How Few Remain Part 44

"If they're not pure enough to satisfy you, you mean," Lincoln said, and Sorge nodded. Lincoln's sigh swirled him in fog. "You can stand against the wall and shout 'Revolution!' as loud as you like, but you won't have many people standing by you if you do. If you want to get on the floor and dance, you have to know the tunes the folks out there are dancing to."

Another policeman made his way over to Lincoln and Sorge. He was swinging his arms back and forth and beating his hands together, and still looked miserably cold. He wore a bushy mustache full of ice crystals. "If you ducks have to go speechifying, why the h.e.l.l don't you do it and get it over with?" he said. "More time you waste, the better the chance somebody's going to freeze to death waiting for you to get on with it. Me, for instance."

"That's a good idea," Lincoln said, and Sorge did not disagree.

They ascended to the platform together. A hum of antic.i.p.ation ran through the crowd. The hard-line Socialist minority began shouting slogans: "Workers of the world, unite!" "Down with the capitalist oppressors!" "Revolution!" They tried to turn that last into a rhythmic chant.

Abraham Lincoln held up his hands for quiet. Slowly, he gained it. Friedrich Sorge had agreed, with some reluctance, that he should speak first. Lincoln's logic was that a fiery call for revolution would frighten off the more moderate members of the crowd if they heard it before they heard anything else: they would think the party had no room for them. Lincoln hoped to show them otherwise. Once he'd done that, Sorge could be as fiery as he liked.

"My friends," Lincoln said, "let me begin by speaking to you of religion." That intrigued some of the crowd and, no doubt, horrified the rest, including the men waving red flags. Intrigued or horrified, they listened. He went on, "Some men think G.o.d has given them the right to eat their their bread in the sweat of bread in the sweat of other other men's faces. That is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven." men's faces. That is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven."

Silence persisted for another few seconds. Then a great roar rose up from the crowd, not only from the ordinary, respectable folks who had been Republicans and were trying to find out why Lincoln was abandoning the party he had led to the White House but also from the hard cases waving red flags. Friedrich Sorge clapped his gloved hands together again and again.

"Here," Lincoln said, and now the crowd hushed at once to hear him. "I am a poor hand to quote Scripture, but I will try it. It is said in one of the admonitions of the Lord, 'As your Father in heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect.' He set that up as a standard, and he who did most toward reaching that standard, attained the highest degree of moral perfection. So I say in relation to the principle that all men are created equal. If we cannot give perfect freedom to every man, let us do nothing that will impose slavery on any man." He had to pause again, for no one could have heard him through the cheers.

When he could speak once more, he went on, "Let us turn this government back into the channel in which the framers of the Const.i.tution originally placed it. Let us stand firmly by each other. And let us discard all quibbling about this cla.s.s and that cla.s.s and the other cla.s.s." Now Sorge looked less ecstatic. Lincoln did not care. He forged ahead: "Let us hear no more how this man is only a laborer, and so counts for nothing. Let us hear no more how that man is a great and wealthy capitalist, and so his will must be obeyed. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once again stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

Again he drew cheers from both factions in the crowd. When they washed over him, he felt neither chilled nor old. As they ebbed, he resumed: "I think this new Socialist Party is and shall be made up of those who, peaceably as far as they can, will oppose the extension of capitalist exploitation, and who will hope for its ultimate extinction-who will believe, if it ceases to spread, that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.

"We have to fight this battle upon principle, and upon principle alone. So I hope those with whom I am surrounded here have principle enough to nerve themselves for the task and leave nothing undone that can be fairly done, to bring about the right result. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. I shall not keep you here much longer, my friends. Our purpose should be, must be, and is simple: to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."

He stepped back. For a moment, no applause came, and he wondered if he had somehow lost his audience as he ended. But no: when the cheers and clapping thundered out, he realized the crowd had granted him that moment of enchanted silence every speaker dreams of and few ever get. He bowed his head. In that brief stretch of time, some of the bitterness of almost twenty years' wandering in the wilderness left him at last, and, when he stood straight again, he stood very straight indeed.

Friedrich Sorge tugged at the sleeve of his coat. He bent down to listen to his colleague through the ongoing roar of the crowd. Half angrily, half admiringly, Sorge demanded, "What am I supposed to say, after you have said all this?"

