How Few Remain

Chapter 16

Frederick Douglass' Train pulled into Chicago at the south side depot, on the corner of State and Twelfth Streets. Looking out the window at the hurly-burly on the platform, Douglass was forcibly reminded that, while the Army of the Ohio butted heads with the Confederates at Louisville, most of the United States kept right on with the business on which they had been engaged before the war began.

After seeing nothing but blue uniforms for so long (save only during that brief, appalling interlude when he saw gray and butternut uniforms instead), Douglass blinked at the spectacle of checked and houndstooth and herringbone sack suits and brightly striped shirts on men, and at the fantastic, unfunctional cut and bright colors of women's clothes. Truly this was a different world from the one he'd just left.

Carrying his suitcases, he made his way to the waiting line of Parmelee's omnibuses. The driver, who was taking a feed bag off a horse's head, looked at him with something less than delight. "What would you be wanting?" he asked, brogue and carroty head of hair alike proclaiming him an Irishman.

"To go to the Palmer House," Douglass replied evenly.

As they often did, his deep, rolling voice and educated accent went some way toward making up for the color of his skin. So did his destination, one of the two best hotels in Chicago. Instead of snarling at him to take himself elsewhere, the omnibus driver, after a visible pause for thought, said nothing more than, "Fare is fifty cents."

Have you got fifty cents? lurked behind the words, as it would not have were the driver addressing a white man. With practiced carelessness, Douglass tossed him a half-dollar. "I've been there before," he said.

The driver plucked the coin out of the air, as if it would vanish if he let it touch the ground. Douglass boarded the half-full omnibus. The driver stared at him, as if wondering how much he could get away with. Douglass looked back with imperturbability as practiced as the carelessness. The Irishman's shoulders slumped. He picked up Douglass' bags and heaved them, a little harder than he might have, into the boot at the rear of the omnibus.

Before long, all the seats on the conveyance were taken-except the one next to Frederick Douglass. He wondered how many times he'd seen that over the years. More than he could count, certainly. The driver evidently reckoned that last seat would not be filled, for he climbed up into his own place, flicked the reins, and got the omnibus rolling. Above the streets, telegraph wires were as thick as vines in the jungle.

"Palmer House!" the driver shouted when he got to the hotel, which occupied the block on Monroe between State and Wabash, the entrance lying on the latter street. Douglass, a couple of other men, and a woman got off the omnibus. Douglass tipped the driver a dime for getting his bags out of the boot, then went inside. The lobby was a huge hall with a floor of multicolored marble tiles. Spittoons rang to well-aimed expectorations; poorer shots gave the marble new, less pleasant, hues. Western Union boys and letter carriers hurried through the hall in all directions.

To Douglass' relief, he had no trouble with his reservation. "Room 211," the desk clerk said, and handed him a key with that number stamped on it. The fellow looked back at the great grid of pigeonholes behind the front desk. "Yes, I thought so-there's a letter waiting for you."

"Thank you." Douglass took the envelope, which bore his name in a script long familiar. The note inside was to the point. If you are not too tired, it read, meet me for supper at seven tonight in the hotel restaurant. We were in at the birth; let us pray we are not to be in at the death. As usual, the signature ran the cross stroke of the initial of the Christian name into the beginning of the first letter of the surname: A. Lincoln.

"Help you with anything?" the desk clerk asked.

"Only in reminding me whether I remember correctly that the entrance to your restaurant is on the State Street side of the building," Douglass replied.

"Yes, that's right." The clerk nodded. He wasn't calling Douglass sir, but in all other respects seemed polite enough. The Negro discounted slights far worse than that.

He went upstairs, unpacked, and took a bath in the tin tub down at the end of the hall. Refreshed, he went back to his room, relighted the gas lamp above the desk, and wrote letters and worked on a newspaper story till it was time to join the former president for supper.

At the Palmer House restaurant, the maitre d' gave him a fishy stare. "I am to dine with Mr. Lincoln," he said, and the ice began to break up. A discreetly passed silver dollar made the fellow as obsequious as any Confederate planter could have wanted in a slave.

Lincoln was already seated when Douglass came up. He unfolded to his full angular height like a carpenter's jointed ruler. "Good to see you, Fred," he said, and held out his big, bony hand.

Douglass took it. "It's been too long," he said. "But neither of us is in fashion these days, and so we both have to work harder just to make our voices heard. That leaves too little time for sociability."

"Ain't it the truth?" Lincoln said in the rustic accents of his youth. "Well, sit yourself down, we'll get outside some supper, and then we'll hash this out and see what we come up with."

"An excellent proposal." Douglass did sit, then examined the menu. He spoke with firm decision: "I shall have a beefsteak. If I can't get a good one in Chicago, they have vanished off the face of the earth."

"I had beef last night, so I believe I'll order the roast chicken," Lincoln said. "Considering what we shall be about over the next few days, though, I wonder whether cooked goose wouldn't be a better choice."

"Surely things have not come to such a pass," Douglass said.

Lincoln looked at him. Lincoln, in fact, looked through him. The ex-president said not a word. Douglass, feeling himself flush, was glad his brown skin kept that from showing. When the waiter came round to see what the two men wanted, he reckoned the interruption not far from providential.

His beefsteak, when in due course it arrived, occasioned another interruption, a rapturous one. Across the table from him, Lincoln methodically demolished half a chicken. Both men drank whiskey with their meals.

"How you stay so lean with such an appetite is beyond me," Douglass said, patting his own considerable girth.

Lincoln shrugged. "I eat-and I am eaten." He had not drunk to excess, any more than Douglass had, but perhaps it was the spirits that let his frustration with the world in which he found himself come forth to a degree he did not usually permit. Or perhaps it was something else. After one of his self-deprecating chuckles, he said, "I bear up well in the presence of mine enemies; only with my friends do I let my sorrows show. Having so few friends these days, I am most often quite the jolly gentleman."

He looked as jolly as an undertaker. He usually looked that way, regardless of how he felt. Douglass said, "Surely the state of the Republican Party cannot be so bad as you implied in your invitation to this supper."

"Can't it? Why not?" Lincoln asked, and Douglass had no answer. The former president went on, "This may be the last supper of the Republican Party."

"With the way the war has gone, I fear you're likely right," Douglass said. "I had such hopes when we began it, and now…" His voice trailed away.

"Now we've both come closer than we would have liked to making the acquaintance of the hangman," Lincoln said, and Douglass winced and nodded. Lincoln continued, "But that is not what I meant. Our party would face hard sledding, and face it soon, even had the war gone as we should have liked."

"You are, I believe, too much the pessimist," Douglass said. "Had we succeeded in forcing the Confederate States to disgorge Chihuahua and Sonora, Republican strength would have been assured for years to come."

