How Few Remain

by Harry Turtledove

  Even though he watched with a telescope, he could not spy any of the Apaches moving up toward the Napoleon the Tombstone volunteers were still firing. He wondered whether Geronimo had ordered them forward. The ground beyond the graveyard offered more cover than a billiard table, but not much. He wouldn't have cared to send his own men up to try to knock the gunners out of action.

  That's why we're allied with the Apaches, the cold, calculating part of his mind said. Let them get hurt doing the nasty little jobs like that.

  He glanced over at Geronimo. The Indian—medicine man, was the closest term Stuart could find for his position—was watching litter-bearers carrying wounded Confederate soldiers back toward the tents where the surgeons plied their grisly trade. When Geronimo felt Stuart's eye on him, the old Indian quickly moved his head and looked in a different direction.

  He didn't do it quite quickly enough. I will be damned, Stuart thought. I know just what that dried-up devil of a redskin is thinking, and nobody will ever make me believe I don't. He's thinking, sure as hell he's thinking, That's why we're allied with the Confederates. Let them get hurt doing the nasty big jobs like that. To hell with me if he's not.

  Stuart whistled "Dixie" between his teeth. Weeks of travel with Geronimo and the other Apache leaders had taught him they were more than the unsophisticated savages the dime novels made them out to be. They were, in fact, very sophisticated savages indeed. Not till that moment, though, had Stuart paused to wonder who was using whom to the greater degree.

  Now Geronimo looked over toward him. The Apache seemed to realize Stuart had peered into his thoughts. He nodded to the white man, a small, tightly controlled movement of his head. Stuart nodded back. The two of them might have been the two sides of a mirror, each reflecting the other's concerns and each surprising the other when he realized it.

  All at once, Stuart noticed the Napoleon had fallen silent again. Now Geronimo looked his way without trying to be furtive about it. The Apache raised his Tredegar to his shoulder and mimed taking aim. Stuart nodded to show he understood and doffed his hat for a moment in salute to the Apache warriors' skill. Geronimo's answering smile showed only a couple of teeth.

  Losing their cannoneers once more dismayed Tombstone's defenders. They fell back from the graveyard into the town. Had Stuart commanded them, he would have had them hold out among Tombstone's tombstones as long as they could; when they retreated, the Confederates and Apaches promptly seized the high ground.

  The Confederate field guns started hammering away at Tombstone itself. When shells struck bare ground, smoke and dirt leapt skyward. When a shell hit a building, it was as if a spoiled child kicked a dollhouse. Timbers flew every which way. No doubt glass did, too, though Stuart could not see that even with his telescope. But he knew what flying bits of glass could do to a man's body, having been educated in the War of Secession.

  "Do we wait for fire to do our work for us?" Major Sellers asked. A couple of thin threads of smoke were already rising into the sky.

  "No, we'll press it a bit," Stuart replied. "Even in fire, the damn-yankees can hold out for a long time down there, and it wouldn't burn them all out. Besides, if we take the town instead of burning it, we also get to forage to our hearts' content."

  "Yes, sir," his aide-de-camp said enthusiastically. The Confederate army in New Mexico Territory operated on the end of an enormously long supply line. Thanks to their victories, Stuart's troopers had plenty of food for themselves and fodder for their animals. They had enough powder and munitions for this fight, too. Looking ahead to the next one, Stuart didn't like the picture he saw.

  Down from the hills toward Tombstone came the dismounted Confederate cavalrymen, four going forward for every one who stayed behind to hold horses. Down from the hills, too, came the Apaches. Stuart was sure that was so although, again, he could see next to no sign of the Indians.

  After a bit, he watched Geronimo instead of trying to spot red-skinned wills-o'-the-wisp. The Indian could plainly tell where his braves were and what they were up to, even if Stuart's eyes could not find them. The Apaches were convinced Geronimo had occult powers. Watching him watch men he could not possibly have seen halfway convinced Stuart they were right.

