“But - ” Stanley bit his lip. Now he was wrong whether he finished the song or he didn’t. At last, unhappily, he sat back down and hurried through the last part of it. His mind wasn’t on his playing; he made more fluffs in those few bars than he usually did in a week, and finished with obvious relief. Bushell sat down on a rattan chair. In keeping with its name, the lounge of the Empire Builder had an East Indian theme. The furniture was of rattan and teak, with bright, intricately patterned cushions. Carpets from Armritsar and Bangalore covered the floor, some with elaborate Urdu calligraphy. On the walls, British soldiers in pith helmets and red uniforms of bygone days rode to battle atop war elephants. A middle-aged man, an elderly woman in the black dress and veil of mourning, and a young man in checked trousers came into the lounge one by one. Politely reserved, they sat well apart from one another and from Bushell and Stanley. The young man asked the woman whether she minded him smoking. When she waved permission, he lit up a meerschaum.

Bushell drew out his pocket watch. At seven minutes of eight, the pumps began draining the airship’s ballast chambers. Less than a minute later, the middle-aged man hastily left the lounge. Sam Stanley caught Bushell’s eye. Neither of them laughed or even smiled, but each enjoyed the other’s amusement. At two minutes of eight, the airship’s motors started up. The low roar filled the lounge. The overhead speaker crackled to life: “This is your captain, ladies and gentlemen. We will be taking off momentarily, and I advise you to find a seat if you’d be so kind. The nose of the airship will rise a bit, which means the floor will tilt until we reach our cruising height of fifteen hundred feet. Thank you, and I hope you’ll all have a pleasant flight with us today aboard the Empire Builder.”

A snap Bushell felt as much as he heard announced the release from the mooring tower. For a moment, the dirigible simply floated in the air. The motors began to work harder. Mist swirled away as the Empire Builder began moving through it. As the captain had warned, the floor did tilt, but not to any great degree. Soon Bushell could see only gray all around; the airship might have been packed in dirty cotton batting.

After a few minutes, the rate of climb leveled off. A steward came around with tea and coffee. Bushell chose Darjeeling, Stanley Irish Breakfast. The steward said, “We shall be serving breakfast in the dining area beginning at a quarter of nine, gentlemen.”

“Nothing but fog today, I’m afraid,” Stanley said, waving at the gloomy prospect outside the observation windows. “You might as well have gone to your stateroom.” By his tone, he wished Bushell had gone to the stateroom. Then he could have played “I Remember Your Name” without embarrassment.

“It doesn’t matter, Sam,” Bushell answered. He didn’t know himself whether he meant the mist or the song. After a moment, he lowered his voice and went on, “For the rest of this trip, I think I’d best be just Tom and Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke Felix. Too many people have heard my rank and surname, and maybe yours and his, too.”

“Incognito we shall be - Tom,” Stanley agreed, and laughed at the hitch he’d put in what should have been a smooth sentence. “I’ll have to work to remember that,” he added seriously, his face full of concentration. “The habit of subordination is hard to break.”

“True enough,” Bushell said, taking out a cigar. “I’ve known Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg what seems like a thousand years now, and I count him a good friend even if you don’t. But whenever we talk, on duty or off, he’s always sir, and whenever I talk about him he’s Sir Horace or Lieutenant General Bragg, not plain old Horace.”

Whatever Stanley thought about Bushell’s friendship with Sir Horace, he kept it to himself, saying, “Ah, but you have it easiest here - Tom.” He paused again, and ruefully shook his head at the blunder before continuing. “Superiors can call inferiors by their Christian names, but not the other way round. You’re used to going Sam and Felix, but we aren’t used to Tom.”

“By the time we finish this case, I expect you will be,” Bushell answered. When he’d smoked the cigar down to a short butt, he stubbed it out and went with Samuel Stanley to the airship’s dining room. Felix Crooke was already there, holding a couple of seats against the polite protests of the waiters. “Good thing you came to my rescue, sir,” he said to Bushell. “I was beginning to fear they’d heave me over the side.”

“Can’t have that,” Bushell said gravely. “Now as for this sir business - ” He explained his notion to Crooke.

“Very sensible,” the RAM from Victoria said at once. “The less public we can keep the investigation, the better it will go and the happier we all shall be.” Courteously, he turned to Stanley. “Don’t you agree, Sam?”

“Absolutely, Lieu - uh, Felix,” Stanley said, following the flub with a muffled “Dammit!” All three RAMs laughed.

“Good to see you gentlemen in such fine humor this morning,” a waiter said, coming over to their table with pencil poised above notepad. “And what would you care to have for breakfast?”

“Eggs Benedict for me, please,” Bushell said. “Since I’m here, I have every intention of enjoying myself.”

“An excellent notion,” the waiter said. He nodded to Samuel Stanley. “And you, sir?”

“I want four rashers of bacon cooked very crisp, with toast and marmalade alongside.”

“Very good, sir.” The waiter wrote it down, then looked a question to Felix Crooke. Crooke coughed a couple of times. “I don’t see it on the menu, but could you grill me a bloater and serve it up with mashed potatoes?”

The waiter almost lost his professional impassivity at that emphatically proletarian choice, but said, “I shall enquire of the chef, sir. We do endeavor to satisfy every taste.” He was shaking his head as he walked back toward the kitchen.

“I like bloaters,” Crooke said defensively. “I’ve been eating them since I was a boy, and I still do, every chance I get.”

“I didn’t say a thing,” Bushell replied. “Did you say anything, Sam?”

“Me? Not a word,” Stanley said solemnly. “Felix, if fancying bloaters for breakfast is the craziest thing you do, then you’re one of the saner men I’ve met.”

“He doesn’t say present company included, mind you,” Bushell put in, pointing to himself, “but he’s thinking it, never fear. Your adjutant is like your valet: he knows you too well to give anything near the amount of respect you think you deserve.”

“I like that, by God.” Felix Crooke made silent clapping motions. “Given half a chance, I expect I’ll steal it. I tell you openly, you see, for I’m a brazen thief.”

“That’s how you got to be our chief student of the Sons of Liberty, is it?” Bushell shot back. “They set you after them because they know you thought the same way?”

Samuel Stanley struck an injured pose “The two of you are going at each other so hard and fast, I didn’t get to say I thought Tom was spouting rubbish.”

“Your mother trained you up right, Sam, and taught you not to interrupt,” Bushell said. “Now you’re suffering for it.” All three men were smiling broadly. Bushell hadn’t known how Crooke would fit in with Stanley and himself, but a man who could take banter and give it back promised to be easy to work with. The waiter returned with three covered plates on a tray. “Your eggs, sir,” he said, setting one in front of Bushell and removing the metal lid with a flourish. Bushell smiled in anticipation as the poached eggs, smothered in rich hollandaise sauce and topping ham and muffins, were revealed. The waiter gave Sam Stanley his bacon and toast, then turned to Felix Crooke. “Here is your bloater and mash, sir. I am told the chef does keep them on hand, as several of our engine mechanics have a fondness for them.”

So there, Bushell thought. Crooke might as well not have heard the waiter’s editorial remark. He gazed on the large, lightly smoked herring with pleasure unalloyed. Steam rose from it and from the large mound of fluffy potatoes with which it shared the plate. He sprinkled the potatoes with salt and pepper, then dug in.

The bloater’s strong odor distracted Bushell from his own more delicate breakfast, but only till he took the first bite. After that, nothing short of the airship’s falling into the sea could have made his attention waver from the food.

The Empire Builder reached Drakestown just past one in the afternoon, within a few minutes of its scheduled arrival. By then, the sun had long since succeeded in burning away the morning mist. It sparkled off the little waves in San Francisco Bay, which somehow had not changed its name when Upper California passed from Franco-Spanish to British possession.

The bay was full of ships, not only those of the Royal Navy and Royal North American Navy but also merchant vessels flying every flag in the world and a great multitude of ferryboats traveling back and forth between Drakestown and the smaller cities on the eastern shore of the bay. Bushell watched the ferries for a while, then turned to Samuel Stanley and asked, “Do you think they’ll ever bridge the bay? They’ve been talking about it since I was a boy - do you remember the drawings in the supplements to the Sunday papers?”

“As if you were looking down from an airship, with all the steamers on the bridge as tiny as ants?”

Stanley said, nodding. “I think everyone remembers those. A few years ago, I would have said it might happen. But after that last earthquake? How would you like to be on a bridge going across the bay when the ground started shaking?”

“No, thank you,” Bushell said. “Getting through an earthquake while you’re on solid ground is bad enough, if you ask me. I suppose you’re right; and the ferryboats do a good enough job, by all accounts. Still, a bridge that size would have been grand to see, don’t you think?”

“For as long as it stood, yes.” Listening to Stanley, anyone would have pegged him at once for a veteran sergeant or a police officer. He had a deep and abiding faith that things would go wrong. The Empire Builder dropped its mooring lines. With the help of the ground crew at Drakestown’s airship port, it locked itself to a mooring tower to disembark some passengers and take on others, along with fuel and water for ballast. By half past two it was airborne again, swaying a little in a crosswind from the west.

Before sunset, it crossed from Upper California into the larger but more sparsely settled province of Oregon. “Are we scheduled to stop at West Boston on the way up to Wellesley?” Felix Crooke asked.

“On the Columbia, you mean?” Bushell said. “Yes, I believe we are. It’s a nice enough town; I’ve been there once or twice.” The last time had been the mission from which he’d decided to come home early. To keep from thinking about that again, he went on, “Did you know it was almost called West Portland?

The first settlers were Massachusetts men, and they spun a shilling, or so the story goes, to see after which of their towns they’d name this one.”

“I looked at the itinerary in my stateroom,” Samuel Stanley said. “We’re supposed to stop at West Boston from ten o’clock to just before midnight. We get into Wellesley at a little past four tomorrow morning.” He rolled his eyes to show what he thought of that.

“Good,” Bushell said, which made both the other RAMs stare at him. He explained: “God willing, at that heathen hour all the reporters will be sleeping peacefully in their nice, warm beds.”

“At that heathen hour, I want to be sleeping peacefully in my nice, warm bed,” Felix Crooke said feelingly.

Bushell sought his own nice, warm bed not long after supper. He was far enough behind on sleep not to mind going to bed early, especially when he knew he’d have to rise early, too. The captain’s voice from the ceiling speaker woke him from a dream in which The Two Georges had somehow stolen Sir Horace Bragg and was holding him for ransom: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to do this to you, but I have to let you know we will be arriving in Wellesley in half an hour. Please do prepare for departure. Thank you.” A hiss of static, and the speaker went dead. Bushell yawned, knuckled his eyes, and groped for the light switch beside his bed. He found it, clicked on a lamp, and sat up, blinking against the sudden glare. He was pulling off his pyjamas and putting on a suit of dark gray wool when a steward pounded on the door and said, “Landing soon, sir. Are you awake in there?”

“No,” Bushell answered as he buttoned his fly.

The steward paused, coughed, chuckled, and said, “Sorry to disturb you, but it has to be done on these early-morning arrivals.” He went down the corridor to rap on the next stateroom door. Despite the captain’s announcement, despite the stewards’ diligence, Bushell was sure somebody would still be sleeping when the Empire Builder locked itself to the mooring mast at the Wellesley Municipal Airship Port.

A cup of English Breakfast tea, so strong it was almost bitter, helped him face the prospect of being alert at four in the morning with something like equanimity. Stanley drank English Breakfast, too; Felix Crooke opted for black coffee.

The three RAMs were among the first passengers off the airship once it was safely moored. Before Bushell had taken more than two steps on the ground, a fusillade of flashbulbs went off in his face. “Why are you in Wellesley, Colonel?” somebody shouted. Somebody else yelled, “Will you be staying here?”

“Where do you go from here, Colonel Bushell?” a woman’s voice bawled.

“I’m sorry, but I have nothing to say,” Bushell answered, and repeated that again and again as he and his colleagues claimed their bags and headed for the cab stand at the kerb a couple of hundred yards from the airship. The reporters followed. Some, like cats, followed the RAMs in front of them, and complained almost as bitterly of trod-on toes as of the lack of satisfactory answers for their questions. Among them, Bushell, Stanley, Crooke, and their gear filled to overflowing the steamer they hired. “Can you get us to the train station without having that pack of vultures on our trail?” Bushell asked, pointing back to the reporters, who were wrangling over who would take which of the other cabs at the stand.

“Do my best, sir,” the cabbie answered, and put his vehicle in gear. Bushell leaned back in the seat, aghast at how many reporters had come to meet him and how persistent they were. He’d known the case would be conducted in the glare of publicity, but he’d hoped to be able to escape that glare every now and again. The Sons of Liberty were going to know his every move almost before he made it. The cab driver, to his great relief, did escape before the pursuit got properly organized. By the time his steamer reached the station - a huge, half-timbered building that resembled nothing so much as a Tudor palace - approaching sunrise was lightening the gray, overcast sky in the east. Bushell tipped him a green ten-shilling note, which sent him on his way with a smile on his face. Inside the station, a ticket agent confirmed the reservations Bushell had made over the telephone. A stout porter took charge of the RAMs’ bags. The police officers went into a small cafe across from their departure platform and ordered breakfast. “I don’t want to be sitting out there in the open for those blasted reporters to see,” Bushell said. “That would make me a perfect target.”

Sure enough, a couple of reporters did come wandering by. One of them even poked his head into the cafe. Bushell kept his own head down and escaped unnoticed.

He and his companions boarded the train as soon as it pulled up to the platform. Samuel Stanley stared in surprise at the informational brochure he pulled from a box mounted on the door near the entry.

“Bloody roundabout way of getting from here to Prince Rupert,” he said, pointing to a map on the back page of the brochure. It showed the route looping through half the province of Vancouver. “I thought we’d just go straight up the coast.”

“Mountains in the way, with no good passes,” Bushell said. He read over his adjutant’s shoulder as Stanley unfolded the brochure. “When luncheon comes around, I want to try the fish chowder they’re talking about. If it’s half as good as they make it sound, you can walk on water once you’ve eaten it.”

The chowder - simmered haddock and salt pork with potatoes, onions, and garlic in a broth of rich cream and fish stock - might not have been good enough to serve as a prelude to miracle-working, but it was tasty and filling. The spectacular mountains and pine woods through which the train passed made the long trip worthwhile. A bear pawing at an old stump looked up as the noisy locomotive rolled by, then went back to grubbing for mice or honey or whatever it was after.

They pulled into Prince George, the gateway town to Vancouver province’s northwest, about seven that evening. The sun was still high in the sky; at fifty-four degrees north latitude, summer days lingered long. But Prince Rupert was still 450 miles - nine long hours - to the west.

“Another four o’clock arrival,” Samuel Stanley said mournfully. “Shame to get into a town at a time when you can’t do anything useful there.”

“And after that, another six hours by ship to Skidegate,” Felix Crooke put in.

“We’ve had all this time to plan,” Bushell said. “When we get there, we go into action.” He could hear he could all but taste - the eagerness in his own voice. To be out and doing - that was why he’d become a RAM in the first place. His last chance might be here now. He intended to make the most of it. VI

WELCOME TO PRINCE RUPERT, THE HALIBUT CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, said the sign in the train station. A faint fishy odor that persisted through steam and coal smoke and tobacco made it plain that was no idle boast.

So did the bill of fare of the station cafe, which had opened to receive early-arriving passengers while the rest of the town slept on. Along with the usual eggs and sausage and bacon and hot and cold porridges, all quite dear not only because the cafe enjoyed a clientele with few other choices but also because Prince Rupert was as far from where processed foods were produced as any place in the NAU, the menu featured fried halibut, poached halibut, dried and salted halibut, smoked halibut, halibut croquettes, and halibut balls in cream gravy.

Bushell had never before breakfasted on poached halibut, but it was far from bad. “You order this in a fancy restaurant in New Liverpool, it would set you back six or eight quid, not seventeen and a tanner,”

he said.

