How Few Remain

Chapter 19

The clock in Frederick Douglass' parlor chimed twelve. All over Rochester, clocks were striking twelve. Douglass raised a glass of wine to his wife and son. "Happy New Year," he said solemnly.

"Happy New Year, Frederick," Anna Douglass said, and drank. "When I was young, I never reckoned I'd live to see such a big number as 1882."

"May you see many more new years, Mother," Lewis Douglass said.

"You're not drinking, son." Frederick Douglass had emptied his own glass, and was reaching for the decanter to refill it.

"No, I'm not," Lewis said, "for the year ahead looks none too happy to me."

"Compare it to the year just past," Douglass said. "When seen from that perspective, how can it fail of being a happy year?"

Lewis gravely considered that. He showed the result of the consideration not by words but by downing the wine in front of him in a couple of quick gulps. When Douglass held out the decanter, he poured his glass full again, too. "Compared to the year just past, any year save perhaps 1862 would seem happy."

Anna cocked her head to one side, listening to bells ringing un-constrainedly and to firecrackers and pistols and rifles going off in the street, some quite close by. "It don't sound the way it ought to," she said.

"It doesn't, does it?" Douglass said. "Something's missing."

Lewis supplied the deficiency: "No cannon this year. No cannon, by order of the mayor and the governor and whichever soldier makes the most noise around these parts. They all fear the British gunboats out on the lake will mistake the celebration for an attack on themselves and use it as a pretext for bombarding the city. A happy new year indeed, is it not?"

"They might do it, too," Douglass said gloomily. "They might enjoy doing it, the better to coerce the president into yielding to their demands."

"He might as well," Anna said. "Things ain't gwine get no better on account of he don't. They done licked us, so they gets to tell us what to do."

Anna's grammar was not all it should have been. That did not make what she said any less true. Lewis must have thought as much, for he said, "Mother, we ought to send you to Washington, because you sec these things a lot more plainly than President Blaine is able to."

"What Blaine can see and what he can do are liable to be two different propositions," Douglass said, regretting every word of defense he spent on the man who had had the best chance since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln to do something about the Confederate States-had it and squandered it. "He's made his bed, and now-"

"And now the whole country has to lie in it," Lewis broke in. He reached for the wine decanter once more, then yanked his hand away. Bitterness filled his voice as he went on, "I'd get drunk, but what's the use? Things wouldn't be any better when I sobered up again."

"Well, I don't aim to get myself drunk any which way," Anna Douglass said. "It's a sinful thing to go and do. What I aim to do is go to bed." She struggled to her feet. " Frederick, you'll help me up the stairs."

"Of course I will, my dear." Douglass rose, too. His body still responded readily to his will. He helped his wife up to the bedroom, helped her out of her dress and corset, and made sure she was comfortable before he went back down to talk with his son a while longer.

Lewis was taking short, quick, furious puffs on a cigar when Frederick Douglass came back to the parlor. "What's the use, Father?" he asked as Douglass sat down once more. "What in God's name is the use? Why don't we all pack up and move to Liberia? We might accomplish something there."

"You may, if you like," Douglass answered evenly. "I've thought about it once or twice-maybe more than once or twice." His son stared at him. He nodded, his face grave. "Oh, yes, I've thought about it. In Liberia, the pond is so small as to make me-or you, should you ever choose to go-a very large fish indeed, which cannot help but feed a man's pride. But if I left, I should be giving up the fight here, and as much as proving the Confederates right when they say the black man cannot compete equally against the white. Every column I write here shows the CSA to be founded on a lie. How could I do the same in Africa?"

Lewis did not answer right away. He took the cigar from his mouth and sat for some time staring at the glowing coal. Then, savagely, he stubbed out the cigar. "Well, you're right," he said. "I wish to heaven you weren't, but you are." He got up and clapped Douglass on the shoulder. "Happy New Year, Father. You were right about that, too. Set next to the one we've escaped, the year ahead can't be so bad. Good night. You needn't get up-rest easy."

