He wasn’t the only one out on this fine, mild day. Boys and girls frolicked where shells had burst and men had bled. An unshaven man in a filthy Canadian Army greatcoat and tattered khaki trousers lifted a bottle to his lips. He set it down slowly and reluctantly, as if its opening were the mouth of his beloved. In a drunken way, that was bound to be so.
McGregor killed time till the bells of the St. Boniface Cathedral, across the Red River, chimed twelve. He got up and ambled back by Custer’s headquarters. He’d timed it perfectly. He’d just gone past the building when a chauffeur-driven Packard—the motorcar that had almost run him down in Rosenfeld when Custer was on his way up to Winnipeg—pulled away from the front of the place. He kept on walking, hardly looking at the automobile, and turned west, away from the Red River.
After a little while, he went up Kennedy. Sure as the devil, there in front of a chophouse called Hy’s sat the Packard. The chauffeur remained on the front seat, eating a sandwich. General Custer and his aide, a tubby officer who seemed to accompany him everywhere, had gone inside.
McGregor smiled to himself. Custer dined at Hy’s every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He was reliable as clockwork. He ate his dinner somewhere else—McGregor hadn’t been able to find out where—on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So far as McGregor could tell, no swarm of guards surrounded him here.
Luck had had very little to do with McGregor’s discovering his weekday routine, or at least three-fifths of it. The embittered farmer had taken to tramping the streets of Winnipeg during the dinner hour, looking for that Packard. Patience paid, as patience has a way of doing. McGregor walked past the motorcar on the other side of the street. The driver paid him no attention whatever. Had he suddenly turned around and gone back the way he’d come, that might have drawn the fellow’s notice to him.
He couldn’t have that, not when he was so close. He made his way back to the park, though he didn’t go past Custer’s headquarters this time. “Now they shouldn’t see me at all,” he said as he sat down on the grass once more. No one heard him. The children were gone. The ex-soldier had passed out. His bottle lay empty beside him.
A little past five, McGregor returned to the boardinghouse. He ate the landlady’s frugal supper without complaint. Afterwards, he went up to his room and read
Quentin Durward
till he grew sleepy. Then he turned off the electric lamp and, so far as he knew, didn’t stir till morning.
Since the next day was Thursday, Custer wouldn’t be dining at Hy’s. McGregor walked in, went over to the bar, and ordered himself a Moosehead. As he drank the beer, he studied the place. He couldn’t very well plant the bomb among the seats; he had nowhere to conceal it there. But a lot of tables were close to the bar, and he’d packed a lot of dynamite and a lot of tenpenny nails for shrapnel into the wooden case he’d brought up from the farm. If he could hide it under the bar somewhere, that stood a good chance of doing the trick. The blast might even bring down the whole building…if the detonation worked as it should.
He worried about that, too. He’d known from his earlier trip to Winnipeg that he’d have to set this bomb and leave it. To make it go off when he wanted it to, he’d brought up an alarm clock, which he would set while he was planting the bomb. When it rang, the vibrating hammer and bells would set off the blasting caps he’d pack around them, which would in turn set off the dynamite. So he hoped, at any rate. But he knew the method was less reliable than a tripwire or a fuse.
“It will work,” he whispered fiercely. “It
has
to work.”
He got out of bed at two the next morning and sneaked out of the boardinghouse. He carried the bomb on his back with straps, as if it were a soldier’s pack. In one pocket of his coat were caps, in the other a small electric torch and a pry bar.
Winnipeg remained under curfew. If a patrolling U.S. soldier spotted him, he was liable to be shot then and there. If he got shot, he was liable to go straight to the moon then and there, in fragments of various sizes. He was taking any number of mad chances with this venture, and knew it. He didn’t care, not any more. Like a soldier about to go over the top, he was irrevocably committed.
An alley ran behind Hy’s. Motion there made his heart spring into his mouth, but it was only a cat leaping out of a garbage can. He wondered if the restaurant had a burglar alarm. He would find out by experiment. He let out a long, happy sigh when the back door yielded to the pry bar almost at once.
Tiptoeing through the kitchen, he came out in back of the bar, as if he were the greasy-haired gent who tended it. Only when he crouched behind it did he turn on the torch. He felt like cheering on seeing not only plenty of room under the bar to stash the bomb but also a burlap bag with which to hide it.