“It’s good smoked, too,” Felix Crooke said. His choice - the nearest thing to a bloater available - did not surprise Bushell. Samuel Stanley, a resolute conservative, worked his way through fried eggs and saveloy sausages.

Twilight brightened as the three men ate. The sun rose early, as it had set late. The cafe boasted a large, west-facing window. From Kaien Island, on which the town of Prince Rupert sat, Bushell looked across Prince Rupert Harbor to Digby Island, which shielded the island from storms. Fishing boats were already putting out to sea. Clouds of gulls wheeled and swirled above them, hoping to scavenge some of the day’s catch.

Bigger ships also sat in the harbor: merchantmen to carry coal and grain and lumber brought into Prince Rupert by rail, the ferry that would take Bushell and his comrades across the Hecate Strait to the Queen Charlotte Islands, and several lean, gray frigates and corvettes with four-inch guns, a reminder that Russian Alaska lay not far to the north.

It was about half a mile from the train station down to the harbor, and a light rain was falling. Bushell hired a cab for the journey; walking so far through drizzle carrying heavy bags did not strike him as an appealing prospect. “Going across to the Queen Charlottes, I’ll lay,” the driver said. “You must have some work with the Royal Navy, eh?”

“You might say that,” Bushell answered.

“I knew it,” the cabman said smugly. “I’m right clever about such things, I am.” He was clever enough, apparently, to be one of the few human beings on the face of the earth who did not recognize Bushell. Happy in momentary anonymity, Bushell said not a word to enlighten him. The ferry, the Northern Lights , was smaller and more elderly than the shiny, modern boats that plied the San Francisco Bay. Only a handful of Bushell’s fellow train passengers boarded the Northern Lights. Most of the men on it wore the bell-bottomed trousers and dark caps of the navy; many of them were muffled in sou’westers or duffel coats against the rain. Their expressions showed them to be less than ecstatic at the prospect of returning to Skidegate.

“To them, Prince Rupert must be bright lights and the big city,” Felix Crooke said. Bushell looked back at the halibut capital of the world. “Poor devils,” he said with feeling. Several of the crewmen of the Northern Lights had coppery skins and black, black hair. Every now and then, as they chattered back and forth with one another, they’d use a word or a phrase that didn’t sound like English. Bushell wondered if they were some of the Haida Indians of whom Kathleen Flannery had spoken. He also wondered what Kathleen was doing. He hoped she’d gone back to Victoria and, when the latest issue of Common Sense arrived in her mailbox, had thrown it straight into the wastepaper basket.

The ferryboat let out a deafening blast from its steam whistle and then, black coal smoke pouring out of its stacks, pulled away from the pier. It steamed around the southern tip of Digby Island and then west across the Hecate Strait toward Skidegate.

Most of the sailors went below; for them, the ocean was a place to work, not something conducive to sightseeing. A couple, perhaps men who had indulged too strenuously in the fleshpots of Prince Rupert (if such there were), leaned far over the lee rail and rid themselves of what ailed them. The passage did not strike Bushell as particularly choppy. He’d expected worse in the northern Pacific. As the morning advanced, the sun began to break through the low clouds. Samuel Stanley pointed northward. “Look, there’s an aeroplane,” he said.

One of the ferry’s crewmen said, “Nothing to be surprised at, sir, not up here. You’ll see ‘em all the time, coming back from patrol off the Alaskan coast. They have a field on Digby Island, and another not far from Skidegate, too.”

“Ever see any Russian aeroplanes?” Bushell asked as the biplane Stanley had spotted buzzed away toward the east.

“I haven’t myself, sir,” the sailor answered, “but I hear tell they’ve landed at our fields a time or two, when they had engine trouble and couldn’t get home. They fly patrol same as we do, after all; I reckon our flying machines have used their fields every once in a while, too. Up here, the wind and the ocean are worse enemies than the Russians and us are to each other.”

That’s what you think. Bushell, Stanley, and Crooke met one another’s eyes, each with the same thing in his mind. None of them spoke.

Luncheon was more halibut, baked or steamed. Not long afterwards, the Queen Charlotte Islands came into sight in the west: a low, gray-green line rising up between sea and sky.

“You can see both the biggest islands from here,” a seaman said. “That’s Graham - where we’re going to the north and Moresby to the south. Just looks like one, though, because Skidegate Inlet narrows down to a narrow little channel between them. You don’t want to sail there unless you have charts and you’re with someone who knows the local waters. It’s never the same twice, on account of the tides.”

Bushell had no interest in sailing narrow tidal channels, nor indeed in sailing of any sort. As far as he was concerned, ships were utilitarian conveyances designed to take him from hither to yon when yon happened to lie across more water than he felt like swimming. But he let the crewman rattle on; policemen soon figured out that you couldn’t tell in advance when you’d learn something useful. The fellow pointed ahead. “There’s Skidegate Village, where a lot of the Haida live.” He chuckled.

“One of my great-grandmothers was Haida, though you wouldn’t guess it from my blue eyes. If you look sharp now, you can see a couple of totem poles standing in front of the houses. Skidegate proper’s at the end of the spit of land, a mile or so south of the Haida village. You can spy the navy ships at anchor there.”

“Yes, I see them.” Bushell nodded. “I’d think they’d base them in the far north of the island, to keep watch on the Russians.”

“There’s torpedo boats and such up at Masset,” the crewman answered, “but the harbor there’s not deep enough to let large warships come in.”

Next to the corvettes and the looming bulk of an armored cruiser, the Northern Lights seemed even smaller and dingier than she really was. As the ship tied up at the dock, Navy men shouldered duffel bags and resignedly, queued up by the gangplank, then filed off the ferry. Struggling with their luggage, the three RAMs followed.

“Where now?” Samuel Stanley asked, setting down his bags with a grunt of relief.

“Hotel first, or whatever passes for one here,” Bushell said. “Then the local constabulary - there won’t be a RAM station - and then the naval commandant. And after that” - he let out a long breath of anticipation -”the post office.”

Getting to the Skidegate Lodge proved no problem. Cabmen fell with glad cries on everyone not wearing navy blue who disembarked from the Northern Lights. The driver who took the RAMs to the hotel chattered on about the theft of The Two Georges , and seemed indignant when his passengers replied only in monosyllables. “Up here, by heaven, we care about our country, we do,” he declared.

“Down south, you ask me, they take it for granted.”

“God save the King-Emperor,” Bushell said, and still would not talk about the case. Skidegate, he saw as the cabby took him and his companions through it, was a town whose principal function was to serve the local Navy base and to separate sailors and Royal Marines from their money as enjoyably as possible. It abounded in grogshops, dance halls, and, for those who had already spent their money but still had other chattels, pawnshops. Most of the people on the sidewalks wore navy blue, and most of the rest Marine khaki; the cab rolled past several detachments of truncheon-toting military policemen in white armbands. The truncheons notwithstanding, the redcaps always seemed to travel in groups of two or more.

The Skidegate Lodge was apparently the hotel in town. A stuffed bald eagle glared at Bushell with eyes of amber glass from its perch on the registration counter. His first thought was of the Independence Party flag, which made suspicion flare in him. But a great many eagles soared majestically over Skidegate and rooted, less majestically, in the rubbish pitch at the edge of the naval base. He decided he was overreacting - the bird did make a splendid trophy.

Seeing him eye it, the desk clerk asked, “Will you be going hunting, sir? Game laws say you can’t shoot an eagle within five miles of the town limits, and they’re strictly enforced.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Bushell said, not directly answering the question. “Have you a town telephone directory I might see?”

“Certainly, sir.” The clerk reached under the desk and pulled one out. He passed it across the polished cedar surface to Bushell. who had to hide a smile as he took it. He was used to the New Liverpool directory, a book thick and heavy enough to make a good bludgeon. By contrast, a skinny little pamphlet served all of Skidegate’s needs.

It did not, however, serve his. After going through it, he said to the clerk, “Could you give me some help, please? I see no listing for a local constabulary.”

“No, sir, you wouldn’t find that,” the clerk said. By the wary look in his eye, he didn’t much care to have anything to do with anyone interested in finding it, either. But, after a moment’s hesitation, he condescended to explain: “The Navy, sir, deals with such matters all over the island. Only fair, I think, seeing as Navy men cause most of our trouble. When the swabbies or the bullocks” - by which he meant the Royal Marines - “have nothing to do with it, they ship the villains across to Prince Rupert to let the civil courts handle things.” He had the air of a man who knew from experience whereof he spoke.

“Who is the commandant of the Navy’s - what would I call it? - security detachment, then?” Bushell asked.

“That would be Commander Hairston,” the desk clerk answered. “His offices are in the Naval Administration Building, close by the docks.”

“Back the way we came,” Bushell said with a sigh. “Well, I suppose we’ll get settled in here before we go pay him a visit.” He glanced over to Stanley and Crooke, who both nodded agreement. Bushell turned back to the clerk. “One last question: is the post office close by?”

“Just around the corner here and then down Carlotta Street half a block. You can’t miss it,” the clerk said, with the sublime optimism all locals show when strangers ask directions. The desk clerk shook his head in bemusement. “I get asked about bear and deer and salmon and eagles all the time, but never till now about constables and patrollers and post offices. Why’d you gents come to Skidegate anyhow, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“To hunt,” Bushell answered. Smiling grimly, he and his companions went up to their rooms, leaving the clerk scratching his head.

As the clerk had promised, the Skidegate post office was easy to find. That being almost the first thing that had gone right with the investigation, Bushell cherished it. He, Crooke, and Stanley took off their hats and unbuttoned their coats when they went inside; it might have been the beginning of summer, but Skidegate was cool and shrouded in mist and drizzle.

A plump, bald, red-faced man looked up from behind the counter. “Help you gents?” he said. He swept away what Bushell thought was a book of word puzzles; business at the post office did not seem brisk.

“I’m looking for the postmaster,” Bushell said.

“You’re not only looking for him, my friend, you’re looking at him,” the red-faced fellow answered with a chuckle that was half cackle. “Rob Pratson’s the name. Now what can I do for you?”

“Mr. Pratson, I hope you’re not given to gossip,” Bushell said, displaying the badge that identified him as an officer of the Royal American Mounted Police. Sam Stanley and Felix Crooke followed suit. Pratson’s watery blue eyes got wide. “Ain’t never seen one of those up here before, ‘cept in the cinema, and now here’s three all together. Ain’t that a thing and a half?” He remembered Bushell’s question. “No, sir, I don’t gab, not me. You can’t do it, not if you’re postmaster in a small town and you want to have friends.”

“Good,” Bushell said. “Not gossiping may involve your neck, not just friendships. Do you understand that?” At Pratson’s nod, he went on, “Now, do you remember receiving one or more packages, shaped about like this” - he used his hands to draw a long, thin rectangular solid - “to be posted to New Liverpool?”

“Oh, that I do,” the postmaster answered. “We’ve had a good many of those go through, past six months or so.”

“Have you?” That was the last thing Bushell wanted to hear. He didn’t tell Pratson what the packages contained; the fewer who knew of such things, the better. Instead, he went on, “Who’s sending them?”

“I’ve had packages like that from three or four people, sir, I have,” Rob Pratson said. “Don’t rightly recall none of their last names; they just go by Geoff and Patrick and Elgin and . . . what the devil’s that other one called? I ain’t seen him but once or twice.” The postmaster snapped his fingers. “Benjamin, that’s it! I think that’s it.”

Stanley and Crooke both had out notepads and were scribbling down the names, just as Bushell was.

“Do these four men live in Skidegate?” he asked hopefully. Maybe, just this once, something would be simple and straightforward.

But Pratson shook his head. “Oh, God bless you, sir, no they don’t. They’re up at Buckley Bay, they are. Far as I know, they’re the only four people up at Buckley Bay.”

“Where the devil’s Buckley Bay, and why are these four chaps the only people there?” Sam Stanley asked. By his tone, he was as sick of complications as Bushell was.

“Buckley Bay ain’t nothin’ these days - hasn’t been for years,” Pratson said. “Used to be a logging town over on the west shore of Masset Inlet, right about in the center of the island here. But ain’t nobody done any logging there since I was a sprout, and that goes back a deal of years, don’t it just. Till them four moved in, the buildings, they just got left to themselves to fall to pieces one bit at a time.”

“What do these four men do there, then?” Bushell demanded. “How do they make their living? How long have they been there?”

The postmaster shrugged. “Been there two, three years, I guess - that’s how long they been comin’ into Skidegate, anyways. They mail their packages, buy a few things down to the grocer’s shop or the ironmonger’s, head on out again. Dunno just how they get by. Hunting and fishing, I reckon, and I hear tell they take sightseers around sometimes, show ‘em the best spots for salmon and I don’t know what all. Whatever they do, nobody ever said they was lackin’ a quid they had need of.”

“Why does that last observation not surprise me?” Felix Crooke said. Pratson would not have known a rhetorical question had one come in to buy a stamp of him. “Dunno, sir, why don’t it?”

“Never mind,” Bushell said. “Thank you, Mr. Pratson - you’ve been very helpful. Let me repeat that you’d be wise to keep this to yourself. If you’re a married man, don’t even tell your wife.”

“Sooner or later, Myrtle will find out someways, and then I’m in the soup,” Pratson said resignedly. “But I won’t blab. Still and all, I wish you’d tell me what this here’s all about. What have them four fellers gone and did?”

“I don’t know yet,” Bushell said. “But I promise you: I’m going to find out.”

Commander Nathan Hairston was a big, bluff man with muttonchop whiskers and a walrus mustache.

“Pleasure to meet you gentlemen - pleasure,” he said as a sailor hurriedly brought a couple of spare chairs into his office. “Haven’t seen RAMs here since Hector was a pup. What can I do to help you?”

Bushell explained. By the time he was nearly through, Commander Hairston’s mouth had fallen open in amazement. He finished, “Do you know these men? Geoff, Patrick, Elgin, and Benjamin the postmaster called them. He didn’t recollect their surnames.”

“I don’t either, I’m afraid. I know the men you mean, or know of them, rather - so far as I was officially aware, they’d never given anyone a moment’s trouble.” Hairston shook his head like a man coming out of a showerbath. “Colonel, to be frank with you, the civilians hereabouts are mostly dull as dust, except every once in a while when they’ve had too much to drink. To think of this sleepy, godforsaken place involved in what has to be the most outrageous crime since the Duke of Philadelphia’s daughter was kidnapped fifty years ago ... I tell you, sir, I can hardly believe it.”

“Not much room for doubt, Commander,” Samuel Stanley said. “Tricky Dick was killed with a Nagant to distract us while the Sons stole The Two Georges, and people here are posting Nagants down to New Liverpool. That would want looking into even if we left the painting out of the bargain.”

“It certainly would,” Felix Crooke said. The expert on the Sons of Liberty went on, “This is a smuggling avenue about which we haven’t had to concern ourselves before. Have you had much trouble along those lines?”

“Smuggling, you mean?” Hairston said. “Never firearms, at least never that I knew till now. We do have men with small boats sneaking down from Alaska every now and again, but we’ve never caught them with anything worse than Russian vodka, the kind that’s strong enough to kick off the top of your head. I suspect they pass off more of that to fishermen on the high seas, too, but it’s all bloody difficult to prove, as you must know.”

“Commander, I am not accusing you of being derelict in your duties,” Bushell said quickly. “This plot must have been a long time hatching, and closely concealed.” His lips twisted in a bitter smile. “It certainly took me by surprise.”

“Mm, yes.” Hairston sent him a sympathetic look. “I asked you once in a general way, but now I’ll be more specific: what can I do to help you?”