"What you were going to say-what else?" Lincoln answered. "I spread oil on the waters where I could. Now you go on and stir them up to a storm again."

And Sorge did his best. It was a speech that would have set a torch under one of the small crowds of dedicated men he was used to addressing, and it did set a torch under some of the crowd in Washington Park. When he spoke of Marx, when he spoke of 1848, when he decried the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune, he struck chords in many of them. To many who heard him, though, those were foreign things of little meaning, and he did nothing to relate them to the experience of the working man in the United States.

Listening to him, Lincoln understood why Socialism had remained so small a movement for so long: it simply was not, or had not been, aimed at the common American laborer. He aimed to change that. He thought he'd made a good start.

On and on Sorge went, considerably longer than Lincoln had done. People began drifting out of the park. When the Socialist finished-"Join with us! You have nothing to lose but your chains!"-some of the applause he got seemed more relieved than inspired.

Policemen began shouting: "Now you've heard 'em! Now get the h.e.l.l out of here! Show's over. Go on home." Near the platform, one of those policemen turned to his pal and said; "Anybody wants to know, we ought to take all these crazy bomb-throwing fanatics and string 'em up. That'd go a long way toward setting the country to rights."

He made no effort to keep his voice down; if anything, he wanted the men on the platform to hear. Sorge turned to Lincoln and said, "You see how the oppressors' lackeys have learned their masters' language. You also see how they ape their masters' thoughts. When we go to the barricades-"

But Lincoln shook his head. "You notice he does not do anything about it. The first amendment to the Const.i.tution protects our right to speak freely." He let out a chuckle the wind flung away. "The first amendment also protects his right to speak freely, however distasteful I find his opinion."

Sorge made a sour face. "Bah! You Americans, I sometimes think, suffer from an excess of this freedom."

"If you feel that way, you should have allied yourself with Benjamin Butler or with the Democrats, not with me," Lincoln answered. "And when you say you Americans you Americans, you show why the Socialists have not made a better showing up until now. You must remember, you are not looking at the United States and their citizens from some external perspective. You are-we are-a part of them."

Had he spoken angrily, the union between his wing of the Republican Party and the Socialists might have broken down then and there. As it was, the look Sorge sent him was thoughtful rather than irate. "Perhaps you touch here on something important. Perhaps you do indeed," the newspaperman said. In musing tones, he went on, "Socialism from France is different from Socialism in Germany. Perhaps Socialism in the United States will prove different from both."

"Come on down from there, you d.a.m.ned crazy loons," said the policeman who'd called a moment earlier for hanging them, "before you both freeze to death, and before I do, too."

Sorge might not have heard him. "When the time comes for it to grow, as the dialectic proves that time will come, I wonder what face Socialism will wear in the Confederate States."

Lincoln paused halfway down the steps. "A black one," he predicted. "If ever there was a proletariat ruthlessly oppressed and valued only for its labor, it is the Negro population of the CSA."

"An interesting notion," Sorge said. "It is for now a lumpenproletariat lumpenproletariat, one without an intelligentsia through which to vent its rage. But, in the fullness of time, this too may change." He suddenly seemed to realize he was alone on the platform. He also suddenly seemed to realize how cold he was. "Brr! Let us be off."

Surrounded by their supporters, Sorge and Lincoln made their way out of Washington Park. Cabs waited to take them back into Chicago. Friedrich Sorge jumped into one. He waved to Lincoln. "Today the city, tomorrow the world," he said gaily, then gave the driver his address. The cab clattered off.

Ducking his head to fit through the short, narrow doorway, Lincoln climbed into another cab. "Where to?" the driver asked him. He gave his son's address. The driver said nothing, but flicked the reins and got rolling.

Friedrich Sorge lived in a cramped, cluttered, dingy South Side flat. Lincoln had visited him there. He had not visited Lincoln in turn; Robert had made it very plain that, while his father was welcome at his luxurious home, his father's political a.s.sociates were not. Lincoln sighed. He would, sometime soon, have to find a place of his own. The idea of a Socialist leader operating out of a mansion struck him as too absurd for words.

