Forrest slowly nodded. He looked like a man trying to show nothing on his face at a poker table. Did that mean he or whoever’d come up with the notion hadn’t thought so far ahead? Potter would have bet it did. He almost asked, but checked himself. That might have looked like showing off.

One other thing did occur to him, though: “You know they’ll do the same thing to us? They just about have to, if for no other reason than to make us as scared of our own shadows as they will be.”

“I’ll… take that up with the President,” Forrest said. Were the raiders in Yankee uniform Jake Featherston’s idea? Potter wouldn’t have been surprised; Featherston had a genius for making trouble in nasty ways. He also had the gifted amateur’s problem of not seeing all the consequences of his troublemaking.

This long war, for instance. He really thought Al Smith would make peace. Potter muttered unhappily. If only the Yankees would have quit. Jake Featherston would have gone down in history then, no doubt about it. Things wouldn’t be so easy now. He asked Forrest, “What do you think of Charlie La Follette?”

“We’ll just have to see,” the chief of the General Staff replied. “So far, he sounds like Smith. But who knows what he’ll be like once he gets out from under the other fellow’s shadow? How about you? You probably know more about him than I do.”

“I doubt it. Who pays attention to the Vice President?” Potter said, and Forrest laughed, again for all the world as if he’d been joking. He went on, “I think you’ve got it about right. Doesn’t look like he’s going to pack in the war.”

“No, it sure doesn’t. Too bad. It’d make our lives easier if he did, that’s for damn sure,” Forrest said-one more thing Potter thought he had about right.

They’d pulled Armstrong Grimes’ regiment, or what was left of it, out of the lines in Utah for a while. The corporal and his buddies had to march away. The powers that be saved most of their trucks to haul men to and from fights they thought more important than the one against the Mormon rebels.