Douglass rested easy. He heard his son take his overcoat off the tree in the front hall, put it on, open the door, and close it after him. Bells on the carriage jingled as Lewis drove home. Douglass looked at the decanter of wine. Like a voyage to Liberia, it tempted him. But, ever since his escape from slavery, he had seldom run away, and he had never been a man who drank alone. Picking up the cut-glass stopper, he set it in its place. Then, with a grunt, he rose once more and went off to bed. He listened to clocks striking one. He expected he would also listen to them striking two, but drifted off before they did.

Other than having a new calendar, 1882 seemed little different from the vanished 1881. Warships flying the Union Jack remained outside Rochester harbor, as they did outside other U.S. harbors along the Great Lakes. No warships flying the Stars and Stripes came out to challenge them. That sprang in part from the cease-fire, but only in part. The rest was that the U.S. Navy's Great Lakes flotilla was incapable of challenging its British counterpart.

One day in the middle of January, the War Department announced that the troops of the Army of the Ohio were returning to U.S. soil. By the way the announcement sounded, no one would have guessed it meant the U.S. Army was abandoning the last foothold it held in Kentucky. The telegram made the move sound like a triumph.

"Look at this!" Douglass waved the announcement in his son's face. "Look at this. How many dead men in Louisville? They won't be coming back to Indiana. And for what did they die? For what, I ask you?"

"For President Blaine's ambition," Lewis answered. "Nothing else." The abject failure of the U.S. war effort had left him even more estranged from and cynical about the society in which he lived than he had been before the fighting started.

But Douglass shook his head. "The cause for which we fought was noble," he insisted, as he had insisted all along. "The power of the Confederate States should have been kept from growing. The tragedy was not that we fought, but that we fought while so manifestly unprepared to fight hard. Blaine gets some of the blame for that, but the Democrats who kept us so weak for so long must share it with him. If we are to have a return engagement with the Confederacy, we must be more ready in all respects. I see no other remedy."

"I never thought I'd live to see the day when you and Ben Butler were proposing the same cure for our disease," Lewis said. "The Democrats like him, too."

That brought Douglass up short. Butler had no more kept silent about the proposals he had made in the meeting at the Florence Hotel outside Chicago than Abraham Lincoln had about his. Both men were stirring up turmoil all through the battered country, and each one's followers violently opposed the other's. As Lincoln had joined with the Socialists, so Butler was indeed drifting back toward the Democrats, from whose ranks he had deserted during the War of Secession.

Reluctantly, Douglass said, "An idea may be a good one no matter who propounds it."

"Nero fiddled while Rome burned," Lewis retorted. "You temporize while the Republican Party goes up in flames."

"I am not temporizing," Douglass said with dignity. "I have done all I could to hold the party together. I am still doing all I can. It may not suffice-I am only one man. But 1 am doing my best."

"You'd have a better chance if your skin were white," Lewis said. Douglass stared at him. Negroes in the U.S. seldom spoke so openly of the handicap they suffered by being black. Lewis glared back in furious defiance. "It's true, and you damn well know it's true."

But Douglass shook his head. "Not for me. Had I been born white-had 1 been born all white"-he corrected himself, to remind his son they both had white blood in their veins-"I suspect I would have drifted into some easy, profitable trade, never giving a second thought, or even a first, to politics. Being the color I am, I have been compelled to face concerns I should otherwise have ignored. It has not been an easy road, but I am a better man for it."

"I do not have your detachment, Father, nor, frankly, do I want it," Lewis said. "I wish you a good morning." He departed Douglass' home without much ceremony and with a good deal of anger.

Douglass had to go out himself a couple of days later, when his wife developed a nasty cough. The new cough syrups, infused with the juice of the opium poppy, really could stop the hacking and barking that seemed such a characteristic sound of winter. Thanking heaven for modern medicine, Douglass bundled himself up and trudged off to the nearest drugstore, a few blocks away.

He thanked heaven for the day, too. As January days in Rochester went, it was good enough-better than good enough. It was bright and clear and, he guessed, a little above freezing. Not too much snow lay on the ground. Even so, he planted his feet with care; the sidewalks had their share of icy patches.

