American Front

What he said made the storekeeper look even more unhappy. "Never should have set the niggers free in the first place," Conroy muttered.

"A little too late to worry about that now, wouldn't you say?" Ke

"Damn foolishness," Conroy said. He looked Cinci

Tom Ke

"Shit," Conroy said, "even the damnyankees got better sense than to go giving niggers guns."

"Mr. Conroy," Cinci

"He's right, Joe," Ke

"He doesn't want to take the packages over to the Kentucky Smoke House, he ain't right at all-just a damn lyin' nigger," Conroy said.

" Kentucky Smoke House? Hell, you don't need me to take anything there," Cinci

"Easier sending somebody colored -safer, too," Ke

That was also probably true. Cinci

Cinci

Without another word, Conroy led him into the back room and pointed to a couple of crates and a tarp. He opened the door out onto the alley. Cinci

He hadn't driven a mule for a while; Ke

Ke

His nose guided him to the Kentucky Smoke House. A lot of buggies and wagons were tied up nearby, along with a couple of motorcars. Again, he re mained inconspicuous. The sweet smell of smoke and cooking meat made spit flood into his mouth when he went inside. There stood Apicius, splashing sauce on a spitted pig's carcass with a paintbrush.

"Got a couple boxes for you from Mistuh Conroy," Cinci

The fat cook nodded. "Felix!" he bawled. "Lucullus!" Two youths with his looks but without his bulk came hurrying up to him. He jerked a thumb at Cinci

His sons-for so Cinci

"I know that already," Cinci

He drove Conroy's wagon back to the general store, then walked home.

The smell of the ribs tormented him all the way there. When he opened the door, Elizabeth started to yell at him for being late. That savoury package started the job of calming her down. The five-dollar gold piece finished it.

Because of the Yankee curfew, nights were usually quiet. The sound of banging -not gunfire, but something else-woke Cinci

In his mind's eye, Cinci

Once upon a time, Provo, Utah, had probably been a pretty town. Mountains towered to the east and northeast; to the west lay Utah Lake . The streets were wide, and shade trees had lined them. This July, as far as Paul Mantarakis was concerned, the place was nothing but a bottleneck, corking the advance of U.S. forces toward Salt Lake City. The trees had either been blasted to bits by artillery fire or cut down to form barricades across the broad streets. Thanks to the mountains and the lake, you couldn't go around Provo. You had to go through it.

Mantarakis scratched his left sleeve. He was probably lousy again. The only notice he took of the third stripe on that sleeve was that the double thickness of cloth made scratching harder.

Captain Norman Hinshaw -a captain because of casualties, the same rea son Mantarakis was a sergeant-squatted down in a foxhole beside him. He pointed ahead. "The big set of buildings-that big set of ruins, I should say- that's what's left of Brigham Young College. That's where the damned Mor mons have all their machine guns, too. That's what keeps us from taking the whole town."

"Yes, sir," Mantarakis said. He knew where the Mormons had their ma chine guns, all right. They'd killed enough Americans with them. Deadpan, he went on, "Of course, it's just a few goddamn fanatics doing all the fighting. The rest of the Mormons all love the USA."

Hinshaw's narrow, sour face looked even narrower and more sour than usual. "They're still feeding that tripe to the people back home," he said. "Some of them may even still believe it. Only soldiers who still believe it are the ones who got shot right off the train."

"That's about the size of it, sir," Mantarakis agreed. As he spoke, he checked right, left, and to the rear. As in Price, the Mormons in Provo had the nasty habit of letting U.S. soldiers overrun their positions, then turning around and shooting them in the back. Paul summed it up as best he could: "If you're a Mormon in Utah, you hate the USA."