam - I’m still not following this.”

“Hommony was slave food. It was cheap, it would keep a man going . . . it still will, come to that, and poor people in the southeastern provinces eat it to this day. But for a Negro family that’s come up in the world, as most of us have - “ Stanley shook his head. “My folks got some in the house just once that I remember, when I was about fourteen. They served me up a big bowl of the porridge and made me eat it all. My father said my grandpa had done the same for him, and so on as far back as any of us remember. He called it knowing what we’d got away from.”

Bushell had been curious about the hommony, but after that impassioned speech he decided he’d be wiser leaving it alone. He chose griddlecakes from good old unabashed wheat flour instead, and maple syrup to go with them. Sam Stanley ordered bacon and eggs, with chips on the side. Their breakfasts had just arrived when Bushell stiffened as a waiter led a new patron to a table. He caught Stanley’s eye. The adjutant followed his gaze. A forkful of eggs halted halfway to Stanley’s mouth. “What do you know about that?” he said softly.

“I don’t know a bloody thing, but I’m going to find out.” Bushell rose from his seat and strode over to the woman who had just come into the dining room. “Won’t you join me for breakfast, Dr. Flannery?” he said with an ironic courtesy that masked the anger and suspicion he felt. Kathleen Flannery looked up in surprise that rapidly became alarm. “Why, Colonel Bushell,” she said.

“How ... pleasant to see you again.” Color rose from her throat to her cheeks to her forehead.

“Won’t you join me for breakfast?” Bushell repeated. It was phrased as a request, but not meant as one. She bit her lip, nodded, and rose. Bushell paced beside her, as if to make sure she didn’t cut and run. He pulled out a chair for her. “I’m sure you also remember Captain Stanley?”

“Of course,” Kathleen answered, nodding. “How are you this morning, Captain?”

“Curious,” Stanley said bluntly. That made her look down at the linen tablecloth in confusion - or was it embarrassment? Bushell couldn’t tell.

A waiter came to the table where Kathleen Flannery had been seated. He scratched his head for a moment, then smiled when he saw her sitting with Bushell and Stanley. “Ah, you have friends here,” he said. “How nice.”

“Yes,” she answered, her voice brittle. When he expectantly poised pencil above pad, she ordered the hommony porridge with a small pitcher of cream. Bushell waited for Samuel Stanley to detonate once more, but his adjutant put on a poker face instead. Stanley knew when not to show his cards. Bushell waited till everyone had finished eating before he lighted a cigar and asked, “And what brings you to Doshoweh at such an, mm, opportune time, Dr. Flannery?”

Kathleen had recovered her spirits. “I don’t have to answer your questions, Colonel,” she said, and started to rise. “If you will excuse me - “

“Sit down.” Bushell’s voice was very quiet; no one two tables over would have heard him. But he’d learned, first in the army and then in the RAMs, to put the snap of command into what he said. Kathleen Flannery returned to her chair before she quite realized she’d done so. Bushell went on, “Would you sooner discuss this at the Doshoweh RAM headquarters? They’re around the corner, I’m told. Or perhaps the local constables would be curious to know why you came into Doshoweh only days after The Two Georges did.”

She stared at him. “Then it’s true,” she breathed. “It did come here.” She reached out to set her hand on his. “Have you got it back?”

“No, we haven’t got it back,” Bushell said roughly, and she took her hand away. “My best guess is that it’s not here now.” He grimaced, wishing he hadn’t told her even that much. Covering annoyance by pouring himself more tea, he continued, “How the devil did you know it was in the first place? What are you doing chasing it after I told you to stay out of the case?”

Kathleen answered the second question: “I’m not your servant, Colonel, no matter what you may think, and I am not obliged to act on your say-so. Serving as curator for the traveling exhibition of The Two Georges would have been a highlight of my career, something to build on for years to come. Having the painting stolen while touring - Think what that does for my prospects.”

Bushell thought about it. She would carry the same sort of black mark on her record as he. “That doesn’t tell me what you’re doing here,” he said. “It took a lot of police work - it took a man dying, for God’s sake - to get us here . . . and we find you in Doshoweh ahead of us. How did you know The Two Georges was here?”

“I don’t know anything about police work,” she said. “I don’t know what you found or where you found it. What I know is art. Every time a major painting is stolen, there’s always a flood of rumors about where it’s gone and who has it. This time we know who has it, and - “

“ - And they made sure there wouldn’t be any rumors about where it was,” Bushell interrupted. “So what are you doing here, Dr. Flannery? Answer me, please.”

“I am trying to answer you,” she said. Now the color that rose to her cheeks was anger, not embarrassment. “It’s much more difficult for me to do so when you keep breaking in.”

“Go on, then,” he told her.

“Thank you so much,” she said icily. “As I think I told you during one of your interrogations in New Liverpool, the All-Union Museum has an extensive collection of Red Indian artifacts. Our associate curator of Iroquois art, Dr. Gyantwaka, recognized that the headline the villains showed with The Two Georges came from the Doshoweh Sentinel. Actually, he wasn’t quite certain, but I decided to take the chance and see what I could find here. And so I arrived day before yesterday.”

Bushell and Samuel Stanley conducted a short conversation that consisted entirely of twitching eyebrows, lip corners moving up and down, and small hand gestures. “It could be,” Bushell said at last, delivering the verdict with obvious reluctance. “Let me ask you another question, then: once you learned this, why did you go haring off on your own? Why didn’t you pass on what you’d learned to the RAMs in Victoria?”

Her green eyes widened slightly. “You mean you didn’t know? Surely, with RAMs from all over the NAU, some of them would have noticed the same thing Dr. Gyantwaka did.”

“We don’t have a lot of Iroquois in the RAMs, I’m afraid,” Stanley said, his voice grave. “No one recognized the headline as coming from his hometown newspaper. We had to dig the information out the hard way. We didn’t discover the source ourselves until a couple of days ago.”

“Oh, dear,” Kathleen Flannery said. “No wonder you were surprised to see me.”

Surprised wasn’t the word. Mistrustful was. Everything Kathleen Flannery did or said seemed perfectly innocent, and everything required checking. Bushell supposed he could ask Major Shikalimo about Dr. Gyantwaka; if Shikalimo didn’t know him or know of him, he’d know somebody who did. Very likely Gyantwaka would check out fine, as the other things Kathleen had said proved for the most part to be as she’d said them. But that everything needed checking bothered Bushell no end. So did the simple fact of her presence here. “Dr. Flannery,” he said, “don’t you know that an amateur can - “

“ - Evidently discover some things about as fast as the entire corps of the Royal American Mounted Police? Is that what you were going to say, Colonel?” Kathleen smiled at him. It was a very sweet smile. It also had razors in it.

Bushell opened his mouth. He closed it again. Damn it, she had found out that The Two Georges was in Doshoweh as fast as the entire corps of the Royal American Mounted Police. He glanced over to Samuel Stanley for support. Stanley was looking down into his teacup. Bushell thought he was trying not to chuckle. That didn’t help him muster the crushing reply he was looking for. Kathleen Flannery didn’t give him much time to gather his wits, either. “You were about to say, Colonel?” she prompted, smiling again with that sweet ferocity.

He recognized the interrogation technique. If you hurried somebody, made him respond to you instead of picking his own pace, you seized the initiative. He’d used the technique himself, hundreds of times. It worked. It was working on him now. That smile made it all the more devastating; it made him want to tell Kathleen everything she wanted to hear. Too bad that was a variant he couldn’t use against villains, few of whose pulses quickened at the sight of his pearly whites.

Kathleen tapped her long nails on the tabletop in obvious, and irritating, impatience. That made Bushell want to laugh; if she hadn’t got the gesture from the cinema, she truly was an inspired amateur. And if she was “Here’s what we’re going to do, Dr. Flannery,” he said, as if he’d had it in mind all along. “You have done better than I thought you could back in New Liverpool. I admit it. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” she said, but she now sounded more wary than relieved. Samuel Stanley also looked puzzled, though he was doing his best not to show it. Bushell wasn’t in the habit of giving in so tamely. He didn’t intend to give in now, either. Doing his best to match Kathleen’s smile, he said, “Since you’ve proved yourself such a fine amateur detective, Dr. Flannery, it’s only right that you move up into the first division and join the professional team. If you’re going to look into the theft of The Two Georges, you can lend your talents to Sam and me and accompany us on our investigations.” That way we can keep an eye on you all the time, he didn’t add, not aloud. “What say you?”

Kathleen Flannery might have been headstrong, but she was anything but a fool. Her eyes sparked angrily as she saw the trap Bushell had set for her. “What happens if I say no, Colonel?”

“Most likely, you’d be investigated as a material witness,” Bushell answered. “I expect the questioning would be most thorough. You’d certainly have to leave off chasing The Two Georges.”

Her lips silently shaped a word he would not have used in her company. She had sand, though. “My solicitor would prepare a brief for a barrister to take to court to stop this harassment.”

“Harassment?” Bushell’s eyes were large and round and innocent. “You are a material witness, Dr. Flannery. Finding out what you know and how you know it may well prove relevant to this case.” That was all too true, any which way. “As for any court action, well, you can’t do much investigating while you’re testifying.”

She looked as if she hated him. She probably did. Somewhere back in his mind, that hurt, more than he wanted to admit even to himself. He was used to ignoring that kind of hurt, though, ignoring it and going forward. Getting The Two Georges back came first. If you didn’t do your duty, you didn’t deserve the privilege of citizenship in the British Empire.

“Very well, Colonel,” she said at last, her voice wintry. “If this is the only way you will permit me to do what I should be doing, I must agree.” The expression on her face told how happy she was about agreeing.

Bushell sent her a thoughtful look. She too took the concept of duty seriously. To him, that was one in her favor ... for the moment. Elgin Goldsmith and his comrades had fought as bravely as any soldiers for what they saw as their duty, too. Maybe duty, like an electric torch, needed to be pointed in the right direction before it could illuminate the path one should take. He shook his head, unhappy at the thought. Duty should be simple, straightforward.

“What’s first on the list for today, Chief?” Samuel Stanley asked. “Shall we visit the RAMs or Major Shikalimo?”

“Shikalimo, I think,” Bushell answered after a moment’s thought. “One thing Dr. Flannery has done for us is show us that we RAMs don’t know everything we should about what’s going on in the Six Nations. If anyone does, it’ll be the local constabulary.”

“I saw a public telephone just outside the restaurant,” Stanley said, pointing. “Let me go ring him up. How soon do you want to see him?”

“As soon as he’ll see us,” Bushell said.

“Right. If you’ll excuse me . . .” Stanley hurried out of the room. When he came back a couple of minutes later, he said, “Half past nine. And I have exact directions on how to get there - it’s about a five-minute walk, they say.”

“Good enough.” Bushell dipped his head to Kathleen. “Shall we meet in the lobby at nine-twenty, then?”

“Of course,” she said. He winced at the distaste she packed into two words. As he and his companions walked to the Doshoweh constabulary station, Bushell watched the Iroquois watching them. He drew no special notice himself; a fair number of white men were on the streets. But Kathleen Flannery’s auburn hair made people give her second looks, and several frankly stared at Samuel Stanley.

That amused Stanley more than it annoyed him. Chuckling, he said, “Not a whole lot of Negroes in the Six Nations, looks like. Maybe I ought to do a little dance, to give them something to remember me by.”

Some of the locals spoke English, others their own purring tongue. Newsboys hawked papers in both languages. Now that it had been brought to his notice, Bushell saw that the typefaces the Doshoweh Sentinel used were like those on the photograph the Sons of Liberty had sent with their ransom demand. He slapped his hand against the side of his leg. If only someone had noticed earlier!

The constabulary station was a nondescript four-story building of muddy yellow brick. Bushell’s first thought was that it would fall down in an earthquake. Doshoweh, though, didn’t need to worry about earthquakes the way New Liverpool did.

Some of the constables inside the station were using the Iroquois language. Bushell noticed that. A lot of Spanish-speakers lived in Upper California, but English was the universal language of government there. But the affiliation of the Six Nations to the NAU was looser than that of ordinary provinces. Major Shikalimo met them in the lobby. When he saw Kathleen Flannery, he looked a question to Bushell. After introducing her to him, Bushell said, “Dr. Flannery has been conducting her own independent investigation of the theft of The Two Georges. Now that we’ve run into each other here, we’ve decided to join forces.” He spoke in carefully neutral tones, hiding both his annoyance that Kathleen hadn’t listened to him and her resentment at being forced into an alliance.

“I see,” Shikalimo said in a voice just as neutral, and then, as if reminding himself, “Well, this is an unusual case in almost every way.” He knew Bushell hadn’t told him anywhere near the whole story, then. When he saw he wasn’t going to get any more of it, he gave half a shrug and went on, “If you’ll come with me to my office, I’ll show you what we’ve been doing here the past few days.”