“Do you have one particular judge likely to issue a speedy search warrant?” Bushell asked. He still had the blank but signed ones he’d got down in New Liverpool, but he wanted to save those if he could. Commander Hairston surprised him by throwing back his head and letting out a Jovian laugh. “My dear fellow, the Queen Charlotte Islands are in their entirety a military reservation, under the direct jurisdiction of the Royal Navy and Royal North American Navy. If we do something altogether outrageous, the judges in Prince Rupert will quash it, but you seem on most solid ground here.”

“The next time I feel on solid ground in this case will be the first,” Bushell said. “Most criminals are bloody stupid.” Hairston and both RAMs nodded at that. Bushell went on, “Whoever’s behind this theft, though, he’s no fool. But never mind that. All right, Commander - you have the jurisdiction.” The desk clerk at the hotel had told him as much; he should have thought through the implications. “What help can you give me?”

“How would you like a couple of squads of Royal Marines first thing tomorrow morning?” Hairston asked. Seeing Bushell’s flabbergasted expression, the Navy man laughed again. “Colonel, this isn’t supposed to be a fair fight. If we’ve got four villains out by Buckley Bay, the idea is to make them give up without a fight or make damned sure we win it. Good heavens, man, did you even bring weapons with you from New Liverpool?”

“We have three pistols,” Bushell answered. “If we needed anything more, we expected we’d be able to draw it from you.”

“Good for you, then,” Commander Hairston said. “From what I’ve seen of a lot of civil police, they forget the nasty chaps can get very nasty, indeed.”

“I would have,” Felix Crooke said. “Colonel Bushell didn’t let me.” He smoothly made the change back to formal address. Bushell sent him an approving glance. Crooke hadn’t had to admit his own naiveté, but he’d done it - a man of integrity.

“If you want rifles, you may certainly have a couple of ours,” Hairston said. “I wouldn’t care to carry anything less, I’ll tell you that.”

Bushell and Stanley both nodded right away. Crooke said, “It’s been so many years since I had a rifle in my hands, I expect I’d be more dangerous to my friends than to the villains. I’ll stick to my revolver, if it’s all the same to you; I’m familiar with it, which counts.”

“However you like, Lieutenant-Colonel,” Hairston said with a shrug of his wide shoulders. He got up from his desk and stood beside the large-scale map of the Queen Charlotte Islands on the wall behind it.

“How do you gents have in mind getting to Buckley Bay? There are no roads on the western shore of Masset Inlet. No reason to have ‘em - hardly anybody lives there. You can go by road to Port Clements, here on the eastern side of the inlet. From there, the road up from Skidegate heads due north to Masset.”

“We don’t want to take a boat straight across the inlet to Buckley Bay, I shouldn’t think,” Bushell said.

“If they saw us coming, they’d just fade back into the woods, and then your Marines might have a hard time running them to earth.”

“I’m afraid you’re right about that,” Hairston said mournfully. “If they’ve been living as trappers and hunters, they’ll know the land in that area better than my men will. How’s this, then: suppose you sail across the inlet from Port Clements to a point, oh, five miles north of the old logging town? Your men won’t think anything’s amiss even if they do see the boat. You can move down to Buckley Bay and nab them at your convenience.”

“That sounds good to me, Commander,” Samuel Stanley said. “Coming at villains from a direction they don’t expect is always a good idea.”

“I agree,” Bushell said, and Felix Crooke nodded again. That Stanley thought well of the plan was in itself recommendation enough for Bushell. Ever since his army days, he’d had reason to admire his adjutant’s tactical sense.

“We’ll do it that way, then,” Hairston said. “Have you brought along clothing and shoes that will stand up to a five-mile hike through woods and brush?”

“I haven’t,” Crooke said. “I took clothes suitable for New Liverpool when I came out from Victoria. I’m afraid the Queen Charlottes are both cooler and damper than I was prepared for.”

“Yes, they would be, if you came from New Liverpool.” Nathan Hairston glanced at Bushell and Stanley. “You two have what you need? I’m impressed. Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke, we’ll send you off to the quartermaster and outfit you as a Royal Marine. You gents are out at the Skidegate Lodge? I’ll send a driver round for you at half past four, then.”

Samuel Stanley looked martyred. “After three mornings in a row of getting up ungodly early, I should be growing used to it. But I’m not - all I’m growing is old, too bloody fast.”

“Think of it this way, Sam,” Bushell said helpfully: “if you’re awake all the time, you’ll seem to live longer.” By Stanley’s expression, that offered insufficient consolation. Crooke went off to be outfitted, and returned to Hairston’s office a little later with khaki tunic and trousers, a rubberized cape of the same color, a webbing belt in Royal Marine red, stout boots with rawhide lacings, and a slouch hat. “Thank you very much for your help, Commander Hairston,” he said.

“My pleasure,” the Skidegate security chief answered. “I’ll give you chaps a lift back to the Lodge, too. Colonel, Captain, we’ll have the rifles waiting for you here when you set out, if that’s all right. You won’t want to have to explain how you came by them when you walk through the lobby.”

“That’s true,” Bushell said. “In fact, if you can get a bag - a civilian-style bag - for that uniform, it would help. And I hope you’ll take us to and from the hotel in civilian steamers. We don’t want word of who we are and what we’re about getting to Buckley Bay ahead of us.”

“I like the way you think, Colonel,” Commander Hairston said with a brusque nod. “Just being in this business makes us take a good many chances. You don’t seem to take any you needn’t.”

A young sailor, grinning from ear to ear at the chance to wear mufti, however briefly, drove the three RAMs back into Skidegate in Hairston’s personal steamer. “Here you are, sir,” he said to Bushell as he pulled up in front of the Skidegate Lodge. “Now to get back before the commander figures I’ve wrapped it around a tree.” Still grinning, he sped away.

“What say we go up to our rooms and then meet in the lobby for supper?” Bushell said. “The Haida Lounge attached to the hotel looked - interesting. They say New Liverpool has every sort of restaurant in the world, but there are no Haida Indian eateries there.”

“They say the same thing about Victoria,” Felix Crooke said, “but it hasn’t got any, either. I’m game for something new. Just let me stow my kit here” - he hefted the bag that held the Royal Marines uniform “and I’ll be with you directly.”

The Haida Lounge was a smoky place. Bushell had been in any number of smoky taverns and restaurants in his time, but without exception their haze sprang from tobacco. Here the smoke was an integral part of the decor; the chef worked at a grill over an alderwood fire in the center of the room. Fans sent some of the smoke toward an opening in the ceiling, but not all. Bushell had expected to find venison and halibut on the menu, and was not disappointed. Sealmeat steaks, salmon cheeks, and dried herring eggs on kelp, however, made him raise an eyebrow, and a couple of items left him altogether at a loss. “What the devil is a fiddlehead?” he said to the waiter.

“No reason for you to know, if you’re a stranger here.” The waiter himself looked to be Haida, at least in good part; his English, while fluent, held a hissing, guttural undertone. “Fiddleheads are the shoots of sword ferns. They curl around on themselves at the tip, like the end of a violin’s neck. We serve them boiled, with butter or with hollandaise sauce.”

“I’ll try some, then - with butter, I think - and for my main course I’ll want the seal.” Bushell reflected that both butter and hollandaise were imperfectly authentic additions to native Haida cuisine, but he hadn’t come here to quibble. “I’ll start with the island salad here, the crabapples and fireweed and cow parsnip.”

“Very good.” The waiter nodded, perhaps pleased by his sense of adventure, then turned to Sam Stanley.

“The venison and wild rice for me,” Stanley said, “and a bottle of your Caribou Ale to wash it down.”

“Yes, sir.” After writing down his order, the waiter looked expectantly to Felix Crooke.

“I’ll have the herring eggs and kelp,” Crooke said, “and the wild rice to go with them. I might almost be eating in a Japanese restaurant.”

“Interesting you should say so, sir,” the waiter remarked. “We sometimes get Japanese here, buying fish or timber. They often order those same dishes. And would you also like an ale?” At Crooke’s nod, the young man turned to Bushell. “And what will you have to drink, sir?”

“Have you got Jameson Irish whiskey?” Bushell asked. The waiter’s blank look said they didn’t. Bushell shrugged. “In that case, bring me one of these Caribous, too.” As the young man hurried off to fetch the ales, Bushell turned to his companions. He raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Damned if I know what sort of wine goes with seal meat, anyhow.”

The seal steak was richly marbled and had a somewhat fishy flavor, no doubt because of the seal’s diet. The fiddleheads tasted nutty; Bushell enjoyed them. The well-hopped ale complimented the meal better than any wine he could think of; he patted himself on the back for a good choice. Sam Stanley demolished his cut of venison and looked ecstatic doing it. And Felix Crooke ate his dried fish eggs and kelp with every sign of relish. “You’d pay thirty pounds in Victoria for a meal like this,” he said.

“I wouldn’t,” Stanley said. He was proud of his conservative tastes.

“Our Haida sweet is whipped soapberries,” the waiter said as he gathered up supper plates. “It’s surprisingly close to ice cream. Would any of you gentlemen care to try it?”

Bushell and Crooke nodded. Sam Stanley said, “Soapberries? No, thank you,” and ordered another Caribou Ale instead. Conservatism had its own punishment; the berries, despite their off-putting name, were sweet and delicious.

After a cigar, Bushell said, “I’m turning in. We shall be busy boys tomorrow.”

“Busy boys early tomorrow,” Stanley added. “I’m going to ask the desk clerk to ring my room at four.”

His sigh was long, mournful, and heartfelt.

“Ask him to do the same for Felix and me, too.” Bushell blew a smoke ring up toward the ceiling. It soon thinned and vanished, reminding him all too much of most of the leads they’d had in the case. When the dreaded telephone call came, Bushell dragged himself out of bed and climbed into the denim trousers, plaid wool shirt, and hooded anorak he’d brought up from New Liverpool and set out before he went to sleep. Then he put on a pair of stout shoes a constable might have worn walking a beat. They weren’t as good as military boots, but they were the best he had.

To his dismay, he found the Haida Lounge closed when he went down to the lobby. Stanley joined him a couple of minutes later, similarly dressed and similarly distressed because he wouldn’t be able to get some tea or coffee to make his heart start beating. “Maybe the Marines will have a vacuum flask,” he said hopefully.

Felix Crooke was already wearing his rain cape when he came downstairs. Bushell wondered at that for a moment, but then realized it let the RAM carry his revolver on his belt unseen. At exactly half past four, a steamer pulled up in front of the Skidegate Lodge. The three RAMs stepped out into light drizzle and piled into it. “Have you back at the base in just a moment, sirs,” the sailor behind the wheel said, and took off with speed enough to push Bushell back against his seat. The steamer stopped behind two large lorries with khaki canvas tops. Waiting next to the lorries were Commander Nathan Hairston and his promised two squads of Royal Marines. “Good morning,” Hairston boomed blithely when the RAMs got out of the motorcar. He looked from Bushell to Stanley, back again. “Yes, for civilian gear what you have isn’t bad at all. Now, you’ll want rifles, you said.” When the RAMs nodded, a Marine lieutenant fetched a couple of Lee-Enfields and handed one to Bushell, the other to Stanley.

The weapons had their magazines attached. When Bushell checked, he found a cartridge in the breech.

“Good,” he said approvingly, flicking on the safety. “The best way not to have trouble is to be ready for it.” He slung the rifle over his shoulder. By the time the day was done, he feared he’d be walking with a list. He hadn’t carried a rifle since his army days.

“Speaking of readiness,” the lieutenant said, and handed Stanley and him four five-round boxes of ammunition apiece.

Bushell stowed them in the outer pockets of his anorak. The weight had already started to grow, and he wasn’t carrying anything like full kit, as the Royal Marines were. He said, “Thank you very much, Lieutenant, ah - “

“Colonel, let me introduce to you Lieutenant Morton Green and his NCOs, Sergeant Fuller and Corporals Johnston and Wainwright,” Hairston said. He did not present the Marine privates. “They know their task is to assist you and your companions in apprehending the four men of whom we spoke yesterday and any of their confederates who may be with them. For this mission, they will treat your RAM ranks as if those obtained in the Royal Marines.”

“That is a high honor,” Bushell said. Lieutenant Green saluted smartly. He was about thirty, of medium height but very fit, with features that seemed both tough and intelligent. His sergeant, Fuller, was a few years older, and had eyes that missed nothing. Although he was blond and ruddy, his air of unhurried competence put Bushell in mind of Samuel Stanley. Corporal Johnston was tall and Corporal Wainwright short - or perhaps it was the other way round.

As for the rest of the Marines, what struck Bushell like a blow was how young they were. Had the soldiers he’d commanded as a lieutenant been that young? Very likely, but he’d been young in those days, too. Now he felt almost grandfatherly. He saw the Marines studying him, too. Wondering if I can keep up on a hike through the woods, he thought. He wondered the same thing. One way or the other, he’d find out.

“No sense standing around here making chitchat,” Commander Hairston said. “You have your job to do, and I wish you only success with it.”

Lieutenant Green waved at the Marines, who swarmed aboard the lorries. Those were troop transporters identical to the ones the army used, with six inward-facing seats on each side of the bed. With the drivers and two more men on each front seat, there was room and to spare for the twenty Marines, their four leaders, and the three RAMs.

“Good luck,” Hairston called. As if that were a signal, the lorries rolled away. They seemed to have no dampers; whenever a tyre went over a stone or into a pothole, everybody aboard felt it. The kidney-shaking ride took Bushell back across half a lifetime. By the way Samuel Stanley smiled to himself, he was remembering long-ago lorry trips, too.

The few civilians up and about in Skidegate didn’t give the lorries a second glance. They were used to military vehicles passing through for one reason or another. From Skidegate, the road swung north along the eastern coast of Graham Island through the Haida town of Skidegate Village and then up toward Tlell.

Bushell, Crooke, and Stanley, having got on last, had seats near their lorry’s rear gate and could see, if not where they were going, at least where they’d been. Bushell had noticed the totem poles of Skidegate Village as the ferry came in to Skidegate itself. Now he got a better look at the houses those poles fronted.

Some were of various imperial styles, like those the British had built in Skidegate. Others, though, preserved the native Haida way of doing things: long houses built of red cedar and roofed with cedar bark. The beams of the roofs - there always seemed to be seven - projected out several feet from the walls at front and rear, perhaps to offer space where people could get dry before going inside. A couple of the long houses had smoke rising from a vent hole in the center of the roof, an arrangement the Haida Lounge must have borrowed along with its name.

Skidegate Village was no larger than its name implied. In moments it fell away behind the lorries. The road ran north just inland from the beach, against which the waters of the Hecate Strait slapped gently. The beach was strewn with driftwood. Along with the wood, Bushell spied a couple of large glass globes that puzzled him until he realized they were floats for fishing nets. He wondered how many miles and how many years they had drifted before finally washing ashore. Gulls and other shorebirds flew up in squawking clouds when the lorries went by.

“They don’t seem used to having people about,” Felix Crooke said. “I wonder how much traffic this road gets.”

“Not much, by the look of it,” Bushell answered. “Haven’t seen any steamers behind us since we got out of Skidegate Village, and I haven’t noticed any coming southbound past us, either.”

He looked inland. Every so often, a dirt trail would join the north-south road. Most of those trails were overgrown, and a lot of the buildings to which they led were weathered and abandoned, their broken-out windows staring like blind eyes. Making a go of it here on the edge of nowhere was anything but easy. Every so often, though, someone managed it. A couple of farms looked prosperous, with shaggy cattle grazing in the meadows. Bushell pointed to one of them. “There you go, Sam. That’s probably where last night’s venison came from.”

“Colonel, you have a low, nasty, suspicious mind, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bloody bit if you were right,” Stanley said.

“We’ve spare water bottles for you and your friends, Colonel,” Lieutenant Green said, “and St. Mary’s Spring is a good place to fill them. The water’s always good there, and you can’t say the same for the streams running into Masset Inlet. It’ll be coming up in a couple of minutes, if you’d like me to stop the lorry for you.”