But Lincoln shook his head. "Try as I will, I cannot make myself believe it, for we have abandoned the principles upon which we-you and I and others-founded the party in the first place. When was the last time you heard a Republican speak up for a fair shake for the working man or for justice and equality for all men? Those are the ideals we espoused when we were young. Have they changed from boons to evils as we grew old?"

Douglass frowned and looked down into his glass of whiskey. In those charged, heady days before the War of Secession, everything had seemed possible. He spoke carefully: "Since the war, we may perhaps have grown too concerned with giving the country back its spine and allowing it to stand tall in the world, and-"

"What about caring what it stands for when it stands tall?" Lincoln broke in. "We have forgotten the working man as the capitalist ground him into the dirt. We have looked outward too much, and at ourselves too little, and so a pit yawns beneath the party. Unless the mass of men believe we represent them and can better their lot, they will cast their ballots elsewhere, and I for one shall not blame them. In their shoes-when they have shoes-I should cast my vote elsewhere, too."

"I look outward," Douglass said. "I look south, to my brethren yet in bondage."

"I know you do, old friend," Lincoln said. "Nor do I presume to condemn you, for there your heart lies. But do you not see that the factory owners in the United States abuse the working classes in much the same way as the slaveowners in the Confederate States abuse the Negro?"

"It might seem so, to a white man," Douglass snapped. But then he softened: "We have disagreed here for years, you and I. I ask you, Abraham: where is the factory owner who, when a pretty woman in his employ strikes his fancy, can abuse her chastity as he wishes?" His mouth tightened. The color of his skin, the shape of his features, testified that he was the product of such a union.

Lincoln replied, "Where is the slaveowner who, when times are slack or when a hand grows old, can turn him out to starve without a backwards glance, as if he were discarding a torn glove? The evils are not identical, but both spring from superiors enjoying untrammeled power over those they call inferiors, which is, as I have long maintained, destructive of democracy."

"The plight of the Negro is worse, and more deserving of attention," Douglass insisted.

"The plight of the Negro in the United States is not far different from the plight of other proletarians in the United States, and grows less different day by day," Lincoln said. "In looking toward the Negro in the Confederate States, for whom we can do little, you ignore both the Negro and the white man in the United States, for whom we can do a great deal."

"I look to amend the worst evil I see," Douglass said stiffly.

"Which is also the one least susceptible to amendment." Then Lincoln laughed, which irked the Negro orator and journalist, who found nothing amusing in the discussion. Seeing his expression, the ex-president explained: "I went through what they call the Lincoln-Douglas debates more than twenty years ago, and now I find myself in the midst of the Lincoln-Douglass debate."

"After some of the things the Little Giant said about the colored man, I'll thank you not to compare me to him," Douglass said, but he was smiling now, too. "You lost that election, but those debates made you a force to be reckoned with."

"And all that reckoning with me got the country was a lost war and a new, unfriendly neighbor on our southern border," Lincoln answered. "All that electing me got the party was the assurance it would not elect another Republican president for the next generation."

Yes, Douglass thought, Lincoln was letting his bitterness show tonight, more than he normally did. The Negro said, "Cheer up, old friend. You yourself spoke of the king who charged his wise men to come up with a saying that would be true and fitting in all times and situations. They gave him the words, 'And this, too, shall pass away.'

"Yes, and do you know what those wise men were talking about?" Lincoln asked. Douglass shook his head. "The Republican Party," Abraham Lincoln said.

Captain Saul Berryman looked neither so bright nor so young as he had before the war against the many foes of the United States. "Good morning, Colonel Schlieffen," he said wearily. He did not bother speaking German, as he had before, but waved Schlieffen to a seat in the outer office. "General Rosecrans will be with you shortly."

"Thank you," Alfred von Schlieffen told Rosecrans' adjutant. Captain Berryman only grunted by way of reply. He had already immersed himself once more in the paperwork that had engrossed him when Schlieffen walked into the office.

The closed door to Rosecrans' inner sanctum did little to muffle the phrases he was, presumably, bellowing into the telephone: "Yes, Mr. President… No, Mr. President… No, no, no… I'm sorry, Your Excellency, but I don't think we can manage that… What? What? I'm sorry, I can't hear you." That last was followed a moment later by a sharp little crash, as of the newfangled machine's earpiece being slammed back into the bracket on which it rested when not in use.

Major General William Rosecrans opened the door to the inner office and peered out, a hunted look in his deep-set eyes. "Ah, Schlieffen," the gcneral-in-chief of the United States said, suddenly genial.

"I'd sure as hell sooner talk with you than with James G."-his beard swallowed a word or two-" Blaine."

"Thank you, General," Schlieffen said, rising and going into Rosecrans' office. What he thought of an officer who would curse his Commander-In-Chief he kept to himself. Instead, pointing to the box on the wall, he said, "I am sorry it did not let you hear well."

"What?" Rosecrans stared. Then he laughed. "I could hear just fine, Colonel. What happened was, I got sick of listening. Any time a man asks you to do what isn't possible, you're a damned sight better off pretending you can't make him out."

Schlieffen thought of the British admiral, Nelson, deliberately raising a telescope to his blind eye so he could keep from officially seeing an order he did not like. With as much sympathy as he could put in his voice, the German military attache asked, "What does the president ask of you that you cannot do?"

He wondered if Rosecrans would answer him. He wouldn't have answered a question like that from a foreign attache, were he back in Berlin. But the American soldier did not hesitate. "What does he ask?" Rosecrans echoed. "What does he ask? He asks me to win the goddamn war for him, that's what. Not so much at this stage of things, is it?"

His breath stank of whiskey. Even a sober man, though, would have been hard pressed to be optimistic at the moment. "How does he want you to do this?" Schlieffen inquired.

"How?" Rosecrans howled, stretching the word out into a cry of pain. "He hasn't the faintest idea how. I'm the soldier, so that's supposed to be my affair. Have you got a won war concealed anywhere about your person, Colonel Schlieffen? I haven't, sure as the devil."

"If President Blaine still wants you this war to win, I do not know how to tell you to do this," Schlieffen said. "The only question I have is why he does not take the peace the Confederates say they will give him and thank God for it. When we France beat, we from them took two provinces and made them pay five milliards of francs."

"What's a milliard?" Rosecrans asked. Schlieffen took a pen from its ink-well and wrote the number on a scrap of paper: 5,000,000,000. Rosecrans looked at it. "Oh. Five billion francs, you mean." He whistled softly. "That's a lot of money."

"Ja, " Schlieffen answered laconically.

"That's a hell of a lot of money," Rosecrans said, as if the German had not spoken.

"Ja," Schlieffen said again, and then, "and Longstreet wants to take no provinces-no, no states, you would say-from the United States. He wants to take no money from the United States. He wants to take only the two provinces he bought from the Empire of Mexico, and to have the United States say they are his. With what he could do, these are good terms, nicht wahrT'

"Oh, they're good terms, all right," Rosecrans said. "You ask me, they're too damn good. It's as though Longstreet is saying, 'We can lick you any old time we please, and we don't have to take anything away from you to make that so.' It's-humiliating, that's what it is."