His office was bigger than the one Bushell had back in New Liverpool, but Bushell wasn’t the chief’s nephew, either. On the wall opposite Shikalimo’s desk was a large print of The Two Georges; on the wall in back of his desk hung a copy of the same portrait of Sosehawa as the one in Bushell’s hotel room. He pointed to it. “By the way it’s displayed, that picture is as important here as The Two Georges is all over the NAU. Who was Sosehawa, if I may ask?”

Kathleen Flannery stirred, as if she knew the answer. But Bushell had aimed the question at Shikalimo, and she left the reply to him. He said, “He was the man who made my people what we are today. He went east, into the province of New York, in 1821, and there he had a - well, you might call it a religious revelation.”

“He was a prophet, then?” Bushell had already heard that some of the Iroquois still followed their Great Spirit, so it stood to reason that they’d had prophets.

But Shikalimo smiled. “Only in a manner of speaking. Sosehawa saw all the new things brewing in New York province: the steamships in New York harbor, the very beginnings of the railroad, things like that. He realized we of the Hodenosaunee did not even know how to smelt iron. If we needed guns to defend ourselves, we had to buy them from white men, for we could not make them ourselves. We were living on the white man’s sufferance, for if whites wanted to brush us aside, they had the power to do it.”

“And Sosehawa changed all that?” Bushell said.

“Exactly. Thanks to him, schools went up all through the Six Nations. We brought in smiths and craftsmen of all sorts, and learned from them all we could. It did not happen overnight, but in a couple of generations’ time we took our place beside the white man as full equals, and no longer had to beg scraps from his table.”

“What’s finest about that is how you’ve kept your own traditions, too,” Kathleen Flannery said. “You’ve taken what you found useful without throwing away everything you had before.”

“That’s what we’ve tried to do, at any rate,” Shikalimo said. “It’s not always easy. With so many more of you people, with your books and films and wireless, we sometimes feel swamped. But we can speak of history another time. On to the matter at hand.”

Bushell leaned forward in his chair. “Good. What have you done since you learned the Sons of Liberty have been operating out of Doshoweh? How do we go about discovering who they are and where in the city they might have concealed The Two Georges?”

“That is the question,” Shikalimo said, with an intonation that left no doubt he was quoting from Hamlet. He spread his hands. “So long as they stab sub rosa, it’s - difficult. What we’ve begun to do is look close at those white men named Joe and Joseph and even Josiah who have let their distaste, shall we say, for the Iroquois become obvious to us. Things would be easier if your letter writer had a name less common among you.”

“Don’t I know it,” Bushell said. “That is a place to start, I suppose, but the Sons, at least the ones involved in this crime, are liable to be too clever to give themselves away so readily.”

“I am assuming as much,” Shikalimo answered. “I don’t look to find them among the men who are outspoken in their scorn. But like associates with like. Some of the men who loudly hate us will have quiet friends who are more dangerous.”

Samuel Stanley glanced over at Bushell. He nodded slightly. Bushell nodded back. Sachem’s nephew he might be, but Shikalimo thought like a police officer. Kathleen Flannery was looking out the window at Doshoweh and missed the bit of byplay. Shikalimo didn’t. He said nothing, but glanced down at his desk as any well-bred man might have on finding himself praised.

He said, “I gather from your colleagues, gentlemen, that you RAMs identified the headline in the newspaper pictured with The Two Georges as coming from the Doshoweh Sentinel, and that is what brought you here.”

“In part, yes,” Bushell said. “Dr. Flannery made the identification independently, with help from an associate of hers, Dr. Gyantwaka - I hope I’m not pronouncing that too badly.”

“You’re understandable,” Shikalimo said: faint praise. “Yes, Gyantwaka is from my clan. We’re all very proud of him, though he and I are only distantly related.” Bushell felt the triumphant smile Kathleen sent his way. Before he could respond to it, Shikalimo went on, “That photograph, by the by, was not sent to the Sentinel, or to any other part in Doshoweh.”

“As I said, the villains here are clever,” Bushell answered. “They tried to delay recognition of the headline for as long as they could.”

“Yes,” Shikalimo said, drawing the word out into a thoughtful hiss. His eyes suddenly came to intent focus on Bushell - he had the makings of a formidable interrogator. “You say you came to Doshoweh in part because of the headline from the Sentinel. The rest would have involved your discovery of the note signed by the man named Joe?”

That led to Bushell’s recounting yet again the story of the gunfight at Buckley Bay, and of finding the envelope postmarked Doshoweh and the note among the rubbish the Sons of Liberty had thrown away. Shikalimo clicked his tongue between his teeth, not quite in the same way a white man would have. “Not only clever men, but terribly in earnest,” he observed. That intent look returned to his long, high-cheekboned face. “Did you bring the envelope with you when you came here? Perhaps by studying the postmark, we can learn from which part of the city it was sent.”

“Major Shikalimo, I was hoping either you or the local RAMs would say something like that.” Bushell reached into the inner pocket of his jacket. “Here you are.” He handed the Iroquois constable the envelope.

Shikalimo looked at it for a moment, then set it on his desk and picked up the telephone. He spoke rapidly in his own language, paused to listen, spoke again, and hung up. A couple of minutes later, another Iroquois whose neat queue contrasted oddly with his spotless white laboratory robe came into Shikalimo’s office. The major’s guests might as well not have been there for him; he had eyes only for the envelope. Carrying it with the care another man might have given the Holy Grail, he departed.

“If it can tell us anything, Ganeodiyo will make it speak,” Shikalimo said.

“Shall we invite Captain Greeley and Lieutenant Lucas here, so they can learn whatever your man finds out?” Bushell said; he was not about to try to pronounce the name of the Iroquois technician on one hearing.

“Very well, since you ask,” Shikalimo said, and rang the local RAM offices. When he got off the telephone, he glanced Bushell’s way in some amusement. “You seem surprised at my hesitation.”

“Not at all,” Bushell said, though astonished would more accurately have described his feelings. Anywhere else in the NAU, constables would have leaped to seek help from the RAMs. Shikalimo spoke to precisely that point: “Within our borders, Colonel, the Six Nations are autonomous, and we take that seriously. From time to time, officials of the Crown, no doubt with the highest of motives” - an eyebrow-twitch showed irony - “have tried to lessen that autonomy. As might not surprise you, we’ve also been training lawyers since Sosehawa’s time.”

They made idle chitchat while waiting for Greeley, Lucas, and Ganeodiyo. Bushell said, “I heard last night that Washington” - he nodded toward the print of The Two Georges - “is reckoned the only white man to reach your heaven.” When Shikalimo nodded, the RAM went on, “How did he earn such a literally singular honor?”

“Not least by enforcing, for a while at any rate, the ban on white settlement west of the Appalachians His Majesty’s government had laid down in 1763,” Shikalimo answered. “Eventually, of course, even King Canute couldn’t have held back the tide, and the ban was lifted. But the thirty-five years it was in force enabled us to consolidate as a nation, and set the stage for Sosehawa’s reforms. Washington could have turned a blind eye to the ban; it would have been a popular thing to do. But he upheld the law. We honor him for that.”

It occurred to Bushell that the Iroquois no doubt viewed the spread of British settlers and provinces in a light different from the one shone on it during his school days. Who could say which perspective, if either, was the true one?

Sylvanus Greeley and Charles Lucas arrived just then, making him lose that train of thought. “Thanks for including us,” Greeley told Shikalimo; he recognized he was here with the Iroquois’s permission. Both local RAMs accepted Bushell’s introduction of Kathleen Flannery with what he thought of as polite horror. Since he outranked them, though, they had to make the best of it. Ganeodiyo returned a couple of minutes later, triumph lighting his solemn features. “Deohstegaa district, on the lakeshore,” he declared. “Now we know where to focus our efforts.”

“Good work,” Shikalimo said in English, and then added several sentences in the Iroquois language. Then Sylvanus Greeley spoke in the same tongue, not with great fluency but plainly making himself understood. Ganeodiyo answered; they went back and forth for a minute or so. Greeley turned to Bushell. “I’m conveying our gratitude.”

“Thank you,” Bushell said. He was impressed the local RAM could do so in the language of the Six Nations. He’d picked up a fair amount of Spanish since coming to New Liverpool, but Spanish came easy to a man who spoke French and had had Latin drilled into him since boyhood. Acquiring Iroquois struck him as an altogether more difficult undertaking.

“That will help us narrow down our search, as Ganeodiyo said.” Shikalimo spoke with great satisfaction.

“We shan’t neglect the rest of Doshoweh, but we will concentrate on men with homes or businesses in that part of the city.”

“The Great Spirit has guided our hunts for longer than the memory of our people reaches,” Ganeodiyo said. “He will smile on our work again.” With a nod to Shikalimo and a grudging one to Sylvanus Greeley, he left the office.

“Forgive him,” Shikalimo murmured to Bushell. “He thinks those who don’t speak our language are slightly less than human. He might almost be an Englishman in that regard.”

The major had a knack for coming up with quietly devastating asides. Having got in the way of one, Bushell felt like an airship with a punctured coronium cell. Rallying, he said, “How can we help you in sifting through whatever evidence you have about white men here who aren’t fond of you Iroquois?”

“Colonel, meaning no disrespect, but that would be difficult for you,” Shikalimo answered. Bushell was irked to see Sylvanus Greeley nodding agreement. Shikalimo went on, “Most of it is not evidence in the proper sense of the word, certainly none that would stand up in a court of law. We know some of the whites who despise us. We’ll ask around in the Deohstegaa district and undoubtedly uncover the names of more. All that, of necessity, is work for our local constables. My people would not be nearly so forthcoming for white men - or even for the charming Dr. Flannery.” He smiled at her. That irked Bushell, too, partly because she was a suspect in his mind and partly because he didn’t want anyone else trying to charm her. He made himself stick to the business at hand. “Very well, Major, you have a point.”

“I’m not putting you out like maize to parch, I promise you that,” Shikalimo said. “Once we have an idea of whose associates may be involved with the Sons of Liberty, we’ll need to avail ourselves of your expertise in picking our most likely targets.” He laughed. “We of the Hodenosaunee have been trying to understand the white man, and the Englishman in particular, for several hundred years now, with results decidedly mixed.”

Bushell got that punctured feeling again. For the most part, Shikalimo behaved like any well-educated subject of the British Empire, but showed now and then that he was at bottom the product of a very different tradition. He seemed to enjoy showing that, rocking Bushell back on his heels and making sure he himself was not taken for granted.

An exceedingly decorative young Iroquois woman in a calico tunic and blue broadcloth skirt, both elaborately embroidered with beadwork, came into the office and smiled at Shikalimo as she set some papers on his desk. Several pairs of male eyes followed her when she swayed away. Charles Lucas laughed. “Ah, Major, it’s a rough duty you have here.”

“What?” For a moment, Shikalimo obviously hadn’t the slightest idea what the RAM was talking about. Then he snapped his fingers. “Oh. I understand. You mean Dewasenta. She is pretty, isn’t she? Till you alluded to it, though, I’d never thought of her that way. She’s of the Turtle clan, you see.”

He spoke as if that explained everything. It evidently explained enough to Lucas, who nodded and subsided. Once again, though, it gave Bushell the feeling that, although Shikalimo spoke impeccable English, he used it to convey alien thoughts. Coughing a little, he said, “Excuse me, Major, but - “ He paused, unsure how to go on.

Shikalimo got him out of the predicament by laughing out loud. “But you haven’t the slightest idea what I’m talking about, you mean. We Hodenosaunee divide ourselves into eight clans, in two groups of four: the Wolf, Bear, Beaver, and Turtle on the one hand, and the Deer, Snipe, Heron, and Hawk on the other. I am of the Bear clan; men of the Bear clan from all the Six Nations are my brothers, and so, in lesser degree, are Wolves, Beavers, and Turtles. And the women of those four clans are my sisters. We do not marry our sisters any more than you do, Colonel.”

Kathleen Flannery nodded along with Shikalimo; she’d known what he was going to say. Bushell hadn’t. Eliminating half the women of your nation struck him as unduly narrowing your choices. . . until he remembered that, with all the women of the NAU from whom to choose, he’d picked Irene. A man could be dead wrong under any circumstances.

Samuel Stanley asked, “Do boys and girls from the wrong clans ever fall in love and run away from the Six Nations to be married?”

“It happens,” Shikalimo admitted, sounding unhappy about it. “Our laws and customs go no farther than our own borders, while the ways of the rest of the NAU seep in. I blame your romantic wireless shows and especially the cinema for many of the troubles of our young people.”

“I blame them for some of the troubles of our young people,” Bushell said. Shikalimo blinked; maybe he’d been expecting an argument. “Will there be anything else, Colonel?” he asked, with a glance toward the papers Dewasenta had brought him.

Bushell wished he could answer yes. No matter what Shikalimo promised, he worried that the Iroquois would put him on the shelf. But, in the end, he had to shake his head, get up, and go. To preserve his sense that he was doing something useful while waiting for Shikalimo to call, Bushell spent a good part of the next three days on the telephone. He rang Major Gordon Rhodes, who had nothing much new to report. He’d grilled Titus Hackett and Franklin Mansfield, but the printers denied any connection between the gold roubles they’d received from the Queen Charlotte Islands and the four Sons of Liberty who’d lived at Buckley Bay. So far, no one had managed to unearth evidence they were lying and bring it to any of His Majesty’s prosecutors.