The cab made its slow way through the bustle of Chicago. The deeper into the city it got, the more streaked with soot the snow on the ground was. Lincoln peered out through the smeary window at bustle and filth alike. "Tomorrow the world," he said softly. "Tomorrow-the world."

Jeb Stuart surveyed the magnificent terrain surrounding him with an emotion closer to despair than admiration. The Sierra Madre Mountains, the extension of the Rockies south of the U.S. border, were steep and treacherous and full of endless trails not wide enough for two men to ride abreast-often barely wide enough for one man on camel- or horseback-and full of endless valleys where endless numbers of Indians could camp and elude his men. And moving guns was even harder than moving men.

Colonel Calhoun Ruggles rode only a couple of men ahead of him. "I wish the Camelry had been able to run down the d.a.m.ned Apaches," Stuart said. He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth; he knew Ruggles had done everything he could to run the red-skinned warriors to earth.

The commander of the Fifth Confederate Cavalry looked back over his shoulder. "Sir, I honest to G.o.d thought we'd run 'em the way hounds run a c.o.o.n. They made fools out of me and my troopers, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Any men who can make fools out of my troopers-well, they're men in my book."

"They made fools of the Yankees for a lot of years," Stuart said, doing his best to encourage Ruggles after tearing him down. "They helped us make fools of the Yankees, too, remember. Maybe they decided it was our turn now."

Colonel Ruggles shook his head. "That's not it, or not all of it, anyway. After they burned Cananea, they knew d.a.m.n well we couldn't let them get by with it, and so they lit out for the mountains." His head went this way and that, too, with no sign whatever that he was enjoying the scenery. "And now we're supposed to dig them out. Rrr." The noise he made was very unhappy.

From behind Stuart, Major Horatio Sellers spoke up: "There is one good thing about this whole business."

"What? About wandering through the mountains for more than a month, with d.a.m.n near the only times the Apaches show themselves the times when they bushwhack some of our scouts?" Stuart exclaimed. Calhoun Ruggles also shook his head in disbelief.

But, sure enough, Sellers came up with one, saying, "If we do flush the Apaches out of their hiding places here, there's not a chance they'll ever come up with new ones, because there can't be any better in the whole wide world."

"By G.o.d, Major, you're right about that," Ruggles said. Stuart found himself nodding, too. In an odd sort of way, Sellers' words offered consolation. The aide-de-camp was right: ground just didn't come any worse than this.

Slowly, tortuously, the troopers descended into a valley where they'd camp for the night. Stuart did not have nearly so big a force with him as had set out from Cananea in pursuit of the Apaches. For one thing, supplying a large force in this cut-up land was impossible. For another, guarding the supplies that did come in required a lot of soldiers. Some of those supplies, inadequately guarded, were now in the Apaches' hands.

Something small and bright and colorful as a jewel hovered in front of Stuart for a moment. It stared at him for a moment out of beady black eyes, then shot off impossibly fast at an equally impossibly angle.

"Hummingbird!" he said, startled. He'd seen hummingbirds back in Virginia, of course, the familiar ruby-throats; El Paso had others, occasionally glimpsed as they buzzed from flower to flower like oversized bees. But he'd never seen one with a purple crown and brilliant green throat before. He wondered what other strange creatures the mountains harbored.

He must have said that aloud, for Major Sellers grunted laughter. "Well, there's the Apaches, for starters," he said. He took the saddle off his horse and set it down on a round brown rock, then started currying the animal. As with any good trooper, his horse came first.

A scout came up to Stuart. "Sir," he said, "there's a trail up ahead, looks like one the Apaches used once upon a time, anyway. Got Mexican plunder all along it: dresses, saddles, flour sacks, things like that. None of it's what you'd call fresh, though. Reckon they came that way some other time when they was raidin' through these parts. Might mean we're gettin' closer to 'em, though."

"So it might." Stuart scanned the peaks ahead. The sun still shone on some of them, though shadow filled the valley. Somewhere up there, along those ridge lines, Apaches were spying on his encampment, even if he had not the slightest hope of spotting them. Almost to a man, the Indians had sharp eyes. They also had, and knew how to use, telescopes looted from the U.S. Army. They were liable to know what he was up to better than he did himself.