Schlieffen essayed a rare joke: "If President Blaine does not for these terms care, President Longstreet will them harder make. Of this I am sure. Do you not think that I… am right?" He nodded to himself, pleased he'd again remembered the English idiom.

"In a red-hot minute," Rosecrans said, which the German military attache, judging by the tone, took for agreement. Sighing, scowling, Rosecrans went on, "But he can't do that now, because that would be humiliating, too. Do you understand what I'm saying, Colonel?"

"Oh, yes, I understand," Schlieffen said. "But in war, the way not to be humiliated is to win. If you lose a war, how can you keep this from happening to you? The enemy to be stronger himself has shown."

"Hasn't he, though?" But then Rosecrans violently shook his head. "No, God damn it, the Confederates haven't shown that they're stronger than we are. As strong as we are, maybe, but not stronger. It's only after England and France jumped on our back that everything went into the privy."

"But we of this spoke down in Washington before the war began," Schlieffen said. " Britain and France have been friends to the Confederate States since before the War of Secession. The United States should have had ready a plan to fight at the same time all three countries."

"I remember you saying that," Rosecrans replied. "I have to tell you, I didn't take it seriously then. Do you really mean to tell me that back in Berlin you've got a plan for war against France and one for war against France and England and one for war against France and England and Russia and one for-"

"Aber natiirlich," Schlieffen broke in. "And we think of also Austria-Hungary and Italy, though they are now our friend. And we remember Holland and Belgium and Denmark and Sweden and Turkey and-"

The gcncral-in-chief of the United States stared at him. "Jesus Christ, you do mean it," Rosecrans said slowly. "What do they do in that General Staff of yours, Colonel, sit around all day studying maps and timetables and lists of regiments and I don't know what all else?"

"Yes," Schlieffen answered, surprised yet again that Rosecrans should be surprised at the idea of military planning. "We believe that, if war comes, we should as little to chance leave as we can."

"A lot of chance in war," Rosecrans insisted. "Can't help it." Yes, he was an American, looking for nothing more than the chance to go out in the field of uncertainty and snatch what he could from it.

"Yes, this is so," Schlieffen said. "A lot, there is. As little as there can be, there should be." What the United States had snatched from the field of uncertainty was a thumping defeat.

"Maybe," Rosecrans said, like a man admitting Limburger cheese might possibly taste good in spite of the way it smelled. "Maybe." He brushed a pale speck from the dark blue wool of his tunic. "The more you talk about it, Colonel, the more I do think the United States should send some of our officers to your country after this blamed war is finally over-if it's ever over-so we can take a long look at how you go about things."

"They would be welcome," Schlieffen said. "Your neighbors who do not love you are allied to the French, who do not love us. Since we have one enemy who is the same, it might for us be good to be with each other friends." He held up a hasty hand. "You must understand, I speak here only for myself, not for Chancellor Bismarck."

"Yes, yes." General Rosecrans nodded impatiently. "I can't speak for the secretary of state, either. Speaking for nobody but William S. Rosecrans, though, Colonel, I'll tell you I like the idea pretty god damn well."

Alfred von Schlieffen sat very still, contemplating what he had just said. The enemy of my enemy is a friend was an ancient truth. France, so far as he could see, would never be anything but Germany 's enemy. France was the Confederate States' friend; the Confederate States were an enemy to the United States, also unlikely to be anything else.

So far as he could see, real, close friendship between Germany and the United States made good strategic sense. He wondered what Minister von Schlozer would think of the idea. Up till now, German relations with both the USA and the CSA had been polite, even cordial, but not particularly close. Would Chancellor Bismarck want to continue what had been working well enough, or would he be interested in changing things? If he was, a U.S. military mission to Berlin might be one tooth of the key in the lock.

Schlozer will have a better idea of the chancellor's mind than I do, Schlieffen thought. Then he realized Rosecrans had just spoken, and he had no idea what the general had said. "I am sorry," he said. "You must please excuse me. I was thinking of something else."

"1 guess you were," Rosecrans said with a chuckle. "The Judgment Trump could have sounded right then, and you never would have noticed. What I said was, I'll take the notion of sending officers to Berlin over to the secretary of state to see what he thinks of it."

"That is good. I am glad to hear it," Schlieffen said.

"Damned if I know what will come of it, though." Rosecrans' good humor vanished. "Ever since Washington warned us against entangling alliances, we've held apart from 'em. Of course, in Washington 's day we didn't have nasty neighbors tangled up with foreigners themselves. But he's like the Good Book to a lot of people here, even if he was from Virginia."

That Rosecrans was himself talking with a foreigner never seemed to enter his mind. Schlieffen had seen in other Americans the same interesting inability to judge the effects of their own words. It did not offend him, not here; he would not let it offend him. "You will do what you can do, General, with the officials of your country, and I will do what I can with the officials of mine, and we will see what from this comes."

Before Rosecrans could answer, the box on the wall clanged to let him know someone wished to speak with him. He grimaced and swore fiercely under his breath. But then, like a hound summoned to the dinner bowl by the ring of a bell, he got up and went to the telephone. "Rosecrans here," he shouted into it. "Yes, Mr. President, I hear you pretty well right now. What were you saying before, Your Excellency?" A pause. "But, Mr. President…"

Schlieffen quickly realized the conversation with President Blaine was liable to go on for some time. He half rose. General Rosecrans nodded permission for him to go. He respectfully dipped his head to the American general-in-chief, then left the inner office.

"Auf wiedersehen, Hen Oberst," Captain Berryman said when he emerged; Rosecrans' adjutant had regained enough spirit to try German again. "Ich hoffe alles is mit, uh, bei Ihnen gut?"

"Yes, everything is well with me, thank you," Schlieffen answered. "How is everything with you?"

Before Berryman could answer, Rosecrans' bellow of frustrated fury did the job for him: "God damn it to hell, Mr. President, I can't give you a victory when the sons of bitches are coming at us five ways at once… Yes, well, maybe you should have thought about that more before you dragged us into this miserable war… Maybe you should think about making peace, too, while you've still got the chance." The sharp click that followed was, again, the earpiece slamming down onto its rest.

Schlieffen and Berryman looked at each other. Neither found anything to say. After a polite, sympathetic nod, Schlieffen let himself out of the antechamber.

Abraham Lincoln appreciated-indeed, savored-the irony of meeting in the Florence Hotel to do battle for the soul of the Republican Party. Here he was, doing his best to make the party remember the labourers who had helped bring it to power, and doing it in a hotel erected by the Pullman Company on part of the city within a city they owned: factories, houses, blocks of flats, all in the holy name of Pullman.

