Augustine finally said good-bye to Briggs and replaced the telephone handset. Then he reached across the desk for one of a dozen pipes in a circular rack, put it between his teeth without filling it, and immediately picked up and began fondling one of the railroad collectibles that cluttered his desk and the office. Railroadiana, Augustine called them. Harper had always considered the President’s passion for trains to be a childish and undignified hobby; but then, that same passion had apparently endeared him to the electorate during his campaign for the presidency. It was generally conceded among political experts that Augustine’s use of his privately owned train, the California Special (since redubbed the Presidential Special, of course) to conduct an anachronistic cross-country whistle-stop campaign, the first national politician to do so since Harry Truman in 1948, had won him as many grass-roots votes as his “New America” platform.

“All right, Maxwell,” the President said at length, “I suppose you’re going to jump on me like everybody else.”

“I have no intention of jumping on you,” Harper said. “I think you made a mistake yesterday and I think you had better take steps to rectify it, but that’s all I’m going to say. My area of expertise, after all, is domestic affairs.”

“So it is.”

“Did you read those briefs?”

“Briefs?” Augustine replaced the railroad collectible and folded his hands in front of him. “You mean the Indian situation in Montana?”

“Of course that’s what I mean.”

“I glanced at them, yes.”

“Glanced at them? Nicholas, this is a serious domestic issue,” Harper said, and he could not quite keep the exasperation out of his voice. “And in less than an hour you have a meeting with Governor Hendricks and Walter Sandcrane and Leo Wade from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”

“Sandcrane? Oh yes, the Indian spokesman. Well, don’t worry about it, Maxwell. I can handle the arbitration. There won’t be any Indian takeover of the Crow reservations in Montana.”