“Yes, do that, please,” Bushell answered. No tea, he thought with a mental sigh. “Could we beg some rations from you, too? We left the hotel without breakfast.”

“I expect we can do something about that, sir,” Morton Green said. The Marines donated tins of stew, some hard crackers, and a jar of jam that smelled something like pineapple and something like methylated spirit. Felix Crooke sniffed at it and shook his head; like the jouncing ride of the lorry, it took Bushell back to his younger days.

St. Mary’s Spring ran cold and clear. Bushell filled his bottle, screwed on the top. Then he dug into a hasty breakfast. The stew would have been better hot (it wouldn’t have been good no matter what anyone did to it), but he could eat it cold, and he didn’t have time to waste. Along with Stanley and Crooke, he chucked the empty container into a rubbish bin by the spring and climbed back into the lorry. They got into Tlell about forty-five minutes after they’d left the Skidegate naval base. The little town lay between tree-covered dunes and the Tlell River. The lorries didn’t stop, but rolled over the Tlell River Bridge. The road swung inland after that, running northwest toward Port Clements. About halfway to the town on Masset Inlet lay Mayer Lake, not quite a mile north of the road. As the gulls on the coast had done, loons and other water birds flew up in alarm when the lorries went past. Port Clements was bigger than Tlell, though Bushell doubted it held as many as five hundred people. It boasted a doctor’s office, but not a post office. A sawmill was much the largest building in town. A couple of men - loggers, by the look of them - glanced curiously at the lorries as they headed for the wharf. “Except for the cutter crew, we don’t - the Navy doesn’t, I mean - come here all that often,”

Lieutenant Green said.

“That’s not so good,” Sam Stanley said quietly. “We’re liable to be blowing our cover.”

“I thought of that, too, but I’m not going to worry about it,” Bushell answered. “If Buckley Bay’s been abandoned for the past sixty years, our chums over there aren’t likely to have a telephone to let someone here ring them up and warn them we’re on the way. As long as the Navy keeps boats here tied up at the wharf for a couple of hours after we leave, we should be all right.”

“Good enough,” Stanley said, and leaned back in his hard, uncomfortable seat. Bushell, the other RAMs, and the Royal Marines scrambled out of the lorries as soon as they stopped moving. The cutter, the HMS Grampus - a miniature corvette about seventy feet long, with a two-pounder for a deck gun - already had her engine running; stinking fuel-oil fumes fouled the cool, damp air.

“Permission to come aboard?” Lieutenant Green called at the foot of the gangplank.

“Granted,” said the lieutenant commander who looked to command the cutter. “You’ve given the lads and me something out of the ordinary to do with our morning, I’ll say that much for you.”

“How far is it across the inlet, Captain?” Bushell asked the officer in charge of the cutter. He peered west himself, but mist and cloud obscured the far shore.

The naval officer beamed at having his functional title given rather than the rank he wore on his cuffs and shoulder boards. “It’s about ten miles to where Commander Hairston told me you want to be left off.”

He stuck out his hand. “I’m Edward Woodbridge, by the way.”

“Tom Bushell.” Bushell introduced Crooke and Stanley.

“Pleased to meet you, gentlemen,” Woodbridge said. “I’m told this has somewhat to do with The Two Georges’ going missing. Never would have expected any such thing here - the Queen Charlottes are mostly quiet as the tomb, not to put too fine a point on it - but we’ll do everything we can to help you get it back. Love that painting, I do.” He looked around. “Are you all aboard? Yes? We’ll cast off, then.”

The rumble of the engine grew louder and deeper. The cutter pulled away from the wharf and onto the still, smooth waters of Masset Inlet. One of the sailors came up to Bushell. “We have a small galley, sir. Would you fancy a cup of tea?”

“Would I, by God!” Bushell exclaimed. “I’ve been wanting some all morning.” The sailor brought it to him in a thick china mug. It was hot and strong and sweet, but had no milk in it. He wondered about that, and asked, “Haven’t you got an icebox in your little galley?”

“That we do, sir, but no milk in it, I’m afraid,” the man answered. “Sailors up here in the Queen Charlottes, we mostly drink our tea Russian-style, with sugar and nothing more.”

“Alaska’s close by,” Bushell observed.

“Yes, sir, that’s part of it, I suppose. The other side of the shilling is, it stays hotter longer without pouring milk into it. In the chill and the wet hereabouts, that’s not the worst thing in the world.”

Bushell walked to the bow of the cutter. Port Clements was already hazy behind him, the far shore of Masset Inlet not yet visible ahead. Two sailors at the bow stared intently down into the water of the inlet.

“What are you looking for?” Bushell asked.

“Deadheads, sir,” one of them answered without turning his head. “All sorts of logs drifting just below the surface. Sometimes, for no reason anybody can figure, they’ll bob up into the air - or into your hull, if you’re not watching out for em.”

“I see,” Bushell said. That watch no doubt also explained why the Grampus wasn’t making a better turn of speed: you didn’t want to be going too fast to stop or swerve if you spotted a deadhead. He checked the time. They’d been a little more than an hour on the road from the Skidegate naval base to Port Clements. It still wasn’t close to half past six. Not bad, he thought. The sun, already high in the northeastern sky, was trying to burn through the clouds that hung over the Queen Charlotte Islands. A bald eagle flew low across the inlet, chasing an osprey with a fish in its talons. The osprey dropped the fish and flapped off, screeching furiously; the eagle flew away with the prize. “Damned thief,” Bushell muttered. As far as he was concerned, that the Independence Party and the Sons of Liberty revered the bald eagle said more about them than it did about the bird.

Because of the watch for logs, the cutter took most of an hour to reach the western shore of Masset Inlet. She glided to a stop about a hundred yards from the muddy beach. “Lower the boats!” Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge said. The sailors went about it as if they’d done it a thousand times, which they probably had. Drill was bloody dull, but it paid off.

One boat held a dozen men, the other eight. The Royal Marines got down into them with the same practiced ease the sailors had shown. A couple of Navy men joined them in each boat. Scrambling down a rope with his feet against the side of a rolling ship was nothing Bushell had practiced, but the Marines grabbed him and helped him ease into the larger boat.

They also aided Samuel Stanley and Felix Crooke. “Thank you, gentlemen,” Crooke said. “For a moment there, I felt like the pendulum in a grandfather clock.” The Marines grinned, proud of the skill they’d shown.

From the deck of the Grampus, Ted Woodbridge called, “I’ve never seen bullocks and RAMs in the same boat till now.” The Royal Marines hooted at him. His grin got broader. “Good hunting, my friends. I’ll see you off Buckely Bay at noon.”

The Marines seized the oars in the bottom of the boats and made short work of the stretch of water between them and the shore. Mud and sand grated under the boats as they rowed them up onto the beach. The Marines leaped out. Rather more slowly, the three RAMs followed. “I’m already feeling old, and we haven’t even started hiking yet,” Bushell said. Sam Stanley nodded agreement. The sailors rowed the boats back to the cutter to pick up the Royal Marines who hadn’t been able to fit the first time. When everyone was ashore, Lieutenant Green turned to Bushell and said, “I expect you’ll want us to go inland a bit before we move on Buckley Bay, eh, sir? If we just come straight down the beach, the chaps we’re looking for will be able to spy us a long ways off.”

“Can’t have that,” Bushell said. “Until we get there, Lieutenant, I’m going to put myself in your hands. You know this country better than I do.” He waved at the trees - cedar and spruce, pine and fir - that came down close to the beach. The land rose up more steeply here than it had on the eastern side of the inlet; he’d seen that much from the cutter. What it would be like when he got into the forest, he couldn’t begin to guess. Most of his military experience had been on the border with Nueva España, hot, dry country as different from these woods as the mountains of the moon.

“Come on, then,” Green said, and led the men inland from the beach. Bushell felt as if he’d stepped into a cool green cathedral, with God the architect rather than man. The sun had come out, but was rarely able to penetrate the canopy of dark green branches overhead. The air was moist and full of the tangy, resinous scent of the trees all around. He wanted to gulp down great lungsful of it and take them with him when he went back to New Liverpool.

“We’ll form a skirmish line, man on the left close enough to the edge of the woods to see the inlet,”

Green said. “If you get separated, steer southwest by the sun and you won’t go far wrong. If the sun goes behind the clouds again or you’re in amongst growth too thick to let you see it, remember that your compass needle will bear a bit northeast, not true north. We’re close enough to the North Magnetic Pole for the deflection to matter.”

“Now there’s something I never imagined I’d have to worry about,” Samuel Stanley said. He took a compass from a pocket of his anorak and gave it a thoughtful look. “Can’t tell that it’s lying to me.”

Shaking his head, he put it back. Bushell kicked at the red-brown needles underfoot; he hadn’t thought to bring a compass.

They set off toward Buckley Bay, each man only a couple of yards from the fellow to his side. Ferns pushed up through the dead needles: bright splashes of green against the dun ground and tree trunks. Here and there, moss found a hold on some of those trunks, and on boulders as well. Bushell suspected that if he stood still for a couple of hours in the cool moistness of the forest, moss would start growing on him, too.

Something screeched jeep! jeep! right above his ear. He had his rifle off his back and halfway to his shoulder before he heard a whir of flapping wings and got a glimpse of a dark blue bird streaking away.

“What the devil was that?” he asked. “It scared me out of a year’s growth.”

“Just a jay, sir,” the Marine on his left answered. “Noisy buggers, aren’t they? I’d sooner run across one of them than a bear, though.”

“Right.” Bushell kept his voice under tight rein. He wondered how many RAM investigations had been halted because a wild beast devoured the investigator. Most of the time, he worried only about dangerous men. Adding wild animals to the mix struck him as unfair.

Every so often, he had to leap over or splash through a little stream; from everything he’d seen, the Queen Charlotte Islands had more water than they knew what to do with. Before long, his feet were soaked. He envied the Royal Marines their tall boots. “Hope you don’t pick up any leeches, sir,” the Marine beside him said helpfully. He gave the pup a dirty look and kept slogging along. To his right, Sam Stanley was also making good progress. Not bad for a couple of old men, Bushell thought. Felix Crooke was years younger than either of them but already starting to pant. “I’ve been behind a desk too long,” he said. “If I fall behind, just shoot me and carry on.”

Stanley made as if to unsling his rifle, then seemed to think better of it. “Can’t do that, sir, I’m afraid,” he said. “The sound would carry too far.”

“I’m so glad you have my welfare in mind,” Crooke said with a rasping chuckle. After two or three miles, they came to a river too wide to be easily forded.

“There’s a log bridge a couple of hundred yards upstream,” Morton Green said. The party gathered together to find it and crossed a few at a time.

Bushell looked down into the clear water to the stream’s gravel bed. Fish hung motionless above the pebbles and small rounded stones, or else dashed off to snap at insects on the surface. Some of the shining green creatures were as long as his arm. As his knowledge of fish before they were cooked was on the theoretical side, he asked Lieutenant Green, “Are those salmon?”

The Marine nodded. “Yes, sir, and trout, too. They all make fine eating when there’s time to fish.” He walked over the bridge with a sigh of regret. So did Bushell. The fresher fish was, the better, and how could it be fresher than just pulled from a river? He thought it a pity his water jar held only water and not a good white wine, a Meursault perhaps, or a Vouvray, or a Rhine wine from the Palatinate. Not long after they’d crossed over the river, they came out of forest into a stretch of saplings and weeds and brush running for several hundred yards: logged-over land that hadn’t yet regrown. Bushell said.

“This can’t date back to the days when Buckley Bay was a going concern.”

“It doesn’t,” Lieutenant Green answered. “From the height of those young trees, I’d say it was cut about ten years ago: the trunks would have been rafted across the inlet to Port Clements and dealt with there. By the time it’s sat idle sixty years, it’ll be ready for another round of cutting.”

Bushell was beginning to feel his years when one of the Royal Marines said, “Hold up - pass the word.”

Inside a few steps, everyone had stopped. A moment later, the reason for the halt came down the line:

“You can see the old settlement through the trees.”

“How are we going to proceed?” Lieutenant Green asked. “If it were a purely military operation, I’d send some men through the woods beyond Buckley Bay and approach from all sides at once to prevent any possible escapes. If, however, you’d sooner just tramp up and rap on the front door, we can do that. Consider me and my men at your disposal.”

“Normally, we would just rap at the front door,” Felix Crooke said.

“Normally, we wouldn’t be carrying these.” Bushell reached over his shoulder to touch the barrel of the rifle slung there. “For that matter, I don’t know which front door in the settlement belongs to the men we’re looking for. We’ll use the military approach here.”

Crooke still looked doubtful, but Samuel Stanley nodded emphatic agreement and said, “Villains with rifles aren’t the sort of people whose front doors I care to rap on.”

“Good enough.” Green gave swift orders to his men. Sergeant Fuller and Corporal Wainwright led one squad off on the flanking maneuver Green had described. Corporal Johnston and the rest of the Royal Marines stayed behind with Green and the RAMs. Green said, “Let’s spread out along the treeline, not showing ourselves, and see what we can see.”

What Bushell saw, from behind a cedar whose trunk was thicker than his body, was the ghostly ruin of what once had been a thriving little town. Overgrown streets made a grid centering on a small square. More than his lifetime of storms and rain and wind and sun had peeled every speck of paint from the buildings and bleached almost white the boards of which they were made. The windows were all blank and vacant, with not a shard of glass anywhere. Here and there, ferns grew on rooftops; beards of moss and lichen hung from eaves.

A couple of trees over, Sam Stanley let out a soft hiss. “Do you see it, sir?” he called to Bushell. “That place on the east side of the square with the big window in front, looks like it was a grocer’s shop once upon a time. There’s smoke coming up from the chimney.”

“I see it,” Bushell answered. It wasn’t a lot of smoke, just the wisps that came from a low fire, but it stood out like a flag (an Independence Party flag, Bushell thought) in a town otherwise slowly being reclaimed by wilderness.

Lieutenant Green saw it, too. “Is that where our suspects live, sir?” he asked Bushell.

“Either them or the Ladies’ Aid Society,” Bushell answered. “How long will your other squad of Marines need to get around to the far side of Buckley Bay?”

“Let’s give them fifteen minutes, unless we spy them advancing out of the forest there sooner,” Green said. “I am correct in assuming you wish a stealthy approach to the target building?”

“That might be a good idea,” Bushell agreed dryly.

Felix Crooke said, “Surely they’ll surrender when they realize we represent the law and the military power, and that we have them outnumbered and surrounded.”

“Don’t think of them as ordinary villains, Felix,” Bushell said. “Think of them as soldiers. They’re playing for keeps.” Behind a spruce, Crooke nodded. Bushell did not like that nod. It looked more as if it came from dutiful obedience than from conviction.

Fifteen minutes passed, then a couple more. Just as Bushell was beginning to get itchy, several men in dark khaki that made them hard to spot burst out of the woods on the far side of Buckley Bay and sprinted toward the lesser cover of saplings, tall clumps of fir, and scattered boulders. As soon as they had flopped down in their new places of concealment, the other half of the squad Sergeant Fuller led ran past them into other hiding places closer to the abandoned town. It was as pretty an example of move-and-support as Bushell had ever seen.

“Now we can start,” Lieutenant Green said softly. “Corporal, you and the odd numbers forward, if you please.”

“Sir!” Corporal Johnston said. He and half the squad ran forward forty or fifty yards and went to ground in the cover they’d chosen for themselves.

“Even numbers and gentlemen of the RAMs,” Green said. Bushell realized he should long since have figured out where he was going to run when the time came. He hadn’t played this game in too long, too long. He spotted a fallen tree that for whatever reason hadn’t been dragged away after it went down. It had lain there a long time; sword ferns grew in profusion atop it. Crouching almost double, he ran for it and dove in behind it hard enough to knock half the wind out of him. Sam Stanley came down behind a moss-covered rock. He mimed wiping sweat from his forehead, but the way he panted was no joke. Southwest of Buckley Bay, Sergeant Fuller’s squad was moving up again. Behind Bushell, Corporal Johnston called, “Odd numbers move.” His half of the squad sprinted past the RAMs.