He rang Jaime Macias, but the New Liverpool constabulary captain had even less to tell him than did Rhodes. The constables had had no luck running Tricky Dick’s killer to earth, and hadn’t turned up any new Nagants used in other crimes, either.

“Knives and coshes and one chap with more imagination than brains who tried to hold up an ironmonger’s shop with a crossbow, but no more rifles,” Macias said. “Can’t say I miss them, either.”

“A crossbow?” Bushell said, bemused. “There’s something you don’t see every day. What happened?”

“He shot his bolt - and missed.” Macias chuckled. “Whereupon the shopkeeper hit him several fine licks with a fireplace poker. He’ll be in hospital for a couple of weeks before they can try him, and in gaol afterwards rather longer than that, unless I’m very much mistaken.”

“Here’s hoping you’re not,” Bushell said. “You haven’t helped me much, but you have brightened up the day. A crossbow!” He let out a highly unprofessional chortle.

His next telephone call went to Victoria. “Dreadful business you went through at Buckley Bay,” Sir Horace Bragg said once the connection was made. “Shocking. A terrible loss, too; Felix Crooke was the best we had when it came to dealing with the Sons.”

“This time they dealt with him,” Bushell said with grim irony. “It’ll hurt us down the line, too. It can’t help but.”

“Try not to take it too hard. From all I’ve heard, you did everything in the most proper fashion imaginable,” Bragg said.

“Yes, and a crown with that will buy me a cup of tea,” Bushell replied. “They don’t pay off for doing things properly. They pay off for getting them done.”

“Doing them properly is most often the way to get them done,” Bragg said. Bushell didn’t answer, since that was true. Bragg went on, “Your investigations certainly seem to be leading you all over the NAU. You’re in the Six Nations now? Who would have imagined the Sons operating there?”

“None of us, evidently,” Bushell said. He didn’t mention Kathleen Flannery. He didn’t want Bragg clucking at him over his mild treatment of her; he had enough on his plate without that. “I feel I’m chasing shapes in the mist, and whenever I get close to one, it disappears. The clock is ticking, too.”

“Well, I can tell you something,” Bragg said in confidential tones. “At a reception at the French embassy last night, Sir David Clarke was seen talking most animatedly with Duke Orlov. Was seen by me, in fact; I was there. Nothing I can prove, nothing I can take to Sir Martin - as if he’d listen to me anyhow - but damn me if I like it.”

“I don’t, either,” Bushell said. “It’s a good job you went back to the capital.” The idea of Sir David and the Russian ambassador to the NAU getting together for a cozy tête-à-tête at some formal reception revolted him. “Pity you couldn’t hear what they were saying.”

“My French isn’t all it should be,” Sir Horace confessed, “and that’s the language they were using.”

Under his breath, he added, “It’s just like Clarke to be fluent in it, too.”

Bushell spoke reasonably good French himself, but he understood what Bragg meant. French was the language of people who called themselves sophisticates the world around, and a good many of the sophisticates were degenerates masquerading under the politer name - Sir David Clarke immediately sprang to mind there. And furthermore, he thought with the British citizen’s almost inborn suspicion for any language not his own, French sounded slimy.

Bragg asked, “How are you doing there, Tom?” Bushell gave him a précis, again not mentioning Kathleen Flannery. When he was through, Sir Horace said, “Sounds like you’re doing a splendid job. Keep up the good work, and by all means keep me apprised of your progress.”

“I shall, sir,” Bushell said, and hung up. He didn’t think he was doing a splendid job. A splendid job would have meant The Two Georges on display back in New Liverpool, and him back there, too, and Felix Crooke in Victoria, worried about the Sons but not too much. He scowled, grimaced, and wished he had a drink.

However mildly he was treating Kathleen Flannery, he didn’t trust her very far. One of the things he didn’t trust her about was going off on her own and learning who could guess what without telling him about it. She’d already shown she did things like that, or she wouldn’t have been in Doshoweh complicating his life.

The only way he saw to be certain she didn’t wander off by herself was to make sure either he or Samuel Stanley stuck close to her all the time. He ended up doing a good deal more of that than Stanley did. He told himself that was because it was part of the case he could personally control. The explanation was true; not even the unsleepingly watchful part of him that demanded perfection could deny it. But neither that part of him nor any other could deny that he found Kathleen attractive, either. He would have seen a good deal of her in the course of duty, had The Two Georges stayed safe in New Liverpool. He might well have tried seeing her off duty, too: who better to show her the sights?

He didn’t know the sights of Doshoweh. The Six Nations had seldom crossed his professional path even before he moved to the southwestern part of the NAU. The Iroquois kept to themselves and stayed out of trouble, characteristics he heartily favored. The only case involving them he remembered was one where they’d asked for RAM help in keeping smugglers from sneaking rotgut into the Six Nations without paying the hefty tax they slapped on it.

Even had he known the sights, Kathleen Flannery likely would have been happier seeing them without him. He’d meet her for breakfast each morning in the restaurant attached to the Hotel Ahgusweyo. The small talk, he thought gloomily, was very small indeed. She had an Irish temper, at least when it came to nursing grudges. He thought it unfair that she reckoned keeping her from hurting the investigation a grudge, but she did.

Another trouble was that Doshoweh itself didn’t have a lot of sights. A museum dedicated to the achievements of Sosehawa took up one day and filled Kathleen with more enthusiasm than she’d shown lately, but left Bushell discontented.

Kathleen noticed. “He was a great man,” she declared, as if he’d denied it. By the light that came into her eyes, she was spoiling for a fight.

“Well, what if he was?” Bushell answered. “The ancient Greeks turned their great men into demigods. From what I saw in there, the Iroquois have done the same thing. You’d think the Great Spirit was whispering into Sosehawa’s ear every step he took.”

“He’s a hero to them - in the mythological sense of the word - and he’s earned it, too,” she said.

“Without him, they might have been overwhelmed, the way so many Indian nations were. It’s only natural for them to make him out to be larger than life.”

Stubbornly, Bushell shook his head. “Remembering the real man and his real accomplishments is more important. Make him out to be half-magical and you take away the chance of having more like him.”

“That’s a reductionist view of history.” By the way Kathleen said it, she might have been accusing him of eating with his fingers.

He spoiled that by ignoring her tone and taking it for a compliment. “Yes, I do try to reduce things to facts. They’re easier to deal with than opinions, and more reliable.” He might have said more than that, but it occurred to him that opinions were meat and drink to the curator of an art museum. How could you objectively decide which painting was better than all the rest? You couldn’t, but people got rich claiming they could. That was a fact, and an unsavory one.

Kathleen said, “If all people thought of when they saw The Two Georges was the painting itself, the Sons of Liberty wouldn’t have bothered stealing it.”

“It’s important because it reminds us of some facts and what sprang from them,” Bushell retorted. “The Sons have a low opinion of those facts.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She exhaled in exasperation. “The opinion people have about The Two Georges - “

“ - Is a fact we need to bear in mind while we investigate,” Bushell broke in. “For instance, I’ll be heartily glad if I never see another reporter again, but I’m sure I will.”

She still glared at him, but now, perhaps, with grudging respect. “You are a very stubborn man.”

“Thank you,” he said, though he knew she hadn’t intended that for a compliment, either. “Shall we head back to the hotel for supper?” After a moment’s hesitation, he offered her his arm. After a longer moment’s hesitation, she took it.

After supper, he spoke to the concierge. The results of the conversation were as he’d hoped they’d be. At breakfast the next morning, he said in elaborately casual tones, “I’m told the hotel operates an omnibus service up to Niagara Falls. The journey takes about forty minutes each way, they say, and gives between two and three hours for sightseeing and a light luncheon. Seems a pity not to see the falls when we’re so close. Would you care to join me on the ‘bus?”

She sipped at her tea before answering, “Well, why not? Since everything here is going at a snail’s pace, we might as well see what we can. When does the omnibus leave?”

“Ten o’clock,” he said, and risked a smile. He was glad she’d said yes, and at the same time angry at himself for inviting her. It wasn’t the right way to go about things, and he knew it: too many unanswered questions still floated around her. But if you’re going to keep an eye on her, you might as well enjoy yourself doing it, he thought. That just made him scowl down at his toast; he knew a rationalization when he saw one, even if he was the fellow who made it.

Samuel Stanley paused at the restaurant entrance to look around, spotted Bushell and Kathleen, and hurried over to them. “Good thing I was still up in my room,” he said. “Shikalimo just telephoned. He wants all three of us at the constabulary building right away - says he has a list of prospects and their friends and acquaintances for us to look over.”

“We’d better go do it, then,” Bushell said, rising from the table. So much for Niagara Falls ran mournfully through his mind. Kathleen Flannery also got up. Bushell turned to Stanley. “We can go on ahead, if you want. Get yourself some breakfast.”

“They’ll be able to feed me something there, I expect,” Stanley said. “As long as it’s not that. . . hommony mush, I’ll be all right.” Bushell suspected he’d swallowed an uncouth adjective, or perhaps even a participle, in the nick of time.

Sylvanus Greeley and Charles Lucas were sitting in Shikalimo’s office when Bushell and his companions got there. He nodded to his fellow RAMs, and to Shikalimo. He gave the Iroquois constabulary major credit for marshaling all his resources no matter how jealously he guarded his own autonomy. Shikalimo said, “I’ve sent out for tea and coffee. Has anyone missed breakfast?” When Samuel Stanley nodded, he asked, “What would you like? I’ll get it for you.” He put his hand on the telephone but waited for Stanley’s reply before picking it up.

“Anything easy,” Stanley said. “A ham and cheese sandwich, say.”

“However you like,” Shikalimo answered, and made the call. After he hung up, he remarked, “You’re a man of simple pleasures, Captain. I think I’d have chosen something on the order of strawberries in cider and fried lake clams, perhaps with waffles and maple syrup afterwards.”

The proposed combination made Bushell’s mouth water. Along with Shikalimo’s elegant accent, it reminded him of how well the Iroquois had done as clients of the Empire and how, while retaining many of their own ways, they’d also borrowed from the British.

Stanley’s mind ran in more immediately practical channels. “If I ate that much, I’d fall asleep on you. A ham sandwich is working food.”

“Then let’s get to work,” Shikalimo said. “We’ve pinpointed four white men in the Deohstegaa area who, mm, have been known to be imperfectly polite in their references to the folk of the Six Nations.” He coughed discreetly. Bushell could imagine for himself the racialist remarks that cough implied.

“Who are these people?” Sylvanus Greeley asked. “I presume you’ve never had grounds for holding any of them.”

“No, we’ve not,” Shikalimo said. “A man is free to express his opinions, no matter how unpalatable his neighbors may find them. This is a principle of your law, by the way, not our own, and I confess I sometimes wonder as to its wisdom. But I digress. The men in question - the questionable men, if you prefer - are Donald Morton, the lake-shipping magnate; Augustus Northgate, the grocer; Solomon York, who runs a printing establishment; and James Stonebreaker, who is, oddly enough, a mason by trade.”

“There are printers involved with the Sons in New Liverpool,” Bushell said. “York would go to the top of my list just on account of his trade.”

“So far as we know, his shop has not produced anything unsavory,” Shikalimo answered. “How far we know is, of course, an open question. I thought we’d agreed earlier that our likeliest targets were to be among the quiet friends and acquaintances of these men.”

“Yes, yes,” Bushell said.

Shikalimo sensed his urgency. “Here we are,” he said, handing papers to the RAMs and to Kathleen Flannery. “I hope Dewasenta did up enough carbons of these for all of us - ah, good. I also hope that, with the resources you gentlemen enjoy, you’ll be able to tell me if any of these chaps is known to be associated with the Sons of Liberty. We have nothing more on any of them than a few minor traffic offenses.”

Bushell’s eyes went down the list. The names were grouped by the man with whom they were linked. Donald Morton must have known a whole great raft of people, if he knew this many named Joe. Whether these Joes were friends or not was another question, one he couldn’t answer. None of the names on the list was familiar to him.

“Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke, I wish he were here,” Charles Lucas said.

“I’m sure he wishes the same thing,” Bushell said. “But he’s not, so we’ll have to do it ourselves.”

Instead of Crooke’s face, though, what came into his mind was a quart bottle of Jameson, stopper out and lying on the table beside it. He could smell the whiskey, could feel the heft and the round smoothness of the bottle in his hand, sweet to the touch as a woman’s breast, could hear the gentle gurgle as he poured amber fire over ice or straight down his throat.

Someone said something. He looked up, startled. The whiskey vision had been so vivid, he’d almost lost himself in it. There was a hell of a thing. He’d been soberer than usual these past few days, but the bottle had hold of him even when he wasn’t drinking.

Evidently for his benefit, Shikalimo repeated, “Does anyone see any names he recognizes?”

