How Few Remain Part 22

"Forward!" Stuart called. "If they're going to stand there and take it, let's make sure they have a lot to take."

Cheering, his men advanced. Neither b.u.t.ternut nor gray perfectly matched this country, but both came closer than the dark blue the U.S. soldiers wore-and both were covered with a good coat of dust and dirt, too. The d.a.m.nyankees found few good targets among their oncoming foes.

The officer in charge of the U.S. forces-whether he was the original commander, Stuart had no way of knowing-finally decided, far too late, to pull out with whatever he would save. By then, rifle fire from both sides of the canyon was far closer than it had been. The Confederate field guns kept sending sh.e.l.ls wherever the Yankees were thickest. Only a battered remnant of the force that had pursued the Apaches south from Tucson rode back toward it.

"Splendid, General, splendid!" Major Horatio Sellers shouted.

"Thank you, Major," Stuart told his aide-de-camp, and then went on, in a musing voice, "Do you know you have a bullet hole in your hat?"

Sellers doffed the headgear and examined it. "I know now, yes, sir," he said, and then, with studied nonchalance, set the hat back on his head. "How vigorous a pursuit were you planning to order?"

"Not very," Stuart answered. "President Longstreet has made it all too plain that our mission is to protect Chihuahua and Sonora, not to try to annex any of New Mexico Territory. A pity, but there you are. After this licking, I don't think the Yankees will be panting to invade our new provinces any time soon."

"I think you're right about that," Sellers said. "And I also have to say that you were right about the Apaches. They served us very handsomely here." He looked around and lowered his voice. "And I hope a lot of them bit the dust, too. What they helped us do to the Yankees, they could do to us one fine day."

"They could," Stuart agreed. "We have to persuade them that it's not in their interest. As I've said, being neither Yankees nor Mexicans, we have a leg up on that game." He pointed toward the mouth of the canyon, where the artillery, lengthening its range, was paying the retreating U.S. soldiers a final farewell. "And we have a leg up on this game, too."

On what had been the main battlefield, gunfire ebbed toward silence. More and more Confederates broke cover to round up prisoners, do what they could for the U.S. wounded, and plunder the dead. The Apaches emerged from their places of concealment, too. Some of those seemed incapable of concealing a man until an Indian, or sometimes two or three, came forth from them.

A fair number of the Confederates-especially members of the Fifth Cavalry, who had done a lot of Comanche fighting-took U.S. scalps as souvenirs of victory. To Stuart's surprise, the Apaches didn't.

"No, that is not our way," Chappo said when the general asked him about it. He frowned in thought, then qualified that: "Some of the wildest of us will sometimes take one scalp"-he held up his forefinger-"only one, for a special ..." He and Stuart hunted for a word. "... a special ceremony, yes. The one who does this spends four days making clean. Not like-" He pointed to the cavalry troopers, who were busy with their knives.

Stuart suffered a timely coughing fit. He was used to whites' being disgusted at Indians' brutality. Here he had an Indian unhappy with the brutality of his own men. When worn on the other foot, the shoe pinched.

To keep himself from dwelling on that, he walked over to have a look at the prisoners. He found that the U.S. Regular Army troopers his men had captured wanted nothing to do with the volunteers who had ridden into battle with them. "You better keep us separate from those sons of b.i.t.c.hes," said one blue-coated cavalryman, a dirty bandage wrapped around a b.l.o.o.d.y crease to his scalp. "G.o.d d.a.m.n the Tombstone Rangers to h.e.l.l, and then stoke the fire afterwards. 'Got to get them Injuns,' they said. 'Them Injuns is runnin' on account of they's a pack of cowards,' they said. And G.o.d d.a.m.n Colonel Hains for listening to 'em, the stupid fool."

Colonel Hains was not in evidence among either the dead or the captured. The commander of the Tombstone Rangers, however, had had his horse shot under him; the beast had pinned him when it crashed to earth. When Stuart came up to him, he was cursing a blue streak as a Confederate medical steward put splints on his ankle. "If I knew who the s.h.i.tepoke was that killed my horse, I'd cut the b.a.l.l.s off the a.s.shole," he greeted Stuart. "I'm going to hobble around on a stick the rest of my born days, G.o.dd.a.m.n it."