This time, Bushell had picked in advance the spot to which he would go. When Lieutenant Green ordered the even numbers ahead, he streaked for the corner of a building on the very edge of Buckley Bay. He crouched, gasping, behind it. Streaks of rust from old nails bled down the boards and gave them their only color.

Corporal Johnston’s demi-squad worked their way into town, too. “Now we move forward until we are noticed,” Green said quietly, “at which point, command returns to your hands, Colonel Bushell.”

“Right,” Bushell said. He slithered through the heather and ferns that choked what had been one of Buckley Bay’s main streets, making for the open square on which stood the building the men he sought were using. He could smell the smoke from their fire: not just wood but roasting meat. The odor made his belly rumble and spit rush into his mouth. Come on, boys, you be hungry, too, he thought. Watch the joint get done cooking or sit around eating it up, don’t pay a bit of attention to what’s going on outside, and we’ll scoop you up neat as you please.

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than a shout made him, his RAM comrades, and the Royal Marines freeze in place: “Who the devil’s sneaking around out there? Whoever you are, you’d better clear out, or you’ll be sorry.”

“Who are you?” Bushell called back. “Is this the residence of four gentlemen named Geoff and Patrick and Elgin and Benjamin?” The formalities had to be observed: there was the one-in-a-milliard chance he was wrong.

“Who wants to know?” that same voice yelled from inside the old shop. To Bushell’s horror, Felix Crooke broke cover and stood up, saying, “We are members of the Royal American Mounted Police and the Royal Marines. We have you outnumbered and trapped. Come out with your hands above your heads and you shall not be harmed.”

“Get down, you damned fool!” Bushell shouted, a split second behind Samuel Stanley. Crooke started to shake his head - afterwards, Bushell was almost sure of it. But an element of doubt always remained, for at that moment a rifle shot rang out. Crooke went down then, but not of his own will; he crashed to earth as if all his bones had suddenly turned to water.

Bushell stared in disbelief and horror. He’d warned Felix Crooke to think of the men they were after as soldiers, not ordinary criminals, but he hadn’t thought of them that way himself, not down deep where it counted. He’d never fired a weapon in the field in all his years as a RAM, and never dreamt of being fired on himself. That was something Russian Okhrana men worried about, or inquisitors of the Holy Alliance. The game was played by different rules in the British Empire. No. The game had been played by different rules.

“Come on, the lot of you, and you’ll get what he got!” The man inside the grocer’s shop sounded fiercely exultant, as if he had done something good and true and noble, not shot a man down in cold blood.

Shock at the unexpected gunplay held Bushell frozen, just for a moment. To the Royal Marines, though, gunfire was anything but unexpected. They opened up with a fusillade that sent bullets flying through the empty window frame from which the shot had come and made chips fly off the timbers of the building with the smoking chimney.

That great racket of riflery got Bushell moving. All at once, he wasn’t a RAM any more, but a subaltern with troops pinned down amid mesquite and chaparral not far from the Rio Grande. As he had then, he knew what wanted doing now: getting his wounded out of further harm’s way. He dashed out into the square to Felix Crooke. A bullet cracked past his head closer than he cared to think about: the Marines’ barrage hadn’t silenced the Sons of Liberty. He slung Crooke across his back and, staggering under the weight of the bigger man, carried him through an open doorway into a shop or home that perhaps had not known the tread of human feet since before he was born. He set Crooke down and groped for a pulse. He found none. Crooke’s eyes were wide and staring. Frantically, Bushell pulled off the khaki cape his fellow RAM was wearing and ripped open his tunic. The bullet - without a doubt, a three-line bullet, the clinical part of him reported: a bullet from a Nagant had struck just to the left of Crooke’s breastbone. He’d been dead, he must have been dead, before he hit the ground.

Cold and terrible anger filled Bushell. Later, when he had time, he would mourn. Now . . . Now he flicked the safety off his own rifle, heaved it to his shoulder, and fired at what he thought was movement back behind the abandoned shop Geoff and Patrick, Elgin and Benjamin had taken for their own. The kick from the Lee-Enfield was like the touch of an old friend: it had been away for a long time, but was immediately familiar. He worked the bolt. An empty brass shell casing flipped out of the breech and landed beside his feet with a small, metallic ting. A fresh round in the chamber, he peered out, waiting for a target.

After the first hail of lead, a lull came over the firing. A couple of Marines were down, one ominously still, the other twisting and writhing in pain. The rest had pulled back into the buildings across the overgrown square from the shop. Bushell couldn’t see Samuel Stanley. He couldn’t worry now, any more than he could mourn. Finishing this dreadful business came first.

“Give yourselves up!” he called across the square. “You’ll have a fair trial.”

“Not bloody likely,” came the reply - a different voice from the one that had spoken first. He fervently hoped the owner of that voice was dead. “We’d swing, and you bloody well know it. You want us, you stinking redcoat, you come get us and pay the price.” As if to punctuate his words, he fired at the spot from which he thought Bushell’s voice was coming. The bullet slammed into the back wall ten feet or so from where the RAM stood.

Several Marines blazed away at the muzzle flash. A mocking laugh told them they’d missed their target.

“Covering fire, sir, if you’d be so kind,” an unruffled voice said: after a moment, Bushell recognized it as Sergeant Fuller’s.

“Covering fire!” Lieutenant Green shouted. The Royal Marines banged away at their foes. Bushell emptied the box of ammunition in his rifle. He pulled another magazine from his pocket, clicked it into place, and shot again. The Sons of Liberty seemed to have plenty of cartridges. He was painfully aware he didn’t.

Sergeant Fuller and half his squad raced across the street where the square ended, to try to flank out the villains. Someone inside the building where the Sons of Liberty sheltered was screaming now, a high, shrill sound of torment that made the hairs on the back of Bushell’s neck try to rise. But firing kept coming from the building, and from a couple of others nearby. The Sons were not making it easy for anyone.

Charging straight across the square at them was nothing but a grandiose way of committing suicide. Flanking them out, as Fuller had realized, gave better odds. Bushell crawled to the rear of the building where he’d brought Felix Crooke, groped in gloom for a back door. His hand closed on something cold and wet and slimy that writhed as he squeezed it: a slug as big and thick as his forefinger. He made a choking sound of disgust, wiped his palm on the thigh of his denims, and at last found the latch he’d been seeking.

The door didn’t want to open. He got to his feet, hoping no one could see him from across the square, and slammed a shoulder against it. It gave all at once. He stumbled out into the overgrown alley behind the building.

Motion there made the barrel of his rifle automatically jerk toward it. He checked himself and exclaimed in glad relief: “Sam!”

“Chief!” Stanley had been swinging his rifle toward Bushell. “How’s Felix?” he demanded. Bushell gave a thumbs-down. Stanley grimaced. “Damn the bastards!” he said. “I figured our best chance at winkling them out was sliding round to one side.”

“Same thing I was thinking,” Bushell said. Together they trotted north past the edge of the square. Getting close a street at a time was different from running across the open space straight at the enemy’s guns.

“Had enough of coming under fire in my army days,” Stanley said. “Never thought it would happen to me as a RAM.”

“Neither did I,” Bushell answered. “Just because we’re up near Russia doesn’t mean we’re in it.”

They wrestled another back door open. The brass latch had turned green over the years, but was still strong. Brushing aside cobwebs, they went out to the front of the building and peered through a window. Bushell paused a moment to catch his breath. He could still smell the cheerful odor of the cookfire and faintly, beneath it, the reek from the rubbish the Sons of Liberty had discarded over their years here. He looked at Stanley, who nodded. They yanked open the front door and dashed for the buildings on the eastern side of the street.

A bullet kicked up dirt a couple of feet away from Bushell. He dove straight through a window as bare of glass as a skull’s eye socket was of flesh. “Oof!” he said as he landed on a hard floor, but he bounced to his feet. Sam Stanley sailed through the window next to the one he’d chosen, and came to earth no more gracefully than he had. He too, though, quickly got up again.

The back door to this building opened without a squeal or a groan, for which Bushell was grateful. Lee-Enfield at the ready, he stepped out into the alley. Samuel Stanley came right behind him. “Watch yourself, Chief,” Stanley said, his eyes flicking every which way. “The buggers have been moving about “

“Don’t I know it.” Bushell too was scanning every building, every window, every doorway. The inside of his mouth felt dry and rough. His heart pounded. Breath whistled in and out of his nostrils. He’d forgotten what combat did to a man.

The firing picked up again off to the north, this time from the flank. “That Fuller, he knows what he wants to do and how to do it,” Stanley said, now sounding intensely satisfied. Bushell nodded, unsurprised at the way his adjutant responded to an NCO’s professional competence.

From the south, a young man came dashing round the corner. He wore a bushy beard, but the hair atop his head was cropped Roundhead close. He carried a rifle in his right hand.

“Hold it right there!” Bushell shouted, at the same instant as Samuel Stanley screamed, “Drop that gun or you’re dead!”

Instead of dropping it, the man started to raise it to his shoulder. Bushell and Stanley fired together. The rifle flew from the young man’s hands. He let out a grunt, a sound more of startlement than of pain. One finger started to move toward a hole in his wool plaid shirt, as if wondering how it had got there. Before the motion was more than well begun, he crumpled amidst the ferns.

Bushell ran to him. The fellow had fallen facedown, which let Bushell see the exit wounds in his back. He was still breathing, but more feebly with every moment that passed. “He’s not going to make it, Sam,”

Bushell said.

“Not with one in the chest and one in the belly, he won’t,” Stanley agreed. He knelt beside the Son of Liberty. “We have to try, though. Cover me while I work on him - wish I had a proper wound dressing here; this’ll cost me my vest.” He shrugged out of his anorak, unbuttoned his shirt, and peeled off the white cotton vest beneath it.

Bushell trotted up toward the corner, sprawled behind a long-abandoned barrel. From there, he could pick off anyone who tried to come by. The firing by the old grocer’s shop had died down again. He heard running feet. His finger tensed on the trigger.

No one came into sight. From around the corner came Sergeant Fuller’s no-nonsense tones: “If that’s you, you RAMs, give me your names.”

“Bushell and Stanley,” Bushell answered. “We have one of the villains down here, Sergeant.”

“He’s gone, Chief,” Stanley said. He rubbed his hands on the ground, then reached for his shirt and anorak.

“We have two dead, one wounded further south,” Sergeant Fuller said, showing himself now. “That should be the lot.” His face went grim, or rather, grimmer. “Good riddance, I say.”

VII

Bushell pulled out his watch and looked at it. When he saw the hour was just past nine, he shook his head in astonishment. The fight with the Sons of Liberty seemed to have lasted for hours, not bare minutes. He’d run into that before, down on the Nuevespañolan border. One more thing about combat I’d managed to forget, he thought.

“What now?” Sam Stanley asked. “The cutter isn’t due back till noon.”

“We search the area and we question the prisoner,” Bushell said. “I wish Felix hadn’t bought his plot. He was the one who knew the Sons backwards and forwards.” He turned to Fuller. “What were your casualties, Sergeant?”

“Not counting your comrade, sir, two dead and four wounded,” the noncom answered. “None of the wounds seems likely to prove fatal, but one of the lads will be on a stick for a long time to come, I’m afraid: took a bullet in the ankle.”

“I’m sorry,” Bushell said. “I never dreamt it would come to - this.” Few criminals in the NAU had firearms, few of those who had them used them when the forces of the law caught them up, and none who did resort to firearms fought with such determination. None had, at any rate - not till now.

“In what sort of shape is the one you captured?” Stanley asked.

“Bullet in the shoulder, through-and-through flesh wound in the leg.” Sergeant Fuller spat in the dirt.

“Bugger’ll live to hang. Waste of good rope, I call it, but what can you do?”

“Can he answer questions?” Bushell said.

A murky light kindled in Fuller’s eyes. “If he doesn’t, by God, we’ve ways to make him sing.”

Two things flashed through Bushell’s mind: Sam would never say such a thing and then, a moment later, Thank heaven the military stays out of police work most places. He kept that to himself; Fuller had put his life on the line to bag the Sons of Liberty. What he did say was, “Take us to him. We’ll see what he tells us.”

“Yes, sir.” Sergeant Fuller led them back toward the grocer’s shop. They passed several two-man teams of Royal Marines methodically going through the abandoned businesses of Buckley Bay. “I set them searching, sir,” Fuller said, noting Bushell’s glance. “We don’t know for a fact there were only the four of them, do we?”

“No, we don’t.” Bushell took a tighter grip on his rifle; he hadn’t thought of that. His soldierly skills, at least in the field, left a good deal to be desired these days. He hoped he’d made up for that loss with what he’d learned as a RAM. Given the way The Two Georges had vanished from under his nose, he had no proof of that, either.

No more gunshots rang out, from which he presumed the Marines found no one new to flush from cover. Lieutenant Green and a couple of other men crouched on the ground beside a fellow who, from his looks, could have been a cousin to the Son of Liberty Bushell and Stanley had shot. He had a bandage on his shoulder and another on his leg, both stained with red. Green looked up. “Here he is, Colonel. Says his name is Elgin Goldsmith. Past that, he’s kept mum, except to say he wants to speak to a solicitor.”

Bushell glowered at the prisoner. “To hell with him and to hell with what he wants. Your men are more important to me, Lieutenant. How are your wounded? Sergeant Fuller says they should pull through.”

“Seems that way, yes,” Green said, nodding, “though poor Metcalf took a nasty one. Do you want to see what you can get out of Mr. Goldsmith here?” He made the title one of contempt.

“What I want is to drag him into the woods and let the bears have him,” Bushell said savagely. “If I do that, though, I sink to his level, which isn’t a place I care to go.” He squatted beside Lieutenant Green.

“All right, Goldsmith, you may as well talk. It can’t make things worse for you, and it might make them better.”

Pain twisted Goldsmith’s face, but his pale eyes blazed at that. “Don’t make me laugh,” he said. “You’ll fucking try me and you’ll fucking hang me, whether I nark or not.”

Since that was true, Bushell didn’t bother arguing it. “Where did you get the rifles you were posting down to New Liverpool?” he asked. Goldsmith set his jaw and said nothing. In a conversational tone of voice, Bushell remarked, “I wonder what would happen if I hit that shoulder of yours with my rifle butt purely by accident, of course.”

“Chief - “ Samuel Stanley began in worried tones. He hadn’t cared for Sergeant Fuller’s suggestion either, then. The sergeant, though, grinned from ear to ear. Bushell would not have cared to be on the receiving end of that grin.

Elgin Goldsmith started to shrug, winced, and stopped halfway. “Go on, then, you damned Okhrana man, if you’re about to. Couldn’t make me hurt no worse than I do already.”

“Oh yes, he could,” Sergeant Fuller said, sounding as if he looked forward to the prospect - and also as if he knew what he was talking about.

Bushell turned his head away from the prisoner before he sighed. One of the things he’d learned was that, unfortunately, courage did not reside only in the hearts of those who were by his standards good men. Villains had their share of it, too: and, of course, no man was ever a villain in his own eyes. Goldsmith no doubt reckoned himself a martyr to the cause of liberty. To him, the cause justified gunrunning, murder, and whatever other crimes he’d committed.

To Bushell, no cause justified crimes. While he might threaten torture, he would not inflict it. “How many rifles have you sent to New Liverpool?” he asked. Goldsmith said nothing. Bushell tried again: “Who pays you to send the rifles, and how much?”