That thought had hardly crossed Stuart's mind before Horatio Sellers burst out in a storm of angry curses. Stuart spun around. "What's the matter, Major?" he asked.

"My blasted saddle's disappeared," Sellers answered. "I set the stupid thing on a rock right there"-he pointed-"and now it's gone."

Gone it was. "You did did put it there," Stuart said. "I saw you do it. It isn't there now." That was pointing out the obvious. put it there," Stuart said. "I saw you do it. It isn't there now." That was pointing out the obvious.

"The son of a b.i.t.c.h G.o.dd.a.m.n well didn't up and walk off by itself," Sellers said. "If I find the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who lifted it, I'll make him sorry he was ever born." He glared around at the amused soldiers who were watching and listening to him. Stuart would have suspected-Stuart did suspect-them, too. The next soldier who didn't relish a practical joke on a superior would be the first.

One of the men pointed toward a patch of waist-high scrub oak near the edge of the light the campfire cast. "Sir, ain't that your gear?"

Sellers' gaze followed the trooper's outthrust finger. "It is, by Jesus!" he rumbled. "How in the d.a.m.nation did it get way the h.e.l.l over there?" He rounded on the nearby cavalrymen. "All right, 'fess up. Which one of you blackguards went and shifted it?"

Instead of confessing, the soldiers denied everything, each more vehemently than the last. Stuart had heard a great many soldiers tell a great many lies in his day. As with anything else, some were good, some bad, some indifferent. Either these men were all inspired liars, or-"Major, I think they may perhaps be telling you the truth."

"Yes, sir!" Major Sellers came to attention stiff as rigor mortis: respect exaggerated to the point of parody. He performed a precise about-face and stomped over to the saddle. When he picked it up, he let out an oath that was startled rather than furious: "Son of a b.i.t.c.h! Did you see that?"

Several people, Stuart included, said, "No." Most of them added "What was it?" or words to that effect.

"An armadillo." Sellers stood there holding the saddle, an extraordinarily foolish expression on his face. "I must have put this thing"-he hefted it-"on top of a big G.o.dd.a.m.n armadillo instead of a rock. It just ran off into the bushes."

With a certain amount of relish, Stuart said, "The saddle didn't up and walk off by itself, eh? This time, it d.a.m.n well did."

Sellers carried it back over by his horse and set it down, with ostentatious care, on a piece of flat, level ground. That care didn't keep him from getting ragged unmercifully by the Confederate troopers the rest of the night. Stuart did his share of the ragging, or maybe a little more. If the lurking Apaches, wherever they were, had been able to figure out what the fuss and feathers were all about, they were probably laughing, too.

When morning came, though, the time for laughter was gone. Stuart's army swung into motion once more, advancing along the trail the scouts had found the evening before. It was broad and easy at first, but soon narrowed and climbed steeply. A pack mule went over the side and rolled to the bottom of a gully. It scrambled up onto its feet, none the worse for wear except for a patch of hide sc.r.a.ped off its flank. A few minutes later, another mule missed a step. Its bray of terror cut off abruptly halfway down the rocky slope. It did not get up when it stopped rolling, and would not get up again. Its head twisted at an unnatural angle.

A little past noon, a scout came back to Stuart with a prize: a Tredegar cartridge an Apache must have dropped. "Has to be one of the redskins we're after, sir," the fellow said. "Means we're on the right trail."

"Yes." Stuart's head came up. "Can't mean anything else." Tredegars were mighty thin on the ground south of the border-back when this had been south of the border. "Maybe we'll catch up with them yet." He frowned. "And maybe they left it there for you to find so they could draw us into a trap." He ordered more scouts forward, and sent men to scrambling along the ridge line to smell out any ambush on either flank.

In the next valley they came to, they found the remains of a Mexican army camp. The camp looked to have been abandoned in great haste a couple of years before, and then plundered by the Indians. "They did try to put them down," Colonel Calhoun Ruggles said.

"Yes, and look what it got them." Major Sellers spoke like a man pa.s.sing judgment.

"We'll do better," Stuart said. "The Empire of Mexico hasn't been what anyone would call vigorous about fighting the Indians. We will will do it, because they haven't got any place to run to from here." do it, because they haven't got any place to run to from here."

