How Few Remain (93 page)

Thinking along with him, Snow said, “We got the chance to find out what in hell’s gone wrong the past few days. Swear to Jesus, sometimes I laugh till I’m like to bust, listenin’ to you cuss old Blaine and the Socialists and whoever else you ain’t feelin’ happy about of a mornin’.”

“I’m so glad I amuse you,” Roosevelt said. “I wish I amused myself. You do know that what you’re laughing about is the humiliation of the United States?”

“Oh, no, Colonel—what I’m laughin’ about is you cussin’ the humiliation of the United States,” Snow said, a distinction a Jesuit might have envied. Before Roosevelt could remark on it, the hand went back into the barn, presumably to hitch the horses to the farm wagon. When he brought the wagon out, he gave Roosevelt a wistful look. “Don’t suppose you’d want some company on the way down to Helena?”

“I alone committed the sin of omission,” Roosevelt answered. “I alone shall atone for it.” Philander Snow let out a gusty sigh. He’d done his best to get out of several hours’ work: done his best and failed, in which he resembled his country. Having failed, he went back to the unending chores that bulked so large in farm life.

Roosevelt rattled down the road by himself. In the back of the wagon, the five-gallon milk cans in which he’d bring back the lamp oil did considerable rattling of their own. They had
KEROSENE
painted on them in big red letters, to make sure no milk went into them by mistake.

With snow on it, the ground was still hard. Before long, the snow would melt, and everything would turn to mud. Getting to Helena through the resulting morass was liable to be an all-day job, as opposed to a couple of hours each way.

A horseman came up the road toward Roosevelt. As the fellow trotted past, he took off his hat and waved it, saying, “Good day to you, Colonel.”

“And to you, Magnussen,” Roosevelt answered. “You look well. How’s that leg of yours feeling? I remember your captain saying you fought bravely.”

“Oh, thank you, Colonel.” The former trooper of the Unauthorized Regiment blushed like a girl. “The leg is good. How do you recall all your men, and who got hit in the leg, and who in the arm, and so on?”

“How? You just do it.” Roosevelt saw nothing out of the ordinary in carrying a flock of details in his head. “It’s no harder than memorizing the multiplication table—easier, for men have faces and voices, and numbers don’t.”

Magnussen laughed. “Easier for you, maybe, Colonel, but not for the likes of me.” He lifted his hat again, then rode on.

“A man can do anything he sets his mind on doing,” Roosevelt called after him. Magnussen gave no sign that he’d heard, though he wasn’t out of earshot. Roosevelt shrugged. Too many men would not set their minds on anything worth doing. That, to him, was why they did not succeed. He loosed an angry snort at the absurdity of Abraham Lincoln’s Socialist notions.

When he got to Helena, he took some little while reaching the general store. Men who’d served in the Unauthorized Regiment were thick on the ground in the territorial capital. If Roosevelt had taken all of them up on the drinks they wanted to buy him, he
would have forgotten his name, let alone such minutiae as where he lived and what he’d come into town to buy.

He filled the milk cans from the big wooden barrel behind the counter at the store. The proprietor, a big redhead named Mc-Namara, said, “I reckoned you was runnin’ low last time you was in, Colonel, but you always know your own business so good, figured I was crazy myself.”

“Even Jove nods,” Roosevelt said, which meant nothing to the storekeeper. Grunting, Roosevelt carried the full milk cans out to the wagon. He turned down another drink while he was doing that.

Virtue unalloyed would have sent him straight back to the ranch. His virtue turned out not to be quite free of admixture. Instead of riding out of town with the kerosene, he went over to the offices of the
Helena Gazette
. As usual, a crowd had gathered in front of the building to read the newspaper on display under glass.

Roosevelt hitched the wagon and started working his way through the crowd toward the paper. He didn’t worry about the kerosene; nobody could inconspicuously amble off with a five-gallon milk can full of the stuff. Men made way for him, so he got to the
Gazette
far sooner than he would have before he’d recruited the Unauthorized Regiment. They reached out to shake his hand or slap him on the back. If Helena had anything to say about it, he could have been elected president tomorrow.

