Ash Davis explained to Neil, at the Bar-B-Q, “There’s two or three Snoods in this town, though Jat runs the biggest crap-game of them all, and they’ve trained their congregations as perfect recruits for the Ku Klux Klan. They aren’t so comic when their gangs of Christian knights beat up frightened little brownskins and burn their houses. As a friend of our race, do you think there’s anything you can do with Mr. Snood?”

“I’ll certainly try,” said Neil.

And knew that he certainly would do nothing at all.

* * * * *

A young man in uniform as captain in the army air corps, cinnamon-colored, erect and smiling, joined their table. He was, they explained, Captain Philip Windeck, who had been a senior in the University of Minnesota engineering school when he had enlisted, and who had flown on many missions over Italy.

“You know,” he said to Neil, “I really haven’t the right to be wearing this uniform any more, but I had a reunion with the fellows tonight. Tomorrow, I go back to overalls.”

“What doing?”

“I’d like to earn a little money and get married and take my wife back to school with me. I thought, with some engineering and a little aviation experience, I might get a job. Well, the airfield here and the automobile dealers all turned me down, but I’ve been lucky enough to get back the job I had before I ever went to engineering school—washing and greasing cars at the O’Toole Cut Rate Garage. Drex Greenshaw—I’m engaged to his daughter—thinks he could get me on as a bus-boy. But I feel it’s better for my martial vanity—the returned hero that was going to be so modest when he was greeted by the mayor and two bands—to have white ex-privates yelling at me, ‘Here you, boy, get a hustle on, you black bastard!’”

As always, all of them, including Phil Windeck, roared at his plight. It was better to laugh at the Thankless Republic than to grow faint and whining. Only Neil looked angry. He was rather gratified when he was accepted by this fellow veteran of the Italian campaign as a friend, and it was as a friend that he greeted Ryan Woolcape when he came in—out of uniform, out of the Army.

Neil was in deep now, deeper than he knew.

* * * * *