"Sorry to hear it," Stuart said, a polite fiction. "Your men fought courageously, Colonel ...?" They'd charged into a trap-by what the Regular had said, they'd ignored the possibility that it might be a trap, too-so they hadn't fought very cleverly, but they had indeed been brave.

"Earp," the colonel of Volunteers said. Stuart thought it was a nauseated noise, perhaps from the pain of his injury, till he amplified it: "Virgil Earp." He was about thirty, with a dark mustache and a complexion, at the moment, on the grayish side. "You d.a.m.n Rebs went and slickered us."

"There's nothing in the rules that says we can't," Stuart answered.

"Wish my brother'd come out West with me," the captured Colonel Earp said. "He's the best poker player I ever knew. You wouldn't have fooled him. Careful Careful there, you son of a wh.o.r.e!" That last was directed at the man tending to his ankle. He gave his attention back to Stuart. "We wanted to wipe out the dirty redskins, but it didn't quite come off." there, you son of a wh.o.r.e!" That last was directed at the man tending to his ankle. He gave his attention back to Stuart. "We wanted to wipe out the dirty redskins, but it didn't quite come off."

"No, it didn't." Stuart knew he sounded smug. He didn't care. He'd earned the right.

Virgil Earp surprised him by starting to laugh. "That's all right, Reb. You go ahead and gloat. Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are your trouble now."

Abruptly, Stuart turned away. The Volunteer might not have been much of a soldier, but he'd put his finger right on the Confederate commander's biggest worry. If the need to worry was so obvious even an arrogant fool could see it at a glance ... Stuart didn't care for anything that implied.

Across the Ohio, the guns had fallen silent. Frederick Dougla.s.s peered suspiciously over the river toward the wreckage of what had been Louisville. The Confederates had asked for an eight-hour truce so they could send a representative to General Willc.o.x's headquarters, and Willc.o.x, after consulting by telegraph with President Blaine, had granted the cease-fire.

Here came the Confederate now: a major carrying a square of white cloth on a stick as his laissez-pa.s.ser laissez-pa.s.ser. Seeing Dougla.s.s standing close to Willc.o.x's tent, he snapped, "You, boy! What business do you have hanging around here? Speak up, and be quick about it."

He might have been speaking to a slave on a plantation. To Dougla.s.s' hidden fury, a couple of the U.S. soldiers escorting the messenger chuckled. With ice in his own voice, Dougla.s.s replied, "What business have I? The business of a citizen of the United States, sir." He spoke with as much pride as St. Paul had when declaring himself a Roman citizen.

"Any country that'd make citizens out of n.i.g.g.e.rs-" The Confederate emissary shook his head and walked into General Willc.o.x's tent.

Dougla.s.s was shaking all over, shaking with rage. He turned to one of the U.S. soldiers who had not joined in the amus.e.m.e.nt at his expense and asked, "Why is that-that individual here, do you know?"

"I'm not supposed to say anything," the bluecoat answered. Dougla.s.s stood as quietly as he could and waited. In his years as a newspaper reporter, he'd seen how proud most people were of knowing things their friends and neighbors didn't, and how important that made them feel. He'd also seen how bad most of them were at keeping their secrets. And, sure enough, after half a minute or so, the soldier resumed: "What I hear, though, is that there Reb is going to put terms to us for ending the war."

"Terms?" Dougla.s.s' ears stood to attention. "What kind of terms?"

"Don't know," the soldier said. His obvious disappointment convinced Dougla.s.s he was telling the truth. "Tell you this much, Uncle: after what I've been through over on the other side of the river, any terms at all'd look pretty d.a.m.n good to me, and you can take that to the bank."

His companions nodded, every one of them. Dougla.s.s made as if to write something in his notebook, to keep the white men from seeing how they had wounded him. Where he'd envisioned a crusade-literally a holy war-to sweep the curse of slavery from the face of the earth forever, they, having fought a bit and seen that the enemy would not fall over at the first blow, were ready to give up and go home.

No feeling among the soldiery for the plight of the Negro in Confederate bondage Confederate bondage, Dougla.s.s scrawled. The plight of the Negro, in fact, was not what had engendered the war. He reminded himself of that, grimly. Not even Lincoln had sent men off to battle for the express purpose of freeing the bondsman. Blaine hated the Confederate States because they were a rival, not because they were tyrants. Had they been exemplars of purest democracy, rivals they would have remained, and he would have hated them no less.