When Goldsmith still refused to talk, Sergeant Fuller said, “Why don’t you walk out into the woods, Colonel? I’ll get your answers for you, and you won’t have to know how I did it.” Noncommissioned officers did many useful things for their superiors in that fashion, but Bushell shook his head. He might not see what Fuller did, but he’d know.

The Marine sergeant shrugged; his was not to argue with a colonel. Elgin Goldsmith visibly gloated. That came closer than any of Fuller’s suggestions to making Bushell want to let the Marine loose on him. Instead, he turned away himself. “Let’s see what we can find in the building where they were living,” he said to Samuel Stanley. “Maybe that will tell us what our charming friend won’t.”

“Maybe,” Stanley said. As they walked toward the grocer’s shop, he added quietly, for Bushell’s ears alone, “For a second there, Chief, I thought you really were going to knock that bugger around.”

“The only time I was tempted was when he sneered at me,” Bushell answered. “If he’d caught me instead of the other way round, he wouldn’t have thought twice.” He stepped into the gloom inside the shop. “To hell with that. What have we here?”

As his eyes adjusted, he saw dark stains on the rammed-earth floor. A trail of blood led toward the back and, when he followed it, out into the alley behind the grocer’s shop. Maybe he hadn’t fired at an imaginary target back there after all, then.

Behind him, Samuel Stanley whistled softly. “Will you just look at this, Chief?”

Bushell had followed the blood trail into the back room without paying attention to anything else there. Now he ducked back inside and turned around. He sucked in his breath in what was almost a gasp: a couple of dozen Nagant rifles hung on nails that had been driven into the boards of the wall. On the floor were piled wooden chests. The top one was open, and half empty. He reached in and picked up a metal five-round box magazine of slightly different shape from the one that fed his Lee-Enfield.

“They had all the ammunition they needed, didn’t they?” Stanley said.

“Enough to fight a small war,” Bushell agreed. “All of it Russian gear.” He looked north, toward Alaska. Stanley nodded, understanding that huntsman’s gaze without a word of explanation. Next to the wooden ammunition chests stood a smaller one made of painted metal. A lock held it closed. Bushell attacked the chest with the butt of his rifle, venting some of the fury he hadn’t let himself turn on Elgin Goldsmith. The lock was made of stern stuff; it did not yield. After a few strokes, though, the hasp that held it to the chest broke off.

Bushell lifted the lid. For a moment, he just stared. “Lord have mercy,” Samuel Stanley said softly.

“How many roubles d’you reckon there are?”

“A great bloody lot of them,” Bushell answered. Even in the dim light of the back room, the gold coins gleamed and sparkled. Next to English sovereigns, they were little things, each one worth two shillings, a penny ha’penny. Enough of them, though, added up to a good sum of money. There were more than enough here for that.

“I wonder how often those four shipped roubles out of here along with rifles,” Stanley said. “The money and the guns all ended up in the wrong hands.”

“I know one set of hands that closed on the money,” Bushell said: “that printer I raided. He got paid in roubles for sightseeing brochures about the Queen Charlotte Islands, and spent them on those obscene pamphlets about the princesses.”

“You’d have the devil’s own time proving it before a magistrate,” Stanley said. “A smart barrister would talk about circumstantial evidence and reasonable doubt until a jury couldn’t tell right from Tuesday.” He quoted Shakespeare, something he was fond of doing: “ ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’“

Normally, Bushell would have joined him for a round of cursing at men whose principal task, as he saw it, was keeping villains out of the gaol cells they deserved. Here, though, he kept his equanimity. “I don’t care about barristers and judges. I know what I know. The Sons of Liberty here got the Nagant that killed Tricky Dick, and they got the roubles for Titus Hackett to spread his filth around. That means those two are connected here, even if neither one knew what the other was doing.”

His adjutant nodded. “It also means both operations were getting their money from the same place.”

Now he turned his head toward Russian Alaska.

“We’ll have a day of reckoning,” Bushell said. “First, we need to put our own house in order. Once we get The Two Georges back, we’ll be in a better position to ask questions of Duke Orlov in Victoria and also of Sergei Pavlov back in New Liverpool.”

“Indeed we will,” Stanley said with a certain anticipatory relish. “One always assumes Russian consuls are spies. Now we’ll have evidence to ship Sergei back to St. Petersburg. And speaking of evidence, let’s see what else we can come up with here.”

Before continuing the search, Bushell lowered the lid to the little metal chest, lest a Royal Marine find temptation stronger than duty. The trouble with gold was its very anonymity; any banker anywhere in the world would give you two shillings, a penny ha’penny for every gold rouble you handed him. Away from a setting like this, the coins weren’t evidence, they were just money. As Stanley had said, a barrister would have no trouble establishing reasonable doubt about the provenance of the printer’s roubles. Up here near the border, a lot of Russian gold would be in circulation, just as a good many British sovereigns were apt to be floating around in Sitka and Kodiak.

But for the rifles and money, the interior of the grocer’s shop yielded little in the way of evidence. Geoff, Patrick, Elgin, and Benjamin had apparently whiled away some of their time with tracts full of hatred similar to those Joseph Watkins had had in his flat, but those, however distasteful, were not against the law. The traps and lines stored in the front room said the Sons of Liberty truly had made part of their living hunting and fishing, as they’d claimed.

“This place is too bloody neat,” Samuel Stanley complained. “It’s almost as if they knew they were going to have visitors, but we made sure they hadn’t a clue.”

“Just because we haven’t found everything doesn’t mean it’s not here,” Bushell said. He snapped his fingers. “For instance - where’s their rubbish pitch?”

Stanley’s eyes lit up. “We haven’t smelled it much, so it’ll be downwind from here: by the water, I’d guess, unless they’ve gone and heaved everything straight into Masset Inlet.”

“There’s a grim thought,” Bushell said. “But you wouldn’t chuck everything into the inlet. If some of your rubbish started turning up at Port Clements, that might bring the Grampus by to give you a caution. They wouldn’t want to draw notice to themselves.”

“Let’s look about,” Stanley said.

Looking didn’t find the rubbish pitch; their noses did. As soon as they’d gone a little more than halfway toward the edge of Masset Inlet, they got wind of the stink. “That way,” they said together. After a moment, Bushell added, “It’s a wonder we haven’t spied a great flock of bald eagles quarreling over the refuse. That would have told us where they kept it.”

When they reached the building where the Sons of Liberty stowed their rubbish, they found a grid of slats nailed over its windows, perhaps for the very purpose of keeping away the eagles. The door also bore a stout padlock. “Bears,” Stanley said, and Bushell nodded.

This time, hammering at the lock with a rifle butt accomplished nothing. “Back in a moment,” Bushell said. When he returned, he had Lieutenant Green in tow, and was carrying all the keys the Sons of Liberty had had on their persons. One of those proved to fit the lock.

“Phew!” Green said, as opening the door released a wave of stinking air. “I’m damned glad this place never has hot summers.”

“Well - yes.” Bushell went first into the rubbish-filled room. The stench here wasn’t as bad as it might have been, but it was pretty bad. Cockroaches scurried round his feet; slugs would have scurried had they been able to move faster.

The midden inside reached more than halfway to the ceiling. An archaeologist could have studied the festering pile for weeks, going through it layer by layer. Bushell, however, was uninterested in the geologic past. He snatched papers off the front and top of the mound, figuring they were the most recent. Gasping and fighting his stomach, he carried a double handful outside.

“My turn,” Stanley said, and plunged into the reeking room. The papers he brought out, like those in Bushell’s hands, carried the reek with them. They were crumpled and torn and stained with tea leaves, coffee grounds, grease, and other less easily identifiable substances. As soon as Stanley emerged, Bushell went back inside.

Lieutenant Green watched them with genuine admiration. “You couldn’t make me do that every day,” he said, “not for a hundred thousand pounds a year.”

“Most of the filth we go through is metaphorical,” Bushell said, setting down another stinking load of what might have been evidence and might have been only wastepaper. “Every now and then, though - “

Samuel Stanley brought out a few more papers. “I think that’s the last of them, unless we want to go digging,” he said, and then, “Phew! They won’t let us into the Skidegate Lodge tonight, not smelling like this they won’t.”

“We’ll worry about that later.” Bushell turned to Morton Green. “Have you stripped the bodies of the Sons of Liberty? We’ll want any papers you find on them, and on the live one, too - Elgin, that’s his name.” As long as he concentrated on what needed doing here, he wouldn’t have to think about Felix Crooke, now growing cold and stiff inside a dead house in a dead town.

“We’ve searched the prisoner, sir, but, except for those keys, we haven’t gone over the effects of the dead men,” Green answered. “I’ll tend to that straightaway.”

He started to leave. Before he could, Bushell said, “If you have someone with a sack, have him bring it here so we can load this” - he groped for a word, but found only a vague gesture - “into it.” Nodding, Green took off at a trot.

That left Bushell having done everything he could for the moment. “Jesus God, Sam, what have we stumbled into?” he groaned, his face a naked mask of pain. “Poor Crooke told the buggers who we were, and they shot him down like a dog. Like a dog.” His shoulders sagged, as if, like Hercules, he’d taken the weight of the world away from Atlas for a moment.

“He was stupid, Chief, and you know it,” Samuel Stanley answered. “We told him what these villains were liable to be like, but he stood up and gave them a clean shot at him. He didn’t believe you, he didn’t believe me, he thought everything would be cricket no matter what we said - and he paid for it.”

“Thinking everything will be cricket shouldn’t get you killed,” Bushell said.

“No, it shouldn’t - but sometimes it will.” Stanley sounded very much like a veteran sergeant talking with a young lieutenant after his first action. “If everything were cricket all the time, there’d be no work for the likes of you and me.”

“He should have stayed behind his desk,” Bushell said. “He knew what he was doing there.”

“The Two Georges should have stayed on the wall in the governor’s mansion,” Stanley said. Bushell grimaced, then nodded.

Lieutenant Commander Edward Woodbridge got out of the larger of the two boats his sailors had rowed from the Grampus to the shore. Nodding to Bushell, he said, “Good morning - no, excuse me, good afternoon, Colonel. I trust you have the villains in captivity?”

Bushell gestured wordlessly. The Navy man followed him to what had been the Buckley Bay town square. The oarsmen tagged along after them. There, faces covered by rain capes, lay Felix Crooke, the three dead Sons of Liberty, and the two dead Royal Marines. With them were the wounded prisoner and the four wounded Marines.

Woodbridge stared in disbelief at the carnage. Before he could speak, one of the sailors behind him burst out, “Lor’ love a duck, wot the bleedin’ ‘ell ‘appened ‘ere?”

“Silence, Montague!” Woodbridge snapped automatically. But he said nothing more after that: Montague’s question was the only one that made sense. Bushell himself was damned if he could see how better to phrase it.

As baldly as if he were dictating an after-action report - something he would have to do all too soon - he described the morning’s events for Woodbridge. When he was through, he asked, “Could a boat have slipped out of Port Clements after the Grampus sailed, to warn these men here?”

“No, sir,” Woodbridge answered decisively. “Not possible. I’ve been on the wireless back to the port several times since we disembarked your party. No untoward action of any sort.”

“That makes sense, Chief, much as I hate to say it.” Samuel Stanley looked as unhappy as he sounded, but went on, “They wouldn’t have yelled out ‘Who are you?’ the way they did if they’d known what we were about.”

“You’re right, and I’m grasping at straws.” Bushell slammed a fist into his open palm. “It just - went wrong.” He turned away.

Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge said, “Let’s get everyone aboard ship. We’ll stow the prisoner in the brig and the other wounded in sick bay; we have a pharmacist’s mate who can tend to them there. Not that you haven’t done well with your first aid, I’m sure, but - “

Bushell nodded, cutting him off. “That would be splendid. Would you see to it?” He started to walk away, to be alone again, but duty pulled him back and made him ask, “When we get back to Port Clements, have you a telephone there I might use?”

“Certainly, Colonel,” Woodbridge answered. “Would you care to wireless a message ahead, so one of my men might relay it for you?”

After a moment’s thought, Bushell shook his head. “No, I’ll tell the RAMs myself. I know the details.”

That said, he did walk off. He’d never set himself a task he relished less.

“Sir, I shall also need to ring up Commander Hairston,” Lieutenant Green said to Woodbridge. The Navy man nodded. Then he turned to his sailors and ordered them back to the Grampus for stretchers to transport the wounded - and the dead - to the boats. “And bring Hartnett with you when you return,” he added, explaining to Bushell, “That’s the pharmacist’s mate I mentioned.”

“Very good,” Bushell said wearily. He took out his water bottle and drank from it. It wasn’t as cold and sweet as it had been when he filled it at St. Mary’s Spring in the early hours of the morning. He didn’t care. Water wasn’t what he craved. Enough whiskey to find oblivion at least for a night. . . that would be sweet. But he couldn’t even drink himself into a stupor, not now, not with so much still to do. Transferring everyone back to the Grampus took far longer than anyone would have imagined before the familiar world of law exploded in gunfire. The Royal Marines would not let the sailors load their fallen comrades onto the stretchers or carry them to the boats. “We tend to our own,” one of them said, pride in his voice. Bushell understood that; he and Stanley set Felix Crooke’s body on its stretcher. Royal Marines also put the dead Sons of Liberty on stretchers, dumping them down onto the canvas as if they were so many chunks of wood.

Hartnett fixed a fresh splint to the leg of the Marine with a shattered ankle, but otherwise pronounced himself satisfied with the treatment the wounded had received. Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge said to Bushell, “By your leave, I can wireless ahead to Port Clements so Dr. Lansing can meet us at the wharf.”

“Yes, go ahead,” Bushell said. He wished Woodbridge - and the entire world - would leave him alone: this even though he knew work, in the absence of whiskey, was the best anodyne he would find. At last the unwounded living went back aboard the Grampus. The cutter backed away from the shore, turned, and, skirting the little tree-covered island not far from Buckley Bay, sailed east across Masset Inlet toward Port Clements.

Bushell stood at the stern, staring back toward the abandoned town. Once Woodbridge made as if to approach him. He did not turn his head, he did not move in any definable way, but he made it plain he did not want anyone near. Woodbridge’s shoulders slumped, ever so slightly. He went back to his duties. Perhaps ten minutes after that, Sam Stanley came up. Bushell projected the same signal by body wireless. Taking advantage of long friendship, Stanley ignored it. He stood beside Bushell, leaning his elbows on the rail and propping his chin in his hands. “Brooding about it won’t make it better,” he observed. “Won’t make you better, either.”

“Go away,” Bushell said without turning his head.

Instead of leaving, Stanley reached into the hip pocket of his trousers and pulled out his wallet. From it he drew a purple five-pound note. He held it in front of Bushell’s nose, so close that Bushell’s eyes had to cross to focus on the small reproduction of The Two Georges on the banknote. “This is what it’s all about, Chief,” he said quietly. “Shall we start looking over the evidence we picked up? Woodbridge has given me a little compartment we can use.”

He waited. When Bushell didn’t answer, he sighed and went off. After a moment, Bushell followed him. Work did prove a pain reliever almost as potent as Jameson. Seated across a steel table in a tiny, metal room painted grey and garishly lit by a bare bulb mounted in the ceiling, Bushell and Stanley sorted through the pile of papers they’d snatched from the rubbish heap the Sons of Liberty had built up in Buckley Bay.

“We’ll do envelopes first,” Bushell declared. “They’ll have dates and postmarks on them, so we’ll know when the villains got them and where they came from.”

“Right, Chief,” Samuel Stanley said, so enthusiastically that Bushell suspected he’d have got loud agreement had he suggested sorting papers by the size and color of the stains they bore. But he was functioning again, and when he functioned, he functioned well.

“Thanks, Sam,” he murmured without looking up.

“For what?” his adjutant asked. “Here, you take this bunch while I’m going through the rest.” He pushed filthy, crumpled papers at Bushell.