Robert had arranged it, of course. His Chicago connections were far better than his father's, these days. The room, Lincoln could not deny, was splendid: magnificent walnut paneling, table with legs even more elaborately carved than that paneling, chairs upholstered in maroon velvet and soft enough to swallow a man, gaslights overhead so ornate, they resembled a forest frozen in beaten bronze.

"I think we are all here," Lincoln said, looking around the room. Fewer were here than he had hoped. Some of his telegrams had gone unanswered; some men he had hoped would accept had declined. He wondered whether he had enough strength at hand, even if everything went as he wanted, to turn the party into the path he had in mind. The only way to find out would be the event.

Around the table, heads nodded. There sat Frederick Douglass, with his big frame and white mane and beard as solid and impressive as a snow-topped mountain. There was John Hay, a lighter presence, once Lincoln's secretary, then minister to the CSA in Blaine 's administration till war broke out. There sat Benjamin Butler, a clever mind concealed within a bald, bloated, sagging walrus of a body: before the War of Secession a Democrat who thought Jefferson Davis might make a good president of the United States, at its end a U.S. general who'd had to flee New Orleans in a Navy frigate to keep the returning Confederates from hanging him without trial.

Next to Butler, rotund Hannibal Hamlin fiddled with his spectacles. He had been Lincoln 's vice president, and had gone down to defeat with him in 1864. But he was a Maine man, and secretary of state to boot, and as such more likely than others to gain the ear of President Blaine. Senator James Garfield of Ohio sat farthest from Lincoln. An officer during the War of Secession, he had risen to prominence as a member of the military courts that purged the Army of defeatists after the fighting ended. But for Hay, he was the youngest man in the room.

"I think two questions stand before the house today," Lincoln said, as if he were addressing the Illinois Assembly. "The first is, where does our party stand now? The second, and more urgent, is, where do we go from here?"

"Where we are, is in trouble," Ben Butler declared in his flat Massachusetts accent. "How do we get out of it?" He shook his big, round head; the gray hair that fringed his bald pate flew this way and that. "Damned if I know. Hanging Blaine from the Washington Monument might be one place to start."

"He did what he was elected to do." Hannibal Hamlin spoke up in defense of the president.

"So he did, and did it damned badly, too," Butler sneered.

"Fighting the Confederate States, opposing their tyranny, is not and cannot be a sin," Frederick Douglass declared.

But Butler had an answer for him, too: "Fighting them and losing is."

"As you will know from the invitations I sent you, I was speaking in more general terms," Lincoln said. "The question I wish to address is, assuming the war lost, as it seems to be, how is the Republican Party once more to recover its status with the American people?"

"By doing as it was meant to do from the outset: by championing freedom over all this continent," Douglass said.

"In aid of that," John Hay said, his voice light and thin after the Negro's, "I have heard that Longstreet will formally free the Negroes in the CSA once this war ends. His allies are said to have extracted such a promise from him as the price of their aid against us."

"One more reason for Blaine to come to terms, then," Douglass exclaimed, his leonine features lighting with hope. A moment later, though, he spoke more cautiously: "If it be true, of course. You, John, will be the best judge of us all as to that."

"With my few months in Richmond before the fighting started?" Hay said with a laugh full of self-mockery. "I believe it to be true, having heard it from sources I reckon trustworthy, but I can offer no guarantee. Nor, even if it is true, can I guess how much de facto, as opposed to de jure, freedom the Negroes in the Confederate States are to have."

"Giving them any at all goes dead against the Confederate Constitution," Garfield pointed out.

"That doesn't always stop us," Butler said. "I don't see any reason the Rebs will lose a whole lot of sleep over it."

"Your cynicism, Mr. Butler, has truly astonishing breadth and scope," John Hay murmured. Butler gave him an oleaginous smile, as at a compliment. Maybe he thought it was one.

Lincoln said, "When a man has no freedom, any increase looms large, f hope you are indeed correct, John. The Negro unchained will grow in ways the men now his masters do not expect." Frederick Douglass nodded vigorous agreement to that. Lincoln continued, "Even as the chains may fall from the limbs of the slave in the Confederate States, so they are being fitted to those of the labourer in the United States. Standing firm against this, we can and shall become the party of the majority once more, after the misfortune of the war sinks below the surface of public recollection."

James Garfield frowned. "I don't see how sounding like radicals will take us anywhere we want to go."

"Justice for the working man is not a radical notion," Lincoln said, "or, if it is, that stands as a judgment against the United States."

"But what do you mean by justice, Lincoln?" Garfield demanded. "If you call raising a Red rebellion, the way you tried to do in Montana Territory — if you call that justice, I want no part of it."

"I make two points in response to that, sir," Lincoln said. "The first is that I raised no rebellion, Red or otherwise. 1 made a speech, similar to many other speeches I have made over the years. If the miners in Helena were forcefully of the opinion that it fit the circumstances under which they lived, I cannot help it. Second and more basic is the fact that the people do retain the right of revolution against a government they find tyrannical."

"Now you do sound like a Red," Ben Butler rumbled. His jowls shook with the weight of his disapproval.

"Without the right of revolution, we should to this day be British subjects, revering Queen Victoria," Lincoln said. "We might make discontented British subjects, but British subjects we should be. If we were still British colonies, we would retain the right of revolution against the Crown. How can we not retain it, then, against the government in Washington?"

"In Philadelphia, you mean," Butler said. "On this theory, you should have let the Confederate States go without firing a shot."

"By no means," Lincoln said. "They sought to break, and, sadly, succeeded in breaking, a union; they did not aim to establish a more perfect one for the nation as a whole."

"A subtle distinction," said Butler, an admirer of subtle distinctions.

"My view," Frederick Douglass said, "is that, while Mr. Lincoln exaggerates the likenesses between the position of the Confederate slave and that of the U.S. labourer, we may, if we so desire, use such exaggerations to good effect on the stump."

"That is what I meant to say, yes," Lincoln said, "save that I purpose making this principle the rock on which our platform stands, not just a net with which to sweep up votes when the next election comes."

Hannibal Hamlin said, "If we take this line, the Democrats will call us a pack of Communards, and that alongside all the other low things they are in the habit of calling us."

"The Democrats lined up in support of property when that included property in Negro slaves. They have not changed since." Lincoln did not try to hide his scorn. "If they start flinging brickbats, they'll have to duck a good many, too."

"How much good will any of this do, gentlemen, when we are tarred with the brush of two losing wars in the space of twenty years?" John Hay asked.

"Exactly my point," Lincoln said. "If we go on as we have been, we are surely ruined. If, on the other hand, we make the changes in our course I have suggested, we offer the entire nation a new birth of liberty. Otherwise, I fear, government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall perish from this earth, replaced by government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. The free men who made the United States a beacon to the nations of the world shall be reduced to gearing in the vast capitalist engine of profit."

"I just don't see it," Senator Garfield said. "I wish I did, but I don't. No room for compromise in any of this. Without compromise, you can't have politics. The brickbats will be flying, all right, but they'll be real brickbats with real bricks. That's the direction whence class warfare comes."

