It was a professional, standing army, and that went a long way toward encouraging our neighbors to at least consider yielding to our control.Luckily f...or us, the main opposition in Oregon was a small collection of eastern counties controlled by extreme survivalists. We had a tacit alliance with the various reservations of the province’s First Nations, who now grasped that we offered a better chance at avoiding a genocidal crusade by far-right extremists. We were a far superior alternative, even. He slid in to the driver’s seat and I split off to my car. I tracked him as he drove to the pumps and followed and pulled in to the pump opposite of the one he chose. I had put on my black baseball cap to shade my eyes from the setting sun. When I got out of my car and moved around back he was already pumping gas so I quickly got my gas going and meandered around the pump. He made eye contact with me and I instinctively said something to him in hopes of getting a conversation going. We made eye. Each time I dispatched a fallen cuirassier a great roar of approval would arise from our square, like that of the crowd at a Roman amphitheatre when a gladiator dispatched his adversary. I nearly paid with my life for this bravado, as one cuirassier, probably an officer, fired his pistol at me as I prepared to deliver the coup de grace, and the ball ripped off my epaulette. I was lucky it did not rip off my head.Eye balls glared, unnaturally white, from faces blackened by the discharge of. Maycroft, she had known, ever since she was a young schoolgirl, it was he had taught her to ride, had taught her to handle a pony and trap, and he been a father figure her own father spending time in the city each weekday. The butler excused himself saying he was going to enlighten the staff, She read the note with misty eyes, the writer a solid and reliable friend, expressing his feelings in a way he would not have felt appropriate in life, declaring his love for her since first he held her as.