"Half a dollar," the druggist said, setting on the counter a glass bottle with the label in typography so rococo as to be almost unreadable. His voice was polite and suspicious at the same time. Douglass' fur-collared overcoat argued that he had the money to pay for the medicine. His being a Negro argued, to far too many white men, that he was likely to be shiftless and liable to be a thief.

He reached into his pocket and found a couple of quarters, which he set beside the bottle of cough elixir. Only after the druggist had scooped the coins into the cash box did his other hand come off the bottle. That care made Douglass want to laugh. He was stout, black, and well past sixty. Even if he did abscond with the medicine, how could he possibly hope to get more than a couple of blocks without being recognized or, more likely, tackled with no ceremony whatever?

He was carrying the bottle of cough syrup out of the store when three middle-aged white men started to come in. He stood aside to let them use the narrow doorway ahead of him. Instead of going on past, though, the fellow in the lead stopped, rocked back on his heels, and looked at him with an expression of mingled contempt and insult.

"Well, looky here, Jim. Looky here, Bill," he drawled. "Ain't this a fine buck nigger we got?" His friends laughed at what they and he thought to be wit.

Douglass stiffened. "If you gentlemen will excuse me-" he said, his voice chillier than the weather outside.

"Listen to him, Josh," either Jim or Bill exclaimed. "Talks just like a white man, he does. Probably got a white man inside him, that he ate up for breakfast." All three of them found that a very funny sally, too.

"If you gentlemen will excuse me-" Douglass repeated, bottling up the fury he felt. He took a step forward. More often than not, his sheer physical presence was enough to let him ease through confrontations like this.

It didn't work today. Instead of giving way before him, the white man in the lead-Josh-deliberately blocked his path. "No, we don't excuse you, Sambo," he said, and looked back over his shoulder. "Do we, boys?"

"No," one of Jim and Bill said, while the other was saying, "Hell, no."

Josh stuck a ringer in Douglass' face. "And do you know why we don't excuse you, boy? I don't excuse you because it's all your goddamn fault."

"I have no idea what you arc talking about," Douglass said, now alarmed as well as furious. This sort of thing hadn't happened to him in Rochester for many years. He knew too well how ugly it could get, and how fast it could get that way. Carefully, he said, "I do not know what you believe to be my fault, but I do know I have never set eyes on any of you before in my life." And, if God be kind, 1 shall never see you again.

"Not you, you-you niggers," Josh said. "Hadn't been for you niggers, this here'd still be one country. We wouldn't have fought two wars against the lousy Rebels, and they wouldn't have licked us twice, neither."

"Yeah," said Jim or Bill.

"That's right," Bill or Jim agreed.

They weren't drunk. Douglass took some small comfort in that. It might make them a little less likely to pound him into the boards of the floor. He said, "Black men did not ask to be brought to these shores, nor did we come willingly. The difficulty lies not in our being here but in the way we have been used. I myself bear on my back the scars of the overseer's lash."

"Ooh, don't he talk fancy," one of the men behind Josh said.

"Reckon that's why the overseer whupped him," Josh replied, which was a disturbingly accurate guess. He didn't attack, he didn't make a fist, but he didn't get out of Douglass' way, either. "Ought to all go back to Africa, every stinking one of you. Then we'd set things to rights here."

"No." Now Douglass let his anger show. "For better and for worse, I am an American, too-every bit as much as you. This is my country, as it is yours."

"Liar!" Josh shouted. His friends echoed him. Now he did fold his hand into a fist. Had the bottle Douglass held been thicker, he would have used it to add strength to his own blow. As things were, he feared it would break and cut his palms and fingers. He got ready to throw it in Josh's face instead.

From behind him came a short, sharp click. It was not a loud noise, but it was one to command immediate, complete, and respectful attention from Douglass and from the three white men of whom he'd fallen foul. Very slowly, Douglass turned his head and peered over his shoulder. The druggist's right hand held a revolver, the hammer cocked and ready to fall.

"That's enough, you men," he said sharply. "I've got no great use for niggers myself, but this fellow wasn't doing you any harm. Let him alone, and get the hell out of here while you're at it."