  The volunteers in Tombstone kept on putting up a brave fight. As they had been in the valley south of Tucson, the U.S. forces were caught in a box with opponents coming at them from three sides at once. Here, though, they had good cover. They also had no good line of retreat from Tombstone, which made them likelier to stand where they were. Whenever Confederates or Indians pushed them, they drove off their foes with an impressive volume of fire from their Winchesters.

  But then more and more of the saloons and gambling halls and sporting houses—which seemed to make up a large portion of Tombstone's buildings—on the northern edge of town caught fire. The flames forced the defenders out of those buildings and farther back into Tombstone. The smoke from them also kept the Tombstone Rangers from shooting as accurately as they had been doing. Confederates and Apaches began dashing between flaming false fronts and into Tombstone. As Stuart rode closer to the mining town, the cheers of his men and the Indians' war cries drowned the shouts of dismay from the U.S. Volunteers.

  Major Horatio Sellers rode alongside him. "Sir, will you send in a man under flag of truce to give the Yankees a chance to surrender?"

  Geronimo and Chappo were also riding forward with the Confederate commander. Before Stuart could answer, Chappo spoke urgently to his father in the Apache language. Geronimo answered with similar urgency and greater excitement. Chappo returned to English: "Do not give them a chance to give up. They have done us too many harms to have a chance to give up."

  Sure as the devil, the Apaches were using the Confederates to pay back their own enemies. But then Major Sellers said, "It's not as if they were Regular Army men, sir, true enough. Probably better than half of them are gamblers or road agents or riffraff of some kind or another."

  The spectacle of his aide-de-camp agreeing with Geronimo instead of trying to find a persuasive excuse to massacre him bemused Stuart. It also helped him make up his mind. "If the Tombstone Rangers want to surrender, they can send a man to us. I won't make it easy for them."

  Chappo translated that for Geronimo. His father grunted, spoke, gestured, spoke again. Chappo didn't turn his response back into English. From the old Indian's tone and expression, though, Jeb Stuart thought he could make a good guess about what it meant: something to the effect of, Oh, all right. I'd sooner every one of them bit the dust, but if they give up, what can you do?

  A dirty-faced Confederate came running back to Stuart. "Sir, the damn-yankees put a couple of sharpshooters up in that church steeple"—he pointed back through drifted smoke toward what was plainly the tallest structure in Tombstone—"and they've done hit a bunch of our boys."

  "I can't knock 'em out by myself, Corporal," Stuart answered. He looked back to see where the field guns were. A couple of them had already taken up positions in the graveyard, not far from where the Napoleon had stood. "Go tell them. They'll take care of it."

  The range was short; the gunners were barely out of effective Winchester range from the outskirts of Tombstone, and might have come under severe fire from U.S. Army Springfields. Stuart watched shells fall around the church. Then one gun crew made a pretty good shot and exploded their shell against the topmost part of the steeple. No further reports of Yankee sharpshooters there came to Stuart's cars.

  That church, he found when he rode into town, was at the corner of Third and Safford. The Tombstone Rangers made a final stand a block south of it, at the adobe Wells Fargo office at Third and Fremont and the corral across the street from it, whose fences they'd reinforced with planks and stones and bricks and whatever else they could find. The OK Corral was a target artillerists dreamt of. After a couple of salvos turned the place into a slaughterhouse, the defenders raised a white flag and threw down their guns, and the fighting stopped.

  Geronimo, seeing
the men who had so tormented the Apaches now in his allies' hands, wanted to change his mind and dispose of them on the spot. "No," Stuart told him through Chappo. "We don't massacre men in cold blood."

  "What will you do with them?" the medicine man asked.

  "Send them down to Hermosillo, along with the rest of the U.S. soldiers we've captured," Stuart answered.

  Geronimo sighed. "It is not enough."

  "It will have to do," Stuart told him. "We haven't done too badly here, when you think about it. We've cleared U.S. forces from a big stretch of south-western New Mexico Territory, and we did it without getting badly hurt at all."

  "Much of what you did, you did because we helped you," Geronimo replied through Chappo. "We should have some reward."