"Yes, it is," Lincoln said softly. "Do you think we can avoid it by pretending the seeds from which it springs are not already planted and growing?"

"Whether we can avoid it is one question," Hay said. "Whether we should embrace it is another question altogether."

"You mean that, John." Lincoln 's voice was full of wonder, full of grief. Hay was his protege. Hay was nearly as much his son as was Robert. As far as Lincoln could see, his own course of thought had followed over the years a perfectly logical, perfectly inevitable path. And yet, the handsome young man who was now an even more handsome middle-aged man had not gone in the same direction. For that matter, neither had Robert Lincoln.

Hay said, "I think everyone here, with the possible exception of Mr. Douglass, feels the same as I do." He sounded sad, too, the way a doctor sounded sad when he had to tell a family the situation for a sick man was hopeless, and that he would soon die.

Lincoln looked around the table, silently polling the men he had asked to join him in Chicago. With him, they could have swung many in the Republican Party to his views. If they were against him, reform along the lines he desired would not come, not through the Republicans. "Gentlemen, think again, please," he said. "Can you not see that this country needs a new birth of freedom if it is to go on being the wonder and the envy of the world?" He knew he was pleading. The last man with whom he'd pleaded was Lord Lyons, the British minister to the United States during the War of Secession.

He'd failed then. After Lee's victories in Pennsylvania, the British government had recognized the Confederate States as a nation among nations and, with France, had forced the USA to do likewise. He was failing now, too. He saw that by the way his comrades would not meet his eyes.

Garfield said, " Lincoln, if we Republicans tried to go down your road, I think you would split the party not in two but in three. Some would go with you, and I expect you would gain a few among the Socialists and others who believe in notions even more radical than yours."

"Thank you so much," Lincoln murmured.

"I mean no offense. I speak the truth as I see it, as you do." Garfield was earnest, sensible, in the middle of the road. He proved as much, continuing, "Some would probably try to hold the party on the course it has now. I lean that way myself, truth to tell. And some would bolt to the Democrats."

"And," Hannibal Hamlin added, "the devil would come down with chilblains before we won another election."

Benjamin Butler said, "It occurs to me that what we may need is not more freedom but a little less. Compared to any European country, this is a land full of bomb-flinging anarchists. We're so damned free, we've thrown two wars away because we did not properly prepare for either of them. Take Germany, now-nothing in Germany but coal and potatoes, far as the eye can see. But they've got discipline there, by God, and they're the strongest power on the continent."

"I wouldn't go so far as Mr. Butler," Hay said, "but I am compelled to believe there is some truth in what he says." Hamlin nodded. So did Garheld.

Lincoln discovered he'd only thought he knew despair. He turned to Frederick Douglass. "What of you, Fred?" he asked.

Douglass had less political clout than any of the others, but more moral authority. After staring for a while at something only he could see, he answered, "My own people, both in the Confederate States and in the United States, need more freedom, not less. I must believe the same also holds true for white men." Had he stopped there, he would have aided Lincoln. But he went on, "Neither am I convinced that taking the Republican Party into the streets, so to speak, is the way to gain a majority for it."

"Let me ask the question another way," Lincoln said: "Other than taking the Republican Party into the streets, how is it to gain a majority? Only sixteen years of accumulated disgust at Democratic feckless-ness let us win this latest election. Things being as they are now, when do you gentlemen foresee our winning another one, and by what means?"

For close to two minutes, no one answered. Then James Garfield said, "Whatever the means may be, they shall not include riots and rebellion, which would only raise enmity against us."

"Like pressure from steam in an engine, pressure for change will rise in the United States," Lincoln said. "Whether it rises through the Republican Party or outside the party remains to be seen. I would sooner see it rise through the party, that we may channel it for the nation's good and for our own."

He looked around the table again. Not even Douglass looked as if he agreed with him. Ben Butler said, "If workers go into the streets, soldiers go into the streets, too. Soldiers carry more rifles. They always have. They always will."

"Unless and until they turn those rifles against the men who give them orders they cannot in good conscience obey," Lincoln said, which produced another long silence. Into it, he continued, "Gentlemen, I say this with a heavy heart, but I say it nonetheless: if, as this meeting makes it appear likely, the Republican Party cannot find room to encourage change, I shall work outside the confines of the party to encourage it. For change, sure as I live and breathe, is coming. And, though they may not be here today, there are those calling themselves Republicans who will follow me."

"You would deliberately split the party?" It was half a gasp from Hannibal Hamlin, half a wheeze.

"No, I would not," Lincoln answered. "But I will."

"If you try, we shall read you out and pretend you were never in," Butler said. "The way the Democrats have campaigned against you ever since the War of Secession, we might be better off reading you out."

"An ostrich may bury its head in the sand and pretend the lion is not there," Lincoln said. "Will that keep the lion from enjoying a supper of ostrich?"

Butler got to his feet. Since he was short and squat, drawing himself up to his full height was less impressive than it might have been otherwise, but he did his best. "I think we have heard enough," he said. "Thank you for inviting us here, Mr. Lincoln. I expect each of us can find his own way out, his own way back to his hotel, and his own way home."

One by one, the Republican leaders filed past Lincoln and toward the door. As John Hay went by, the ex-president softly asked, "Et tu, John?"

"Et ego, Mr. Lincoln." Hay's voice was sad, but it was firm. Like the others, even Frederick Douglass, he left without a backwards glance.

Lincoln stood all alone in the room poor men had built so rich men might confer in it. "Labour first," he said, as he had so many times. "Labour first, then capital. If they cannot remember that on their own, I shall make certain they are reminded of it." And he left, too, his back straight, his stride determined. He had been a Whig. He was-no, he had been-a Republican. Now…

"They have lost the war," General Thomas Jackson told Major General E. Porter Alexander. "If they cannot realize that on their own, I shall make certain they are reminded of it."

"Yes, sir." Alexander was not a young man, but retained a large measure of boyish enthusiasm. "President Longstreet's tried to make 'em take their medicine. If they won't open their mouth, we'll just have to yank it open and shove the pill down their throats whether they like it or not."

"Well put." Jackson studied the dispositions on the map. "Everything appears to be in readiness."

"Everything on my end is, sir," his chief artillerist answered. "The guns await only your order to begin."

"Tomorrow morning at half past five," Jackson said. "The end of the day, if God grant victory on our arms, should see the removal from our soil of more than half the Yankees now infesting it."

"Here's hoping you're right, sir," General Alexander said. "And if you are, I'm damned if I can see how they'll be able to go on fighting after that."

"Do not speak so lightly of damnation." Jackson put a rumble of reproof in his voice. "To tell the truth, though, I cannot see how they have gone on fighting so long when so little has gone right for them. Much as I hate to say it, they are braver than I reckoned."

"Hasn't done 'em much good, and that's what counts," Alexander answered.