What he read, though, made him grind his teeth. “The arrogance of our enemies!” he burst out. “But for Maine, they hold not a single square inch of our sacred soil, yet they presume to order us around as if we were beasts of burden.”

“What are we going to do to them?” somebody asked. “What
can
we do to them? We’re too busy squabbling among ourselves to hurt anybody else.” He pointed to a story about a Socialist parade in Boston that had got out of hand. The police had opened fire, and four were dead, including one policeman.
Red is the color of the blood of martyrs
, a Socialist spokesman was quoted as saying.

“To hell with Abraham Lincoln,” Roosevelt ground out. “Custer was right—Pope should have hanged him while he had him under lock and key in Utah Territory. He’s ten times as much trouble as all the Mormons and all their wives put together.” He
heard himself in some surprise; he hadn’t thought he might agree with Custer on anything.

About half the crowd in front of the copy of the
Gazette
loudly approved his words. The other half—miners, mostly—as loudly told him where to go and how to get there. Helena, he remembered, had broken out in riots after one of Lincoln’s speeches, while Great Falls had stayed calm. To a man who had nothing to offer but the sweat of his brow, class warfare was a seductive strumpet indeed.

“I don’t think Lincoln’s is the best way for the working men of this country to get a square deal,” he said, sticking out his chin. “And besides, if we fight one another, who wins? Do the capitalists win? Do the workers win? Not a chance in hell, either way. I’ll tell you who wins: the British and the French and the Confederates. Nobody else.”

That got him a thoughtful silence. He was happy enough to gain even so much; he’d been wondering whether Helena would erupt again on account of him. He knew where the Gatling guns were. Colonel Welton had kept most of them even after Custer returned to Kansas. They were the most telling argument yet prepared against the rise of Socialism.

But then a miner said, “Colonel, you can talk about winners and losers as much as you like—when you’re one of the winners. When you’re putting in twelve, fourteen hours underground six days a week and you don’t make enough to feed yourself, let alone your wife and children, well, hell, you’ve already lost. How are you worse off then if you try and do something different? What can you throw away that ain’t already gone?”

The miner drew applause from people who had booed Roosevelt; those who had agreed with him stood silent, waiting to hear what he would say. He picked his words with care: “Do you want to burn down the timbers that are holding up the roof of the tunnel? That’s what Red revolution means. If you want to shore up the roof so it doesn’t come down on your head, peaceably petition the government for redress of grievances.”

“And a hell of a lot of good that’ll do,” the miner said. “They only listen to the bastards with money.”

“No,” Roosevelt said. “They listen to the bastards with votes. And you mark my words, sir: they will go a hell of a long way to keep the revolution from coming. A man will do a great many
startling things if all his other choices look worse. On that you may rely.”

“Lincoln said the same damn thing, and you were going on about hanging him,” the miner said.

“Lincoln pays lip service to peaceable redress, but he doesn’t believe in it,” Roosevelt said. “I do.”

The miner looked him up and down. “You don’t mind me saying so, there’s a hell of a lot of difference between what some pup who was a cavalry colonel for a little while thinks and what goes through the head of a fellow who was president of the United States and who’s been trying to help the little fellow, the laboring man, his whole life long.”

Some little pup who was a cavalry colonel for a little while. A
flush heated Roosevelt’s cheeks and turned his ears to fire. Now he knew what came after hero: has-been. Savagely, he said, “Lincoln is the past. I am the future. And Socialism, sir, Socialism is the road to ruin.”

If he impressed the miner, the man—who had to be at least twice his age—did not show it. “Talk is cheap,” he said. “You get to be as old as Lincoln is nowadays, you look back and see what you’ve done, see if you measure up. You ask me, it ain’t likely.”

“I will take that wager, and I will take that chance,” Theodore Roosevelt said. “And there is one thing Lincoln has done that I swear before almighty God I shall never do.”

“Yeah?” The miner laughed. “What is it?”

“If the chance should come my way to fight the Confederate States of America, I shall never lose a war to them,” Roosevelt promised. The miner laughed again. Roosevelt didn’t care.

    General Thomas Jackson had just finished the last piece of fried chicken on his plate and was wiping his fingers when someone knocked on the door of his Richmond house. “Who could that be?” his wife said in some annoyance. “I had looked for a quiet evening at home. Since the war took you away from your family for so long, I think I am entitled to look for a few quiet evenings at home with you.”