  He could not force the issue; he had not the men for that. Stuart said, "You do have a reward. Here is all this land with no Yankee soldiers on it. Here are your braves with the fine rifles they have from us. How can you complain?"

  "It is not enough," Geronimo repeated. He said nothing more after that. Stuart resolved to keep a close eye on him and his followers.

  ****

  As soon as Abraham Lincoln saw the crowd that had come to hear him in Great Falls, he knew he would not have such an appreciative audience as he had enjoyed in Helena. By the standards of Montana Territory, Helena was an old town, having been founded just after the end of the War of Secession. Great Falls, by contrast, was so new the unpainted lumber of the storefronts and houses hardly looked weathered.

  More to the point, though, Helena was a mining town, a town built up from nothing by the labourers who worked their claims—and who, most of them, worked luckier men's claims these days—in the surrounding hills. Great Falls, by contrast, was a foundation of capital, a town that had sprung to life when the railroad out to the Pacific went through. If it hadn't been for fear of the British up in Canada, the railroad would probably still remain unbuilt. But it was here, and so were the people it had brought. Storekeepers and merchants and brokers predominated: the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat.

  Lincoln sighed. In Helena, he'd got exactly the response he'd wanted. He'd told the miners some home truths about the way the country treated them. Without more than a handful of Negroes to exploit, it battened off the sweat of the poor and the ignorant and the newly arrived and the unlucky. Capitalists didn't want their victims to know that.

  Capitalists had reasons for not wanting their victims to know that, too. After he'd told the miners some things of which their bosses would have preferred them to remain ignorant, they'd torn up Helena pretty well. He smiled at the thought of it. He hadn't touched off that kind of donnybrook in years.

  He'd won the supreme accolade from one of the local capitalists, a tough, white-bearded fellow named Thomas Cruse: "If I ever set eyes on you again, you son of a bitch," Cruse had growled, "I'll blow your stinking brains out."

  "Thank you, sir," Lincoln had answered, which only served to make Cruse madder. Lincoln wasn't about to lose sleep over that. From what he'd heard, Cruse had once been a miner, one of the handful lucky enough to strike it rich. Having made his pile, he'd promptly forgotten his class origins, in much the same way as an Irish washerwoman who'd married well would come back from a European tour spelling her name Brigitte, not Brigid.

  Another sigh came from his lips. No, no sparks tonight, not from these comfortable, well-dressed people. A couple of Army officers sat in the second row, no doubt to listen for any seditious utterances he might make. One of them looked preposterously young to be wearing a cavalry colonel's uniform. Lincoln wondered what sort of strings the fellow had pulled to get his command, and why he'd tied a red bandanna around his left upper arm.

  Rather nervously, a local labour organizer (not that there was much local labour to organize) named Lancaster Stubbins introduced Lincoln to the crowd: "Friends, let's give a warm Montana welcome to the man who makes it hot for capital, the fiery champion of the working man, the former president of the United States, Mr. Abraham Lincoln!"

  Despite Stubbins' images of heat, the most enthusiastic word Lincoln could in justice apply to the round of applause he got was tepid. That did not surprise him. Here in Great Falls, he would have been surprised had it proved otherwise. When he took his place behind the podium, he stood exposed to the crowd from the middle of his belly up. That didn't surprise him, either; almost every podium behind which he'd ever stood—and he'd stood behind a great forest of them—had been made for a smaller race of men.

  He sipped at the glass of water thoughtfully placed there, then began: "My friends, they ran me out of Helena because they said I made a riot there. As God is my witness, I tell you I made no riot there."

  No applause came from the crowd. Shouts of "Liar!" rang out. So did other shouts: "We have the telegraph!" and "We know what happened!"