Presently, Captain Oliver Richardson came out of the tent. He was puffing on a cigar and looked mightily contented with the world. When he saw Dougla.s.s, he stared right through him. Dougla.s.s would have bet he knew the terms the major in b.u.t.ternut had brought. The Negro did not waste his time asking Richardson about them. General Willc.o.x's adjutant cared for him no more than did the Confederate emissary.

A couple of minutes later, a corporal with the crossed semaph.o.r.e flags of the Signal Corps on his sleeve hurried from Willc.o.x's tent to that of the telegraphers nearby. Slowly, as if without the slightest need to hurry, Frederick Dougla.s.s strolled in the same direction. He positioned himself not far from the entrance, looked busy (in fact, he was jotting down unflattering observations about Captain Richardson, of which he had a never-failing supply), and waited.

In due course, the corporal came out once more. Dougla.s.s intercepted him in a way that, like any great art, looked effortless even when it wasn't. In confidential tones, he asked, "What sort of impossible terms are the Rebs proposing?"

"They don't sound so impossible to me," the soldier answered.

When he said no more than that, Dougla.s.s was tempted to grab him by the front of his blouse and shake the news out of him. Restraining himself with an effort, he said, "What are they, then?" The soldier hesitated, visibly considering whether to reply. "It doesn't matter if you tell me," Dougla.s.s a.s.sured him. "Whatever the terms may be, I can neither accept nor refuse them."

"That's true enough," the Signal Corps corporal said, half to himself. "All right, I'll tell you: the offer is to end the war and pretend it never happened, near enough. Both sides to pull back over the border. No reparations, nothing of the sort. We just go on about our business."

Dougla.s.s sucked in a long breath of air. Those were generous terms, far more generous than he'd expected the Confederate States to offer. Some-maybe many-in the United States would want to accept them, especially as word of the horrors of the battle of Louisville spread through the land. Dougla.s.s had done some spreading of that word himself, and now all at once bitterly regretted it.

"What of Chihuahua and Sonora?" he asked.

"Huh? Oh, them. Right." The corporal needed to be reminded of the immediate cause of the war. "The Rebs'd keep 'em."

"I see," Dougla.s.s said slowly.

"General Willc.o.x said that, far as he was concerned, the Confederates were welcome to 'em, that they weren't worth owning in the first place, and that the only things in 'em was cactuses and redskins and greasers."

Rather than keeping too quiet, the soldier was suddenly talking more than Dougla.s.s had expected. "Did he?" the Negro journalist murmured. If an important U.S. commander didn't think the Mexican provinces were worth the cost the country was paying to try to make the Confederate States disgorge them, how would President Blaine feel?

"He did, sure as I'm standing here next to you," the Signal Corps corporal answered. "And I'm not going to stand next to you any more, though, on account of somebody's gonna spot me and figure I've been bangin' my gums too much." He sidled off, doing his best to look as if he'd never been there at all.

Frederick Dougla.s.s wrote down the details the soldier had given him while they were still fresh in his mind. Then he shoved the notebook back into his pocket and walked over to his tent. He'd been under canvas long enough to have grown used to the stark simplicity of a stool, a kerosene lamp, and an iron-framed military cot. They made his home in Rochester, which before leaving it he'd thought of as having all the modern conveniences, instead seem overcrowded and overstuffed.

He sat down on the stool and covered his face with his hands. He was not quite so appalled as he had been after shooting the disemboweled Ma.s.sachusetts artilleryman. The physical shock of that deed would stay with him till his dying day. The grief flowing through him now, though, ran deeper and stronger than that which had followed the mercy killing.

"I was right then," he said. "Now ..."

Now, instead of watching a man die before his eyes, he was seeing a lifetime's effort and hope take their last breaths. James G. Blaine had started this war, basically, to punish the Confederate States for winning the War of Secession. Now that he had discovered he was punishing the United States even more severely, how could he continue after getting an honorable-no, an honorable-sounding-peace proposal from the CSA?

In Blaine's place, Dougla.s.s would have been hard pressed to keep from accepting such a peace. But if it was made, the USA and CSA would live side by side for another generation, maybe two or even three, and the vast white majority in the United States would go right on despising the handful of Negroes in their midst and doing their best to forget the millions of Negroes in the Confederate States even existed.

