How Few Remain

Chapter 2

Theodore Roosevelt looked over his ranch with considerable satisfaction. Ranch was the western word, of course, borrowed from the Spanish; back in New York State, it would have been a farm.

He sucked in a deep breath of the sweet, pure air of Montana Territory. "Like wine in the lungs," he said. "No coal smoke, no city stinks, nothing but pure, wholesome, delicious oxygen." He'd been a scrawny weakling when he came out to the West a couple of years before, an old man inside though he'd scarcely passed his twentieth birthday. Now, though older by the calendar, he felt years- decadesyounger inside. Strenuous labour, that was the trick.

One of the hands, a grizzled ex-miner who possessed but did not rejoice in the name of Philander Snow, cocked an eyebrow at that. "Oxy-what, boss?" he asked.

"Oxygen, Phil," Roosevelt repeated. "Oxygen. What we breathe. What makes lamps burn. What, without which, life would be impossible."

"I thought that was whiskey, or maybe women, depending," Snow said. "More women in the Territory than there used to be, and nowadays I can't do as much with 'em. Ain't that the way it goes?" He spat a mournful stream of tobacco juice onto the ground.

Roosevelt laughed, but quickly sobered. His education made him stick out in these parts. He had trouble talking with his hands, with his fellow ranchers, and even with the townsfolk in Helena about anything past superficialities. Sometimes he felt more nearly an exile than an emigrant from his old way of life. The closest civilized conversation was down in Cheyenne, or maybe even Denver.

But then Philander Snow remarked, "It'll be lambing time any day now," and thoughts of the work at hand replaced those having to do with combustion and metabolism.

Off in the distance, the sheep cropped the new spring grass. The ranch had several hundred head, and a couple of hundred cattle to go with them. Along with the fields of wheat and barley and the vegetable plot near the ranch house, Roosevelt produced all the food he needed, and had a tidy surplus to sell. "Self-sufficiency," he declared. "Every man's dream-and, by jingo, I've got it! Lord of the manor, that's what I am."

"Ain't nothin' wrong with your manners, boss," Snow said, spitting again. "Oh, you was kind of fancified and dudish when you first got here, I reckon, but you've done settled in nice as you please."

"For which I do thank you, Phil, most sincerely." As he had many times in the past, Roosevelt reflected that, while both he and his hands used English, they did not speak the same language.

"This here's a nice spread you got," Snow said. "Not so small you can't do all sorts of things with it, not so big you got to have your own army before you can get any work done. Down in Texas, I hear tell, they got ranches big as a whole county, do nothin' on 'em but raise cows. Pack of damn foolishness, anybody wants to know." Another stream of brown landed wetly in the dust.

"You get no arguments from me." Roosevelt looked south, as if, someone having mentioned Texas, he could see it from here. "Do you know, it broke my father's heart when the United States lost the War of Secession, but I'd say we're just as well rid of those Rebels. They'd bring their ways of doing things-everything larger than life, as you say-up here if we were still part of the same nation."

"They'd bring their niggers, too." One more expectoration gave Philander Snow's opinion of that. "Far as I'm concerned, the Rebs are welcome to 'em. This here's a white man's country, nothin' else but."

"I agree with you once again," Roosevelt said. "The United States are better off without any great presence of the dusky race in our midst. Were it not for the Negro, I doubt we and our former compatriots should ever have come to blows."

"Likely tell, us and the Rebs wouldn't have fought a war, neither," Snow observed. Roosevelt 's metal framed spectacles and the mustache he was assiduously cultivating helped keep his face from showing what he thought. After a moment, the ranch hand went on, "And now it looks like we're goin' to fight them sons of bitches again."

"And bully for Blaine, I say!" Roosevelt clenched his fists. "Lord knows I have no use for the Republican Party except in that it wants us to take a strong line with our neighbors, but that, these days, is an enormous exception."