None of the RAMs said anything. Shikalimo looked down at his desk. His faith in the omniscience and infallibility of the NAU’s top police force had just gone down a peg, or maybe two. He was a young man yet, Bushell thought. He had a lot of disappointments ahead of him yet. Then, hesitantly, Kathleen Flannery said, “I don’t know if this is the same Joseph Kilbride as the one I’ve heard of before, but there is a man by that name who collects art from the later colonial period, just before the days when the Union was organized.”

Bushell sent her a sharp glance. He’d been wishing Shikalimo hadn’t given her the list. If she saw on it someone whose name she knew, she could easily keep quiet about it and alert him. Now she’d identified somebody. He didn’t know what to make of that. Maybe she was sincerely trying to help the investigation. Recovering The Two Georges would put her career back on the rails. But if she put suspicion on the wrong man, the right one could carry on unhindered. Sylvanus Greeley had a more basic question: “What does his taste in art collecting have to do with the case?”

Shikalimo shifted in his seat. As clearly as if he’d shouted it, Bushell could read what he was thinking: this man may be a RAM, but he has no imagination. He was thinking the same thing himself. But he let Kathleen explain. She, after all, had raised the issue.

By the tone she took - rather like a teacher explaining fractions to a room full of restive trade-school students - her estimate of Greeley’s candlepower was also none too high. “In the 1760s, there was quite a bit of tension between the mother country and the colonies, and talk of their breaking away. The Sons of Liberty still think that would have been a good idea. It might have happened - or might have been tried, anyhow - if His Majesty’s government and the leaders of the colonies hadn’t worked out a modus vivendi.”

“I still don’t see - “ Greeley began, but then he held up a finger. “Oh, wait. Maybe I do. You’re saying that anybody who’s interested in art from that time would be interested in other things, too, like us breaking off from England.”

Greeley wasn’t an idiot after all. A muttonhead, perhaps, but not an idiot. “And a half plus a half really is one,” Bushell muttered under his breath. “God save the King-Emperor.”

Kathleen sent him a curious look, but then nodded to Sylvanus Greeley. “That’s my idea, anyhow - or that he may be interested in those other things, too. For that matter, I don’t know whether this is the Joseph Kilbride who collects art. It’s not the most common name, but it’s not precisely a rare one, either.”

“I can find out this Kilbride’s avocations, I expect,” Shikalimo said. He too looked toward Bushell, silently asking whether the track was worth pursuing. Bushell sent back an almost imperceptible nod. He didn’t like relying on Kathleen, but he didn’t see that he had much choice. Had she named Joseph Kilbride after someone else had proposed a different target for investigation, he would have thought a red herring more likely.

Shikalimo picked up the telephone. He spoke into it in his own language, but every now and then a name or phrase in English would come through: Joseph Kilbride, colonial art, Sons of Liberty. Hearing them embedded in the throaty Iroquois language bemused Bushell. When Shikalimo hung up, he returned to English to say, “I’ll have four or five people checking on that. We should know soon.”

Sure enough, the phone rang in less than ten minutes. Shikalimo listened, murmured, “Oh, jolly good,”

and laid the handset in its cradle. “Hasanoanda gets things done,” he said with a smile. “He rang up the Doshoweh Sentinel, as being most likely to know what hobbyhorses a white man might ride. Sure enough, this is the Joseph Kilbride of whom Dr. Flannery has heard.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Samuel Stanley said.

“I propose we get over to Mr. Kilbride’s residence and ask some questions of him,” Sylvanus Greeley boomed, as if he’d found out about Kilbride through his own skill at detection. Since the move was so obvious even a proved muttonhead could see it, Bushell forbore to argue. IX

Shikalimo’s Supermarine saloon held himself, the two local RAMs, and the three travelers. The backseat made a tight squeeze, but Bushell minded less than he might have, for he was pressed up against Kathleen Flannery. As good manners demanded, they both pretended to ignore the close contact. Bushell, though, was very much aware of what he affected to disregard. He wondered if Kathleen was, too.

As he had when he picked up Bushell and Stanley at the train station, Shikalimo drove the powerful Supermarine as if he were in a road race. “Have a care, there,” Charles Lucas protested feebly when he shot around a lorry and then swung back into the lane it occupied so abruptly that his passengers slid from side to side as much as their cramped quarters would allow.

“Haven’t had a wreck yet,” Shikalimo said gaily. He changed lanes again, for no purpose Bushell could see other than horrifying Lucas.

With three large men in the front seat and only the roadster’s small side windows to look out of, Bushell didn’t see as much of Doshoweh as he would have wanted. He did note that, once they got away from the center of the city, it stopped looking quite so much like any other town of similar size in the NAU. For one thing, except in scattered districts, signs written in English almost disappeared. As they were speeding through one such district, Shikalimo remarked, “A lot of whites here.” The houses bore him out: they were clapboards and half-timbered Tudors that wouldn’t have looked out of place in New England or New York.

Away from the white parts of town, though, houses as he knew them largely disappeared. Instead, long, narrow buildings of bark and timber framing stretched on and on, sometimes for fifty or sixty feet, sometimes for twice that. Children too young for school played around them, while women cultivated maize and beans and squashes in gardens that replaced lawns.

Shikalimo said, “Some of our people live in the ganosote, the bark house, because they can afford no better. Others, though, prefer our traditional homes for other reasons: they enjoy the sense of community the ganosote gives them. I mean that literally as well as metaphorically; more often than not, all the families in a bark house will be of the same clan.”

Bushell thought of the block of flats in which he lived. People came and went almost at random. He knew only a handful of his fellow lodgers by name. “Maybe your people have the right idea,” he said.

“Sometimes differences are just - different,” Shikalimo answered with a shrug. “When I went off to university, I wondered how you whites managed to live as naked individuals, so to speak: without the clan structure I’d taken for granted, and with even your families pale things by the standards to which I was accustomed. But, after some years of that life, coming home to the Six Nations was a shock of another sort. What I do, whom I see are dictated more by my position in the clan than my own choice. It sometimes has the feel of a strait-jacket - rather a loose-fitting one, but a straitjacket nonetheless.”

“Isn’t that partly because you’re the Sachem’s nephew?” Samuel Stanley asked.

“Partly, but less than you’d think,” Shikalimo said. “Among us, your place in the clan dictates possibilities no matter who you are.” He chuckled in wry amusement. “I daresay I have more sympathy for the scandalous princesses on the odd branches of His Majesty’s family tree than the rest of you might. Their kicking over the traces so thoroughly makes me jealous.”

“It also makes them fine targets for the scandal sheets the Sons of Liberty turn out,” Bushell said.

“I wonder what sort of scandal I could essay,” Shikalimo murmured. Bushell wouldn’t have been more than half surprised to find he meant it seriously.

Deohstegaa lay northwest of the center of Doshoweh. The shore of the lake the Iroquois called Doshoweh Tecarneodi and the English-speaking world Lake Erie was rocky thereabouts, but quays running out into the water made for a fine harbor. As Shikalimo raced past that harbor, Bushell saw that most of the men working there were of the blood of the Six Nations.

Perhaps catching his gaze in the mirror, Shikalimo said, “We really are part of the twentieth century these days, Colonel.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t be so proud of it,” Bushell answered.

The house in front of which Shikalimo stopped was in an enclave of British-style homes that spoke of wealth despite being close to the docks. Had the lawns in front of it been a vegetable garden, the crops it yielded might have fed a fair part of Doshoweh. When Bushell pressed the button by the door, chimes played the opening bars of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Fallen Innocents, which the radical composer had dedicated to those who fell to Bonaparte’s guns in the ill-fated French uprising against Louis XVI.

Bushell raised an eyebrow. “If this chap’s not a Son of Liberty, his doorbell doesn’t know it.”

The door opened. A butler in black tie and frock coat peered out at the group on the porch. If he was impressed, he hid it well. “Yes? How may I help you?” he asked, in tones that implied, How may I help you off the property?

Bushell displayed his badge. So did Samuel Stanley. So did the two local RAMs. So did Shikalimo. Kathleen Flannery took something official-looking from her handbag and held it up, too. For all Bushell knew, it entitled her to visit the washroom at her museum. When flashed along with so much highly intimidating and highly genuine tin, it passed muster.

“Where’s Kilbride?”Bushell growled, like a cinema ruffian.

The butler’s mouth worked. For close to fifteen seconds, nothing came out. At last, in strangled tones, he managed, “Mr. Kilbride is not here at present.”

“No reason he should be. I’m sure he’s a busy man,” Samuel Stanley said smoothly. He and Bushell had played nice guy, tough guy at scores of interrogations; they did it now almost without conscious thought.

“Can you tell us where his place of business is?”

“You don’t understand,” the butler said, his voice losing culture and hauteur at about the same speed. “I don’t mean he’s not at home. I mean he’s not in Doshoweh right now.”

“Where’d he go?” Bushell demanded, still sounding tough. “When’d he leave?”

“He’s in Pennsylvania,” the butler answered. “I don’t know anything more about it than that, honest I don’t. He packed up and took off day before yesterday. Nobody knew he was going to do it till he had Foyt drive him to the train station.” He gamely tried to recover his professional persona: “It has thrown the household into rather a muddle.” The persona crumbled again, for he expanded on that, saying,

“Everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket, as a matter of fact.”

“Whereabouts in Pennsylvania is he?” Bushell said, at the same time as Sylvanus Greeley was asking,

“When will he be back?”

“Don’t know,” the butler replied. He said no more; the answer was evidently intended to be comprehensive.

“Somebody tipped him,” Stanley muttered in disgust. The butler’s face made a fascinating study. Bushell wouldn’t have minded turning Gainsborough loose on him as he tried to figure out what his master might have done.

He agreed with his adjutant: someone had to have warned Kilbride to make himself scarce. And if that was so, Kathleen Flannery really had uncovered a villain - unless this was all an elaborate feint to throw him off the scent. He didn’t find that likely: plans so elaborate had a way of breaking down. Which meant

- probably meant - Kathleen was trustworthy.

It also meant they needed to run Joseph Kilbride to earth as fast as they could. “Give me your master’s business address and telephone number,” he told the butler. “Maybe they’ll know there why he’s left town and just where the devil he’s gone.”

The butler plucked a card from a silver box on a table close by the door. “Here is the information you require, sir.”

Bushell put on his spectacles to read the engraved typography on the business card. JOSEPH J. KILBRIDE, PURVEYOR OF FINE FOODS AND SPIRITS, the card declared, and gave the telephone number and an address on Gawehga Road. “Where’s Gawehga Road?” he asked.

“Not far from here,” Greeley, Lucas, and Shikalimo answered in the same breath. Shikalimo added,

“Gawehga, in case you’re interested, means snowshoe.” He gave Bushell a mischievous look.

“Actually, it means snowshoe even if you’re not interested.”

Bushell turned back to the butler. “Before we go haring off to this grocer’s shop or whatever it is” - he watched the fellow’s nostrils flare in what might have been anger or might have been half a guffaw “would anybody else around this shack know where Kilbride’s gone? Is there a Mrs. Kilbride, for instance?”

“Sir, if I am not acquainted with Mr. Kilbride’s destination, no one associated with this establishment is, of that I assure you.” The butler had his fancy diction back in place. “And I am not. Mr. Kilbride, furthermore, is a widower. None of his occasional companions is likely to be informed of his comings and goings.”

“Hangs about with tarts, does he?” Bushell waited for the butler’s stilled snort of laughter to prove the guess good, then grinned at Shikalimo. “See if you can run some of them down when you get the chance. Never can tell what a dirty old man might say in between the sheets.”

“Sir!” The butler blushed bright red. But after he glanced back over his shoulder to make sure no one down the hall could hear him, he leaned forward and said, “Not a chance, pal. The boss talks like every word costs him a shilling - and he’s tight with his shillings, he is.” He straightened up and became once more the image of decorum.

That sounded like the truth to Bushell. It also made Kilbride sound like a Son of Liberty, or at least like someone who could be a Son without letting on. If he was a man of that sort, they wouldn’t find out where he’d gone from anyone with whom he worked. They had to try, though. “Let’s go,” Bushell said. He wondered if the butler would slam the door in relief at having them gone, and kept an ear peeled as they walked back toward Shikalimo’s steamer. Rather to his disappointment, he didn’t hear any bang. Kilbride’s Fine Food and Drink, declared the sign above the shop off Gawehga Road. Across the street was open ground, a park or possibly just a meadow. Several dozen people were gathered there, some in clothing that wouldn’t have been out of place anywhere in the Empire, some in Iroquois-style skins and embroidered cloth of like cut, some mixing the two. One of them thrust a torch into a brazier. Whatever was in there burned smokily, a grey-white plume rising toward the sky. The - congregation was the word that sprang to Bushell’s mind - chanted something in the Iroquois language and began a slow, dignified line dance.

“A prayer of thanksgiving to Hawenneyu - the Great Spirit, one would say in English,” Shikalimo said.

“The smoke from the tobacco wafts the prayer up to the heavens. Incense served a similar function in Christian worship at one time, I believe.”

Bushell didn’t know enough about such things to say whether he was right or wrong. He asked, “How many of your people have kept the old ways, and how many gone over to Christianity?”