Josh and Jim and Bill tumbled over one another leaving the drugstore. The druggist carefully uncocked the pistol and set it down out of sight. Frederick Douglass inclined his head. "I thank you very much indeed, sir."

"Didn't do it for you so much as to keep the place from getting torn up," the druggist replied in matter-of-fact tones. "Like I said, I don't much care for niggers, especially niggers like you that put on airs, but that ain't the same as saying you deserved a licking when you hadn't done anything to deserve one. Now take your cough elixir and go on home."

"I'll do that," Douglass said. "A man who, for whatever reason, will not let another be beaten unjustly has in himself the seeds of justice." He tipped his hat and walked out of the store.

Once on the sidewalk, he looked around warily to see whether the white ruffians might want another try at him. But they were nowhere around. They must have had enough. His sigh of relief put a fair-sized frosty cloud in the air.

When he got home, Anna was sitting in the parlor, coughing like a consumptive. "Hold on, my dear," he said. "A tablespoon of this will bring relief."

"Fetch me a glass o' water with it, on account of it's gwine taste nasty," she answered. She sighed when he brought the medicine and the water. "I ain't been out of the house in a good while now. Anything much interestin' happen while you was at the drugstore?"

Douglass gravely considered that. After a moment, he shook his head. "No," he said. "Nothing much."

Snow blew into Friedrich Sorge's face. As it had a way of doing in Chicago, the wind howled. Sorge clutched at his hat. The Socialist newspaperman had an exalted expression on his face. Turning to Abraham Lincoln, he shouted, "Will you look at the size of this crowd? Have you ever in all your life seen anything like it?"

"Why, yes, a great many times, as a matter of fact," Lincoln answered, and hid a smile when Sorge looked dumbfounded. He set a gloved hand on his new ally's shoulder. "You have to remember, my friend, that you have been in politics as an agitator, a gadfly. From now on, we will be playing the game to win, which is a different proposition altogether."

"Yes." Sorge still sounded dazed. "I see that. I knew our joining would bring new strength to the movement, but I must say I did not imagine it would bring so much." He laughed. The wind did its best to blow the laughter away. "Until now, I did not imagine how weak we were, nor how strong we might become. It is… amazing. Not since I left the old country have I been part of anything to compare to thisand in the old country, we were put down with guns."

Lincoln had different standards of comparison. To him, it was just another political rally, and not a particularly large one at that. Muffled against the cold and the wind, men and women trudged south along Cottage Grove Avenue toward Washington Park. Considering the weather, it wasn't a bad crowd at all. It was also, without a doubt, the most energetic crowd Lincoln had seen since the War of Secession.

Red flags whipped in the wind. It had already torn some of them into streamers. Men had to wrestle to keep the signs they held from flying away, JUSTICE FOR THE WORKING MAN, some said, TAX CAPITALISTS' INCOME, others urged, REVOLUTION IS A RIGHT, still others warned.

Some of the people on the sidewalks cheered as the marchers walked past. Others hurried along, intent on their own business or on finding someplace to get out of the cold. Policemen in overcoats of military blue were out in force. They had clubs in their hands and pistols on their belts. If peaceable protest turned to uprising-or, perhaps, if the police thought it might, this gathering too could be put down with guns.

Trees in Washington Park were skeletally bare. What little grass snow did not cover was yellow and dead. It was as bleak and forbidding a place as Lincoln could imagine. But it also struck him as the perfect place to hold a rally for the new fusion of the Socialists and his wing of the Republican Party.

"In the summer, you know, and when the weather is fine, the rich promenade through here, showing off their fancy carriages and matched teams and expensive clothes," he said to Friedrich Sorge.

Sorge nodded. "Yes, I have seen this." He scowled. "It is not enough for them that they have. They must be seen to have. Their fellow plutocrats must know they, too, are part of the elite, and the proletariat must be reminded that they are too rich and powerful to be trifled with."

"Thanks to their money, they think it is summer in the United States the year around," Lincoln said. "To the people coming into Washington Park now, blizzards blow in January and July alike."