"You damn straight it is, boss," Philander Snow said with a vehement nod. "Them Rebs, they been rubbin' our noses in the dirt since we lost the war, and them Easterners, they just smile and take it and say thank you meek and mild as you please. Hope to Jesus they get around to lettin' Montana into the Union one day soon, so as I can vote for people who'll show a little backbone. Not even a lot, mind you-a little'd be plenty to make the Rebels climb down off their high horse, you ask me."

"I think you're dead right, Phil, but the Confederates aren't the only ones we have to worry about, not here in Montana they're not." Where Theodore Roosevelt had looked south toward Texas, he now turned north. "Here near Helena, we're only a couple of hundred miles away from the Canadian border."

"I've met me some Canucks," Snow said. "They ain't the worst people you'd ever want to know. But Canada ain't free and independent, not all the way it ain't. The limeys, they do whatever they please there."

"They certainly do," Roosevelt agreed, "and they're able to do it, too, since their transcontinental railroad went through about the time I came to Montana. The only reason they had for building that railroad-the only reason, I say, Phil-is to shuttle British soldiers along the frontier to those places where they might prove most advantageous."

"And where they'll do the most good, too," Snow said.

Roosevelt smiled. His hired hand had no idea what was funny. He didn't explain he had no desire to make the older man feel foolish. Instead, he came round to the other subject uppermost on his mind: "And now the Confederates, not content with battening on our weakness these past twenty years, have sunk their fangs into the Empire of Mexico as well."

"By what the papers were saying last time you went into town, President Blaine ain't gonna take that layin' down," Snow said.

"He'd better not. If he does, the whole country lies down with him. He wasn't elected to play the coward, which is what I've been saying." Resolution crystallized in Roosevelt. When he made up his mind, he made it up in a hurry, and all the way. "Harness the team to the Handbasket, Phil. I'm going into town to find out what the latest news is. If there's war, sure as the sun comes up tomorrow we'll have hordes of redcoats pouring over the border. By jingo, I wish the telegraph line reached all the way out here. I want to know what's going on out in the bigger world."

If Philander Snow cared about the wider world, he concealed it very well. He might have been-he probably had been-a rough character once, but work on the farm and the occasional spree in Helena satisfied him now. "Give me just a few minutes, boss, and I'll take care of it." He spat and chuckled and spat again. "You're a hell of a funny fellow, boss, when you take it in your mind to be."

Roosevelt went back into the ranch house for his Winchester. The ranch lay about ten miles north of Helena, in a little valley whose surrounding hills protected it from the worst of the winter blizzards. He was more worried about bears than bandits or hostile Indians, but you never could tell. He took a box of. 45 caliber cartridges along with the rifle.

Snow brought the buggy out of the barn almost as quickly as he'd promised. "Here you go," he said, climbing down from the driver's bench so Roosevelt could get aboard. "To Helena Handbasket," he said, and chuckled again. "You struck the mother lode when you came up with that one, sure as hell."

"Glad you like it." Roosevelt liked it, too. He stowed the rifle where he could grab it in a hurry if he had to, flicked the reins, and got the horses going toward Helena.

He reached the territorial capital a couple of hours later. Farms much like his own covered most of the flat land, with stretches of forest between them. Here and there, on the higher ground, were shafts and timbers from mines hopeful prospectors had begun. Most of them were years abandoned. Most of the prospectors, like Philander Snow, were making their living in some different line of work these days.

Helena sat in a valley of its own. Some of the log cabins of the earliest settlers, those who'd come just after the end of the War of Secession, still stood down near the bottom of the valley, by the tributary of the Prickly Pear that had made people pause hereabouts in the first place. Newer, finer homes climbed the hills to either side.

Down on Broadway, as Roosevelt drove the wagon toward the newspaper office, he felt himself returned to a cosmopolitan city, even if not to a sophisticated one. Here riding beside him was a bearded prospector leading a pack mule. The fellow still hoped to strike it rich, as did some of his comrades. Every once in a while, those hopes came true. Mines near Helena, and newer ones by Wickes to the south and Marysville to the west, had made millionaires-but only a handful.

A Chinaman in a conical straw hat walked by, carrying two crates hanging from a pole over his right shoulder. Roosevelt approved of Chinese industriousness, but wouldn't have minded seeing all the Celestials gone from the West. They don't fit in, he thought: too different from Americans.

