Free American Front by Harry Turtledove

long, thin, porous border. Late rains or early frost could blight his crops. So could war.
    His wife Maude came out of the house to stand beside him. They’d been married fifteen years, ever since he’d got out of the Army and gone into the militia: almost all his adult life, in other words, and all of hers. If they hadn’t thought alike back in the days when they were courting—he wasn’t quite sure about that, not after so long—they certainly did now.
    And so it was Maude who said, “They’ve come over the border, eh?”
    “They have.” Arthur McGregor sighed. “After Winnipeg, I’ve no doubt.” Only a slight difference in accent, an extra tincture of Scots that made the last word sound like “doat,” told him from one of the Americans he despised and feared. “They take the town, they cut the country in half, they do.”
    Maude turned and looked southward, as if in fear of locusts, though soldiers from the United States were liable to prove even more destructive. Under her bonnet, she wore her red hair tightly pinned down against her head, but it was so fine, wisps kept escaping the pins and springing out in front of her face. She brushed them back from her gray eyes with work-roughened hands: like her husband, she’d never known an easy day in her life. “The devil’s own lot of them down there,” she said, her voice worried.
    “Don’t I know it? Don’t we all know it?” McGregor sighed again. “Sixty, sixty-five million of them, maybe eight million up here.” By the way he spoke, he expected everyone in the United States, young or old, man or woman, to parade past the farmhouse in the next few minutes.
    “We’re not alone, eh?” Maude said; maybe she was seeing sixty or sixty-five million angry Americans in her mind’s eye, too. “We’ve England with us, and the Confederacy, and the Empire of Mexico.”
    “England’s going to be busy close to home,” her husband answered with the ingrained pessimism of a man who’d been wrestling with a stubborn Mother Nature for a living since before he needed to shave. “Mexico’s nothing, maybe less, and the Yanks outweigh the Confederates two to one or more, too. They can fight them and have plenty to spare for us.”
    Maude peered south again, this time as if looking past the USA to the CSA. “I don’t know I much care for having those people on our side, when you get down to it. The way they treat their colored people, they might as well be—”
    “Russians?” Arthur McGregor suggested wryly. “The Czar’s on our side, too. The Yanks are no bargain, either; we’d never have had conscription up here if they didn’t start it first, and these days down there, from what the newspapers say, you fill out a form for this, you fill out a form for that, you fill out a form for the other thing, same as you would if the Kaiser was running things. Only free land on the continent is where we’re standing, seems to me.”
    “Pa! Pa!” His son Alexander came running toward the house, his voice cracking in excitement as any fourteen-year-old’s was apt to do. “There’s soldiers coming, Pa!” He pointed to the north.
    Arthur, his mind focused on the threat from the United States, hadn’t looked back toward Winnipeg in a while. Now he did. Sure enough, as his son had said, here came a cavalry troop, small in the distance, down toward the border with Dakota. Alexander jumped up and down, waving frantically at the soldiers. Arthur McGregor waved, too, but in a more measured way. He had a much better idea than his son of what war actually entailed.
    The troopers waved back. Then, to McGregor’s surprise, one of them peeled off from the rest and guided his chestnut toward the farmhouse at a fast trot. He reined in just in front of the porch: a little sallow fellow with waxed mustache who lifted his cap to Maude before nodding gravely to Arthur and less gravely to Alexander, who was all but hopping out of his overalls.
    “Good day, my friends,”