"This is true," Sorge agreed emphatically. He hesitated. "It is also very well said, though with my English imperfect you will not, perhaps, find in this much praise. But I think you have in yourself the makings of a poet."

"Interesting you should say so," Lincoln replied. "I tried verse a few times, many years ago-half a lifetime ago, now that I think about it. I don't reckon the results were altogether unfortunate, at least the best of them, but they were not of the quality to which I aspired, and so I gave up the effort and turned back to politics and the law, which better suited my bent."

"You may have given up too soon," Sorge said. "Even more than other kinds of writing, poetry repays steady effort."

"Even if you are right, as you may well be, far too many years have passed for it to matter now," Lincoln said. "If, by lucky chance, some phrase in a speech or in an article should strike the ear or mind as happily phrased, maybe it is the poet, still struggling after so long to break free."

More miserably cold-looking policemen directed the throng to an open area in front of a wooden platform from which more red banners flew. The wind was methodically ripping them to shreds. "Say your say and then go home," a policeman told Lincoln. The former president judged that likelier to be a plea from the heart than a political statement; the fellow's teeth were chattering so loudly, he was hard to understand.

Friedrich Sorgc said, "Not too hard, is it, to know which of our followers came from your camp and which from mine?"

"No, not hard," Lincoln said. The difference interested him and amused Sorge. About four out of five people in the crowd obeyed without question the police who herded them where they were supposed to go. The fifth, the odd man out, called the Chicago policemen every name in the book, sometimes angrily, sometimes with a jaunty air that said it was all a game. The fifth man, the odd man, was far more likely to be carrying a red flag than the other four.

"Some people, Lincoln, you see, truly do believe in the revolution of the proletariat," Sorge said.

"I do recollect that, believe me," Lincoln answered. "What you have to remember is that some people don't. Looking over the crowd here, I'd judge that most of the people in it don't. What we have to do to build this party is to make the people who don't believe in revolution want to join so they can reform the country, and at the same time keep the ones who are revolutionaries in the fold."

Sorge's mouth puckered as if he'd bitten into an unripe persimmon. "You are saying-you have been saying since we first spoke- that we must water down the doctrines of the party the way a dishonest distiller will water down the whiskey he sells."

"Look at the crowd we have here today," Lincoln said patiently. "With a crowd like this, we can make the bosses think twice before they throw workers out in the streets or cut their pay. With a crowd like this, we can elect men who see things our way. Wouldn't you like to see a dozen, or two dozen, Socialist congressmen on the train for Washington after the elections this fall?"

"I do not know," Sorge said. "I truly do not know. If they call themselves Socialists but hold positions that are not Socialist positions-"

"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 arc 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 hell 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 anticipation 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 God has given them the right to eat their bread in the sweat of other 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 Constitution originally placed it. Let us stand firmly by each other. And let us discard all quibbling about this class and that class and the other class." Now Sorge looked less ecstatic. Lincoln did not care. He forged ahead: "Let us hear no more how this man is only a labourer, 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 labourer. 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 hell 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 Constitution 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 show why the Socialists have not made a better showing up until now. You must remember, you arc 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 damned 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 labour, it is the Negro population of the CSA."

"An interesting notion," Sorge said. "It is for now a lumpen-proletariat, 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 associates 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 camelor 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 Rugglcs rode only a couple of men ahead of him. "I wish the Camelry had been able to run down the damned 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 God thought we'd run 'em the way hounds run a coon. 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 Rugglcs shook his head. "That's not it, or not all of it, anyway. After they burned Cananea, they knew damn 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 damn 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 God, 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 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 bitch goddamn well didn't up and walk off by itself," Sellers said. "If I find the bastard 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 suspectedStuart 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 damnation did it get way the hell 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 bitch! 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 goddamn 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 damn 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 scraped 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." Trede-gars 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 passing 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 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 damnyankees, 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, hellishly 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 bastards 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, "Damned 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 scraped 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 after 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 butternut 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 passed before first one and then another of the army's field guns began landing shells on the positions from which the Apaches were fighting. Getting those guns over what passed for trails in the Sierra Madre had been backbreaking labour-luckily, not man-killing labour-but it paid dividends now.