Solomon Katz ran a drugstore near the office of the Helena Gazette; Sam Houlihan ran the hardware store next door, and Otto Burmeister the bakery next to that. Among Helena 's ten or twelve thousand people, there were members of every nation ever to set foot on the North American continent.

And, trotting up the street on their ponies, a couple of the original inhabitants of the continent came toward Roosevelt. One of the Sioux wore the buckskin tunic and trousers traditional to his people, the other blue denim trousers and a calico shirt. Idly, Roosevelt wondered what Helena-a medium-sized town at best, but a larger assemblage of people than their tribe had ever managed-seemed like to them.

He shrugged. In the larger scheme of things, their opinion counted for very little. As if to take their minds off the defeat the United States had suffered at the hands of the Confederacy, and also spurred by the Sioux uprisings in Minnesota, the USA had thrown swarms of soldiers across the prairie, subduing the aborigines by numbers and firepower even if not with any great military skill. These days, the Indians could only stand and watch as the lands that had been theirs served the purposes of a stronger race.

Roosevelt looked for the Indians to head into one of the saloons sprouting like mushrooms along Broadway. Instead, they tied up their horses in front of Houlihan's establishment and went in there. Roosevelt 's head bobbed up and down in approval: Indians who needed hammers or saw blades or a keg of nails were Indians on the way to civilization. He'd heard the Lord's Prayer had been translated into Sioux, which he also took for a good sign.

The Gazette had a copy of the front page of the day's edition displayed under glass in front of the office. A small crowd of people stared at it. Roosevelt worked his way through the crowd till he could read the headlines, REBEL INTRANSIGENCE, shouted one. BLAINE TAKES FIRM LINE ON CONFEDERATE LAND GRAB, Said another. ENGLAND WARNS USA NOT TO MEDDLE, declared a third.

" England, she has no right to make such a warning," said one of the men in front of Roosevelt. He had a guttural accent; warning came out varning. Roosevelt 's big head nodded vehemently-even a German immigrant could see the nose in front of his face.

He wondered if Blaine would see it or back down, spineless as the Democrats who'd run the country since Lincoln was so unceremoniously shown the door after the war against secession turned out to be the War of Secession. By that second headline, the president seemed to be doing what the people had elected him to do, for which Roosevelt thanked God.

Behind Roosevelt, the crowd parted as if it were the Red Sea and Moses had come. But it wasn't Moses, it was a fierce-looking fellow with a bushy white mustache and chin beard who wore a banker's somber black suit.

"Mornin', Mr. Cruse," a grocer said respectfully. "Good day, sir," one of the men who worked at the livery stable added, tipping his straw hat. "How's the boy, Tommy?" said a miner who matched Cruse in years but not in affluence.

"Mornin' to you all," Cruse said, affable enough and to spare. A few years earlier, he'd been poorer than the miner who'd greeted him. Roosevelt doubted whether any bank in Montana Territory would have lent him more than fifty dollars. But he'd made his strike, which was rare, and he'd sold it for every penny it was worth, which was rarer. These days, he didn't need to borrow money from a bank, for he owned one. He was one of the handful of men throughout the West who'd gone at a single bound from prospector to capitalist.

He'd dealt squarely with people when he was poor, and he kept on dealing squarely with them now that he was rich. Had he wanted to be territorial governor, he could have been. He'd never given any sign of being interested in the job.

Like everyone else, Roosevelt gave way for him. It was a gesture of respect for the man's achievement, not one of servility. Roosevelt had money of his own, New York money, infinitely older and infinitely more stable than that grubbed from the ground here in the wild territories.

"Good morning, Mr. Roosevelt," Cruse said, nodding to him. The self-made millionaire respected those who gave him his due and no more.

"Good morning to you, Mr. Cruse," Roosevelt answered, hoping he would be as vigorous as the ex-miner when he got old. He pointed toward the front page of the Helena Gazette. "What do you think we ought to do, sir, about the Confederates' land grab?"

