Blood and iron

He said, "I'll leave it at that, then. I do thank you kindly for hearing me out. Next train north doesn't come in till tomorrow, does it?"

"No," Tom Colleton said. "St. Matthews isn't the big city. You'll have seen that for yourself, I reckon. If you want to come along with me, we'll see whether the hotel has an empty room." He snorted. "Let's see if the hotel has any rooms that aren't empty besides the one you'll be in. Come on."

As soon as her brother took Tom Brearley out of the flat, A

And so could telephone co

A

Her brother came in a couple of minutes later. "Well, what do you think of Kimball now?" he asked.

"The same as before," A

"My fire-eating sister," Tom said, more admiringly than not.

"That's right," A

Cinci

He cranked the engine. The shabby old Duryea truck thundered into life. It didn't give half the trouble it usually did, as if it too were glad to shake the dust of Kentucky from its tires. Cinci

There sat Elizabeth, Achilles on her lap. "We ready?" Cinci

Ready or not, they were going to do it. Elizabeth nodded. Achilles yelled "Ready!" at the top of his lungs. Cinci

As Cinci

"I do, too," he answered. "But they're set in their ways, like folks can get. I ain't go

"Maybe they will," his wife said. "I hope they do. Won't be so lonesome if they do, that's for sure."

"Yeah." If Cinci

"The United States," Elizabeth said softly.

Cinci

Back in the days before the war, he'd spent a lot of time looking across the Ohio. Negroes didn't have it easy in the USA. He knew that. Had he not known it, he would have got his nose rubbed in it during the war. A lot of men down from the United States thought they had to act like slave drivers to get any kind of work out of Negroes. But not all of them did, and laws restricting what blacks could do were milder in the USA than in the CSA: he didn't have to worry about a passbook any more, for instance.

One reason for such mildness, of course, was that blacks were far thi

Down off the bridge, down into Cinci

"This here's what I been tellin' you, honey," Cinci

"What's a foreigner, Pa?" Achilles asked.

"Somebody who's in a country he wasn't born in," Cinci

His son thought about that, then asked, "How do you tell a foreigner from somebody who ain't?"

"A lot of times, on account of he'll talk fu

He shrugged. It was unfair, no two ways about it. His hope was that Achilles would find things less unfair elsewhere in the USA than in Kentucky.

People were looking at him: people on the sidewalk, people in motorcars, even a couple of men who stopped painting a sign to stare. They were all white. Cinci

A fat, red-faced policeman held up his hand. Cinci

The expression of distaste on the cop's face was broad enough for him and the truck both. The fellow jerked a thumb toward the curb. "Pull over that wagon," he said in gutturally accented English. "I will with you speak."

"Is he a foreigner, Pa?" Achilles asked excitedly. "He talks fu

"Reckon he might be," Cinci

"Real live Germans?" Achilles' eyes were enormous. The USA's European allies were folk to conjure with, just as Frenchmen had been in the CSA… until the war came, and France lost.