How Few Remain (48 page)

“Well, what is it?” Roosevelt said. North of Fort Benton lived only a few scattered farmers and sheepherders. No telegraph lines ran north from there, which made Roosevelt feel cut off from the world beyond the circle of prairie he could see.

“Rebs and Indians done licked us south of Tucson, down in New Mexico Territory,” the courier answered, which produced a chorus of groans from everyone who heard it. “And there’s no good news to speak of out of Louisville, neither. We throw in some men, they get themselves shot, we throw in some more. Don’t know what the devil we got to show for it.”

Louisville, Roosevelt thought, was the very opposite of the fight he would have to make against the British if they did invade Montana Territory. Down in Kentucky, too many men were jammed into too little space, and all of it built up. That was a recipe for slaughter, not war.

Thinking along with him, Lieutenant Jobst said, “Louisville’s a bad place to pick for a battle. If the Rebels had gone into Washington or Cincinnati, it’s the sort of battle we’d have given them. As things are, we get that end of the stick.”

“What happened down in New Mexico?” Roosevelt asked the man from Fort Benton.

“Sir, I don’t rightly know,” the soldier said. He took a note from the pocket of his blouse. “This here is what Colonel Welton gave me to give you. He said I should read it before I set out so I could tell you what it said in case it got soaked or somethin’.”

Roosevelt read the note. It told him no more than the courier had: the bare facts of defeat in New Mexico and bloody stalemate in Kentucky. He crumpled it and threw it into the fire, then rounded on Lieutenant Jobst. “If you ask me, Lieutenant, an invasion of Canada is likely to be the best thing we could do right now. Heaven knows we’re going nowhere on any other front.”

“That’s not for me to say, sir,” Jobst replied, “nor, if you’ll forgive me for reminding you, for you, either.”

“I know it’s not.” Roosevelt paused to light a cigar. He blew out a cloud of fragrant smoke, then sighed. “The tobacco in this one’s from Confederate Cuba. We don’t grow such good leaf here in the USA, more’s the pity.”

Taking his change of subject as acquiescence, Karl Jobst said, “I’m sure the War Department will notify Fort Benton if they want us to undertake any offensive action.”

“And why are you so sure of that?” Roosevelt inquired, as sardonically as he could. “Look how long the powers that be took to decide that the Unauthorized Regiment should go into service, and at everything I had to do to convince them.”

Lieutenant Jobst hesitated. Roosevelt was, for the moment, his superior, yes. But, when the war ended, Roosevelt would go back to being a civilian while Jobst stayed in the Army. And, despite being a young man, Jobst was older than his regimental commander. Both those factors warred with his sense of subordination. He picked his words with obvious care: “The powers that be did not know how fine a regiment you’d recruited, sir. I assure you, they are aware of the threat the British and Canadians pose to our northern frontier.”

Roosevelt wanted to argue with that. He wanted to argue with everything keeping him from doing what he most wanted to do: punish the enemies of the United States. Try as he would, he found no way; Jobst was too sensible to be doubted here. “I suppose you have a point,” Roosevelt said with such good grace as he could.

“Sir,” the courier asked, “what word should I bring back to Colonel Welton at the fort?”

“All’s quiet,” Roosevelt answered. That didn’t make him happy, either, for it gave him no excuse to strike back at the British Empire. But, he felt, having become a U.S. Volunteer obligated him to give his own superior nothing but the truth. “I have riders constantly going back and forth from each of my troops to this place. Should the foe make so bold as to pull the tail feathers of our great American eagle, I would know it before a day had passed, and would send a messenger to Colonel Welton with orders to kill his horse getting the news down to Fort Benton.”

“Pull the tail feathers of the American eagle,” the soldier repeated. Then he said it again, quietly, as if memorizing it. “That’s pretty fine, sir. You come up with things like that, you ought to write ’em down.”

“You’re not the first person who’s said so,” Roosevelt purred; he was anything but immune to having his vanity watered. “One day, perhaps I shall. Meanwhile, though”—he struck a theatrical
pose, not altogether aware he was doing it—”we have a war to win.”

“Yes, sir!” the courier said.

Lieutenant Jobst studied Roosevelt. “Sir, I hope we do get the chance to fight the British,” he said. “I think your men would follow you straight to hell, and that’s something no one but God can give an officer.”

“I don’t aim to lead them to hell,” Roosevelt said. “I may lead them
through
hell, but I intend to take them
to
victory.”