“We’re about evenly divided,” the Iroquois answered. “A couple of generations ago, there was fear the worship of Hawenneyu might fade away, leaving us without an important piece of our past. Even in this twentieth century, we have long memories, as you British do. But that seems not to have happened; the balance has remained more or less constant for as long as I’ve been alive.” He pointed toward the sign above Kilbride’s establishment. “Just as well, too, I’d say, for it keeps us from seeing more things like that.”

For a moment, Bushell didn’t follow him. Then he realized the sign was only in English, without an Iroquois equivalent. Most businesses in Doshoweh were more likely to be missing English than the language of the Six Nations. Kilbride’s choice said something about the way he thought. When you coupled that with his taste in art and the music of his door chime. . . . Bushell’s pulse quickened. Joseph Kilbride did seem to have all the mental furniture of a Son of Liberty, and he was also a capable, prosperous man. If he was a Son, he ought to be one of high stature. And a Son of high Stature might know quite a lot about The Two Georges. The bell above the door pealed when Bushell and his companions went into Kilbride’s establishment. He saw at once that the fine in the title of the shop was not misplaced. Kilbride sold fancy hams from Virginia and the Germanies, New Scotland smoked salmon, tinned lobster meat, fancy capers, salted olives from the Ottoman protectorates, and a variety of fresh spices whose aromas made Bushell’s nose twitch appreciatively. One wall held fine wines from France and Upper California, the Germanies and the Italian states, along with Russian potato spirits, Holland gin, and whiskey from Scotland and the provinces of Franklin and Tennessee. For good measure, humidors of expensive Havanas stood nearby. Bushell took a look at some of the prices. An eyebrow rose. Everything in the place was expensive. Part of that was quality. Part of it looked to be profit.

“May I help you?” a clerk called from behind a counter.

“Is Mr. Kilbride in?” Bushell asked.

“I’m sorry, sir, no,” the clerk answered, shaking his head. “What’s this in aid of, if I may ask?” As those of Kilbride’s butler had, his eyes grew wide when Bushell and the other officers displayed their badges. He licked his lips. “Uh, let me refer you to Mr. Whitby. He is our senior manager. Excuse me.” He headed for the back of the store at an undignified lope.

When he returned, he brought with him a stout, bald, sour-faced gentleman in a suit of grey worsted whose lines tried without much success to disguise his bulk. The man thrust out a large pink hand. “I’m Anson Whitby.” His voice was a rumbling bass. “Kilbride’s is not accustomed to having constabulary officers inquiring after its proprietor.”

“I’m not a constabulary officer,” Bushell said with a bright smile. “I’m a RAM.”

Whitby proved his face could express something other than glowering disapproval: he looked astonished. “Good heavens!” he said. “What on earth can Kilbride’s have done to deserve this?”

“Not Kilbride’s - Kilbride,” Bushell said, cheery still - it seemed to disconcert Anson Whitby. “Where exactly is Mr. Kilbride, if he’s not at home and he’s not here?”

“He telephoned me morning before last, saying he was called away to Pennsylvania on urgent business,”

Whitby answered. “I asked him where in Pennsylvania and how long he would be gone, and he told me to mind my damned business. Beg your pardon, ma’am,” he added to Kathleen Flannery, “but that’s what he said.”

“Is that how he usually talks?” Bushell asked.

“Too right it is,” Whitby said. “And if he could keep his left hand from knowing what his right hand was up to, he’d do that, too.” He cocked his head to one side, so that he took on the aspect of a bulldog deciding whether to bite. “What do you think he’s done, anyhow?”

“I think he’s done all sorts of interesting and unpleasant things,” Bushell answered, not caring to give details. “I think he’ll pay for them with a good many years in gaol once we run him to earth, too.”

Anson Whitby stared at him. So did the clerk, in slack-jawed, round-eyed astonishment. From their reactions, he guessed neither of them was party to Kilbride’s extracurricular activities, though Whitby, at least, had the look of a man who could run a bluff.

The door chime rang. Bushell half turned to see who was coming in. To his surprise, the customer was an Iroquois, an elderly man in the dark suit, waistcoat, and homburg of a prosperous businessman anywhere in the British Empire. By the way he nodded to Anson Whitby, he was a regular here. That surprised Bushell, who hadn’t expected Kilbride’s shop to cater to anyone but whites. The Iroquois made a beeline for the wall of liquors. He chose a bottle of Franklin whiskey and another of potent Russian spirits and carried them to the counter. The clerk hurried behind it to ring up the sale on the register.

“That will be twenty guineas,” he said. The Iroquois gentleman drew a beaded wallet from a trouser pocket. He handed the clerk a red twenty-pound note, then added a gold sovereign to make up the extra twenty shillings. The clerk put the bottles of spirits into a paper sack for him. As the customer turned to go, he caught sight of Shikalimo among the whites in the shop. His smile was sickly as he hurried out the door. He leaped into the steamer he’d parked in front of the Supermarine and sped away.

Shikalimo sighed. “Even with the taxes we slap on liquor, our people remain too fond of it. You British have been drinking spirits for centuries longer than we have, and they still do you harm. With us, they might as well be poison.”

They were poison for Bushell, too, but that didn’t stop him from drinking them. His body was telling him he hadn’t had enough to drink in a long time. His body, though, thought enough to drink meant drinking till he couldn’t hold up a glass any more. His mind knew better . . . sometimes. Samuel Stanley said, “You won’t have a lot of drunks here, not at ten guineas the bottle you won’t.”

“That’s the idea, yes,” Shikalimo said. He turned a hooded glance on Anson Whitby. “Of course, not all establishments have tariffs quite so high as these.”

“How many Iroquois do come in here?” Bushell asked Whitby.

“A goodly number, that’s as much as I can say,” Whitby answered. “Keeping track of our customers by race would be a gross invasion of their privacy.” He seemed to wrap himself in an invisible banner of rectitude.

“What does Joseph Kilbride think about the Iroquois?” Bushell asked.

“I’ve never heard him express an opinion,” Whitby said.

He was a tough customer. When Bushell put that question to the senior manager, he looked not at him but toward the young clerk. At Whitby’s steadfast denial, the clerk stared down at the countertop and fiddled with some jars of gumdrops on it. The tips of his ears turned pink.

“You, there!” Bushell called, and the clerk jumped. “Have you ever heard Mr. Kilbride express an opinion about the Iroquois?”

“Me?” the clerk squeaked. The tips of his ears got redder. He glanced nervously toward Whitby, who stared back with a gaze a basilisk might have envied. “Uh, no, not really. That is - “

Bushell strode over to him. “Are you afraid of that fat tun? Don’t be. The worst he can do is give you the sack, and a man who’s willing to work won’t lack a situation long. And if you tell us what you know, you’ll be helping us track down The Two Georges.”

He hadn’t mentioned the painting till then. The clerk’s eyes got big again. “Really?” he breathed, and stopped looking toward Anson Whitby. “I remember he said once that he liked having Indians come into the shop because he got their money and he got them drunk, too. I could be wrong, but I think the person he said it to was Mr. Whitby.”

“It was not,” Whitby said evenly. “As I told you, I never heard him express any such opinion - nor any complimentary one, either. He is, as I’ve noted, sparing of speech.”

Shikalimo said, “Mr. Whitby, if you are discovered to be tampering with the truth in this matter, I assure you that you shall regret it.” Had he made the threat in obvious anger, it would have been easier to shrug off. Instead, he stated it as if it were a simple law of nature, inexorable as night following day. Bushell would not have cared to have such a warning leveled at him.

“I regret nothing,” Whitby said. “The facts are as I state them. If you prefer a clerk’s word to mine, I can do nothing but conclude it better fits some theory you have already concocted.”

“Thank you both,” Bushell said to Whitby and the clerk, and headed for the door. Samuel Stanley followed at once, willing to back whatever play he made. Shikalimo began to expostulate, but found himself talking to Bushell’s back. He went after Bushell with obvious reluctance. So did the local RAMs and Kathleen Flannery.

Out on the sidewalk, Charles Lucas exclaimed, “That fast bastard, he’s lying through his teeth, Colonel. What are you doing letting him off like that?”

“Of course he’s lying,” Bushell said, which touched off a fresh round of protests. “So what?”

That startled the others into a moment’s silence. A grin suddenly spread over Samuel Stanley’s face.

“‘So what?’ is right,” he said. “Whitby’s not the chap we’re after, no matter what sort of villain he turns out to be in his own right.”

“You’ve got it,” Bushell agreed. “We want Kilbride. We’ve found out enough to know he leans toward the Sons of Liberty. All I want to do now is go to the train station, find out if he bought a ticket there, where in Pennsylvania he was going, and whether he got on the train. If he did, I’m going after him.”

Shikalimo nodded thoughtfully. “You focus on the essentials, Colonel. This is worth remembering.”

“I wouldn’t have known Kilbride was essential if Dr. Flannery hadn’t recognized his name.” Bushell turned to Kathleen. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she answered. “As I’ve been trying to tell you, Colonel, I really do want to get The Two Georges back.”

“Yes, you have said that,” Bushell agreed, which was not the same as admitting he completely believed her. To his relief, she did not seem to notice the distinction. That she’d spotted Kilbride’s name made him more inclined to trust her, but he could not escape the nagging fear that the pursuit on which he was embarking was intended to distract him from the true trail. A drowning man, though, grabbed for any spar he could reach.

Shikalimo was busy focusing on the essentials: “When we go to the station, we should be armed with a picture of the honorable Mr. Kilbride.” For a man so young, he had a nice command of irony. “I wonder if that butler could be persuaded to part with one without our having to go to the trouble of obtaining a search warrant. If he liked his master better, I should say no, but as things are - “ He let that hang, continuing in a slightly different vein: “I do sometimes find the Anglo-Saxon insistence on having the proper papers even in emergencies a curious bit of superstition.”

“It’s a better way to do things than the one the Russians use, where the Okhrana can knock on your door - knock down your door - with any excuse or none,” Bushell said. Shikalimo shrugged, but was too polite to take the argument any further.

They drove back to Joseph Kilbride’s mansion. “A picture?” the butler said. “I can do that. Just let me nip one out from where it won’t be noticed.” He disappeared. From inside the house came a woman’s voice (perhaps Kilbride’s latest lady friend, Bushell thought, or perhaps just the housekeeper), then his, then the woman’s again, louder. The butler returned, handed Bushell a photograph, and declared in stentorian tones, “As I told you before, you are not welcome here without the due legal formalities.” He tipped Bushell a wink while slamming the door in his face.

In deference to the charade, they went out to Shikalimo’s steamer before looking at the picture. “Lovely chap,” Bushell murmured as Joseph Kilbride stared pugnaciously up from the palm of his hand. Kilbride looked more like a retired prizefighter than an art collector. He had a large Celtic face and a large broken nose. His eyes were pale and hard and shrewd.

“If they sold him a ticket, they’ll remember him,” Samuel Stanley said.

“Then we’ll find out if they did,” Shikalimo said, and put the Supermarine in gear. Returning to the train station was almost like coming home. After you’d been on the road for a while, any place you saw twice seemed intimately familiar - and train stations were all pretty much alike to begin with. The men and women in the ticket cages exclaimed in excitement when Major Shikalimo, the RAMs, and Kathleen Flannery descended on them.

“Oh, him,” a woman with a grey streak in her midnight hair said when she saw Kilbride’s photograph.

“Yes, I sold him a ticket.” She laughed. “He tried to bargain over the price, like a man buying terrapins at the fish market.”

“Where was he going?” Bushell asked.

The ticket seller frowned. “Charleroi, that’s it,” she said after a moment. Seeing Bushell’s blank look, she added, “It’s south of Pittsburgh.”

“Mining town,” Shikalimo put in. “But then, around Pittsburgh they’re all mining towns.” He sighed. “The NAU needs the coal, needs the electricity, but that’s an ugly part of the world - as if someone took a lot of the ugliness from the rest of the Union and dropped it there.”

“Charleroi,” Samuel Stanley muttered, half to himself. “Charleroi. . . Why have I heard that name before?” He took a couple of steps back and forth, then suddenly straightened. “Some of the coal miners who were out picketing when Tricky Dick got shot came from Charleroi.” He got a faraway look in his eyes as he went back over the evidence he’d gathered what seemed an age before. “McGaffigan, O’Flynn - somebody else, too, I forget who.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” Bushell said. “Do you think things might be coming together after all?” He laughed. “Probably something in the rules against that, but we’ll find out.”

“You’re going on to Charleroi, then?” Kathleen Flannery asked.

“No, Dr. Flannery - we are.” He’d wanted to take her to Niagara Falls, by all accounts one of the most beautiful spots in the British Empire. The Pennsylvania coal mines did not strike him as an adequate substitute.

When Shikalimo dropped Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen Flannery at the train station the next afternoon, he said, “We often look over the border and think how lucky we are.” The Pennsylvania Railroad train that would pull out of Doshoweh, bound for Pittsburgh and points south, had no name. It was just a train, doing a job that had to be done but didn’t seem worth commemorating in any way. Bushell took that as a symptom of what the Iroquois was talking about. Nobody much wanted to go to western Pennsylvania. Sometimes, though, you had to, like it or not.