The Apaches did not care for coming under shellfire-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 God!"

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 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 God!" 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 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 scraped a match against the sole of his boot and lighted a cigar. Libbie gave him a disapproving look. "Must 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.

"Dashed?" Libbie set her hands on her hips. Her eyes sparked. She was a very determined person. " Autie, you didn't just promise not to swear where I could hear. You promised not to swear at all."

Another nice thing about a cigar, Custer had discovered, was that it gave him an excuse not to talk for a little while. Libbie wasn't just determined; she was tenacious as a terrier. Tom would have known how disapproving of his new vices she'd be. Tom had loved her, too, loved her like a brother. Poor Tom. Custer wondered if the empty place inside him would ever disappear. He didn't think so. When he couldn't use the cigar to keep quiet any more, he said, "Times have changed, and not for the better, either."

"And," Libbie went on implacably, "you promised your sister you would never again drink liquor, and I know you have violated that pledge as well."

"When I promised her, I never dreamt my beloved country would go down to humiliating defeat at the hands of the Black Republicans not once but twice," Custer said. "Can you blame me if I seek consolation?"

"I might not blame you had you sought consolation once, though even that would be a violation of your promise," Libbie said. "But, having reacquired the habit you abandoned so long ago, you have indulged it not once but repeatedly."

The reason for that was simple: after twenty years, Custer had rediscovered how much he enjoyed the feel of whiskey coursing through him. Coming right out and saying so, however, struck him as impolitic. What he did say was "I am far more moderate than in the old days."

"If you mean you aren't staggering down the street puking every few steps, well, yes, that is true." Such acid filled Libbie's voice, Custer flinched from it as he never had from enemy fire. Inexorably, she went on, "But if you think you are fulfilling your promise, I cannot agree."

Custer did not answer. He felt trapped. Not only did the blizzard keep him from escaping his wife, it also kept him from escaping Colonel Henry Welton. Welton was a model of military punctilio; nothing he did, nothing he said, could possibly be construed as offensive toward the newly promoted superior now residing in what had been his fort for so long. All the same, Custer felt about as welcome as a man in the last stages of cholera.

Libbie might have picked the thought out of his head. She said, "That foolish infantry colonel thinks he should have more of the credit for winning the battle by the Teton, Autie. I can't imagine why, but he plainly does. Everyone wants some of the glory that should rightly attach to you."

Whatever she thought of Custer's shortcomings-and she was seldom reticent in telling him what she thought-she was as determined as he to wring the greatest possible advantage out of his virtues. He said, "I still maintain, and shall continue to maintain, that we should have done as well against the British without the Gatling guns as we did with them. Tom would back me, I know it. Dear Lord, if only he could have then! I wish the stupid things had not been on the field at all; in that case, no occasion for argument would have or could have arisen."

"Of course not," Libbie said soothingly. Then her brow, which she prided herself on keeping smooth, furrowed. "I wish that that Colonel Roosevelt had not been on the field, either. He has stolen much of the approbation that would otherwise have gone to you."

"I've thought about that," Custer said, ''and I have decided it does not matter."

"It certainly does," Libbie exclaimed indignantly. He nodded, ever so slightly; he'd succeeded in diverting her from his flaws. She continued, "How can you possibly say it does not matter when he has what should be yours?"

"Because whether he has it or not, what can he do with it?" Custer said. "He is a colonel of Volunteers whose regiment has been mustered out of U.S. service, so he cannot harm my Army career. And he is a puppy of twenty-three, so he cannot be my rival for any political office, the Constitution disqualifying him from such a pursuit on account of his age. Q.E.D., as my instructors in the mysteries of geometry were given to saying."

"All that may be so," Libbie said, and then, grudgingly, "I suppose all that is so. Nonetheless, I am ever so glad he has left Fort Benton. Say what you will about him, enough ambition burns in that man for a hundred Henry Weltons. Deny it if you can." Her chin jutted defiance.

"Let him be as ambitious as he likes," Custer said. "His desires cannot impinge on mine."