Some of the envelopes were from commercial establishments in Skidegate. Bushell set those aside for the time being, since they’d been discarded unopened. Then curiosity got the better of him. He slit one and pulled out an advertising circular. Even in the back of beyond, such worthless tripe got posted. The rest of the envelopes proved more interesting. “They had friends all over the bloody place, didn’t they?” Stanley remarked.

“That they did,” Bushell said somberly. Just looking at the postmarks made him see the spiderweb of conspiracy the Sons of Liberty had spun across the NAU. The threads were thin and normally all but invisible, but no less sticky and dangerous on account of that.

He’d expected to find envelopes posted from New Liverpool, and he did. To his disappointment, none of them came from Sergei Pavlov. And he knew the Sons of Liberty were strong in Boston and Pennsylvania: Common Sense came out of the one, while the harsh lives the coal miners of the other led inclined them away from the status quo. But one envelope he discovered left him shaking his head. “Will you look at this, Sam?”

“What have you got?”

Bushell passed him the envelope. It was franked not with the usual one-florin stamps of the NAU, but with one that bore a lightning bolt, the legend HENO THE THUNDERER, and, in larger letters, the words THE SIX NATIONS. The postmark read Doshoweh.

Stanley clicked his tongue between his teeth. “If that’s not the strangest place from which to post something to the Sons of Liberty, damn me if I know what is.”

“Just what I was thinking,” Bushell answered. The Six Nations that made up the Iroquois Confederacy controlled the land just west of the province of New York, and did so for the most part under their own laws, though the NAU had charge of their dealings with foreign powers. The relationship, though (like much of the Empire’s constitution) never formally defined, had continued for more than two centuries, and satisfied most people on both sides of it.

“Doshoweh’s that town not far from Niagara Falls, isn’t it?” Stanley said.

“That’s right - capital of the Six Nations. And, as you said, a bloody odd place for the Sons of Liberty to be operating.” The liberty to which the Sons dedicated themselves was reserved for them alone, and emphatically did not include the Indians who had inhabited North America before the Sons’ fathers crossed the Atlantic.

“It might be a brilliant piece of cover,” Stanley said, passing the envelope back to Bushell. “I don’t think we’ve ever looked for the Sons of Liberty inside the Six Nations - who would? They could do just about whatever they pleased there, so long as they kept quiet about it and didn’t draw the notice of the local authorities.”

Bushell examined the postmark more closely. “Whatever they’ve been doing, they’re still at it. This was sent less than a week ago. Eighteenth June, the date is.”

“Is that a fact?” Stanley said. “Then it won’t have got to our villains much before we did. I wonder if we can find the letter that came in the envelope.”

They went through the papers they’d collected from the rubbish heap. To their frustration, none of them proved to bear the requisite date. Then Bushell said, “Maybe one of the villains still had it on him when the fighting started.”

Those papers were separate from the ones plucked off the midden. Instead of stains from tea leaves and coffee grounds, some of them were brownish-black with drying blood. Bushell carefully unfolded one.

“Here!” he exclaimed. “It’s dated 18 June - no address, though, worse luck. Just the message - listen to this, Sam: ‘Stop sending rifles at once; repeat, at once. No point to drawing unwanted attention to ourselves.’ And it’s signed, ‘Joe.’“

Stanley slammed his fist down on the tabletop. “We’re on the right track.” He looked up to the bare bulb as if it were the naked face of God. “At last.”

“Amen,” Bushell said: it was, for him, an answered prayer.

Bushell approached the telephone in Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge’s office in Port Clements like a man walking to the gallows, each step more difficult than the one that had gone before. When he sat down at the desk, he felt as if the hangman had slipped the hood down over his head. He picked up the phone, and in his mind heard and felt the trap fall out from under his feet. To the operator, he said, “I’d like to ring the offices of the Royal American Mounted Police in New Liverpool, Upper California, please. The number there is BLenheim 1415, and my name is Thomas Bushell.”

“Sir, your call will need a little while to put through,” the operator warned, surprise in her voice. He’d expected that. He wondered how long it had been since anyone in the Queen Charlotte Islands had telephoned New Liverpool. “Do whatever you need to do,” he said, and settled down to wait, the telephone handset against his ear.

The Port Clements operator relayed the call to Skidegate, the Skidegate operator to Prince Rupert across the Hecate Strait. That connection took a while to make; listening to the clicks and pops in his ear, Bushell wondered if the call was going by wire or swimming over the waves. At last Prince Rupert acknowledged the existence of Skidegate, but then had to pass the call on to Prince George. From Prince George, probably by a roundabout route paralleling the railroad tracks, it reached Wellesley on the Puget Sound.

After that, as if relieved to be returning to civilization, the call moved rapidly south. Almost twenty minutes had passed before the Port Clements operator told the RAM switchboard, “I have a long-distance call for you from Mr. Thomas Bushell.”

“Yes, have him go ahead,” the RAM operator said, and then, to Bushell, “How may I help you, Colonel?”

“Is that you, Jonathan?” Bushell said. “Put me through to Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg, please.”

“I’m sorry, Colonel, but I can’t,” Jonathan answered. “His train departed for Victoria this morning.”

“What’s that?” Bushell said. “He told me he was going to stay in New Liverpool for a couple of weeks, maybe longer.”

“Yes, sir, that’s what he’d been saying up until yesterday,” the RAM operator answered. “But Sir Martin Luther King and his staff headed back for the capital last night. I don’t know this for a fact, sir” Jonathan’s voice went low and conspiratorial as he shared his gossip - “but they say Sir Horace was going on about not letting Sir Martin and some of the people who work for him out of his sight for any longer than he could help.”

“Was he?” Bushell replied with interest. Sir Horace had suspicions, then; Bushell wondered how closely they marched with his own. “Get me Gordon Rhodes, then.”

“Colonel Bushell! I’m so glad to hear from you,” Major Rhodes exclaimed when the call went through. Before Bushell could answer, Rhodes went on, “We’ve finally tracked down the newspaper whose headline the Sons of Liberty used in the photograph they sent us and the press along with their ransom note.”

“Have you?” Bushell said. That was important enough that he needed to know it, so he held off giving his own news, most of which he was less than eager to pass on in any case. “Tell me.”

“Yes, sir.” Rhodes took a deep, portentous breath. “It’s from the Doshouieh Sentinel, the chief English-language newspaper in the Six Nations. Isn’t that remarkable? Who would have thought the Sons of Liberty had penetrated the Iro-quois chiefdom?”

“Up until an hour ago, no one,” Bushell said. That discovery fit all too well with his own, and had been won at far less cost.

Full of his own concerns, Rhodes failed to pay close attention to his superior’s reply. He continued, “It’s a pity Captain Oliver had to return to Victoria with Sir Horace. She did some outstanding work for us here, identifying that headline, and I want to be certain she gets the credit she deserves.”

He sounded so enthusiastic, Bushell wondered whether Patricia Oliver had been as outstanding off duty as she had while at RAM headquarters. He scowled down at Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge’s desk. It wasn’t his business. Better he didn’t know, in fact.

Gordon Rhodes said, “And how are things up in the Queen Charlotte Islands, sir? Do you know, I had to check in the Times Atlas of the British Empire to be sure where you and Captain Stanley and Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke were going.”

“So did I, before we set out,” Bushell answered. Once he’d said that, though, he had to tell the rest: the Sons of Liberty shooting Felix Crooke as he tried to persuade them to surrender, the gun battle that followed, the casualties among both the Sons and the Royal Marines.

“Good God, sir!” Rhodes said when Bushell paused in the dismal narrative. “A RAM gunned down like a bandit down in the Nuevespañolan mountains?” He sounded shocked to the core. Bushell did not blame him. He was shocked, too; he’d seen it happen instead of hearing about it over fifteen hundred miles of wire. When the news spread, flags would fly at half staff in front of every RAM office in the NAU.

Mechanically, Bushell went on to summarize the evidence he and Samuel Stanley had found after the shooting stopped. “We need to notify the RAMs in Doshoweh at once,” he said. “I doubt The Two Georges is still there - the Sons would have moved it as soon as they posted their pictures - but we may be able to keep them from operating out of the Six Nations anymore.”

“I’ll take care of that, sir,” Gordon Rhodes said. “We’ll have to deal with the local Iroquois constabulary, too; the Six Nations being as they are, we have rather less authority there than elsewhere in the Union.”

“That’s right,” Bushell said. One more thing to complicate my life ran through his mind. “We’ll have to manage as best we can, that’s all. Oh - when you call Doshoweh, tell them one more thing, will you?”

“Whatever you like, sir,” Rhodes said, and waited expectantly. When Bushell didn’t answer right away, he asked, “Er - what is it?”

“Tell them Sam and I are on our way.”

Getting off the Queen Charlotte Islands wasn’t as easy as Bushell had hoped. He and Lieutenant Green both spoke to Commander Hairston by telephone from Port Clements, but, in a case with half a dozen men dead by gunfire and more wounded, that was not of itself an adequate response.

“I’ll need formal depositions from you and Captain Stanley, Colonel,” Hairston said. “I want to wrap up the case against this Goldsmith so tight, there’ll be not a chance of his wriggling free of the noose.”

“But, Commander, Captain Stanley and I have to go back to the mainland to follow the leads to The Two Georges we discovered,” Bushell protested.

“No, sir,” Hairston said. “That case is a theft. This one is a homicide, so it takes precedence. You and your adjutant are not going back to Prince Rupert till you tell me everything you know about what happened at Buckley Bay. The faster you do that, the faster you get what you want.”

He was right. After a moment’s anger, Bushell realized as much. He also realized it wouldn’t have mattered had Hairston been wrong: the man had the authority to hold him here, if not indefinitely, then long enough to play havoc with the investigation. He sighed. “All right, Commander. When we get back to Skidegate, we shall be at your service.”

The drive back to Skidegate was made in mournful silence. Along with the lorries that had made the trip north from the naval base came a flat-bed machine driven by one of Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge’s sailors. In the staked bed, covered by a large canvas tarpaulin from the Grampus, lay the bodies of Felix Crooke and the slain Royal Marines and Sons of Liberty. Dr. Lansing, the Port Clements physician, drove some of the wounded to Skidegate in the town ambulance. Another sailor drove the rest

- including Elgin Goldsmith - in Lansing’s private steamer.

It was nearly four o’clock by the time the sad convoy reached the naval base. Redcaps took charge of Goldsmith, and of the dead; Navy doctors saw to the injured Marines. The flatbed lorry, ambulance, and motorcar steamed back toward Port Clements.

Commander Hairston met the returning RAMs and Royal Marines with half a dozen yeomen, each poised to record witness statements tachygraphically. Four of the six clerks were Negroes; their predilection for bureaucratic slots seemed to hold good even in the Navy. Bushell spoke mechanically, as if someone had wound up a platter and were playing it through his mouth rather than a phonogram. A yeoman’s pen raced across sheet after sheet of paper, covering the pages with arcane pothooks. Hairston sat in a chair off to one side, listening like a man carved from stone. When Bushell had finished, Hairston spoke to the yeoman: “Thank you, Washington. Now go transcribe that; I’ll want Colonel Bushell’s signature on the fair copy before he leaves Skidegate.” Saluting, the colored yeoman departed. Hairston turned to Bushell. “You got your tail in a crack, didn’t you, Colonel?

God in heaven, what a mess.”

“God in heaven,” Bushell repeated dully. He shook his head, still having trouble believing how things had turned sour so fast. “Everything was going just as it should, and then - “ He didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on.

“Not your fault, Colonel, I shouldn’t think,” Hairston said. “You and your party did everything right, up to the very last minute. For whatever it may be worth to you, you have my sympathy.”

“I don’t want your sympathy,” Bushell said. “I want to - “ To get drunk and blot out everything that happened today. But he couldn’t say that. Worse luck, he couldn’t do it. Haltingly, he continued, “I want to get on with the investigation. I want Felix still to be alive, and your Marines, too.” He couldn’t have that, either.

In a room not far away, a typewriter started tapping. After a while, another joined it, then another and another. The clattering keys and the warning bells as the machines reached the ends of lines were normally sounds of purposeful activity. Now they reminded Bushell of the other, more violent activity they were setting down on paper, magically transmuting terror to evidence. Hairston said, “I’m afraid the afternoon ferry will already have sailed for Prince Rupert, Colonel. You’ll be laying over here another night.”

“Yes, I know.” Bushell kept his temper under tight rein - as well he was sober. Rationally, he knew the local security chief was doing his job, and doing it properly. Rationality had nothing to do with the way he wanted to storm forward after The Two Georges - and escape the Queen Charlotte Islands as fast as he could.

“Will you take charge of Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke’s body?” Hairston asked. “I’m sure you RAMs have your own procedures for comrades killed in the line of duty.”

Bushell covered his face with his hands. Wish as he would, he couldn’t escape what had happened. “I’ll see the body across to Prince Rupert, at any rate,” he said. “I’m sure we do have procedures for such a case, Commander, but I’m damned if I know what they are. I don’t remember when the last RAM was shot dead attempting to make an arrest. It’s been years - I know that.”

Yeoman Washington brought in a typed version of Bushell’s statement. Bushell skimmed it, scrawled his signature, and thrust the papers at Hairston. The security chief took them, then reached for the telephone.

“I’ll get you and Captain Stanley a driver to take you back to the Skidegate Lodge,” he said. The ride to the hotel passed in almost complete silence. The sailor at the wheel of the steamer knew what had happened up at Buckley Bay. His mute outrage blended with those of Bushell and Stanley; the men understood one another without need for words.

“Evenin’, gents,” the clerk who had registered them the day before called from behind the desk. He suddenly noticed that, while he’d registered three men, only two were walking into the hotel. “Where’s your friend? The fish catch him?” He laughed at his own wit. Bushell crossed the lobby in half a dozen long strides. Eyes blazing, he seized the clerk by the cravat and dragged him forward across the registration desk until the two men were nose to nose. The clerk let out a strangled squawk and tried to break free, but Bushell slapped his arm aside. Samuel Stanley hurried up, set a hand on Bushell’s shoulder. “Let him go, Chief!” he said in a low but urgent voice.

As if throwing a piece of garbage, Bushell pushed the clerk back to his place. The man stared at him, popeyed. “I’ll have the redcaps on you,” he gasped.

“Our friend is dead - shot dead,” Stanley said. “So are two Royal Marines. So are three villains. Aside from those small details, the world’s a lovely place.”

The clerk’s eyes got wider. Bushell watched the process with a certain abstract interest; he hadn’t thought it possible. “I - I’m sorry,” the fellow stammered. “I didn’t know - “

“Why does this not surprise me?” Bushell turned on his heel and strode toward the stairs. Stanley followed him. As they climbed to their rooms, Bushell said, “We have a lot of planning to do, if we’re going to find the fastest way to get to Doshoweh from Prince Rupert.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” His adjutant started ticking possibilities off on his fingers: “Train back to Wellesley and then airship - or airships; I don’t know the routes offhand - to Doshoweh; train all the way from Prince Rupert; or train partway east from Prince Rupert to Doshoweh and then pick up an airship. Which one’s fastest is going to depend on what sort of conditions we can get and the layovers we’ll have to make.”

“We can’t find out what we need to know, not here in this one-lung town,” Bushell said. “We’ll learn more in Prince Rupert - at the train station, or else from the RAMs: they’ll have to do a good deal of traveling, I expect.”

“Yes, Prince Rupert’s a long way from - anywhere, when you get down to it,” Stanley said. “For tonight, what say we wash up and eat some supper in the Haida Lounge?” He paused, then added cautiously, “And maybe we could have a couple of drinks, too.”

“Now you’re talking,” Bushell said with such enthusiasm that his adjutant looked at him in alarm. He patted Stanley on the shoulder. “Relax, Sam. I don’t have to be functional till tomorrow afternoon. When the ferry comes, I’ll be ready to meet it.”