  Lincoln held up a hand. "I made no riot there," he repeated. "That riot made itself." More outcry rose from the audience. The young colonel in the second row wearing a red bandanna seemed ready to bounce out of his chair, if not out of his uniform. Lincoln waited for quiet. When he finally got something close to it, he went on, "Do you think, my friends, the honest labourers who heard me in Helena would have turned the town on its ear had they been happy with their lot? I did not make them unhappy with it. How could I have done so, having only just arrived? All I did was remind them of what they had, and what in law and justice they were entitled to, and invite them to compare the one to the other. If that should be inciting to riot, then Adams and Franklin and Washington and Jefferson deserved the hangings they did not get."

  Sudden silence slammed down. He had hoped for as much. The people still remembered freedom, no matter how the plutocrats tried to make them forget. Heartened, Lincoln continued, "So many in Helena, like so many elsewhere in the United States—so many even here, in Great Falls—labour so that a few who are rich can become richer. Ignorant old man that I am, I have a moderately hard time seeing the fairness there.

  "A capitalist will tell you that his wealth benefits everyone. Maybe he is even telling you the truth, although my experience is that these capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people. Or do you not think his wealth would benefit you more, were some part of it in your pocket rather than his?"

  That got a laugh—not a large one, but a laugh. "Tell 'em, Abe!" somebody called. Somebody else hissed.

  Lincoln held up his hand again. Quiet, this time, came quicker. He said, "Even before the War of Secession, I made my views on the matter clear. As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. Democracy has no place for slaves or masters. To whatever extent it makes such a place, it is no longer democracy. A man with silk drawers, a gold stickpin, and a diamond on his pinky may disagree. What of the miner in his tattered overalls or the shopkeeper in his apron? Does not the capitalist trample them down, by his own rising up?

  "And does he not sow the seeds of his own destruction in the trampling? For when, through this means, he has succeeded in dehumanizing the labouring proletariat by whose sweat he eats soft bread, when he has again and again put the working man down and made him as nearly one with the beasts of the field as he can, when he has placed him where any ray of hope is extinguished and his soul sits in darkness like the souls of the damned . . . When the capitalist has done all this, does he not fear, while he sips his champagne, that the demon he has made will one day turn and rend him!"

  That was the sentence upon which his speech in Helena had ended. He had not intended it to end there. He had planned to go on for some time. But the ragged miners there construed his words literally, and acted on what he had taken for (or part of him had taken for) a mere figure of speech.

  Here in Great Falls, he got no riot. He did get an audience perhaps more attentive than it had planned on being. When he saw men leaning forward to hear him better, he knew he'd succeeded. "My friends, the defense of our nation lies not in our strength of arms, though 1 wish our arms every success in th
is war upon which we are engaged. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. If we let it perish, we grow the seeds of tyranny on our own soil. If we suffer our labourers to wear the chains of wage slavery, we look forward to the day when the nation is enchained.

  "To our north, in Canada, we find a people with a different government from ours, being ruled by a Queen. Turning south to the Confederate States, we see a people who, while they boast of being free, continue to hold their fellow men in bondage. At present, we are at war with both these peoples, not least because we do not wish to permit their unfree power to be extended. If is altogether fitting and proper that we should struggle, if struggle we must, for such a cause.

  "Yet will we fight for the cause of freedom abroad, while allowing the same cause to perish at home'} We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some, the word means for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and with the product of his labour. With others, the same word means for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labour. The fullness of time, I am convinced, will prove to the world which is the true definition of the word, and my earnest hope remains that the United States of America shall yet lead the way in the proving."

  In Great Falls, he got applause, warmer than when he was introduced. In Helena, that passage might have touched off the riot had the previous one not done it. In a way, he appreciated the polite hearing. In another way, he would sooner have been booed off the platform. People who listened politely and forgot an hour later what they'd heard were no great asset to the cause of liberty.

  "We shall have change in this country, my friends," he said. "I leave you tonight with this thought to take to your homes: if we cannot find a peaceable way to bring about this change, we shall find another way, as our forefathers did in 1776. We have now, as we had then, the revolutionary right to overthrow a government become a tyranny to benefit only to the rich. I pray we shall have no need to exercise this right. But it is there, and, if the need be there as well, we shall take it up, and the foundations of the nation shall tremble. Good night."