Honesty forced him to add: "Not legally, at any rate. If I tell Johnny Horton to stand down, and he doesn't, then he's just another mutineer."
Blumroder cocked his head, in a gesture that was quizzical as much as it was skeptical. "He is a lieutenant. I believe that outranks you, Warrant Officer."
"He doesn't outrank me," Noelle interrupted. "And I turned full authority over to Mr. Hatfield. Legally, that's good enough."
Anse could almost hear the next two words, that she must have been thinking but—thankfully—didn't speak out loud.
I think. Noelle Murphy was jerry-rigging just as fast as Anse was.
What the hell. Anse had seen plenty of jerry-rigged machines work well enough, and long enough, in his fifty-four years of life. Maybe this one would, too.
"That's it, then," he said.
"I swear to God, Anse, I had no idea . . ."
"Shut up, Pat," Anse growled. "Don't give me that bullshit. I'll accept that you didn't know. But don't tell me you had no suspicions that Blumroder—your own partner, fer chrissake—wasn't involved in the business."
After a moment, Anse's brother-in-law looked away, then sighed.
"Well, okay. But, look . . ."
When his eyes came back to Anse, there was as much anger in them as shame and embarrassment.
"I live here, damn you. These people are my neighbors."
They were standing inside Pat's shop. Pat used the rifle in his hands to point to the western wall. "Just three shops down, there's a mother and her daughter who were gang-raped by mercenaries in Gustavus Adolphus's army. The girl was only fourteen. When the mother tried to protest that they were Lutherans, too, the stinking bastards just laughed at her. Two of them were members—still are, goddamit—of the Swedish garrison here. When she tried to register a complaint with the garrison commander afterward—yeah, the same Bruno Felder asshole who's still in command—he laughed at her, too."
Anse set his jaws. "I'm not arguing about that, Pat. I don't like mercenary soldiers any more than you do. It still doesn't change the fact that, within a year, we'll most likely have fought a war—and some of our soldiers will have gotten killed with guns from here. And they're going to be pissed as all hell, especially if they find out the gun trade with our enemies is still going on. You know that as well as I do."
Pat looked away again. "Yeah. Well. Look, I didn't know what to do. But I did report the problem to Grantville, at least."
Anse took a deep breath, and let it out. There was no point in staying angry with Pat. If he'd been in the same circumstances, Anse wasn't sure what he'd have done, either. Pat was a civilian. No fig leaf. No backup. Should he somehow have gone for the kind of private justice—vigilante justice—Anse was denying to both Blumroder and the CoC? Somewhere, in his own mind, was there still a sneaking feeling that it would be all right for an American to handle things that way, just because he was an American, but not for Germans who were N.U.S. citizens to do the same?
"All right, forget it. Water under the bridge, and all that. But for the moment, you're a member of my posse also. Got any problems with that?"
Finally, Pat smiled. "Not any, Anse. Not any at all."
"Good. In that case—don't get squirrelly on me, Pat—I want every uptime weapon you've got in the hands of the Jaeger. They're probably better shots than you are."
"Not mine," said Gaylynn Reardon sharply. "Not Gary's, neither." Her husband, standing next to her, looked just as stubborn as she did.
Anse shook his head. "Fine, fine. In the interest of maintaining American pride and morale—not to mention keeping peace in the family—you and Gary and Pat can each keep a modern rifle. But I want the rest in the hands of those who can do the most with them."
"I can shoot as well any damn Jaeger," she insisted. "Got nothing to with pride."
"Who cares how well you shoot, Mrs. Reardon?" he demanded harshly. "How well can you kill? Not dark outlines against the snow or distant figures on a roof that you'd have had in your scope if we'd run into trouble on the trip down here. Men standing right in front of you?"
She didn't look away. But she did swallow.
"Yeah. What I thought. We're not deer hunting, here. I want those guns in the hands of the Jaeger. If there are any left over, let Blumroder decide who gets them. Understood?"
After a moment, they all nodded.
"Do you really think it'll come to that, Anse?" asked Pat.