Absently, Jackson nodded. "Courage and the goodness of one's cause, unfortunately, do not always go hand in hand."

"Yes, sir, that's a fact." His artillery chief nodded, too. "If Douglass taught us anything, he taught us that." Alexander's chuckle had a slight nervous edge. "And, looking out of the other side of the mirror, he learned the same thing from us, I reckon."

"Goodness does not depend on the position from which one observes it," Jackson said sternly. "Goodness is." He sounded very certain. He was very certain. Even so, he did his best not to think about Frederick Douglass. He also noticed that E. Porter Alexander didn't reply, which might well have meant Alexander, too, carefully wasn't thinking about the Negro.

He went to bed that night with the rattle and bang of rifle fire from the trenches in Louisville and to the east of the city and the occasional rumble of artillery in his ears. Everything sounded as it had since the U.S. flank attack bogged down. Thus lulled, he fell asleep almost as soon as he finished his prayers. Neither too much noise nor too little would give the Yankees anything out of the ordinary with which to concern themselves.

An orderly shook him awake with the words, "Half past three, sir, like you ordered."

Yawning, Jackson got into his boots and stuck his hat on his head. The orderly gave him a big tin cup full of coffee strong enough to try to climb over the rim. The handle burned his fingers. The coffee burned his mouth when he gulped it down. "Ahh," he said-a gasp of approval. "I'm ready. Now off to meet up with General Alexander."

He reached the artillerist, at batteries east of Louisville that had come to Kentucky gun by gun from all over the CSA, about half an hour before the show was scheduled to begin. "Good to see you, sir," Alexander said, saluting. In the dim gray of early dawn, he seemed as much a ghost as a man. "Everything is ready. We await only the hour."

"As it should be," Jackson said. Every so often, he would hold his watch next to a lantern. Time moved more slowly than it had any business doing. He'd seen that before. It always bemused him. At last, a little after he could see the time without putting the watch up to the light, he said, "The hour is come."

As if his words had been a signal, a great bellow of artillery rose west of him: all the guns that had defended Louisville against the flanking attack now sent their full fury against the line upon which they had halted the U.S. forces. The flashes from their muzzles lit up the horizon, as if the sun were rising from the wrong direction.

E. Porter Alexander beamed. "Isn't it bully, sir?"

In searching for a description, Jackson would sooner have found one in the Book of Revelations. Even so, he did not reprove his gayer subordinate. "It will do, General. It will do."

U.S. artillery, both in the salient east of Louisville and on the far side of the Ohio, was quick to respond. All through the fight for Louisville, the U.S. cannon had given Jackson more worry than anything else. The United States had brought a lot of guns into the fight, and handled them well. Their artillerymen might lack Porter's imagination, but they were solid professionals. Their shells would punish the Confederate entrenchments.

In spite of that countcrfire, the C.S. soldiers in those entrenchments opened up on the Yankees in front of them with their Trede-gars: a hailstone-on-tin-roof accompaniment to the big guns' thunder. Jackson was sure Rebel yells rang out all along the line as the Confederates there went over to the attack, but the roar of the guns drowned them.

"I pity those poor fellows," Alexander said. "They can't possibly break through, and they'll pay a stiff price for trying."

"It is the price of victory," Jackson said in a voice like iron. His chief artillerist grimaced, but finally nodded.

The sun rose. Jackson waited, still as a statue, while messengers brought word of the fighting to the west. As General Alexander had predicted, the U.S. position facing Louisville was more than strong enough to keep the attacking Confederates from doing much past getting into the first couple of lines of trenches. Jackson had hoped for more, but he had not really expected it.

An hour passed. Turning to Alexander, he asked, "Do you think they are fully engaged, reserves coming up, all their eyes turned on the fight right in front of them?"

"Sir, if they're not, they never will be," Alexander replied. With a faint hint of scorn, he added, "They have so much trouble seeing what's right in front of their noses, they sure as the devil aren't going to look any further."

Jackson considered. From the outset, he had held this moment in his hands and his hands alone. He stared eastward. His nostrils flared, like a wolf's when it takes a scent. He nodded, a sharp, almost involuntary motion. "Let it begin," he said.

E. Porter Alexander shouted an order. All the guns within the sound of his voice let loose. That roar signaled the eruption of all the guns the Confederates had assembled along the southern flank of the Yankees' salient. Up till now, nothing much had happened along that flank. Jackson had kept it strong enough to discourage U.S. forces from trying to shift direction and move against it, which hadn't been hard: the enemy's aim remained focused on Louisville alone. Along with guns, he'd been quietly bringing men forward over the past few days. Now, as they burst from their trenches and dashed toward those of the Yankees, he did hear Rebel yells through the gunfire, a great catamount chorus of them.

"The men must go forward at all hazard, so long as any hope of success presents itself," he said aloud, as he had in the orders he'd sent to the brigade commanders south of the U.S. salient. "If we are to roll up the Yankees' strong fortified west-facing line, we can only do so by an unexpected assault from the flank and rear."

"Pour it on, boys!" Porter Alexander was yelling. "Pour it on!" Jackson tried to inspire his men to the same clear, cold despisal of the foe and certainty God was on their side as he felt himself. Alexander was warmer and earthier at the same time. "Give 'em a good boot in the ass!" he shouted. "Come on, you mangy bastards, work those guns!"

He got louder and coarser from there. Jackson started to rebuke him, then noticed how splendidly the sweating, smoke-stained artillerymen were handling their cannon. He held his peace. After the battle was over, perhaps he would reprove Alexander for some of his more blasphemous suggestions and ask that he refrain from using them in the future. Meanwhile, the artillery commander was getting results. That counted for more.

Streams of Yankee prisoners began shambling past what had for so long been the dividing point between their army and that of the CSA. One of them, a man old enough to have fought in the War of Secession, recognized Jackson. "God damn you, Stonewall, you sneaky son of a bitch!" he shouted. Jackson tipped his hat-to him, that was praise. The Confederates guarding the U.S. soldiers laughed. So did a few of the Yankees.

Some of the U.S. guns north of the Ohio shifted their fire to oppose the Confederate breakthrough. Jackson used a telescope to watch shells bursting among his advancing soldiers. But, for once, the U.S. artillerymen were slower than they should have been in responding to changing conditions on the field. As an old artillerist, Jackson also realized the smoke and dust his own bombardment was kicking up hampered the foe in his choice of targets.

More prisoners came back, some of them carried on makeshift litters by their comrades. Messengers came back, too. One young man, his voice cracking with excitement, exclaimed, "General Jackson, sir, them damn-yankees is unraveling faster'n the sleeve off a two-bit shirt. They would run, only they ain't got nowheres to run to."

"God having delivered them into our hands, let us make certain we do not fail to achieve His great purpose by permitting them to slip through our fingers," Jackson said, and ordered more reinforcements forward.