Her voice dropped almost to a whisper: "Do you think you can be nominated for the presidency? Do you think you will be nominated for the presidency?"

"I can be," he answered. " Jackson was. Harrison was. Taylor was. Winfield Scott was, too, though he failed of election."

"Whoever faces Blaine year after next will not lose," Libbie said.

"No, I shouldn't think so," Custer agreed. "Whether I will be nominated depends on whether I can keep my name in the public's eye between now and then, and also on whether the leaders of the party decide I am the man whose name they want to put forward at the convention."

"And whatever fame this Roosevelt gained at your expense will make both of those things less likely," Libbie pointed out. "There. Do you see? You have contradicted yourself." She looked as triumphant as if she had just driven back an invading British army.

Before Custer could reply, someone knocked on the door to his quarters. Through the yowling wind, a soldier called, "Colonel Welton's compliments, General, and would you and your lady care to join him for supper?"

"Yes, we'll come," Custer said, and then, to Libbie, "Wrap yourself up warm, my dear, and we'll see what the cooks have done with- or to-supper." Her coat was of Angora sheep, and warm. His own, of buffalo hide, had served him well in the field.

Even so, that first dreadful breath of air once he left his quarters almost froze him from the lungs outwards. His teeth chattered. A moment later, he heard Libbie's clicking away, too.

Snow swirled around him, making even the short walk to the officers' dining room an adventure. The way was made more uncertain because the dining-room shutters, like most of the rest at Fort Benton, were closed to help hold in heat. Custer had to grope for the latch. Only when he opened the door did yellow lamplight spill out and illuminate the endlessly blowing snow-and no sooner had he opened the door than shouts of "Close it!" rang out from within.

He waved Libbie in ahead of him, then went into the dining room and shut the door after himself. The first breath of warm air inside was nearly as stunning as the first frigid breath outside had been. Sweat sprang out on his forehead. He got out of his overcoat in a hurry. So did Libbie.

"Good evening, General Custer, ma'am," Henry Welton said. He rose and saluted.

Custer returned the salute. "Good evening, Colonel," he said. Yes, everything was perfectly proper, perfectly correct, and colder than the blizzard outside. Everything had been that way since he'd brought the Fifth Cavalry down to Fort Benton after the first of the year. He sniffed and smiled. "What's for supper?" he asked. "Whatever it is, it sure smells good."

Sometimes his pretense broke the ice for a little while. Today was one of those times. Henry Welton actually smiled back and answered in civil tones: "Fried potatoes from our own garden, boiled beans and salt pork, and roast prairie chickens." He even essayed a small joke: "Not too hard keeping meat fresh, this season of the year."

"No, indeed." Custer tried to joke back: "Not too hard keeping meat hard, cither, this season of the year."

Welton smiled again. So did a couple of his junior officers. So did Custer, with some effort. It didn't help much. He and the officers of Welton's Seventh Infantry were smiling past one another, like carriages going by on opposite sides of the road.

Custer was fond of fried potatoes, though he would have liked fried onions-or onions of any sort-even more. The beans and pork were beans and pork; he'd been eating them for so many years, he hardly noticed them on his plate except insofar as they helped fill his belly. He enjoyed the prairie chickens. They were all dark meat, and full of flavor.

A couple of whiskey bottles and a pitcher of lemonade from concentrate went around the table. Most of the officers drank whiskey. Libbie filled her tin cup with lemonade and pointedly passed the pitcher to Custer. "Wouldn't you like some, Autic?"

That would have sounded harmless to anyone who didn't know her well. To Custer, it was anything but. "With the weather like this, I do believe I'd sooner have something to help keep me warm," he said. One of the whiskey bottles sat within reach. He poured some-not an enormous tot, by any means-into his cup, then raised it high. "Confusion to our enemies!"

Not even Welton and his officers could find fault with that toast. They drank with Custer. As the liquor ran down his throat, Libbie gave him a look that should have completely counteracted its warming effect, but somehow didn't quite. She did no more than that. In public, she stood foursquare behind Custer, for behaving in any other way might have harmed his chances. What she was liable to say when they went back to their quarters was another matter. Custer didn't care to think about that. To help keep him from thinking about it, he poured more whiskey into the cup. Libbie sent him another glacial glance.