"They could go up into the USA, sir," Sellers said.

Stuart shook his head. "Not after they made common cause with us against the Yankees. The USA would sooner kill 'em than look at 'em after that, you mark my words. We'd be the same. If a Comanche band comes out of New Mexico and wants to take our side against the d.a.m.nyankees, do we let 'em?"

Ruggles was best qualified to speak to that, and did: "No, sir. It happened once or twice, not long after the War of Secession: some of the Comanches reckoned they could play us and the United States off against each other." His smile was thoroughly grim. "Buzzards ate well for a few days afterwards."

Two valleys deeper into the mountains, the Confederates came upon an abandoned Apache encampment, and not an old one, either: some of the ashes in the fire pits were still warm, while flies buzzed around the bones of butchered beeves. "Now we're getting somewhere," Stuart said with more satisfaction than he'd shown since the army plunged into the divinely beautiful, h.e.l.lishly rugged terrain of the Sierra Madre. "If we can get them on the run, they'll start making mistakes, and they can't afford that."

He snapped orders. Three trails led out of the valley. Mounted scouts trotted rapidly down all of them. Within half a minute of one another, three explosions shattered the quiet. All told, they cost four men killed and half a dozen wounded. One of those wounded, one of the luckier ones, told Stuart, "It was a charge buried in the ground, sir, with a trip line for a horse or a man to set it off." Blood was soaking through the rag wrapped around his forearm. "I didn't think those Apache b.a.s.t.a.r.ds knew about little tricks like that."

Stuart and Major Horatio Sellers looked at each other. Both spoke the same name at the same time: "Batsinas." Stuart went on, "What's the name of that Yankee who comes up with a new invention every day before breakfast? Tom Edison, that's who I mean. The Apaches have got themselves a regular Tom Edison in that fellow."

"If they're going to start planting torpedoes in the road, we won't be able to rush after them," Sellers said.

"We can't rush after them in this country, anyway," Stuart answered. "So long as we get them, that's what counts."

Unhappily, Sellers said, "d.a.m.ned redskins didn't even give us a clue about which way they went. If they'd put a torpedo on one trail and left the other two alone, we'd have a pretty fair notion which one to follow."

"Not necessarily," Stuart said. "A torpedo on one trail could as easily lure us into an ambush or a false path as to show the way the Indians did go. They're more than clever enough to do something like that. We've seen as much."

Major Sellers looked unhappier still before at last nodding. "I said before, we should have slaughtered them," he muttered.

"We got good use out of them up in New Mexico Territory," Stuart said. "If they hadn't quarreled with the Mexicans, we'd still be on good terms with them." He craned his neck to look around. Which of the crags ahead held Apaches with Tredegars? Behind which bushes were they crouching? He couldn't begin to guess, and that worried him. He did some muttering of his own: "Now we have to make sure they don't slaughter us."

With some misgivings, he pushed his force down the trail the scouts reported to be most used. The column had not got far when boulders thundered down the mountainside above them. The avalanche sc.r.a.ped several men and horses and camels and mules off the paths into a ravine below. For a moment, Stuart spied men up above him, looking at what their handiwork had done. When Confederate troopers opened fire on them, they disappeared. He hoped his men had hit some of them, but he wouldn't have bet on it.

"Come on," he called to the soldiers. "We just keep after 'em, that's all."

Perhaps half a mile farther down the trail, another landslide took its toll. Doggedly, the Confederates pressed on. "This is the difference between us and the Empire of Mexico," Major Sellers said. "If the Apaches gave the Mexicans a little licking, they'd leave. The redskins must reckon we'll do the same." He shook his head. "Won't happen."

"No, indeed," Stuart said. "We shall teach them a new reckoning."

Maybe his army's persistence started giving the Indians that new reckoning. Or maybe he had chosen the right trail after all, and was nearing whatever encampment Geronimo's men had set up after abandoning the shelters his troopers had already found. Whatever the reason, the Apaches started shooting at the Confederates from the slopes above them and from in back of rocks and bushes ahead.

Soldiers who were hit screamed. Soldiers who were not, though, went into action with a fierce joy. If the Apaches would stand and fight, they could fight back. At Stuart's shouted orders, they went forward dismounted, so they could advance over ground their mounts could not cross. Gray and b.u.t.ternut uniforms were hard to see against rock and dirt as they moved ahead.