General Alexander was also sending some of his guns forward so they could bear on the retreating U.S. soldiers. "You know something, sir?" he said. "This business is a lot more fun when you're moving ahead than when you're falling back."

"I believe I may have made a similar observation myself, at one time or another in my career," Jackson said.

"Yankees aren't having much fun right now," Alexander said. Jackson smiled. It was the sort of smile that made blue-tuniced prisoners shiver as they stumbled into captivity.

A messenger ran up. "Sir," he panted, "we-uns just ran over the biggest damn Yankee supply dump you ever did see."

"Put guards around it," Jackson ordered. "Let no one go into it. Arrest any who try. If they resist even in the least, shoot them. Do you understand me, Private?"

"Y-Y-Yes, sir," the messenger stammered, and fled.

To E. Porter Alexander, Jackson said, "During the War of Secession, we lived off Yankee plunder because we had so few goods of our own. Sometimes we foraged when we should have been fighting. Now, with a sufficiency of our own supplies, fighting shall come first, as it should."

"Telling soldiers not to plunder is like telling roosters not to tread hens," Alexander said.

"Sooner or later, the philandering rooster ends up in a stew," Jackson replied. "The plundering soldier is also likely to end up stewing, especially if he pauses to plunder when he should advance."

Before long, disarmed Confederates started coming past him: only a trickle compared to the number of Yankee prisoners, but too many to suit Jackson. Some of them called out to him in appeal. He turned his back, the better to remind them they had jeopardized his victory with their greed.

Messengers also kept coming back. They were far more welcome, since almost all the news they brought was good. Here and there, by squads and companies, the Yankees kept fighting grimly. More often, though, they gave way to the alarm that could jolt through even experienced troops when flanked, and tumbled back toward the Ohio in headlong retreat.

Slyly, Porter Alexander asked, "What do we do if we go and catch Frederick Douglass again?"

"Dear God in heaven!" Jackson clapped a hand to his forehead. "I forgot to issue any orders about him. We give him back to the United States, exactly as we did before. President Longstreet, I must say, convinced me of the urgent necessity for following that course and no other."

He shouted for runners and sent orders for the good treatment of any captured elderly Negro agitator up to the front along with orders for continued advances. No news of any such prisoner's being taken got back to him. No news of any such Negro's being conveniently found dead on the field got back to him, either. But then, such news wouldn't. If Douglass had been killed by bullet or shell or hasty noose, his body either lay unnoticed where it had fallen or had been flung into a ditch to make sure it stayed unnoticed.

"Maybe he was back in U.S. territory when the attack began," Jackson said hopefully. "For our sake, I pray he was. For his sake, I pray he was, too."

"You say that about Frederick Douglass, sir?" E. Porter Alexander gave him a quizzical look.

"I do," Jackson answered. "He has, I would say, already done as much damage to our cause as he is likely to do." He did not mention President Longstreet's plan for manumitting Negroes in the CSA after the close of the war. General Alexander did not need to know about that, not yet. Jackson wished he didn't need to know about it, either.

Over the months since Longstreet had broached his intentions to him, he'd reluctantly decided the president knew what he was doing. Longstreet, as far as Jackson was concerned, made a better politician than a soldier; he was full of the deviousness politics required. If he said manumitting the Negro would redound to the advantage of the Confederate States, odds were he knew whereof he spoke.

"Sir!" A messenger shattered Jackson 's reverie. "Sir, we have men on the Ohio!"

"Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow," Jackson murmured.

"We won't keep 'em there," Alexander predicted. "The damnyankees can send too many shells down on 'em from across the river."

"You're likely right," Jackson said. "But that they are there spells the ruin of this salient, and all done in the space of a couple of hours."

"Uh, sir, look to the sky," Alexander said. "The sun'll be going down in an hour or so."

Jackson looked, and blinked in astonishment. Where had the time gone? "Very well, General: in the space of a day. I hope you are satisfied." He used words that seldom passed his lips: "I certainly am."

"Brother Sam," Vernon Perkins said severely over breakfast, "I must tell you that I am most vexed at the way your dog gobbles everything in his bowl and then steals from the portion allotted to Rover."

"You have to remember, Vern," Sam Clemens answered, "Sutro is named for a politician, so it's in his nature to steal whatever he can grab."

"And stop calling me Vern!" His brother-in-law's voice went shrill. " Vernon is a perfectly good name, and the one by which I prefer to be known."

"All right…" Sam was on the point of calling him Vern again, as if absentmindedly, but Alexandra's warning glance persuaded him that wouldn't be a good idea. He ate the rest of his insipid, lumpy oatmeal, grabbed his hat, and fled the regimented boredom of his brother-in-law's house for the genial, congenial chaos prevailing at the San Francisco Morning Call.

Wrecking crews were still tearing down buildings the British bombardment and invasion had ruined. Already, on some sites that had been cleared, new construction was going up: pine frames of a yellow bright enough to hurt the eye. On lots still empty, signs promised resurrection almost as fervently as did the Bible, THE OTTO V. JONES INSTITUTE OF PHRENOLOGY SHALL REOCCUPY THESE PREMISES, One declared.

"Too bad," Sam said, and walked on.

Half a block farther south, another sign in the middle of a vacant stretch of ground said, WHEN COHAN'S OPENS UP AGAIN, WE'LL HAVE A BETTER FREE LUNCH TABLE THAN EVER. Always a man to prefer five-cent beer and free lunch to phrenology, Clemens beamed at that. Two lots farther on again, yet another sign

offered a simple promise: WE'LL BE BACK.

Once Sam got down to the Morning Call offices on Market Street, he forgot about signs. "What's the story on Kentucky?" he called, walking in the door.

" U.S. troops still in the city of Louisville," Clay Herndon said. "General Willcox says he pulled back from the salient east of town to consolidate for another push somewhere else. New York quotes Berlin quoting London quoting Richmond quoting Stonewall Jackson saying we pulled back on account of he licked the stuffing out of us."

"That sounds about right, even if it did go through more hands than a streetwalker when the fleet sails into port," Clemens said. "And what's the latest out of Philadelphia, or don't I want to know?"

Herndon spoke in a monotonous drone: "President Blaine is reported to be studying the situation and will comment further when more is known." He went back to his normal voice: "He's probably hiding under the bed, waiting for the Rebs to walk in and cart him off."

"Why would they want to cart him off?" Sam asked with a bitter snort. "He does them more good right where he is. I don't suppose he's said anything more about Longstreet's call for peace since yesterday?"

"Nary a word," Herndon answered.

Clemens snorted again. "Well, I don't reckon we ought to be surprised. Since the last time Longstreet said he could have peace if he wanted it, we've been licked up and down both coasts, in New Mexico, and on the Great Lakes. If that wasn't enough to give the man a clue, why the devil should he take any notice of throwing away half of what's supposed to be the best army we've got?"

"Damned if I know." Herndon paused to light a cigar, then added, "You forgot about Montana."

