"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, cither. 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 lamp posts 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.
By the time Sam finished butchering the story, he felt better. He took it over to Leary. "See if I've done anything to it that you can't stand. If I have, tell me about it. If I haven't, clean it up and take it to the typesetters."
"All right, boss," Leary said. Clemens' tone warned him he would not be wise to defend his original version too strenuously. He looked down at the paper, then up at his editor. His unlined face turned red. "Did I write that?"
"The apostrophe, you mean? It's not in my handwriting." Sam strode off.
He spent the rest of the morning arguing with people who didn't want their stories shortened; with people who hadn't finished stories that would eventually need shortening; with typesetters who, by all appearances, couldn't spell cat if he spotted them the c and the a; and with printers who hadn't tightened the nine wood blocks of an engraving of the ruins of Louisville enough to keep the spaces between them from showing on the page as thin white lines.
"No, of course it wasn't you fellows," he said when the printers tried to deny responsibility. "A British spy sneaked in and did it while you weren't looking. If he's hiding under one of your presses and jumps out and does it again, though, I'm going to be very unhappy— and so will you."
Quarreling till noon helped him work up an appetite—or maybe his stomach was growling from nerves because he still didn't know which way President Blaine would jump. However that was, he'd grown ravenous by the time twelve o'clock rolled around. He collared Clay Herndon and said, "Let's go over to the Palace for lunch."
"Bully!" Herndon lifted a gingery eyebrow. "Are you counterfeiting double eagles down in your cellar, or is Mayor Sutro paying you not to run that picture of him and Limber Hannah?"
Clemens' ears burned. He rallied quickly, saying, "If I had that picture, I'd run it on the front page, and I'd make damned sure the printers screwed the engraving blocks together good and tight. In a manner of speaking. Come on. If we're going to live, let's live a little."
"Sold!" Herndon sprang from his seat.
Being on Market Street
, the Palace Hotel was only a few minutes' walk from the Morning Call offices. Going into the restaurant, though, was entering another world. Sam felt released from prison: no more dingy cubbyholes crammed with wisecracking newspapermen and smelling of printer's ink. The restaurant was bright and airy, full of starched white linen and gleaming cutlery, and as full of the odors of good food and even better tobacco. In such surroundings, Sam was almost ashamed to light up one of the cheap cheroots he enjoyed more than any other cigars—almost, but not quite.
He ordered toasted angels—oysters wrapped in bacon, flavored with red peppers and lime juice, and grilled on skewers—and deviled pork chops. Herndon chose oysters, too, in an omelet with flour and heavy cream. The waiter started to suggest that might make a better breakfast than a luncheon. Herndon fixed him with a steely glare. "If I wanted advice, pal, I'd have ordered some," he said. The waiter bowed and retreated. The reporter got his omelet.
"That's telling him," Clemens said, lifting a sparkling tumbler of whiskey in salute. "Put a fancy suit on some people and they think they own the world—and they make you believe it, too." He sipped from his drink, looked thoughtful, and went on, "That's probably why generals look like gold-plated peacocks."
"You're likely right," Herndon answered. Struck by the aptness of his own thought, Sam looked around the restaurant for officers. There wouldn't be any generals here, not with Colonel Sherman commanding the garrison, but the principle applied, in diminishing degree, to other ranks as well. He spotted a major, a couple of captains, and a lieutenant commander from the small Pacific Squadron of the U.S. Navy: all in all, enough in the way of epaulets and gold buttons and plumed hats to convince him he'd stumbled across a new law of nature.
Then the food arrived, and he stopped worrying about the U.S. Army, or even the Navy. The toasted angels were perfect, or maybe a little bit better: the bacon brought out the delicate, oceanic flavor of the oysters, with the pepper and lime juice adding a piquant counterpoint. And the pork chops, served in a sauce of mustard, horseradish, and chutney, had a solid, fatty taste that made him demolish them one after another.
Across the table from him, Herndon was methodically laying waste to the omelet. "God damn, Sam," he said, features working in the throes of some deep emotion, "why don't we do this more often?"
"Only reason I can think of is that I'm not stamping out double eagles downstairs," Clemens answered, real regret in his voice. "I felt like it today, that's all. I'll feel like it tomorrow, too, but my wallet won't."
After more whiskey, Turkish coffee, and zabaglione, the two newspapermen sorrowfully paid the bill and even more sorrowfully walked back to the Morning Call. As soon as they came through the door, Edgar Leary all but leaped on them. He was waving a telegram in his hand and dancing around as if about to hit the warpath.
"Easy, there," Sam said. "Get the rattlesnake out of your unmentionables and tell us what the devil's going on."
"We've got Blaine's answer," Leary said, waving it in Clemens' face. "Came over the wire not five minutes ago." Before Sam could snatch it out of his hand, he went on, "Blaine says no—a big, loud, no. We aren't licked anywhere, he says—"
"Anywhere but New Mexico Territory," Sam broke in. He checked himself. "Never mind. I'll shut up. What else does he say?"
"Says we were right to fight at the beginning, and says we're still right now. Says we're going to make the Confederate States cough up what they had no business taking in the first place. Says—"
Clemens could restrain himself no longer: "He says we'll make the Empire of Mexico keep those two worthless provinces if we have to kill every man in the United States to do it."
"That's not quite how he put it," Leary said.
"No, but that's what it means." Now Clemens did take the telegram from him. He rapidly read through it, then nodded. "Yes, that's what it me
ans, all right. If we'd spent five millions a few months ago, we could have made Maximilian happy and taken all the steam out of Longstreet's boiler. Now we'll spend ten or twenty or fifty times that much, and for what? What do we get? A war that isn't going anyplace, soldiers maimed and murdered by the thousands, and tomorrow's editorial for me. Isn't that grand?"
Without waiting for an answer, he carried the telegram back to his desk, read it again, and began to write:
"Throw some good money after the bad," you will hear them say, after you have thrown away half your life's savings on a railroad that goes up a mountain but does not come down the other side; or on a street-paving company whose president has lacked the forethought to cross your mayor's palm with silver; or on your brother-in-law, whom you reckon must surely be right this once, having been wrong so often, "throw some good after the bad, and you will earn it all back, and more besides."
This is what they tell you, and once in a blue moon they tell you the truth. The rest of the time, they buy themselves railroad cars—heavens! railroads!—and yachts and shooting boxes in Scotland and Congressmen to shoot from the shooting boxes, and they do it with your bad money and your good impartially.
Yet this appears to be the theory upon which James G. Blaine has chosen to go on with this war, no other theory looking to hold. Not only has he chosen to throw good money after bad, but to throw good men after good. The dead mount up, and the peg-legged, and the hook-handed, and the blind, but never you fear, for we have gained a mile of ground in Kentucky, near enough, and have not lost above forty or fifty miles of New Mexico to make up for it, and have had Washington, D.C., knocked flat besides, and so victory must be right around the corner.
He rubbed his chin, studying what he'd done. "Will this cause them to make me out to be a Confederate spy again?" he murmured. He read the words once more. "To hell with that. It's the truth." He inked his pen and kept on with the editorial.
How Few Remain Page 36
