Walk in Hell

Ha

Mary didn't understand. "Father-?" Julia said in a halting voice; she wasn't sure she understood, and desperately hoped she didn't. Maude set her hand on McGregor's arm. She knew. So did he.

They shot him at sunrise, he thought dully. Before sunrise. It would have been dark and chilly, even before they wrapped a black rag over Alexander's bright, laughing eyes, tied him to a post or stood him up against a wall or did whatever they did, and fired a volley that made him one with the darkness and ice forever.

The American soldiers behind Captain Ha

McGregor couldn't even scream at him to get out. They had Alexander's body, the body that, the Yank said, had not suffered, but was now dead. "Take it," McGregor said, stumbling over the words, "take it to the Presbyterian church. He'll go in, in the graveyard there."

Julia shrieked. So did Mary-she knew what the graveyard meant. She sprang for Captain Ha

"I shall do as you request," Captain Ha

"Somebody went out and told you one more lie, Captain, and you piled it on top of all the other lies you heard, and it finally gave you enough of a stack so you could shoot my boy, the way you've been looking to do all these months," McGregor said.

"We do not believe it was a lie," Ha

"And I don't believe you," McGregor said. "Now get out of my sight. If I ever set eyes on you again-" Maude's hand tightened on his upper arm and brought him a little way back toward himself.

"Mr. McGregor, I understand that you are overwrought now," the U.S. officer said, trying to be kind, trying to be sympathetic, and only making McGregor hate him more on account of it. He turned to his soldiers. "Come on, boys. We've done what we had to do. Let's go."

All the men walked back to the Ford. Ha

He didn't much care whether he lived or died himself. But he did care about Maude and Julia and Mary. His family. All the family he had left.

He turned back to his wife. Tears were ru

"Alexander," Maude whispered, her faced pressed against his shoulder.

"Alexander," he echoed slowly. His mind raced ahead. Look ahead, look behind, look around-if you didn't look at where you were, you wouldn't have to think about how bad things were here at the focused moment of now.

He saw Alexander laid to rest in the churchyard, the grass there already sere and brown. He saw past that. His son had said-had no doubt said up until the very moment the rifles fired-he'd had no part in the things he was accused of doing. McGregor believed him.

Someone had lied, then. Someone had lied to bring him to death before sunrise. Someone, probably, whose son really had done the things Alexander stood accused of doing, and wanted to see the McGregors suffer along with him, no matter how unjustly. Whoever it was, McGregor figured he could find him, sooner or later. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.

And the Americans had believed the lie. They must have known it was a lie. But they hadn't shot anybody lately, and maybe they needed examples to keep the Canadians quiet.

Whatever their reasons, he vowed they weren't going to keep him quiet. They'd shot Alexander for a franc-tireur. He hadn't been one. McGregor was sure of that, down to the marrow of his bones. But in shooting him, they'd made themselves a franc-tireur, all right.

"I'm twenty years out of the Army," he murmured. Maude stared at him. She would know what he was thinking. He didn't care, not now he didn't. He'd forgotten a lot of things over half a lifetime or so. If he had to use them again, though, he expected they'd come back soon enough.

Having wished that, after so long in river monitors, he might go back to sea, George Enos was repenting of his decision. He had gone to sea in fishing boats since before the time when he needed a razor. Going to sea in a destroyer was an altogether different business, as he was discovering day by day.

"It's like you've ridden horses all your life, and they were the horses the brewery uses to haul beer barrels to the saloon," he said to Andy Conkling, who had the bunk under his. "Then one day they put you on a thoroughbred and they tell you you'll do fine because what the hell, it's a horse."

Conkling laughed at him. He had a round red face and a big Kaiser Bill mustache, so that he put George in mind of a clock with its hands pointing at ten minutes to two. He said, "Yeah, she does go pretty good, don't she?"

"You might say so," Enos answered, a New England understatement that made his new friend laugh again. To back it up, he went on, "She cruises-just idles along, mind you-at fifteen knots. No boat I've ever been on could do fifteen knots if you tied down the safety valve and stoked the engine till it blew up."

"Not brewery horses," Conkling said. "Mules. Maybe donkeys."

"Yeah," George said. "And the Ericsson gives us what, going flat out? Thirty knots?"

"Just under, at the trials. Some other boats in the class made it. But she'll give twenty-eight easy," Conkling told him.

Fifteen felt plenty fast to Enos. He stared out at the Atlantic racing past under the destroyer's keel. The USS Ericsson was a bigger, more stable platform than any steam trawler he'd ever sailed, displacing over a thousand tons, but the waves hit her harder, too. And besides-"You've got to remember, I'm just off a river monitor. After that, any ocean sailing is rough business."

"Those things are snapping turtles," Andy Conkling said disdainfully. "This here is a shark."

From what Enos had seen and heard, deep-sea sailors had nothing but scorn for the river-monitor fleet. From what he'd seen aboard the Punishment, the monitors didn't deserve any such scorn. Trying to convince shipmates of that struck him as a good way to waste his breath. He kept quiet.

In a thoughtful tone of voice, Conkling went on, "Of course, this here is a little shark. That's why we need to be able to run so damn fast: to get away from the big sharks on the other side."

"Yeah," Enos said again. He looked out across the endless sweep of the Atlantic once more. That was no idle sightseeing-far from it. Spotting smoke on the horizon-or, worse, a periscope perilously close-might mean the difference between finishing the cruise and sliding under the waves as smoking refuse. "The limeys are out there looking for us, too."

"You bet your ass they are, chum," Conkling said. "They don't want us ru