"Oh? Have we been licked there, too?" Sam asked. "You didn't say anything about that."

"Don't know if we have or we haven't," his friend replied. "Not enough telegraph lines up where the soldiers are for anyone to know anything. Word goes from Louisville to Richmond to London to Berlin to New York to here a hell of a lot faster than it leaks out of a place like that."

"They've kicked us around everywhere else," Sam said, "they being whoever's gone up against us. No reason to expect anything different out in the middle of nowhere, is there?"

"Can't think of any," Herndon said. "Wish I could."

"Don't we both?" Sam walked over to his desk and sat down. All unbidden, he saw in his mind the grimy face of the Royal Marine who could have killed him out in front of the newspaper offices. Even though he was sitting, his knees quivered. "We were at their mercy," he muttered, more than half to himself. "They could do anything they wanted with us-and they did."

The telegraph clicker started delivering a new message. "Let's see what's gone wrong now," Herndon said. Out came the message, a word at a time. " London by way of Berlin by way of New York City — the British and Canadians are saying they've reached the line in Maine that was the British claim line before the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, and they'll stop there and annex it to Canada."

"Is that what they're saying?" Clemens raised a bushy eyebrow. "How does that square with what Longstreet's been saying about peace without losing pieces of the USA?"

"Damned if I know," Herndon said again. "Of course, Longstreet only speaks for the Confederate States. Not likely the limeys would let him tie their hands. They do as they please, not as Old Pete pleases."

"You're right about that," Sam agreed. "The British Empire is the biggest dog around, which is why Englishmen can act like sons of bitches all over the world. But good God, Clay, now they've given Blaine a reason to keep fighting, and one that makes some kind of sense. This damned war is liable to drag on forever."

"Congressional elections next year," Herndon said reassuringly. "With the House of Representatives Blaine 'll get after this fiasco, he won't see two bits of money for the Army. He'd have to give up then."

"He should have given up weeks ago," Clemens snapped. "He shouldn't have started the blamed war in the first place." He shook his fist in the direction of Philadelphia. "I told you so, Mr. President! Now if only you'd gone and listened to me. But what the hell: no one else does, so why should you be any different?"

Herndon didn't answer that. Sam fired up a cigar and filled the space around him with noxious fumes. Thus fortified, he attacked the pile of stories on his desk. Colonel Sherman was proclaiming that more fortifications could make San Francisco invulnerable to attack from the sea. Sam scribbled a note at the bottom of the article: Comments about stolen horses and locked barn doors would seem to fit here.

Edgar Leary had covered Mayor Sutro's latest pronunciamento about the urgency of rebuilding what the Royal Navy and Marines had devastated. Sam devastated Leary's prose, shelling adjectives and bayoneting adverbs. He had a scrawled suggestion for a further line of development on this piece, too: The faster we rebuild, the less anyone checks on how much money gets spent and on who spends it. It will stick in somebody's pockets, odds are those of some of His Honor's chums. Whose? Find out, and we'll shake this city harder than any earthquake ever did.

He didn't think Leary could or would find out; Adolph Sutro had proved adept at covering his tracks and those of his henchmen. But it would give the kid something to do and keep Leary out of his hair for a while, which wasn't the worst bargain in the world. And Leary, even if he couldn't write for beans, was pretty good at getting to the bottom of things.

The rest of the pieces were routine: a looter caught in the act and shot dead, the usual rash of robberies and burglaries and assaults, and praise for the entertainments offered in those theaters to which the Royal Marines had not applied the most incendiary form of dramatic criticism. Having covered both the police-court circuit and the theaters in his time, Clemens knew how hard it was to breathe life into reports concerning them. After marking the copy with a relatively gentle hand, he passed it on to the typesetters.

That done, he pulled out a blank sheet of paper, inked his pen anew, and… did not write. He knew what he wanted to say. He knew what he needed to say. He'd been saying it ever since the war broke out, and suggesting it before the war broke out. What point to doing it again? If your editorials sounded the same day after day after day, how did that differ from touring the police courts and recording the never-ending human folly and viciousness they memorialized?

At last, he found a way. "No wife-beater ever born," he muttered, "no wife-beater with the worst will in the world, does a millionth part of the harm James G. Blaine caused with only good intentions."

That scornful grumble gave him a title for the editorial that would not write itself, GOOD INTENTIONS, he printed in block capitals at the top of the page. The title gave him an opening sentence.

We know what road is paved with good intentions. What we need to do now is take a long, hard look at how the United States found themselves on that road, and how they will be able to get off it again without becoming too badly scorched in the doing. Heaven and the infernal regions both know there is blame and to spare to go around.

Ever since the voters in their wisdom threw Abe Lincoln out on his car-after in their wisdom electing him four years earlier and thus proving what a remarkably changeable commodity wisdom can be; quicksilver won't touch it, and not a single, nor even a married, woman in the electorate to blame it on-after heaving Lincoln over the side, I say, we spent the next many years electing Democrats whose notion of statecraft, as best anyone can tell, was to bow down to Richmond as the pious Mussulman bows in the direction of Mecca. And the voters saw this, and said that it was good.

And Richmond said it was pretty good, too, and gobbled down Cuba without so much as calling for a toothpick, and sent redskins into Kansas until any old run-of-the-mill bald man was reckoned to have had his coiffure lifted by the Kiowas. And the Democrats in the White House sighed and wrung their hands and likely knocked back a beaker or three of whiskey on the sly, since they had hardly more use for the Kansas Jayhawkers than they did for the niggers of Cuba.

Kick a country or any other dog long enough, though, and it will turn and try to bite you. As we had coughed up Abe Lincoln, so in the fullness of time-if last November will do duty for that article-we coughed up James G. Blaine. And Blaine snarled, and Blaine growled, and, like a fierce old bulldog tormented past endurance, Blaine bit.

Like an old old bulldog, though, Blaine unfortunately neglected to equip the said bite with anything in the least resembling teeth. And so, having closed his gums round the leg of the Confederate States, he has hung on like grim death while they and England and France all belabour him with a fine assortment of clubs and switches and bludgeons. He will gnaw off the Rebels' leg or die trying-so his mumbled growls proclaim.

That he will die trying-that we will die while he tries-has long since become obvious to everyone save him alone; he is evidently an old blind bulldog as well as an old toothless one.

Our own fair city has already paid the price for his bullheaded bulldoggery. If he persists, how long will it be before we once more play the role of a china shop?

What will it take to make him come to his senses, if by some accident he should have any left? He Sam hadn't noticed the telegraph clicking away. In a voice filled with excitement, Clay Herndon cried, " Blaine 's calling for an unconditional cease-fire on all fronts. He's thrown in the sponge, Sam!"

Clemens stared at the editorial he'd been writing. He picked up the sheet, tore it to shreds, and flung them into the waste-paper basket. He was grinning from ear to ear as he did it, too.