Jobst didn’t say anything to that. The courier from Fort Benton softly clapped his hands together once, before he’d quite realized he’d done it. In the firelight, his eyes were wide and bright and staring.

Roosevelt chose not to sleep inside his tent, not when the weather was dry. Curled in his bedroll later that night, he stared up and up and up at the sky. Stars were dusted across that great blue-black bowl like diamonds over velvet, the Milky Way a ghostly road of light. As he watched, two shooting stars glowed for a heartbeat, then silently vanished.

He sighed. You never saw skies like this in New York: too much stinking smoke in the air, too many city lights swallowing the fainter stars. This perfection struck him as reason enough by itself to have come to Montana Territory. So thinking, he took off his spectacles, slid them into their leather case, and drifted off in bare moments.

He woke, refreshed, at sunrise, breathing cool air like wine. Even in August, even when the day would be hot and muggy by noon, early morning was to be cherished. He pulled on boots, put on spectacles, and began mixing calisthenics with rounds of shadow boxing.

“Colonel, you make me tired just watching you,” Lieutenant Jobst said when he woke up a few minutes later.

“You should try it yourself,” Roosevelt panted. “Nothing like exercise for improving the circulation of the blood.”

“If I felt any healthier now, I do believe I’d fall over,” Jobst replied. Roosevelt snorted and ripped off a couple of sharp right-left combinations that would have stretched any invading Englishman—at any rate, any invading Englishman without a rifle—senseless in the dust.

After antelope meat, hardtack, and coffee, Roosevelt mounted and rode off across the plains on patrol. Along with commanding
his soldiers, he wanted to do everything they did. And, if the British did presume to invade the United States, he wanted at least a chance of being the first to discover them.

Duty and the siren song of paperwork brought him back to camp in a couple of hours. He was busy writing up a requisition for beans and salt pork for A Troop, far off to the west by the Cut Bank River, when someone rode in from the south. Curiosity and a distaste for requisitions, no matter how necessary, made him stick his head out of the tent to see what was going on.

He’d expected the newcomer to belong to one troop or another of the Unauthorized Regiment. But the soldier wore no red bandanna tied to his left sleeve. That meant he was from Fort Benton. Roosevelt’s eyebrows pulled down and together. Colonel Welton wasn’t in the habit of sending couriers up to him two days running.

“What’s the news?” he called.

The soldier, who had been talking with Lieutenant Jobst, saluted and said, “Sir, I have an urgent message for you.”

“I didn’t think you’d ridden fifty miles or so for your amusement,” Roosevelt returned. “Go ahead and give it to me.”

“Sir, it’s only in writing,” the courier said. Roosevelt blinked. That wasn’t what Welton usually did, either. He saw Lieutenant Jobst also looking surprised. The rider took from his saddlebag an oilskin pouch that would have protected its contents regardless of the streams through which he might have splashed. He handed it to Roosevelt. “Here you are, sir.”

“Thank you.” Roosevelt drew away. Had Welton wanted the courier to know what the message said, he would have told him. Lieutenant Jobst followed Roosevelt, who frowned a little but said nothing.

He opened the pouch. Inside lay a sealed envelope. He opened that, too, and drew out the folded sheet of paper it contained. Together, he and Jobst read the note on that sheet of paper. Both of them let out low whistles, neither noticing the other.

“Longstreet offers peace on the
status quo ante bellum
, except the Rebs get to keep their Mexican provinces?” Jobst murmured. “That could be damned hard for President Blaine to turn down.”

“Yes.” Roosevelt faced southeast, all thoughts of keeping secrets from Colonel Welton’s courier flown from his head. He shook his fist in the general direction of Richmond. “You son of a
bitch!” he shouted. “You filthy, stinking son of a bitch! God damn you to hell and fry you black, I went to all the trouble of putting a regiment together, and now I don’t even get the chance to fight with it? You
son
of a bitch!” To his own mortification, he burst into tears of rage.

    “Morning, boys,” Samuel Clemens called as he took off his straw boater and hung it on a hat tree just inside the entrance to the
Morning Call
offices.

“Mornin’, boss.” “Good morning, Sam.” “How are you?” The answers came back in quick succession, as they had for as long as he’d been working on the newspaper. No outside observer would have noticed anything different from the way it had been, say, a month before. As he walked to his desk, Clemens told himself that was because there was nothing to notice.