“All right, Chief.” Stanley still looked dubious. “See you downstairs in, oh, half an hour?”

Bushell nodded and went into his room. He spent most of the time in the showerbath, with the water as hot as he could stand it. Scrub as he would, though, he couldn’t wash away the feeling that Felix Crooke’s blood still stained him.

In the Haida Lounge, he ordered salmon cheeks. Samuel Stanley surprised him by picking the dried herring eggs on kelp. He started to ask Stanley about it, then held his peace: his adjutant had found his own way to memorialize their fallen comrade.

Both men chose Caribou Ale. Bushell resolved to stick to that. Getting drunk on ale took application; it wasn’t as easy as it was with Jameson. After the third bottle, the tip of his nose began to go numb, a sign the brew was starting to have its way with him. After the third one, though, he also had to visit the jakes, and he sloshed when he got up to do it. Dedicated drinkers of ale and beer could put away vast amounts of their chosen beverage, but he hadn’t developed the knack. After five ales, he was logy and yawning and ready for bed. Samuel Stanley beamed with well-hopped approval as the two of them, none too steadily, headed up to their rooms.

The headache with which Bushell woke soon yielded to a couple of paracetamol tablets. He called the hotel’s housekeeping service and gave them the clothes he’d worn the day before. A couple of hours later, a young woman returned the garments. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “but you can still see the stain on your anorak from the deer or whatever you killed. We did our best, but - “ She spread her hands.

“Thanks for trying,” Bushell said, and tipped her ten shillings. After he shut the door, he wadded up the anorak and threw it into a corner of the closet. If one of the cleaning men wanted it, he could take it, and welcome.

He jumped when the telephone rang. It was Commander Hairston. “We’ll have Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke’s body at the dock in a Navy coffin to meet the ferry. I’ve rung up the Prince Rupert RAMs, too, let them know what’s happened. Someone will be waiting for you there when you make port.”

“I’m grateful for your help,” Bushell said, though he dreaded spending hours having to bear the silent reproach of the plain pine box and what it bore.

He and Stanley took a cab to the harbor - by chance, the same cab that had taken them to the Skidegate Lodge when they reached the Queen Charlotte Islands. As the desk clerk had, the driver said,

“Weren’t there three of you gents before?”

Unlike the clerk, he wasn’t being snide, merely curious. After a moment of awkward silence, Samuel Stanley answered, “Our friend - will be waiting for us there.” Bushell bit his lip. A long queue of happy sailors bound for leave waited for the ferry to board passengers for Prince Rupert. A couple of minutes after Bushell and Stanley arrived, a Navy lorry pulled up at the dock. Half a dozen redcaps lifted the coffin down from the bed of the lorry. The sailors stared. Commander Hairston got out of the left side of the driver’s compartment and walked over to Bushell and Stanley. “I’m sorry it turned out this way, gentlemen,” he said heavily. “That’s all I can tell you.”

When the crew of the Northern Lights moved aside the light metal gate from the dock end of the gangplank, the sailors stood aside to let the military police carry Felix Crooke’s body aboard the ferry. Some of them took off their caps in token of respect for the dead. They would have heard about what happened up at Buckley Bay; that story must have gone through barracks and ships at the speed of light. Bushell stood by the bow rail most of the way across the Hecate Strait, as if he did not want to look back at the islands he was leaving. Once or twice, sailors started to come up to him, whether to ask questions about the gun battle or to offer their sympathies he could not guess. None actually got close enough to speak to him; as he had on the Grampus, he made it very plain he wanted to be left alone. On this journey, Samuel Stanley respected his privacy, too. Stanley, no doubt, did not want sailors importuning him, either.

The sun still stood high in the northwest when the Northern Lights got into Prince Rupert a few minutes past eight in the evening. On the docks waited six RAMs in dress reds - more pallbearers, Bushell thought - along with another, older man in civilian clothes. After the sailors streamed off the ferry, the RAMs boarded and came up to Bushell and Stanley, who met them beside Crooke’s coffin.

“Colonel Bushell?” The man in mufti held out his hand. “I’m Major Winston Macmillan, commandant here. Commander Hairston rang me up this morning. Terrible thing.” His eyes flicked to the coffin. “I can’t believe it.”

“Thank you for your help, Major.” Bushell was sick of saying that. He didn’t want to be the object of anyone’s help; he just wanted to get on with the business of cracking his case. But what he wanted and what he got had swung away from each other in the old logging town.

“I gather you’ll want us to take charge of arrangements for transportation of the body and such.”

Macmillan again glanced down at the box that held the mortal remains of Felix Crooke.

“If you’d be so kind.”

“We are at your service, Colonel - and at Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke’s.” He looked at the coffin once more. His voice went heavy and full of grief: “He’s one of ours, after all.” After a moment to collect himself, he continued, “If you two gentlemen will be so kind as to accompany me? No matter what has happened here, of course, your duty does not cease. The Two Georges - “ As he had before, Macmillan murmured, “Terrible thing.”

By the size of the headquarters he commanded, Macmillan had been hard-pressed to collect half a dozen men to bear away Felix Crooke’s coffin, though he had responsibility over an area the size of Upper California. He did, however, possess an abundance of railroad and airship schedules, and pored over them with Bushell and Stanley.

“The train rolls out of here at half past five tomorrow morning,” he said. “That’s the one fixed point amongst the variables. It’s bound for Wellesley, of course, and would put you there late tomorrow evening. The next airship out of Wellesley wouldn’t be till the morning after, though. You could change trains in Prince George and go east over the Rockies that way. From Regina, you could take an airship to Astoria on Lake Michigan and make your connection for Doshoweh there. If all goes well, I believe that is your fastest route to the Six Nations.”

“Let me see the schedules once more,” Bushell said, and he and Stanley spent the next hour or so in calculation. At some time during that interval, roast-beef sandwiches on sourdough bread appeared as if by magic. Bushell had his two thirds eaten before he fully realized it was there.

“Going to be very tight, Chief,” Stanley said. Bushell looked for him to complain about having to rise early yet again to catch the eastbound train, but he was all business. “We don’t have much time to get from the train station to the airship port in Regina, or from one airship to the other in Astoria. If we run even a little late, we lose half a day, and you know what they say about the Astoria airship port.”

Bushell did know. O’Hare Airship Port was the busiest one in the NAU. Astoria, being centrally located, lay at the heart of several airship companies’ routes. Delays there were legendary.

“Safer just to take the train all the way from Regina,” Stanley went on. “We could just as easily get into Doshoweh later as earlier if we gamble on the airships.”

“You’re right - it would be safer,” Bushell said. His adjutant started to brighten, but then he went on,

“All the same, we’ll gamble. If we’re late, we’re late, but I want the chance to be early.” He turned to Major Macmillan. “Have your people make the arrangements.”

“Yes, sir,” Macmillan said, in the tone of voice juniors use to betoken obedience to their superior’s foolish orders. Samuel Stanley said nothing, but the expression he wore was eloquent. Bushell didn’t care. He felt all too acutely time’s hot breath on the back of his neck. Anything he could do that might wring out a few more precious hours in which to pursue The Two Georges, he would. He and Stanley waited at the headquarters building until their travel plans were set up. Then Macmillan, as if washing his hands of them, had them motored to the Highliner Inn. It was after eleven, but through scattered clouds twilight remained bright in the west and north. As it did at any other hour, the air smelled faintly of halibut.

Over halibut balls in the train-station cafe the next morning, Bushell plowed through the Prince Rupert Register. The banner headline told of the gunfight at Buckley Bay and the death of Felix Crooke. He was, an enterprising reporter had discovered, the first RAM killed by gunfire in fourteen years. Samuel Stanley had a copy of the Register, too. When he finished his eggs and bacon, he slammed the paper down and growled, “Why don’t they just wire the Sons of Liberty what we were up to there?

Every bloody rag in the whole bloody NAU will have printed this by tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, the two RAMs would, if everything went well, be getting into Regina and making their airship connection for Astoria. Worrying about that was enough for Bushell at the moment; he stayed philosophical about the newspaper. “Could be worse,” he said. “The story doesn’t mention our names.”

“Huzzah,” Stanley said sourly. “The whole bloody Empire already knows we were headed up this way. The trouble with the Sons is, they’re smart enough to remember that and make the connection.”

“Damn all we can do about it,” Bushell said. A tinny speaker announced the imminent departure of the train bound for Prince George and Wellesley. He gulped the last of his Irish Breakfast, slammed the cup down on the table, and hurried to the platform. Still grumbling, Samuel Stanley followed. The nine-hour trip back to Prince George was like watching a film run in reverse. Bushell felt bored and useless. On most journeys, he used his time wisely, bringing along plenty of work to occupy him while he was traveling to ready him for whatever he had to do once he arrived at his destination. All that mattered now was arriving, for he couldn’t do anything useful till he got to Doshoweh. The thought of climbing into the open cockpit of a military aeroplane and whizzing across the continent at a couple of hundred miles an hour seemed less foolishly extravagant than it had when he’d laughed at it in the dining room of the Upper California Limited.

He fell asleep in his seat, lulled by the rhythm of the rails and by a long succession of short nights. The squeal of the train’s brakes as it pulled into Prince George woke him. In the aisle seat beside him, Samuel Stanley seemed ready to snore all the way down to Wellesley.

Regretfully, Bushell shook him. “We change trains here, Sam.”

Stanley’s eyes flew open. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said indignantly. He looked out the window and saw they were at the station. A sheepish grin spread over his face. “Oh. Maybe I was.”

They went back to the baggage car and made sure a porter transferred their cases to the platform where the train that would take them to Regina waited. Bushell slipped the fellow a ten-shilling note and, after a moment’s hesitation, half a crown to go with it. Far from home, he was willing to pay to ensure things running smoothly.

The Northern Rockies Special pulled out of Prince George at twenty past three, ten minutes late. Although the delay would be inconsequential when set against the nearly daylong journey to Regina, Bushell fretted nonetheless. He knew he was gambling, and knew that if he lost his gamble he would have done better not to make it.

“I wish Edmonton had airships going out of it oftener than every third day,” he muttered to Samuel Stanley.

“So do I, Chief - uh, Tom - but I can’t do anything about it,” Stanley answered. “Might as well wish the Rockies were flat, so we’d make better time through ‘em. We do the best we can with the hand we’ve been dealt, that’s all.”

They were approaching the Rockies when they went to the dining car for supper. Bushell ate steak and kidney pie, Stanley Helvetian steak with mushrooms. When they’d finished, they returned to the sleeping compartment they were sharing and watched for a while as the mountains grew all around them. Yellowknife Pass, through which they’d traverse the Rockies, topped out at less than four thousand feet, but great steep piles of granite and basalt, cloaked with conifers on their lower slopes and snow and ice above, reached high into the sky to north and south.

“Pretty country,” Stanley remarked after a while.

Bushell grunted. He had his nose in a book by then: a scientific romance he’d taken from the Sons’

shelter in Buckley Bay. It was called The United Colonies Triumphant and seemed typical of the breed: it showed an independent North America coming to the rescue of England in a great European war against, not the Holy Alliance or Russia, but, of all improbable things, a unified Germany.

“Damned foolishness,” Bushell growled, tempted to fling the poorly written tome across the compartment. “As if the British Empire wouldn’t be the mightiest in the world even without North America.”

“Why do you wade through the tripe if it annoys you so?” Stanley asked.

“I keep trying to understand how the Sons think - ‘know your enemy,’“ Bushell said. “But this is just foolishness. The book is set now, more or less, and in this mythical world North America is an even greater center of manufactures than it is in truth, but it still keeps Negroes and Indians in bondage as farmhands. The author is too ignorant to see how machines would take the place of slaves.”

Stanley’s mouth tightened. “Even so, that does tell you something about the way those people think.”

“Something, yes, but nothing pleasant - and nothing I didn’t already know.” Bushell paused to light a cigar, then picked up The United Colonies Triumphant once more. “ ‘Scientific romance’ my arse - no science and no romance to it that I can see: just someone who doesn’t write very well proving it at great length. A world that never could be, not in a thousand years.” He let out a noise half snort, half guffaw. The book was too preposterous for words.

A large sign by the railroad track announced that they were passing out of the province of Vancouver and into the province of Albertus. A few hundred yards farther on, a series of several smaller signs extolled the virtues of a patent shaving soap. Bushell found the foolish jingling verses on them badly out of place when set against the brooding majesty of the mountains.

Shadows pooled and lengthened. After a while, the train was running in deep twilight while the mountainsides above still blazed with light. Some of the mountains’ flanks were covered not merely with snow but with ice; near the little town of Jasper, one glacier came down almost near enough to touch out the window, or so it seemed.

“Beautiful scenery,” Bushell said; The United Colonies Triumphant wasn’t nearly interesting enough to keep him reading at a steady clip. “But it’s a cold beauty, and it makes me cold looking at it.”

“If that Swedish fashion for sliding through snow with boards on your feet ever caught on in the NAU, this is where they’d come to do it,” Samuel Stanley said. “Skiing, that’s what they call it. I’d almost forgotten.”

“I never knew,” Bushell said. “Where did you learn that?”

“The army, a couple of years before I was attached to your platoon,” Stanley answered. “If you ever have to fight on snow, you can go a lot faster on those skis than you can on snowshoes. The Russians have skiers in Alaska: a couple of regiments of them, they said at my training center.”

Bushell had a disquieting vision of regiments of Russians with boards on their feet and Nagants on their backs gliding across the frozen northern reaches of the NAU one winter, not stopping till they came to the icebound shores of Hudson Bay. He knew the vision was absurd; no matter how mobile they were, a couple of regiments of troops wouldn’t go far, and a lot of land lay between the Alaskan frontier and Hudson Bay. But he’d had Russians on the brain lately.

To keep from thinking about Russians and ski troops, he went back to the scientific romance again. They worried about Germans there. That was laughable by anyone’s standards. Germans were good for music, beer, heavy food, heavier philosophies, and squabbling among themselves. Bavarians were jolly, Austrians haughty, and Prussians inclined to be dour (who could blame them for that, when they were stuck next to Russia?), but they weren’t forces to reckon with, nor was any other German kingdom, principality, duchy, archibishopric, or free city. The idea of all of them behind a single malign ruler was . .

.”Absurd,” Bushell said with another snort, and plowed on.

After a while, he surprised himself in a yawn. The book made a soporific to rank with Jameson. He set it down and got into his pyjamas. After his earlier nap, he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep, but surprised himself again by dropping off almost at once.

“Get down, you damned fool!” Bushell shouted. A shot rang out. But instead of watching Felix Crooke fall, he felt an explosion of light in his own head.

His eyes flew open. A morning sunbeam had stolen through the slats of the blinds and was hitting him in the face. “Jesus,” he muttered. The dream had been terrifyingly real. He groped for his pocket watch. It was a little past five. The dining car wouldn’t be open for breakfast yet, and he’d wake Sam if he did a lot of moving around. That meant going back to The United Colonies Triumphant. He turned on the reading lamp in his bunk. The book was better than his nightmare - but not much.

Samuel Stanley woke up less than half an hour later. He blinked to see Bushell already among those present, then let out a wry chuckle. “We must be getting used to climbing out of bed at these appalling hours. I didn’t think that was what the papers meant by a fate worse than death, but I could be wrong.”

Bushell dogeared the book with a grunt of relief and slid out of bed. When he pulled up the blinds, he grunted again, this time in surprise, and gave back a pace from the window. The train might have been transported to a new and different world while he and Stanley slept. The Rockies that separated Vancouver from Albertus had vanished behind them. Instead, the Northern Rockies Special rolled through flat farmlands, punctuated here and there with low, rolling hills.

“Are those wheatfields out there?” Stanley also seemed startled at the overnight transformation of the world.

“More likely rye or barley,” Bushell answered. “We’re still pretty far north.”