"Confusion to our enemies indeed," Henry Welton said. He was drinking whiskey, too, and making no bones about it. "It's the best thing that could strike them, from our point of view, and the only thing that could bring them down to our level."

When it came to politics-with, no doubt, the exception of Custer's political ambitions-Custer and the officers of the Seventh Infantry were not so far apart. Almost to a man, they loathed the administration currently in Washington, or rather in Philadelphia, having been shelled out of Washington. Only the presence of Libbie Custer and some of the other officers' wives kept them from expressing their opinion in terms even more forceful than the ones they used.

Custer said, "We didn't know what the devil we were doing when we made war, and we don't know what the devil we're doing now that we're trying to make peace, either."

" Blaine can't stomach giving away half of Maine," Welton said scornfully. "If he does, it'll make the state we ship him back to smaller."

"We should have hanged Lincoln — look at the rabble-rousing he's doing now-and we should hang that dashed idiot Blaine, too," Custer said. Even with whiskey in him, he would not curse in the presence of women.

"That's what comes of electing Republicans," Libbie said. There her opinions marched with her husband's.

"Once we finally do have peace-if we finally do have peacethat'll be a sham, too, nothing but a hoax and a humbug," Custer said. "It always has been. Sooner or later, the Fifth will go back to Kansas, and we'll ride along the border with the CSA, and sure as the devil the Kiowas and the Comanches will ride up and burn a farm and kill the men and do worse to the women, and then they'll go back down into Indian Territory where we can't follow 'em. It's been going on ever since the War of Secession, and what can we do about it? Not a blasted thing I can see." A considerable silence followed. Into it, Custer added, "That's the way it's always been, and I don't sec it changing any time soon. I wish I did, but I don't."

Not quite quietly enough, one of Henry Welton's officers muttered, "I wish to Jesus the Fifth would go back to Kansas, and get the devil out of our hair."

Another considerable silence filled the room, this one not nearly so sympathetic nor companionable as the first. Custer might have blown up. Instead (and he saw Libbie looking at him in surprise), he sipped his whiskey and affected not to hear. When the Fifth did go back to Kansas, he would not be going back with it, at least not as regimental commander. That was too small a position for a brigadier general to hold. Maybe, as John Pope had been doing before being sent to Utah, he would take charge of several regiments. Maybe the War Department would send him back to Washington, to help clean up the mess there. Whether or not he did that, someone would have to take care of it.

And maybe, when 1884 rolled around, he would lay down his commission, take off his uniform, put on a civilian sack suit and top hat, and campaign not against the British or the Confederates or the Indians but against the manifest and manifold iniquities of the Republican Party. That, though, was not entirely up to him. He would have to see what-and whom-the leaders of the Democrats had in mind.

Henry Welton said, "General, when you do go back to Kansas, would you arrange to leave behind some of your Gatling-gun crews as a defense against another British invasion?"

"Why, certainly," Custer said. "As a matter of fact…" He was about to say, You 're welcome to every blasted one of them. Before he could, he saw Libbie looking intently at him. That look reminded him of the slaughter the Gatlings had wreaked on the Kiowas. They might do the same again. Tom would surely have thought so. He softened his words: "As a matter of fact, you can have several of them."

"Thank you, sir." By Welton's tone, he'd expected Custer to give him all the contraptions.

Maybe the whiskey helped fuel Custer's chuckle. Being too predictable didn't do. "See me tomorrow, Colonel, and we'll see if we can't settle on how many can stay here and how many will go with us."

"Yes, sir, I'll do that," Welton answered. "I do wish you all the best on your return to Kansas." That was more polite than the way his junior officer had phrased it, but meant the same thing. Henry Welton did not care for having a bigger chief in the teepee with him.

When supper was over, Custer and Libbie made their way back to their quarters. It was cold outside, and had got colder since they'd come to the dining room. Inside, it was nice and warm. Libbie spoke one word: "Whiskey." All at once, it was chillier in there than out in the snow. Custer wanted another drink.