Stuart shouted other orders, too, to a runner. The man dashed back along the trail, breasting the tide of troopers going forward. He did his job better-which meant faster-than Stuart had dared hope. Only a few minutes pa.s.sed before first one and then another of the army's field guns began landing sh.e.l.ls on the positions from which the Apaches were fighting. Getting those guns over what pa.s.sed for trails in the Sierra Madre had been back-breaking labor-luckily, not man-killing labor-but it paid dividends now.

The Apaches did not care for coming under sh.e.l.lfire-or perhaps it unnerved them where bullets whipping past did not because it was less familiar. It made some of them break cover, a mistake often fatal. Yelling and whooping, the Confederates on foot went forward.

U.S. soldiers in a position like the one the Apaches held would have slugged it out with their Confederate opponents and made them pay a high price for every foot they gained. Had Stuart been defending that position against the Yankees, he would have done the same. The Apaches, though, did not fight to spend men. He'd seen that before. When they were under pressure, they saw nothing shameful about escaping from danger.

Firing slowly died away as the C.S. troopers found no more targets, real or imaginary: for Stuart was sure his men had frequently fired at bushes and rocks and even-he glanced over at Major Sellers-armadillos. "Forward!" he shouted, and forward the column went.

A few hundred yards beyond the place where the Apaches had made their stand, the trail led into another wide, fertile valley. Water trickled down from springs on the hillsides. Even in winter, everything was green. Birds chirped and warbled. Flies buzzed. The Apaches had had a camp there. It was far more hastily abandoned than the one Stuart's army had overrun early in the morning. A couple of beef cattle the Indians hadn't been able to take with them lowed mournfully.

Major Horatio Sellers rubbed his hands together. "We've got 'em on the run now, by G.o.d!"

Jeb Stuart looked around, as he had at the other abandoned camp. He saw no one but his own men. That did not mean no one but his own men saw him, and he knew it. "They've got enough places to run to," he said, not so delighted with having driven the Indians from their refuge as he'd thought he would be.

"Sooner or later, we'll get 'em," his aide-de-camp said.

"Yes, I figure we will, too," Stuart agreed. "As you said, Major, we're a lot more stubborn than the Mexicans. But I hadn't realized how many hiding places this country offers till I traveled it. We'll be a good long while at the job, I fear-years, most likely."

Sellers' mouth twisted. "I don't like that notion so very much."

"Neither do I, not even a little." Stuart drew himself up straighter. "It's got to be done, though, and I expect we'll do it ... eventually." After that last word was out of his mouth, he wished he hadn't said it. Then he looked around at the Sierra Madre again. He sighed. Eventually Eventually had needed saying. had needed saying.

From a bush so small no white man would ever have imagined using it for a hiding place, a rifle barked. Something hit Stuart a heavy blow in the belly. He grunted, as if at acute indigestion. "My G.o.d!" Horatio Sellers cried. "The general's shot!"

Next thing Stuart knew, he was lying in the dirt. Someone was making a noise like a fox with its leg in a trap. He realized it was he. The pain had started. It was very bad. It was worse than very bad. It was tremendous, appalling, all-consuming. He writhed and moaned and then shrieked, unashamed. None of it did any good.

Leaning over him, Sellers shouted, "Fetch the surgeon, dammit!"

Blood poured between Stuart's fingers as he clutched at himself. The surgeon wouldn't do any good, either. Wishing he could lose consciousness again, Stuart was only too sure of that. He shrieked again. He couldn't help himself. However long eventually eventually was, he wouldn't be here to see it. was, he wouldn't be here to see it.

Brigadier General George Custer threw more coal into the stove in his quarters at Fort Benton. The fire in the stove glowed a cheery red. Despite that, he was anything but warm. A blizzard howled outside.

He sc.r.a.ped a match against the sole of his boot and lighted a cigar. Libbie gave him a disapproving look. "Must "Must you do that?" she demanded. you do that?" she demanded.

"Dashed right I must," Custer said, and sucked in smoke. He didn't cough at all now. Sometimes the smoke even tasted good.