"Let me see the latest before I answer." Unlike so many of his comrades, Thomas Cruse would not leap blind. He stood well back from the newspaper under glass, studying the headlines. The crowd of men who had also been reading them waited, silent, for his considered opinion. Once he was done, he spoke with due deliberation: "I think we ought to continue on the course we've taken up till now. I see no other we can choose."

"My exact thought, Mr. Cruse," Roosevelt agreed enthusiastically. "But if the Confederates and the British-and the French who prop up Maximilian-also continue on their course…"

"Then we lick 'em," Tom Cruse said in a loud, harsh voice. The crowd in front of the newspaper office erupted in cheers. Theodore Roosevelt joined them. Cruse could speak for all of Montana Territory. The miner turned banker had certainly spoken for him.

General James Ewell Brown Stuart's way had always been to lead from the front. As commander of the Confederate States Department of the Trans-Mississippi, he might have made his headquarters in Houston or Austin, as several of his predecessors had done. Instead, ever since being promoted to the position two years earlier, he'd based himself in the miserable village of El Paso, as far west as he could go while staying in the CSA.

Peering north and west along the Rio Grande — swollen, at the moment, with spring runoff and very different from the sleepy stream it would be soon-Jeb Stuart looked into the USA. That proximity to the rival nation made El Paso important as a Confederate outpost, and was the reason he'd brought his headquarters hither.

But El Paso had been a place of significance before an international border sprang up between Texas and New Mexico Territory, between CSA and USA. It and its sister town on the other side of the Rio Grande, Paso del Norte, had stood on opposite sides of the border first between Mexico and the USA and then between Mexico and the CSA. The pass the names of the two towns commemorated was one of the lowest and broadest through the Rockies, a gateway between east and west travelers had been using for centuries.

Stuart looked across the Rio Grande to Paso del Norte. Not quite twenty years earlier, the national border between Texas and New Mexico had gone up. (It would have gone up farther west and north, but the Confederate invasion of New Mexico, mounted without adequate manpower or supplies, had failed.) Now, as soon as Stuart got the telegram for which he was waiting, the border on the Rio Grande would cease to be.

His aide-de-camp, a burly major named Horatio Sellers, came walking up to the edge of the river to stand alongside him. Sweat streaked Sellers' ruddy face. Dust didn't scuff up under his boots, as it would in a few weeks, but the heat was already irksome, and gave every promise of becoming appalling.

Sellers peered across into what remained for the moment the territory of the Empire of Mexico. Paso del Norte was larger than its Confederate counterpart, but no more prepossessing. A couple of cathedrals reared above the mud-brick buildings that made up most of the town. The flat roofs of those buildings made the place look as if the sun had pounded it down from greater prominence.

Sellers said, "We're giving Maximilian three million in gold and silver for those two provinces? Three million? Sir, you ask me, we ought to get change back from fifty cents."

"Nobody asked you, Major," Stuart answered. "Nobody asked me, either. That doesn't matter. If we're ordered-when we're ordered-to take possession of the provinces for the Confederacy, that's what we'll do. That's all we can do."

"Yes, sir," his aide-de-camp answered resignedly.

"Look on the bright side," Stuart said. "We've got the Yankees hopping around like fleas on a hot griddle. That's worthwhile all by itself, if you ask me." He grinned. "Of course, Longstreet didn't ask me, any more than he asked you."

Sellers remained gloomy, which was in good accord with his nature. "Two provinces full of desert and Indians and Mexicans, and we're supposed to turn them into Confederate states, sir? It'll be a lot of work, I can tell you that. Christ, Negro servitude is illegal south of the border."

"Well, if the border moves south, our laws move with it," Stuart answered. "I expect we'll manage well enough there." He chuckled. "I'll bet Stonewall wishes he were here instead of me. He liked Mexico when he fought there for the USA — he even learned to speak Spanish. But he's stuck in Richmond, and that's about as far from El Paso as you can be and still stay in the Confederate States."