With one exception, service aboard the train reflected its determinedly anonymous status. The upholstery and springs of the seats had seen better days. The dining car was dingy, the beefsteak Bushell ordered for supper overcooked and fatty. The stewards slapped food and dishes around in a way he hadn’t seen since his last army mess hall. And yet, every so often, people would come up from the car in back of the diner with beatific smiles on their faces.

Bushell’s curiosity finally got the better of him. When still another obviously satisfied soul went past him, he reached out to bar the fellow’s path, asking, “What do they have back there, friend, the hashish?”

“You ain’t far wrong, buddy. That’s the Pennsy club car, that is,” the man answered in tones of reverence better suited to discussions of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The high-proof fumes he breathed into Bushell’s face added their accent to his words.

After the stewards went clattering off with the last of the china and silverware, Bushell said to Sam and Kathleen, “Well, shall we see if that really is a proper oasis?”

“Why not?” Kathleen said. “It can’t be worse than the rest of the train, and it might be better.”

“Couldn’t have put it neater myself,” Samuel Stanley said as he got up from the table.

“Well, well,” Bushell murmured when they went into the club car, and then again: “Well, well.” The car was cool and dim and seemed quiet, maybe because of that - it rattled along over the rails no different from any other. But none of that was why Bushell had exclaimed.

“Will you look at the display behind the bar?” Stanley said softly. “I’ve seen fancy taverns that don’t stock half as many kinds of hooch. You want anything at all, you can get it here.”

“Amen,” Bushell said. “And catch the mirror behind the bottles - it makes it look as if there are twice as many.” He laughed. “Overkill.”

Four men got up from the bar. Bushell and his companions slid onto three of the stools they’d vacated. He ordered Jameson over ice, Kathleen a gin and tonic, and Samuel Stanley a pint of Molson’s ale. The bartender drew it from the tap with practiced perfection, stopping the flow so the top of the head reached the edge of the glass without a drop spilling over.

After he went off to serve another thirsty soul, Stanley said, “I know why the club car’s so fancy even when the rest of the train’s down at the heels.” Bushell raised a questioning eyebrow. His adjutant explained: “If you were going into the Pennsylvania coal country, wouldn’t you want someplace where you could try and forget it?”

“Many a truth spoken in jest,” Bushell said. He raised his glass. “To finding Joseph Kilbride and some answers, in whichever order we come across them.” They all drank. He savored the smoky taste of the Irish whiskey in his mouth and its warmth in his belly.

When Kathleen Flannery’s drink was done, she excused herself for a moment. Bushell ordered a second round from the bartender. When the new drinks came, he said, “Here’s another toast for you and me, Sam: here’s hoping we didn’t leave Doshoweh too bloody soon.”

Stanley sighed and nodded. “We left a lot behind, didn’t we? I’d like to know more about that printer Shikalimo turned up, I’d like to have found the room where the Sons were hiding The Two Georges, I’d like to have done a whole lot of things. But we can’t be in two or four places at once, and we don’t have a lot of time. We have to follow the trail that looks hottest and remember we have other people looking in other places.”

“The trail that looks hottest,” Bushell repeated. “Here’s one more toast still: here’s hoping it doesn’t look hottest because somebody set it up to look that way.” Without waiting for Stanley to follow suit, he poured the shot of Jameson down his throat and signaled the bartender for another.

“You still aren’t sure about - “ Stanley suddenly clammed up.

Kathleen Flannery slid back onto her stool. “The two of you are pretty quiet,” she said. “You must have been talking about me.”

Samuel Stanley swigged at his Molson’s to give himself an excuse not to deal with that one. “Men always talk about women when they aren’t there,” Bushell answered lazily. “It gives us the chance to - “

“ - To bend your elbow, it looks like,” Kathleen said, pointing to the empty glass the bartender hadn’t taken away.

“To squeeze a word in without getting interrupted, I was going to say,” Bushell finished.

“Were you?” Kathleen picked up her fresh drink, sipped, and peered at him from over the rim of the glass.

“If I wasn’t, you’ll never prove it now,” he said.

“So I won’t. Point to you, Colonel Bushell.” Kathleen Flannery could have said that in tones of Alaskan ice, as she’d spoken when Bushell gave her no choice about coming along with him and Sam Stanley. She didn’t - quite. He took that as progress, all the while wondering whether she was playing the same game as he or a different one altogether.

That was the question in more ways than one, especially when they were almost flirting like this. Is she a suspect? had nearly vanished from his mind, but it was still there. But he also wondered what else lay behind those green eyes. Does she feel anything for me? He couldn’t just ask. That would break the rules of the game. He’d have to find out.

He had that drink, and then another one, and then another. Samuel Stanley nursed his second ale. Bushell wondered if Sam was going to kick him in the ankle to try to get him to slow down. His adjutant had a good deal of mother hen in him. Stanley contented himself with looking worried. Since he looked worried a lot of the time, only Bushell noticed.

Kathleen Flannery finished three drinks. She was starting a fourth when the train pulled into Pittsburgh. Streetlamps and tongues of flame from factory chimneys made the sooty air outside seem thick, almost curdled. “I’ve been through here in the daytime,” Kathleen said. “It’s worse then; you can see the smoke curling and twisting through the valleys that lead down to the rivers.” She spoke slowly and carefully, pausing every couple of words to make sure they’d come out the way she wanted them.

“New Liverpool’s air isn’t all it should be,” Bushell said, “but it’s nothing like this.” His speech did not show that he had considerably more liquor on board than Kathleen. Some of the learned quacks said holding your whiskey well was a sign you were too fond of it. For one thing, Bushell already knew how fond of whiskey he was. For another, he wasn’t in the habit of listening to quacks no matter how learned they were.

The conductor came through the club car. “Liberty Street station!” he called. “All out for Pittsburgh!”

There was a general exodus. No matter how unpleasant a place the grimy industrial city was, a lot of capital resided here, and gold drew men as a lodestone draws iron.

“Liberty Street?” Bushell raised his glass once more. “Down with liberty - and its sons.” He and Stanley drank to that at once. Kathleen Flannery followed suit, a little more slowly. Did that mean she didn’t care for the toast, or just that she’d had enough to drink? Bushell rubbed at his mustache. How far to rely on her? If he guessed wrong on that - He drained his Jameson.

At some time in the past - whether ten years before or only six months, Bushell couldn’t tell - the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Pittsburgh had been painted white. Now it was a streaky, dingy grey, uglier than it would have been had it not tried defying the soft-coal smoke that made the town what it was.

The train lay over in Pittsburgh for most of an hour, loading and unloading passengers. Some of the people who came into the club car had the sleek and prosperous look of businessmen. More, though, were miners and factory hands heading back to their home towns after coming into the city for whatever they couldn’t get locally.

A lot of the men in overalls and boots and cloth caps and collarless shirts spoke with a brogue. Bushell glanced over to Kathleen. Her English was almost as elegant as Shikalimo’s. He wondered what her father sounded like.

From Pittsburgh to Charleroi was a journey of less than half an hour, and would have taken only half that time had the train not made several stops at other industrial and mining towns along the way. The laborers who packed the club car drank with a grim intensity that made even Bushell raise an eyebrow. No men who were happy with their lot would have needed so much anesthesia before they got home. Some of the drinkers had their hair cropped short in the Roundhead look that set his teeth on edge. Others rolled up shirtsleeves to show off eagles tattooed on forearms or biceps. He wondered how many of them were Sons of Liberty and how many just venting frustration at life in the NAU. They were fools if they thought breaking away from England would get them out of the mines and foundries. An independent North America would need coal and steel no less than the NAU did. He shrugged and knocked back the last of his Jameson. Some people thought change automatically led to improvement. Having been through a great many changes in his own life - and ended up half drunk on a nameless train rattling south toward a grimy coal town - he wondered about that.

“Charleroi!” the conductor called. “All out for Charleroi!” He pushed his way through the club car to make the announcement in the next one back.

The train squealed to a stop. The Charleroi station hardly rated the name. It boasted a ticket booth, an awning over the tracks to keep rain off arriving and departing passengers, and not much more. Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen Flannery got their bags and then stood under the awning for a moment, wondering where to go next. They drew guarded looks from the miners and the women and children who came to meet them: not only were they strangers, but their clothes proclaimed them to be of a different class from the locals.

Bushell walked over to the ticket booth. “If I want a good hotel, where do I go?”

The ticket seller shifted a pipe to the corner of his mouth and answered, “Somewheres else.” When that failed to shift Bushell, he sighed and pointed south. “Down there just a couple buildings, that’s the Ribblesdale House. Best we got. It ain’t much, and that’s a fact.”

Despite its fancy name, the Ribblesdale House proved to be a down-at-the-heels building with tired wallpaper and carpeting grey with ground-in grime. “Yes, sir, we have plenty of rooms,” the desk clerk said. The unspoken question in his eyes was, Why the devil were you stupid enough to come to Charleroi?

“Do you have a Joseph Kilbride registered here?” Bushell asked.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t give out that information,” the clerk answered. Bushell laid his badge on the counter. The clerk’s eyes went large and round. “Uh, let me check.” He flipped through the registration book. “No, no one by that name here. I didn’t think so.”

“Well, where is he, then?” Samuel Stanley burst out. He rounded on the clerk. “Does this godforsaken hole in the ground have any other hotels?”

The young man’s skin was fair enough to let Bushell see his flush. “There’s the Hastings Arms,” he said, with the clear implication that anyone who’d register at the Hastings Arms was a savage irremediably beyond the pale of civilization.

“We’ll check it in the morning,” Bushell decided. “He may be staying with friends, too. If he has any friends in this town, he deserves to stay with them, and they deserve to have him.”

“Here are your keys, sirs, ma’am,” the clerk said. “I’ve given you three adjoining rooms right upstairs on the first floor: 135, 137, and 139.”

“Thank you, Mr. - “ Bushell peered toward the name badge the fellow wore on his right lapel. “Mr. Devlin. Those will do nicely.”

The Ribblesdale House had an attached dining room. It did not come up to Bushell’s standards. The eggs were greasy, the bacon overcooked, and the pot of English Breakfast he ordered had been steeped so long, it was bitter. The toast came to the table cold, but that was common practice at hotels that tried to ape those of England, so he didn’t know whether to blame it on mere fecklessness or social climbing. He and his companions stolidly worked their way through breakfast, imperfectly satisfactory though it was. He was lighting his first cigar of the morning to get the bitter taste of the tea out of his mouth when a couple of young men in suits and waistcoats paused at the entrance to the dining room. At first he pegged them for businessmen, but their lapels were too wide and too sharp, their trousers too baggy, to let them fit into most reputable businesses. He sucked in more aromatic cigar smoke. Charleroi might not have any reputable businesses.

The pair spotted him, Stanley, and Kathleen - not hard, since they were the only people in the dining room. Side by side, the newcomers walked over to stand close by the table where Bushell and his companions sat. Except to blow cigar smoke in their direction, he ignored them. Samuel Stanley and Kathleen followed his lead, save that they did not have cigars.

One of the two young men had a receding hairline. The other wore a close-trimmed, gingery beard. The balding one whipped out a notebook and fountain pen. In portentous tones, the other asked, “You’re the RAMs who came into Charleroi last night?” The chap with the pen and notebook started scribbling before Bushell spoke a word.

“If you already know the answers, why ask the questions?” Bushell said mildly. Reporters, he thought, in lieu of a stronger pejorative. “Let’s try it the other way: who are you?”

“Michael Shaughnessy,” said the one with the notebook, at the same time as the bearded one was saying, “Jerry Doyle.” Bushell expected them to announce the name of the Charleroi - or possibly Pittsburgh - paper that employed them. Instead, they chorused, “We’re with Common Sense.”

“Are you?” Bushell said, still not sounding very interested. “If you had any, you wouldn’t be.” While the two reporters were adding that up and discovering that it came out to something less than a ringing endorsement, he let his eyes stray casually to Kathleen Flannery.

She was looking straight at him, perhaps expecting that questioning gaze. “I didn’t call them,” she declared. “I’ve never set eyes on them before, I’ve never heard of them, and I didn’t know they were going to be here.”

“Did I say you did?” Bushell answered. But her quick, vehement denial rekindled the doubts that had died to smoldering embers. The edge of a headache he had from last night’s whiskey got worse. He didn’t let any of that show, but nodded affably enough to Doyle and Shaughnessy. “I might have known Mr. Kennedy would send out a vulture, but I didn’t think he’d put a bald eagle on the train with him.”

Michael Shaughnessy reddened as easily as a woman might have. “Now see here, you tyrant’s slave - “

Doyle set a hand on his companion’s arm. “He’s trying to get your goat, Mike, and by the sound of you he has it.” Like Shaughnessy, he had a vanishing trace of a brogue, almost swallowed in a flat New England accent. Turning to Bushell, he said, “We’ll come to keep an eye on the monstrous waste of public money you RAMs are making of the search for that ugly daub, The Two Georges.”

