American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,226

election night and changing returns as the telegraph brought in new ones. When Reggie got there, the blackboards remained pristine: the polls were still open throughout the country. Because of that, only a few people stood around in front of the offices. Reggie got an excellent spot. He knew he might have to defend it with elbows as the night wore along, but that was part of the game, too.

A man came up, loudly unhappy that all the saloons were closed on election day. “Bunch of damn foolishness,” he said. “Fools we’ve got running this year, we need to get drunk before we can stand to vote for any of ’em.” By his vehemence, he might already have found liquid sustenance somewhere.

At half past seven, a fellow in shirtsleeves and green celluloid visor came out with a sheaf of telegrams in his hand. He started putting numbers from states on the eastern seaboard in their appropriate boxes. Earliest returns showed Hampton ahead in South Carolina and Virginia, Jake Featherston in North Carolina and Florida, and the Radical Liberals—Reggie clapped his hands—in Cuba. The numbers meant hardly more than the blanks they replaced. He was glad to have them anyhow.

More numbers went up as the hour got later. Hardly any of them made the people who awaited them very happy. The Examiner leaned toward the Radical Liberals, and it soon became abundantly clear that, whatever else happened, Ainsworth Layne would not be the next president of the Confederate States.

That would have disappointed Reggie more had he thought going in that Layne enjoyed any great chance of winning. The Radical Liberals always did best on the fringes of the Confederacy; they were liable to win Sonora and Chihuahua, too, when results finally trickled out of the mountains and deserts of the far Southwest.

But the real battle would be decided between Texas and Virginia. Returns also came in slowly from the Confederate heartland. They hadn’t seemed so slow during the last Congressional election, nor the one before that. Bartlett had been in no position to evaluate how fast the returns for the last presidential election came in, not in November 1915 he hadn’t. Back in 1909, he hadn’t cared; he hadn’t been old enough to vote then.

“Hate to say it, but I’m pulling for Wade Hampton,” a man about his own age said not far away. “I’ve voted Radical Liberal ever since I turned twenty-one, and I’d get into screaming fights with Whigs. But you look around at what the other choice is—” The fellow shivered melodramatically.

“I voted for Layne,” Reggie said. “I’m not sorry I did, either. I’m just sorry more people didn’t.”

Off in the distance, somebody shouted, “Freedom!” But the Freedom Party muscle boys did not wade into the crowd outside the Examiner building. They would have paid for any attack they made; Reggie was sure he wasn’t the only Radical Liberal packing a revolver in case of trouble from goons.

More and more numbers went up. By midnight or so, they started to blur for Reggie. Strong coffee at supper or not, he couldn’t hold his eyes open any more. Things weren’t decided, but he headed back toward his flat anyway. He was glad the election remained up in the air. Only when he’d got very close to home did he realize he should have been sorry Jake Featherston hadn’t been knocked out five minutes after the polls closed.

Jake Featherston yawned so wide, his jaw cracked like a knuckle. He hadn’t been so tired since the battles of the Great War. It was half past four Wednesday morning, and he’d been up since first light Tuesday. He’d voted early, posed for photographers outside the polling place, and then headed here to the Spottswood Hotel at the corner of Eighth and Main to see what he would see. He’d wanted the Ford Hotel, right across the street from Capitol Square, but the Whigs had booked it first.

He looked down at the glass of whiskey in his hand. Yawning again, he realized he might not have felt so battered if he hadn’t kept that glass full through the night. He shrugged. Too late to worry about it now. He wasn’t in the habit of looking back at things he’d done, anyway.

Somebody knocked on the door to his room. He opened it. As he’d expected, there stood Ferdinand Koenig, his backer when the Freedom Party was tiny and raw, his vice-presidential candidate now that the Party was a power in the land…but not quite