Dougla.s.s looked up and scowled at the canvas wall of the tent as if it were Oliver Richardson's smoothly handsome face. "I shall oppose this peace with every fiber of my being," he said aloud, as if someone had doubted him. "No matter what the cost, I shall urge that the war go forward, for the sake of my people."

The guns did not resume their deadly work immediately the peace expired. Both sides held back, awaiting President Blaine's decision. Dougla.s.s did not realize how constant a companion the roar of battle had been until he discovered the long stretch of silence was making him jumpy.

When he messed with the staff officers in the seemingly unnatural quiet that evening, he found he did not have to pretend ignorance of the proposed peace terms. Everyone was talking about them, and everyone a.s.sumed someone else had let Dougla.s.s know what they were. Almost to a man, the officers thought President Blaine would accept President Longstreet's offer.

"We'll be going home soon," Captain Richardson predicted. "I'd have liked to lick the d.a.m.n Rebs, I'll say that, but it doesn't look like it's in the cards here."

Alfred von Schlieffen spoke up: "Did I not hear from the far-writer-no, the telegraph, you say; I am sorry-did I not hear that the Confederate States have in New Mexico a victory won?"

"I heard that," several people said around mouthfuls of fried chicken. Dougla.s.s had not heard it, but he'd been moping in his tent since getting word of the Confederate peace proposal. Somebody said, "The Rebs used the G.o.dd.a.m.n Apaches to lure our boys into a trap, that's what happened."

"We should have given the Apaches what we gave the Sioux," Richardson said. He slammed his fist down on the table, making silverware and tin plates jump. "We would have done it, too, I reckon, if they hadn't run down into Mexico every time we got on their tail."

"Yes, and now, instead of running into the Empire of Mexico, which was weak enough to allow our pursuit, they shall, if President Blaine accepts this peace, run down into Confederate territory, where we can no more pursue them than we can the Kiowas of the Indian Territory," Dougla.s.s said.

As always, the power of his voice let him command attention. Somebody a long way down the table-he didn't see who-said, "d.a.m.ned if the n.i.g.g.e.r isn't right." For once in his life, he felt happier about the agreement than angry at the insulting t.i.tle.

Thoughtfully, someone else said, "Maybe we've been looking too hard at all the blood we've spilled here in Louisville and not enough at the whole war."

"I don't know what's to look at," Oliver Richardson said. "We aren't doing any better anywhere else."

"But you are not invaded," Colonel Schlieffen said, "but only in this one far-off Territory. Your armed forces are not beaten. If the United States have the will, you can go on with this war."

"You're right, sir," Frederick Dougla.s.s exclaimed. "We can can beat the Confederate States. We are larger and stronger than they. Do you soldiers want them laughing at us for another twenty years, as they've done ever since the War of Secession? If we give up the fight without being defeated, we shall make ourselves a laughingstock before the eyes of the whole world." beat the Confederate States. We are larger and stronger than they. Do you soldiers want them laughing at us for another twenty years, as they've done ever since the War of Secession? If we give up the fight without being defeated, we shall make ourselves a laughingstock before the eyes of the whole world."

"If we go on and keep getting our a.s.s kicked, the rest of the world is going to think that's pretty d.a.m.n funny, too," Richardson said.

"But if we win," Dougla.s.s replied, "if we win, what glory! And what a triumph for the holy cause of freedom."

"Oh, Christ," Richardson muttered to the officer next to him, "now he's going to start going on about the slaves again." The other soldier nodded. Dougla.s.s almost threw a bowl full of boiled beets at them. With so many in the USA feeling as Oliver Richardson did, would even victory over the Confederate States bring liberation? And if it did not, what in G.o.d's name would?

Colonel Theodore Roosevelt raised the Winchester to his shoulder, squinted down the sights, and pulled the trigger. The rifle bucked against his shoulder. "Take that, you d.a.m.ned Englishman!" he shouted, working the lever. A bra.s.s cartridge case leaped into the air, then fell to the ground with a small clink. He aimed the rifle again, ready for another shot.

He didn't fire. A couple of hundred yards away, the p.r.o.nghorn, after its first frantic bound, was already staggering. As its herd-mates raced off over the plains of northern Montana Territory, it took three or four more wobbly steps, then fell. Roosevelt shouted again, this time in triumph. He ran toward the mortally wounded antelope. His boots kicked up dust at every stride.