He paused to light a cigar at a gas lamp, then sat down and took a couple of puffs. On the desk in a fancy gilt frame sat a tintype of himself, Alexandra, and the children. He could see his reflection in the glass in front of the photograph. He was unsmiling on the tintype because smiles were hard to hold while waiting for the exposure to be completed. His reflection was unsmiling because …

“Because there’s nothing to smile about,” he muttered. Try as he would, he couldn’t convince himself things were as they had been before those two ruffians hauled him off to the Presidio. He still carried in a vest pocket the good character Colonel Sherman had given him. No one had accused him of disloyalty since, not out loud.

But when he greeted people, didn’t their responses come a quarter of a second slow? Didn’t they sound ever so slightly off, like those of a good actor who would die prosperous but whom no one would remember three days after they shoveled dirt over him? And these were his colleagues, here at a newspaper that opposed the present war. If this was what his brief brush with Confederate service got him here, he shuddered to think what the rest of San Francisco thought. None of the other papers had made him out to be a traitor, but that was probably only a matter of time.

He was scowling as he sorted through the telegrams that had come in during the night. For one thing, none of them had the
news he really needed. For another, he wasn’t sure it even mattered. If people thought he was tarred by the brush of the CSA, if they didn’t take seriously what he wrote because he was the one who wrote it, what good was he in the spot he was holding?

Sharp, quick, abrupt footsteps behind him. He recognized them before Clay Herndon said, “Good morning to you, Sam.”

“Morning, Clay.” Sam spun around in his chair. It squeaked. “I’ve got to oil that, or else set a cat to catch the mouse in there.” He felt a little less morose as he blew smoke at Herndon. The reporter didn’t treat him as if he suffered from a wasting sickness. Clemens ruffled the telegrams on his desk. “Still nothing out of Philadelphia, I see.”

“Not a word,” Herndon agreed.

“How long can President Blaine sit there like a broody hen before he hatches a yes or a no?” Clemens demanded.

“Been a day and a half so far,” Herndon said. “He doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry, does he?”

“He was in a hurry to start the damned war,” Sam said. “Now that he’s got a chance to get out of it easier and cheaper than anybody thought he would, I don’t know what in creation he’s waiting for.”

“Chihuahua and Sonora,” Clay Herndon said.

Clemens rolled his eyes. “If he thinks a slab of Mexican desert is worth the Children’s Crusade he’s thrown against Louisville, he’s … he’s … he’s the fellow who was in a hurry to start the damned war.” He sighed. “Since he is that fellow, he’s liable to keep right on at it, I suppose. But if he can’t live with this peace, I don’t know where he’ll find a better one.”

“But if he says yes to it, then he has to go and tell the voters why he went and started a war and then quit before he got anything out of it,” Herndon said.

“That’s true,” Clemens admitted. “But if he says no, he’s liable to have to go and tell the voters why he went and started a war and then lost it. That made Abe Lincoln what he is today.”

“A rabble-rousing blowhard, do you mean?” Herndon said, and Sam laughed. The reporter went on, “What I think is that Blaine’s like a jackass between two bales of hay, and he can’t figure out which one to take a bite out of.”

“Blaine’s like a jackass more ways than that.” Sam threw back his head and did an alarmingly realistic impression of a donkey.

That made Herndon laugh in turn. “Time to get to work,” he said, and headed off to his own desk.

“Time to get to work,” Clemens repeated. He looked upon the notion with all the enthusiasm he would have given a trip to the dentist. What he wanted to do was write an editorial. He couldn’t do that till Blaine figured out which bale of hay made him hungrier.

Edgar Leary came up with a couple of sheets of paper in his hand. “Here’s that story about the people who were stranded in Colorado when the Mormons closed down the railroad, boss,” he said. “You should hear the way they go on. If it were up to them, there wouldn’t be enough lampposts to hang all the Mormons from.”

“Give it here. I’ll have a look at it.” Sam took the sheets and proceeded to edit them almost as savagely as he’d dealt with Mayor Sutro’s inanities over at City Hall. Leary had the
Morning Call’s
slant on the story straight: the Mormon troubles were Blaine’s fault, for the settlers in Utah would never have dared defy the power of the United States were that power not otherwise occupied. But the young reporter was wordy, he had trouble figuring out what was important and what wasn’t, and once, perhaps absently—Sam hoped absently—he’d written
it’s
when he meant
its
.