American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold Read Free

now, I was just getting to that. I—”
      Anne did hang up then. She wasted not a minute getting back to work. With her finances in the state they were, they needed all the time she could give them. They needed more than that, too: they needed something close to a miracle. She wasn’t a pauper, as so many prewar planters were these days. But she wasn’t rich enough not to have to worry, either, and she didn’t know if she ever would be.
      A few minutes later, the phone rang again. Anne picked it up. “Why, Mr. Wiggins. What a pleasant surprise,” she said before whoever was on the other end of the line could speak. If it wasn’t Wiggins, she would have to apologize to someone, but she thought the odds were good enough to take the chance.
      And it was. “Miss Colleton, if you would let me explain myself—” She cut him off, though she didn’t—quite—hang up on him once more. “I gave you two chances to do that. You didn’t. If you think I’m in the habit of wasting my time on strange men who call me out of the blue, you’re mistaken—and whoever told you what you think you know about me hasn’t got the faintest notion of what he’s talking about.”
      “Oh, I don’t know.” Wiggins’ voice was dry. “He told me you were sharp as a tack but a first-class bitch, and that doesn’t seem so far out to me.”
      “I’m sure he meant it as an insult, but I’ll take it for a compliment,” Anne said. “Last chance, Mr.
      Wiggins—who told you that?”
      “Jake Featherston.”
      Anne had expected almost any other name than that of the Freedom Party leader. Something she didn’t want to call alarm shot through her. She took Jake Featherston very seriously. That didn’t mean she wanted anything to do with him. She’d backed him for a while, yes, but she backed winners, and he didn’t look like one any more. Trying to gain time to recover her composure, she asked, “If you used to work for the Whigs, why are you calling me for Featherston now?”
      “On account of what I saw when I went to Philadelphia, ma’am,” he replied. “The United States don’t respect you when you’re weak. If you’re down, they’ll kick you. But if you’re strong, they have got to sit up and take notice. That’s a fact.”
      “I agree with that. I think everyone in the Confederate States agrees with that,” Anne said.
      “Well, there you are,” Wiggins said cheerily. “If you agree with that, the Freedom Party is really and truly the only place for you, because—”
      “Nonsense.” Anne didn’t care about his reasons. She had reasons of her own: “The Freedom Party has about as much chance of electing the next president as I do of getting elected myself. I have no intention of giving Jake Featherston one more dime. Every since that madman of a Grady Calkins murdered President Hampton, it’d take a special miracle for anyone from the Freedom Party to get himself elected dog catcher, let alone anything more. I don’t spend my money where it does me no good.”
      “I don’t think the clouds are as black as you say, ma’am,” Wiggins replied. “Yes, we lost a couple of seats in the election last November, but not as many as people said we would. We’ll be back—you wait and see if we aren’t. Folks don’t have much in the way of memory—and besides, ma’am, we’re right .”
      “If you can’t win an election, whether you’re right or not doesn’t matter,” Anne pointed out.
      “We will.” Wiggins sounded confident. She got the idea he sounded confident all the time. He went on,
      “I want to say a couple of other things, and then I’m through. First one is, Mr. Featherston, he knows who’s for him, and he knows who’s against him, and he never, ever, forgets the one or the other.” He was, without question, right about that. Featherston was as relentless as a barrel smashing through one line of trenches after another. Anne didn’t intimidate easily, but