“Isn’t it nice, Sam?” Bushell steepled his fingers. “Common Sense sends the art critics to look after us.”

Samuel Stanley was too angry to enjoy irony. “How the devil did that blasted rag know to send them here? We just got here ourselves.” His not looking at Kathleen was as pointed as the glance Bushell had sent her. Then he glowered up at the reporters. “Who tipped you off?”

“You don’t think we’d tell you?” Jerry Doyle raised an eyebrow in well-crafted dismay. “The press is still free, not the muzzled lapdog of the Crown you’d make it if you had your way.”

“Be careful who you’re talking to,” Shaughnessy warned, mock alarm in his voice. “For if the one here is the famous Colonel Bushell who’s had his pictures in all the papers, the other must be his just as famous aide, Captain Stanley - Sam the spade.” He rocked back on his heels in amusement to see how the RAMs would take that.

Stanley bit his lip. Bushell wondered how long it had been since someone sneered at him on account of his race. Such things happened more often than RAMs getting shot at in the course of their duties, but they weren’t common: Negroes of a given social class were usually treated much like their white counterparts. Why not? Bushell thought. A man couldn’t help his race, but hard work would lift him out of the class into which he’d been born.

“Vulgarians,” Kathleen muttered. It wasn’t meant to be overheard. That made Bushell feel better about catching it. If Kathleen didn’t think well of men who would make a racialist joke, maybe she hadn’t been the one who called Common Sense.

On the other hand, maybe she just hadn’t known whom the periodical would despatch to Charleroi. Bushell looked at the reporters as if he’d bitten into an apple and found them in there. “Do you know a fellow called Joseph Kilbride?” he asked.

He expected them to shake their heads. That was what Shaughnessy did. Jerry Doyle said, “The art collector? What’s he got to do with anything? You think he has The Two Georges hanging in his parlor?” He laughed loud and long at his own wit.

“Stranger things have happened.” Bushell got up from the table. He tossed down banknotes to cover the cost of breakfast. Kathleen and Sam rose, too. Stanley stared at the two men from Common Sense for a couple of seconds. He was taller than either of them, and wider through the shoulders and narrower in the hips. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t move toward them. They drew back a pace anyhow. He strode through the space they had vacated. You got the idea he would have gone through there whether they’d stepped back or not.

“Constabulary station should only be a couple of blocks that way,” Bushell said, pointing toward the Monongehela as he and his companions left the hotel.

“We’ll do better there than we have here, that’s certain,” Sam Stanley said, and set off for the station with the same determined steps he’d shown in the hotel dining room.

Bushell and Kathleen Flannery followed him. Just breathing made Bushell feel as if he’d smoked a dozen cigars in a room without ventilation. The air had a smoky, sulfurous tang to it. Buildings only a few blocks away seemed hazy, indistinct, yet the hot sun beat down out of a clear sky. Bushell thought longingly of the cool, crisp, pine-scented air of the Queen Charlotte Islands. He hadn’t imagined he would look with longing on anything that had to do with the Queen Charlotte Islands. His first glimpse of Charleroi by daylight left him unimpressed. The Ribblesdale House was in the middle of the downtown business district, but most of the businesses, by the look of them, would have quickly failed in New Liverpool. The mannequins in the windows of clothiers’ wore garments either poorly made or overpriced or both. He’d never seen such an expanse of unpainted pine and garish upholstery as the furniture shops displayed. The profusion of secondhand shops argued that not enough people had the wherewithal to buy new goods.

Taverns, pubs, saloons, bars... Charleroi had far more than its share of those. Unlike the other establishments, they were most of them clean and freshly painted. They could afford such luxuries. If you didn’t drink in Charleroi, what else did you have to do with your time?

Kathleen pointed ahead. “Is that the station? The building with the flag in front of it?”

Bushell’s cough had nothing to do with the noxious air he was breathing. “Wrong flag, I’m afraid.” In New Liverpool, Independence Party headquarters lay out in the distant suburbs. In Charleroi, the banner with the eagle and stripes flew in front of a building as impressive as any the downtown boasted. Charleroi being what it was, that didn’t say much, but what it did say, Bushell didn’t like. People inside the Independence Party building were busy. Bushell watched them bustling around as he walked by. Sam Stanley also paid thoughtful attention to the party headquarters. “If we’re lucky,” he said, “we’ll spot Kilbride in there, and make life easier for ourselves.”

They weren’t lucky.

The constabulary station lay a few doors past the building that housed the Independence Party. Comparing them, Bushell suspected the party had more money than the constables did. If anybody had painted the station since the reign of Edward IX, he would have been astonished.

“Help you?” the big, burly sergeant behind the front desk asked in a gravelly voice when Bushell and his companions walked in. The station was even less prepossessing on the inside than its exterior suggested. It stank of sweat and smoke and puke and stale tea leaves. Kathleen looked appalled; Bushell and Stanley had seen the like before. Bushell showed his badge. The constabulary sergeant nodded. “Come on, I’ll take you back to the chief.”

The sergeant’s boss looked like him, but with an extra ten years and a greying beard tacked on. Like his underling, Chief John Lassiter looked as if he’d be more at home down in a mine than keeping order aboveground. He didn’t seem sure of what Kathleen Flannery was doing with the two RAMs, but he didn’t ask any questions about it, either. Since Bushell wasn’t so sure what Kathleen was doing there himself, that was just as well.

He came straight to the point: “Chief, we think a fellow named Joseph Kilbride came down here from Doshoweh the other day. He’s not at the Ribblesdale. If he’s not at the - what was the name of the place? - the Hasting Arms, that’s it, where is he likely to be?”

“You talk about hotels, those two are about it,” Lassiter said. “We got some rooming houses, too, or he could be staying with somebody here, you know. Kilbride, eh?” He chewed on the end of the pencil he used to jot down the name. “That’s liable to be tough. These micks, they stick together like nobody’s business.”

Kathleen Flannery sucked in a long, angry breath. Bushell stepped on her toe. Chief Lassiter’s desk didn’t let him see that. Kathleen glared but subsided.

Lassiter sighed. “Well, we’ll do what we can for you, Colonel.” He glanced over his shoulder at the print of The Two Georges behind his desk. “We got to get that painting back. You have a description of this Kilbride item?”

“Can’t give you height or weight, I’m afraid, but here’s our boy.” Bushell passed Lassiter the photograph of Joseph Kilbride that the butler had given him.

“May I keep this?” the chief asked.

“Long enough to duplicate it, no more,” Bushell said. “If we don’t catch up with him here, we’re liable to need it again.”

Lassiter gnawed on the end of the pencil once more. “Mm, that’s fair. Anything else you can tell me about him?” He glanced down at the picture. “Wouldn’t want to meet him in an alley after dark, not with a phiz like that.”

“He’s supposed to be a tightwad, too, people in Doshoweh say,” Samuel Stanley put in.

“All right, so we won’t catch him in a saloon buying a round for the house,” Lassiter said. In spite of the sarcasm, he wrote that down. “Never can tell what’ll turn up useful, though.” He gave the pencil another couple of gentle nibbles, then set it down. “Anything else I can do for you folks today?”

Bushell pulled out some notes. “We need addresses - records too, if they have any - for three miners: Percy McGaffigan, Michael O’Flynn, and Anthony Rothrock.”

“There’s four or five Michael O’Flynns in this town I can think of off the top of my head,” Lassiter said.

“Any way to narrow it down?”

“We want the one who went to New Liverpool to picket at the governor’s mansion the night The Two Georges got stolen.”

Lassiter thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Yeah, of course you do. I’m stupid this morning - sue me. I can dig that out. You’re at the Ribblesdale, I think you said? Somebody will ring you tonight. We got a lot of McGaffigans, too, but not a lot of Percys, I bet. The other one was Rothrock?

Come on in the back room with me. We’ll see what we find.”

The back room was a miniature and rather disorganized version of the records room at the New Liverpool RAM station. Chief Lassiter seemed to know where the bodies were buried, though. He shoved aside two boxes of files to get at the bottom drawer of a cabinet.

“McGaffigan, Fred; McGaffigan, Liam, McGaffigan, Percy - here we go.” He pulled out the file folder.

“Last address we have for him is 39 Lantern Way.” The curl of his lip said what he thought of that address. He flipped through the reports in the file. “Drunk and disorderly five years ago, public drunkenness year before that, drunk and disorderly last year - paid a twenty-quid fine for that one. Sounds like a miner, in other words.”

Bushell scribbled the address into a notebook. “What about Rothrock?”

“Name rings a bell,” Lassiter said. “Let’s have us a look.” The folder in question was in one of the boxes he’d move to get to McGaffigan’s. “Here we go. Anthony Aurelius Rothrock, last address 2 Coker Drive.” From his face, that was a worse place to live than Lantern Way. “Drunk and disorderly; wife beating, but his old woman wouldn’t press the charge; D and D again ... ah, here’s why I remember him. Assault with intent to maim: he went after a fellow with a broken bottle in a tavern brawl a couple of years ago. Carved him up proper, too.”

“Why isn’t he in gaol, then?” Bushell and Stanley asked in the same breath.

“A pack of his mates were in the place with him, and they all swore up and down it was self-defense.”

By the way Lassiter’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline, he was less than convinced. He shrugged a constable’s shrug, as if to say, What can you do?

“Have you got a town plan, so we can find these places?” Bushell asked.

“Come back to my office with me, and I’ll get you one,” the local chief said. While rummaging through his desk, he looked up toward Kathleen Flannery for a moment. “These places you’re going, they might not be the sort where you’d want to take a lady.”

Bushell didn’t answer. He’d figured that out for himself. On the other hand, he didn’t want to leave Kathleen by herself, either - no telling what sort of mischief she might get into. It was a poser. Kathleen solved it for him, saying indignantly, “If these gentlemen” - she freighted the word with meaning it was not altogether intended to bear - “can make their visits, I think I shall be able to accompany them.”

Chief Lassiter’s eyebrows rose again, this time in a slightly different way. “However you like, then,” he said, and ran one hand over the other in a gesture of which Pontius Pilate would have approved. “Ah, here we are,” he added with a grunt of triumph, and presented Bushell a much-folded map.

“Can you find out whether McGaffigan and Rothrock are on day shift or nights?” Bushell said. Lassiter nodded. “No point going to see ‘em if you won’t find ‘em home, is there?” He plucked at his beard. “Let me call the colliery for you.” He picked up the telephone, dialed a number without having to look it up. “Stephen? John here, down at the station. Need a bit of information from you - “ He asked a couple of questions, scribbled, asked again, scribbled some more, said, “Thanks,” and hung up. Turning to Bushell, he said. “They’re both on days. Day shift lets off at five. If you get there at half past or a bit later, you’ll catch them at home, probably before they’ve started supper. You’d not want to get them then, I shouldn’t think.”

“Too right,” Bushell said. “They don’t have to say a thing to us. If we get them angry, they won’t want to talk.”

“Don’t know that they will anyhow,” Lassiter said, “but that’s your lookout. I’ll start beating the bushes about Kilbride, and I’ll track down which O’Flynn was gone from the mine when The Two Georges got nicked. Stephen should know, or be able to find out. I’ll ring you when I have what you need.”

“Why don’t you give us the address of the Hastings Arms?” Samuel Stanley said. “If it’s not too far, we can check it ourselves - give us something useful to do the rest of this morning.”

“That makes sense,” Lassiter agreed. “The Hastings is at 137 Royal Street - that’s two streets north of here, down close to the river.”

By the time they left the constabulary station, summer heat and stickiness were out in full force. They made Bushell’s shirt cling greasily to his torso; he took off his hat and fanned his head with it. The smoke and the harsh, sulfurous tang of the air left his lungs stinging from every breath. At the end of the ten-minute walk, he felt more worn than he had during the hike to Buckley Bay. In front of the Hastings Arms, he paused a moment to look out at the Monongahela. The river was wide and swift and should have been beautiful, but no river full of coal barges and stained with the effluents of factories uncounted could look anything but grim.

Sam Stanley’s gaze followed his. “That’s the water that comes out of the taps at the hotel,” he said, sounding unhappy at the notion.

Bushell considered. “Best argument I’ve heard yet for drinking whiskey.”

“Let’s go inside,” Kathleen said, dabbing at her forehead with a linen handkerchief. “Maybe they’ll have ceiling fans working.”

“And you’re from Victoria,” Stanley said. “In New Liverpool, they don’t have this kind of muggy heat. You can stick a fork in me, because I’m baked.”

No ceiling fans spun inside the lobby of the Hastings Arms. The place was almost as shabby as the supercilious clerk back at the Ribblesdale had said it would be. The potted plant that had been set up as an ornament was now brown and dead, but nobody had bothered taking it away. To Bushell’s mind, two even more unlovely growths had sprouted in the lobby: Michael Shaughnessy and Jerry Doyle. The reporters from Common Sense moved to cut Bushell off as he walked toward the front desk.