He wound the alarm clock and set it for one, then pried up the lid to the bomb, set the clock in place, and, handling them very carefully, packed the blasting caps by the bells. Then he replaced the lid, covered the box with the burlap sack, and left by the route he’d used to come. He closed the door behind him, risking the torch once more to see if the pry marks were too visible. He grinned: he could hardly see them at all. Odds were, no one else would even notice he’d come and gone.
He reentered the boardinghouse as stealthily as he’d left. Going back to sleep was hard. Getting up to appear to go to work was even harder. When he departed after breakfast, he didn’t pass by Custer’s headquarters, but used the next street over to head for the park. He settled himself on the grass to wait.
St. Boniface’s bells chimed the hours. After they rang twelve times, he began to fidget. Time seemed to crawl on hands and knees. How long till one o’clock? Forever? No. Before the bells chimed one, a far greater and more discordant blast of sound echoed through Winnipeg. Arthur McGregor sprang to his feet, shouting in delight. He frightened a few pigeons near him. Other than the pigeons, no one paid him the least attention.
Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling eyed General Custer with a sort of sad certainty. The old boy was having altogether too much fun for his own good. When his wife noticed how much fun he’d been having—and Libbie would; oh yes, she would—she would have some sharp things to say about it.
For the moment, though, Custer was doing the talking. He liked nothing better. “All in the line of duty,” he boomed, like a courting prairie chicken. “All in the line of duty, my dear.”
The reporter’s pencil scratched across the notebook page, filling it with shorthand pothooks and squiggles. “Tell me more,” Ophelia Clemens said. “Tell me how you happened to decide the War Department was using barrels the wrong way and how you came up with one that proved more effective.”
“I’d be glad to,” Custer said with a smile broad enough to show off all the coffee-stained splendor of his store-bought teeth.
I’ll bet you would,
Dowling thought. He wouldn’t have minded having Ophelia Clemens interview him, either. She was a fine-looking woman—somewhere between forty and forty-five, Dowling guessed—with red-gold hair very lightly streaked with gray, and with an hourglass figure that had yielded nothing (well, next to nothing) to time.
Instead of answering her question, as he’d said he would, Custer asked one of his own: “How’d a pretty lady like you get into the newspaper business, anyhow? Most reporters I know have mustaches and smoke cigars.”
Miss Clemens—she wore no wedding band—shrugged. “My father was in the business for fifty years, till he died ten years ago. He taught me everything I know. For whatever it may be worth to you, he wore a mustache and smoked cigars. Now, then—” She repeated the question about barrels.
She’s sharp as a tack behind that pretty smile,
Abner Dowling judged. Custer hadn’t figured that out yet; the pretty smile was all he noticed. His answer proved as much. He didn’t quite say God and a choir of angels had delivered the new doctrine for barrels to him from on high, but he certainly implied it.
Ophelia Clemens tapped the unsharpened end of her pencil against the spiral wire that held her notebook together. “Isn’t another reason the fact that you’ve been known for headlong attacks straight at the foe ever since the days of the War of Secession, and that barrels offered you the chance to do that again, except in a new way?”
Dowling wanted to kiss her for reasons that had nothing to do with the way she looked. She
was
sharp as a tack, by God. Custer had done nothing but go straight at the enemy all through the Great War. First Army had suffered gruesomely, too, sending attack after attack straight into the teeth of the Rebs’ defensive positions. If not for barrels, Custer would probably still be banging heads with his Confederate opposite numbers down in Tennessee.
Now he said, “What was that, Miss Clemens? My ears aren’t quite what they used to be, I’m afraid.” Dowling had seen him use that selective deafness before. He wasn’t too hard of hearing, not considering how old he was. But he was, and always had been, ever so hard of listening.
Patiently, Ophelia Clemens repeated the question, changing not a single word. As she did so, the bells of St. Boniface’s Cathedral, over on the east side of the Red River, announced the noon hour.
Custer had no trouble hearing the bells, even if he managed to miss the question again. He said, “Perhaps you’ll take luncheon with my adjutant and me, Miss Ophelia. There’s a very fine chophouse not ten minutes away that I visit regularly: in fact, I have a motorcar laid on that should be pulling up in front of this building right about now.”
“I’d be delighted,” the reporter said, “provided we can keep working through it. That way, my editors won’t mind picking up the tab for me.”