"Good shot, Colonel!" First Lieutenant Karl Jobst exclaimed. Jobst, only a few years older than his superior, was a Regular Army officer, not an original member of Roosevelt's Unauthorized Regiment. Colonel Henry Welton had detailed him to the Volunteers as Roosevelt's adjutant and, Roosevelt suspected, as his watchdog, too. He'd stopped resenting it. Jobst had already made himself very useful.

"Right in the lung, by jingo! That's bully," Roosevelt said, seeing the b.l.o.o.d.y froth on the antelope's nose and mouth. The animal tried to rise when he came up to it, but could not. Its large, dark eyes reproached him. He stooped, pulled out a knife, and cut its throat to put it out of its misery. After watching its blood spill over the dirt, he rose, a broad grin on his face. "Good eating tonight!"

"Yes, sir," Jobst said with a grin of his own. "If there's anything better than antelope liver fried up with salt pork, I'm switched if I know what it is." He drew his knife, too. "Let's butcher it and take it back to camp."

They opened the body cavity and dumped the guts out onto the ground. Flies buzzed around them. Roosevelt plunged his knife into the soil again and again to clean it. "I wish this had been an Englishman, by G.o.dfrey," he said. "I chafe at the defensive."

"Sir, our orders are to patrol the border but not to cross it," Lieutenant Jobst said. "If the enemy should invade us, we are expected to resist him. But we are not to provoke him, not when the United States have enough on their plate fighting the Confederates."

He spoke politely, deferentially: Roosevelt outranked him. He also spoke firmly: he was there not only to give the colonel of Volunteers a hand but to make sure he didn't go haring off on his own. Roosevelt knew how tempted he was to do just that, and gave Colonel Welton a certain amount of grudging respect for having antic.i.p.ated his impulses.

He grabbed the carca.s.s' hind legs, Jobst the forelegs. They carried the dead antelope back to the horses. The pack animal to whose back they tied the antelope snorted and rolled its eyes, not liking the smell of blood. Jobst, who was very good with horses, gave the beast a lump of sugar and calmed it down.

Camp lay close by the bank of the Willow River, which at this season of the year was little more than a creek. Roosevelt had patrols scattered from the Cut Bank River in the west all the way to the Lodge in the east, covering better than a hundred miles of border country with his regiment. Placing his headquarters roughly in the middle of that broad stretch of rolling prairie did not leave him rea.s.sured. "How are we supposed to fight the British if they do cross the border?" he demanded of Lieutenant Jobst, not for the first time. "They'll brush aside the handful who discover them the way I brushed off those deerflies back where we made the kill."

"Sir, we aren't supposed to fight them singlehanded," his adjutant replied. "We'll fall back, we'll hara.s.s them, we'll concentrate, we'll send word of their whereabouts down to Fort Benton so Colonel Welton can bring up the infantry, and then we'll lick 'em."

"I suppose so," Roosevelt said, not quite graciously. He admitted to himself-but to no one else-that he had trouble with the idea of not fighting the foe singlehanded. In all his visions of battle with the British, he saw himself. Sometimes he alone was enough to defeat the foe, sometimes he had help from the Unauthorized Regiment. In none of them did the rest of the U.S. Army play any role. He knew what he imagined and what was real were not one and the same. Knowing it and coming to terms with it were not one and the same, either.

The rest of the small regimental staff greeted him with enthusiasm and the antelope with even more. The cook, an enormous Irishman named Rafferty, had an equally enormous pot of beans going, but he was among the loudest of the men cheering the kill. "Beans'll keep you from starving, that they will," he said, "but after a while you don't care. This here, now-" He ran his tongue over his lips in antic.i.p.ation.

Roosevelt was gnawing on an antelope rib and getting grease in his mustache when a rider came trotting up from the south. "What's the news?" Roosevelt called to him. "Have some meat, have some coffee, and tell us what you know."

"Thank you, sir," the soldier from Fort Benton said. He loaded a tin plate with food-not only a chunk of roast antelope haunch but also a big dollop of Rafferty's beans-and then sat down by the fire. "News could be better."

"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 s.p.a.ce, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 a.s.sure 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 pa.s.sed, 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 h.e.l.l, and that's something no one but G.o.d can give an officer."