“What took you so long to get here, Colonel?” Shaughnessy asked, as Doyle readied pad and pen to record Bushell’s reply for posterity. “We’ve been waiting half an hour, maybe longer.”

“So very sorry to inconvenience you,” Bushell replied. “Had I but known you were here, I would have dropped everything else I was doing and rushed right over. I’m sure you understand that.”

Jerry Doyle smiled for a moment. Shaughnessy turned an angry red. Bushell strode past both of them. He hoped they hadn’t worked on the desk clerk.

Shaughnessy said, “Dr. Flannery, what are you doing coursing with the hunting dogs of the filthy, corrupt Crown?”

Bushell stiffened. So they knew who she was, did they? They might have found out from the register at the Ribblesdale, or ... “Help you, sir?” the desk clerk asked, distracting him. He showed the fellow his badge. “Do you have a Joseph Kilbride registered here?” he asked; since he’d left Kilbride’s photograph with Chief Lassiter, he had to use a verbal description. Behind him, Kathleen Flannery was answering Shaughnessy’s question. Since he was talking himself, he couldn’t hear what she said.

“These guys here were asking me the same thing.” The clerk pointed to Doyle and Shaughnessy. “I told them no, and I got to tell you the same thing.” The register was on a plate that spun. The clerk spun it so it was right side up for Bushell. “You can see for yourself.”

The pages open for Bushell’s inspection showed people who’d registered at the Hastings Arms for the past ten days: a good sign the place wasn’t doing much business. A look at the lobby would have sufficed to tell Bushell that, though. The register showed no sign of tampering, but he looked at some earlier and later leaves all the same. As Chief Lassiter had said, you never could tell. But he found nothing out of the ordinary elsewhere in the register, either.

“All right, the man’s not staying here,” he said. “Have you seen him in town?”

“Afraid I haven’t, sir,” the desk clerk replied, spinning the hotel register so it faced back toward him once more. “If I had, I expect I’d know it, too. You make him sound like a right bruiser, and that’s a fact.”

“He is, I think,” Bushell said. “If you do see him, ring me at the Ribblesdale straightaway.” The clerk touched a knuckle to his forehead, just below the hairline, in token of obedience. From the look in his eyes, though, Bushell figured the chance he would telephone was at best one in three. When you factored that in with a one-in-a-million chance of the man’s actually spotting Kilbride, the odds of hearing from him again weren’t what you’d call good.

Bushell turned away. The Jameson headache with which he’d got up still throbbed at his temples. The best cure he knew was more of the same, especially since frustration was making his head hurt more than it would have otherwise. Charleroi didn’t have much going for it; even here downtown, it was a grimy, depressing place. But one thing it did have was plenty of watering holes. A voice inside his head jeered at him: Go ahead, drink your luncheon, it said. Maybe tomorrow you’ll drink your breakfast, too. Maybe the day after that you’ll drink your breakfast and forget you’ve done it.

Shut up, he told the voice fiercely. I’ve only done that once. Discovering he’d had half a day carved out of his memory had frightened him enough that he’d stayed teetotal for - longer than usual when he tried laying off, anyhow.

Kathleen Flannery was saying, “Why don’t you go away and quit pestering us and let us do our job?”

That pleased Bushell enough to take his mind off whiskey for a while.

“It’s just our own jobs we’re doing,” Michael Shaughnessy answered, striking a dramatic pose.

“Keeping the people informed, you might say - more than the tame papers in every town do, that I tell you. And you, you’re no police dog. Talk of your job, why aren’t you back at your precious art museum?”

“Because something precious is missing,” she said in the controlled snarl Bushell had more often heard aimed at him. “If you haven’t the eyes to see that, God and the saints help you.”

“But Dr. Flannery, all we’re trying to do is make North America free from the Crown that - “

Shaughnessy’s voice rose shrilly.

Kathleen cut through his tumbled words: “Go away.” She turned her back to make it plain she was taking no further notice of the man from Common Sense.

He kept on talking. Bushell stepped between him and Kathleen. He was older, smaller, and lighter than Shaughnessy. “Don’t you think it would be polite to do as the lady asked you?” he asked quietly. Shaughnessy turned to Jerry Doyle. “Do you hear him threatening me?” he said in a loud voice.

“I asked you to be polite, sir,” Bushell said. “If you find that a threat - well, you’re working for the right publication.”

“Come on, Mike,” Doyle said. “If we go on with it, they’ll find some way to make trouble for us.”

Reluctantly, his colleague accompanied him toward the street door of the Hastings Arms. As they went out, Doyle fired a Parthian shot at the RAMs: “You’ve not seen the last of us, I’ll have you know.”

“Thus unlamenting let me die,” Bushell said, slightly changing Pope’s “Ode on Solitude” to good effect. By then, though, the door had closed, so the reporters didn’t hear him.

“Thank you,” Kathleen said, turning toward Bushell. “I don’t like being badgered - by anyone.”

“Really?” His mouth dropped open in surprise. “I hadn’t noticed.” Her eyes sparked dangerously for a moment. Then she let out a strangled snort that was evidently intended as a laugh: as if she didn’t want to admit, even to herself, that he’d amused her.

“Where now, Chief?” Samuel Stanley asked.

Bushell didn’t answer till after he led his companions out onto the sidewalk: no telling what affiliations the desk clerk had. Doyle and Shaughnessy were already a long block away, and by all appearances arguing with each other. He approved.

“Where now?” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that.” It was a thumping lie, but his mouth was smarter than his brain, because he came up with a good answer: “Aside from art, what does Kilbride do? He sells food and spirits. A business trip would give him a coronium-tight alibi for coming here. If we check some of the taverns around here, we might find someone who’s seen him.”

“That’s a fine notion,” Kathleen said, nodding vigorously.

Sam Stanley looked at Bushell out of the corner of his eye. Any time Bushell proposed going into a tavern, he turned suspicious. Since the idea did make sense, though, he too nodded after a moment.

“Maybe one of them will have a decent luncheon spread set out, too,” he said. “I’m getting on toward feeling peckish. You can’t be sure with things like that - they might not, too, what with so many of their customers down underground right now. Only one way to find out.”

They started working their way west along Royal Street, away from the Monongehela. The impressively named avenue had as rich a supply of drinking establishments as any of the other streets Bushell had seen in downtown Charleroi. They didn’t lack for customers, either, despite the early hour. None of the bartenders and proprietors with whom Bushell spoke admitted to having heard of Joseph Kilbride. One of them said, “Wish I had, pal. If he can keep himself in business up in the Six Nations, what with the taxes they charge there, I bet he’s a man I could deal with.”

A couple of saloons had Independence Party flags prominently displayed in back of the bar along with sparkling rows of liquor bottles. Since that wasn’t illegal - and since he hoped his barroom brawling days were behind him - Bushell didn’t make an issue of it. He garnered quite enough suspicious looks just by walking into those places in a suit and tie and wearing a fedora rather than a shapeless cloth cap.

“Here we go!” Samuel Stanley said when they found an establishment that catered to a somewhat higher class of customer: it was across the street from the Charleroi Central Bank, and full of earnest young men in somber business clothes and young women in flowery dresses and hairstyles that had been all the rage in New York and New Liverpool the year before. As many of them were eating as drinking. “Something better than tinned steak-and-kidney pie, with luck.”

“Business first,” Bushell said, but the man behind the counter (who also proved to be the owner) denied any knowledge of Kilbride. Still, the place did seem about as good as they were likely to find for luncheon. They grabbed a table. When a waitress came by, Bushell ordered corned beef and cabbage and a Jameson to go with it. Samuel Stanley coughed significantly. Bushell had expected that, and pretended not to hear it - Sam was his adjutant, not his nursemaid. He hadn’t expected a dirty look from Kathleen, who’d chosen a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich for herself.

She gave him another dirty look when the food arrived. He didn’t think it was because he spread mustard on both the fragrantly steaming meat and the cabbage. In fact, he didn’t see any reason for it. But when her glare didn’t go away, he finally asked, “Is something wrong?”

“That,” she said through tight lips, pointing to his plate. “While you’re at it, why don’t you give us a few choruses of ‘McNamara’s Band’?”

“Oh,” Bushell said, and then muttered, “Hommony grits,” under his breath. Stanley, who was with great gusto carving a piece off a slice of roast beef while eating another, swallowed wrong. Bushell pounded him on the back. When he decided Sam wasn’t going to choke to death after all, he gave his attention back to Kathleen. “The only reason I ordered that” - he tapped the corned beef with his fork - “was that I figured it had better be good in a town full of Irishmen.”

She studied him as if he were a painting that had come before her for authentication: was he an Old Master or just a worthless modern forgery? “All right,” she said after that long, measuring stare, and then, perhaps feeling that wasn’t enough, “If you knew how many times I’ve had being Irish thrown in my face

- If I do my job well, who my father is shouldn’t matter a farthing’s worth.”

Bushell raised his glass of whiskey and solemnly drank in salute to that. All the same, he could not help remembering that Kathleen’s father - Aloysius Flannery, that’s what his name was - bought her a subscription to Common Sense every year.

X

Bushell had never seen so many black men on the streets in his life. The miners heading away from the mines after their shift ended were not merely brown, as Samuel Stanley was - they were black. Black as coal, Bushell thought, and no wonder.

They bantered with one another as they spread through the town, some going home, others hurrying to the taverns to slake their thirst. Had Bushell been among their number, he would have had a drink, or more likely several, before he’d have wanted to face anyone he loved. Putting in a day’s work hundreds, maybe thousands of feet underground in tunnels barely tall enough to stand up in, never knowing when those tunnels would flood or come crashing down on your head or collapse somewhere behind you, sealing you off from any hope of rescue . . . The very idea made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

But what had Shakespeare said of the gravedigger? “Custom had made it in him a property of easiness,”

that was the line. It held with the miners, too. They were raucous and cheerful, almost to a man. If they worried about how they made their living, they didn’t show it on the outside. They were magnificent-looking men, too, despite, or maybe because of, the coal dust that coated their bare torsos. Whatever evils that could be ascribed to it - and Bushell know how many they were laboring in the mines kept a man fit - till blacklung got him, anyhow. For his age, he was in good condition, but miners who had to be ten years older were far firmer and stronger. He felt himself drawing back his shoulders, tightening his belly. Walking along beside him, Samuel Stanley also held himself quite erect.

As soon as the two RAMs and Kathleen Flannery got out of Charleroi’s business district, Kathleen’s attention swung from the miners themselves to the homes in which they lived. “How can we expect human beings to put up with conditions like these?” she said, pointing. “And how long can we expect human beings to put up with them?”

Looking down the long rows of hovels jammed against one another, Bushell had a hard time finding an answer for those questions. The whole block of houses on Lantern Way leaned from the vertical; doors and windows were ten or even twenty degrees out of true. Grass grew rank on the thin strip of lawn between the sagging houses and the street. A few houses had decrepit steamers in various states of disrepair up on the lawn. Most, though, were without motorcars of any sort. Swarms of boys played on the grass and in the street. With bats that looked carved from branches, wickets made of piled jackets, and a sixpenny India-rubber ball, a mob of them had a spirited, if disorderly, game of cricket under way. They paused in their action while Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen walked through the makeshift playing field toward Percy McGaffigan’s house at number 39. The older lads followed Kathleen Flannery with their eyes; young and old seemed to view the presence of well-dressed strangers with suspicion, for Bushell and his companions brought silence with them, the usual racket resuming behind them after they’d passed.

Only a worn path in the grass served as a walkway up to number 39. The door leaned enough to the left to be disconcerting. Bushell wanted to lean that way himself, to make the world look straight. Running into the effect without having several Jameson in him was new, but not particularly welcome.

“I feel like I’m going into one of those crooked houses they have at carnivals sometimes,” Samuel Stanley said, so Bushell wasn’t the only one the off-kilter door bothered. He looked for a bell. Not finding one, he rapped on the door. A dog yapped inside the house. The door opened with a squeal; Bushell wouldn’t have been surprised if it hadn’t been capable of opening. A plump, pale, tired-looking woman in a cheap cotton dress of a bilious green stared at him as if he’d just dropped from the moon. Behind her, two small boys and a somewhat larger girl looked equally amazed.

“Does Percy McGaffigan live here?” he asked, showing his badge.

The woman’s eyes got even wider. “No,” she said quickly. “Never heard of no McGaffigans. You got the wrong house, Mister. Go away.”

“It’s all right, Maggie,” a man’s voice said from behind her. “Leastways, I think it is. These are the blokes from New Liverpool I was telling you about. Let ‘em in. They’re just sniffing after The Two Georges, nothing more.”

Reluctantly, Maggie McGaffigan stood aside. She didn’t look happy about it, whether because she still feared for her husband’s safety or because she didn’t want strangers inspecting her housekeeping Bushell couldn’t have said. By the way the parlor looked, she didn’t do enough housekeeping to make inspection worthwhile. The room was small and dingy, the furniture - mismatched pieces looking as if they’d been found at jumble sales - falling to bits, dirty clothes strewn everywhere. The place smelled of sweat, grease, and dog.