“Oh, very well,” Custer said with poor grace. He’d no doubt wanted to use the luncheon as a breather from her astute questions. But Ophelia Clemens wasn’t half bad at getting her own way, either.
When they boarded the chauffeured Packard, Custer got his way, placing himself between Dowling and Miss Clemens. The seat was crowded for three: both he and his adjutant took up a good deal of space. Had Custer been so tightly squeezed against another officer, he would have had something rude to say about Dowling’s girth. As things were, he didn’t complain a bit.
“Hy’s, Gallwitz,” Dowling said, realizing the general was otherwise occupied.
“Yes, sir.” The chauffeur put the Packard in gear.
At the chophouse, Custer got himself a double whiskey and tried to press the same on Ophelia Clemens. She contented herself with a glass of red wine. Dowling ordered a Moosehead. Say whatever else you would about them, the Canucks brewed better beer than they did down in the States.
Custer ordered a mutton chop and then, his glass having somehow emptied itself, another double whiskey. Dowling chose the mutton, too; Hy’s did it splendidly. Miss Clemens ordered a small sirloin—likely, Dowling thought, to keep from having to match Custer in any way.
The second double vanished as fast as the first had done. Custer began talking a blue streak. He wasn’t always perfectly clear, but he wasn’t always perfectly clear sober, either. Even after the food arrived, Ophelia Clemens kept taking notes. “Tell me,” she said, “from the viewpoint of the commanding general, what is the hardest thing about occupying Canada?”
“There’s too much of it, and I haven’t got a quarter of the troops I need,” Custer answered. Drunk or sober, that was his constant complaint, and one with a good deal of truth to it, too. He cut a big bite off his chop and continued with his mouth full: “Not a chance in…blazes of getting the men I need, either, not with the…blasted Socialists holding the purse strings in their stingy fists.”
“You would favor a third term for TR, then?” Miss Clemens asked: a shrewd jab if she knew of the rivalry between Roosevelt and Custer, as she evidently did.
I’m a soldier, and shouldn’t discuss politics,
would have been the discreet answer. But Custer had already started discussing politics, and was discreet only by accident. He’d just put another forkful of mutton into his mouth when he got the question, and bit down hard on it, the meat, and the fork, all at the same time.
He bit down hard literally as well as metaphorically. Too hard, in fact: Dowling heard a snapping noise. Custer exclaimed in dismay: “Oh, fow Jeshush Chwisht’sh shake! I’ve bwoken my uppuh pwate!” He raised his napkin to his mouth and removed the pieces.
“I’m terribly sorry, General,” Ophelia Clemens said. Her green eyes might have sparkled. They definitely didn’t twinkle. Dowling admired her self-control.
He went over to the bartender and got the name and address of a nearby dentist. “He’ll have you fixed up in jig time, sir,” Dowling said, and then, “I’m sorry, Miss Clemens, but it looks like we’re going to break up early today.”
“That’sh wight,” Custer said, nodding. “I’m showwy, too, Mish Ophewia, but I’ve got to get thish fikshed.”
“I understand.” Ophelia Clemens kept on taking notes and asking questions. Dowling wondered if Custer’s embarrassment would become news from coast to coast.
If so, too bad,
Dowling thought. Custer had always courted publicity. That usually paid handsome dividends. Every once in a while, it took a bite out of him.
When they got out to the automobile, Dowling told Gallwitz where to take Custer. Ophelia Clemens got in, too. No matter how mushy Custer sounded, she wanted to finish the interview. “Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said, stolid as always. He started the engine; the Packard rolled smoothly down Kennedy Street.
He’d just turned right onto Broadway, where the dentist had his office, when the world blew up behind the motorcar. The roar sounded like the end of the world, that was for sure. Windows shattered on both sides of the street, showering passersby with glass. The Packard’s windshield shattered, too. Most of the glass it held, luckily, blew away from the chauffeur. Gallwitz shouted anyway, in surprise and maybe fright as well. Dowling could hardly blame him.
And Custer shouted, “Shtop the automobiwe! Tu’n awound! Go back! We’ve got to shee what happened and what we can do to he’p!” He should have sounded ridiculous—an old man with no teeth, real or false, in his upper jaw, bellowing like a maniac. Somehow, he didn’t.