“Let us hope it is some traveler who has lost his way and seeks directions, then,” Jackson said. “But if it is not, Mary, that too is as God wills.”

Cyrus, the butler, came into the dining room. “General Jackson,
suh, Senator Hampton say he wish to have a word with you,” the slave reported.

“Hampton?” Jackson’s eyebrows rose. So did he. “Of course I’ll see him. You’ve put him in the parlor?” Cyrus nodded. Jackson headed in that direction. “I wonder what on earth he can want with me, though.”

When he went into the parlor, Wade Hampton III rose from a sofa to shake his hand. The senator from South Carolina was five or six years older than Jackson, portly but erect, balding, with a neat beard once brown but now mostly gray and splendid mustachios. He and Jackson had known each other for twenty years, since the days when the former planter commanded a cavalry brigade under Jeb Stuart.

After the greetings were done, after Hampton had declined food and drink, the South Carolinian closed both doors into the parlor, having first looked up and down each hallway to ensure that no one lurked nearby. That bit of melodrama accomplished, he said, “I must have your word, General, that, come what may, what we say and do here tonight shall remain solely between the two of us.”

“Well, sir, that depends,” Jackson said. “If you are contemplating treason against the government of the Confederate States, I’m afraid I cannot help you.”

He’d meant it for a joke, a piece of light badinage. The last thing he expected was for Wade Hampton to look as if he’d just taken a gunshot wound. Slowly, Hampton said, “Treason against the government of the Confederate States is not the same as treason against the Confederate States. Of this I am convinced down to the bottom of my soul. If you disagree, tell me at once, and I shall bid you a good evening and beg your pardon for having disturbed you.”

“You had better tell me more,” Jackson said, also slowly. “I must confess, I have not the faintest idea of what you are talking about. Do you believe that I, in my recent conversation with General Rosecrans and Mr. Hay, am somehow betraying our country? If so, sir, we would be wiser to continue this conversation through our friends.” Dueling had been illegal in Virginia for many years. From time to time, though, gentlemen still traded fire on the field of honor.

But Hampton hastily held up a hand. “By no means!” he exclaimed. “You do not tarnish the honor of the Confederacy;
your every action brightens it. Would to God others might say the same instead of trampling our beloved Constitution in the dust.”

“Take a seat, sir; take a seat,” Jackson urged. After Hampton sat, so did the Confederate general-in-chief, on a cane-backed chair well suited to his rigid posture. “You still have the advantage of me, for I know of no plots brewing against our government.”

“You have a sizable army in northern Virginia, ready to compel the Yankees to obedience,” Hampton said. After Jackson nodded, the senator went on, “I trust the men would also obey you if you called on them to preserve our republic from those who would destroy the principles on which it was founded.”

“Speak your mind, if that is what you came for,” Jackson said. Wade Hampton did nothing of the sort, but sat mute. Jackson’s bushy eyebrows came down low over his eyes. The scowl that made soldiers quail had no effect on the senator. Sighing, Jackson did something out of the ordinary for him: he gave ground. “Very well—you have my promise.”

“I knew you were a true patriot,” Hampton breathed. “Here, then: I shall ask my question, which is this—if you order your men to defend the Constitution of the Confederate States, will they move against the men here in Richmond who set it at naught?”

When Hampton spoke of setting an army in motion against Richmond, that
was
liable to be treason, though Jackson could not imagine his old comrade-in-arms disloyal to the CSA. “From whom, in your view, does the Constitution want defending?” he asked.

And, at last, the senator from South Carolina brought his fear and anger out into the light: “From President Longstreet, General, and from any other man who would tamper with the structure of society we have so long maintained in our beloved nation.”

“Ahh.” Jackson let out a long exhalation. “You oppose him because he intends to manumit the Negro.”

“Of course I do,” Hampton said. “What right-thinking white man in this country does not? My home state was first to leave the USA because of the federal government’s continued interference with slavery, as our ordinance of secession clearly shows. Shall we tolerate from Richmond the tyranny that led us to break with Washington?”