"Sir," Sellers persisted, exactly as if Jeb Stuart could do something about the situation, "supposing we do annex Sonora and Chihuahua. How the devil are we supposed to defend them from the USA? New Mexico Territory and California have a lot longer stretch of border with 'em than Texas does, and the Yankees have a railroad down there, so they can ship in troops faster than we can hope to manage it. What are we going to do?"

"Whatever it takes, and whatever we have to do," Stuart said, though he recognized the answer as imperfectly satisfactory. "I'll tell you this much, Major, and you can mark my words: once those provinces are in our hands, we will have a railroad through to the Pacific inside of five years. We aren't like Maximilian's pack of do-nothings down in Mexico City. When the Anglo-Saxon race sets its mind to do something, that thing gets done."

"Of course, sir." Major Sellers was as smugly confident of the superiority of his own people as was Stuart. After a moment, he added, "We'll need a railroad more than the greasers would have, too. We'll use it for trade, the same as they would have done, but we'll use it against the United States, too, and they never would have bothered with that."

Stuart nodded. "Can't say you're wrong there. If Mexico ever got into a brawl with the USA, first thing she'd do would be to pull out of that part of the country and see whether a Yankee army was still worth anything once it got done slogging its way through the desert."

"No, sir." Sellers shook his head. "The first thing Maximilian would do would be to scream for us to help. The second thing he'd do would be to pull out of Sonora and Chihuahua."

"You're likely to be right about that, too," Stewart said. The sound of boots clumping on the dirt made him turn his head. An orderly was coming up, a telegram clenched in his right fist. "Well, well." One of Stuart's thick eyebrows rose. "What have we here?"

"Wire for you, sir," said the orderly, a youngster named Withers. "From Richmond."

"I hadn't really expected them to wire me from Washington, D.C.," Stuart answered. Major Sellers snorted. Withers looked blank; he didn't get the joke. With a small mental sigh, Stuart read the telegram. That eyebrow climbed higher and higher as he did. "Well, well," he said again.

"Sir?" Sellers said.

Stuart realized well, well was something less than informative. "We are ordered by General Jackson to assemble two regiments of cavalry and two batteries of artillery at Presidio, and also to assemble five regiments of cavalry, half a dozen batteries, and three regiments of infantry here at El Paso, the said concentrations to be completed no later than May 16." The date amused him. Most officers would surely have chosen the fifteenth. But that was a Sunday, and Jackson had always been averse to doing anything not vitally necessary on the Sabbath.

Sellers whistled softly. "It's going to happen, then."

"I would say that appears very likely, Major," Stuart agreed. "Presidio is on the road to the town of Chihuahua, the capital of Chihuahua province, which we would naturally have to occupy upon annexation. And of the larger force to be assembled here, I presume some will go to Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora province-which I suppose will become Sonora Territory-and some will defend El Paso against whatever moves the United States may make in response to our actions."

"We'll have to post guards all along the railroad." Now Major Sellers looked north. The Texas-New Mexico frontier and the Rio Grande pinched El Paso off at the end of a long, narrow neck of Confederate territory, through which the Texas Western Railroad necessarily ran. Small parties of raiders could do a lot of damage along that line.

"Once the annexation goes through, we won't have any trouble moving south of the Rio Grande. We'll have more depth in which to operate," Stuart said. That was true, but it wasn't so useful as it might have been, and he knew as much. No railroad to El Paso ran through Chihuahua province; movement would have to be by horseback and wagon. He sighed, folded the telegram, and put it in the breast pocket of his butternut tunic: he was not a man to wear an old-style uniform once the new one had been authorized. "Have to go back to my office and see what I can move, and from which places."

The longer he studied the map, the less happy he got. To carry out General Jackson's orders, he would have to pull troops from as far away as Arkansas, and that would result in weakening a different frontier with the USA. He would also have to call down the Fifth Cavalry and to denude the rest of the garrisons protecting west Texas from the Comanche raiders who took refuge in New Mexico Territory. If the Yankees turned the Comanches loose, there was liable to be hell to pay among the ranchers and farmers in that part of the country.

But there would certainly be hell to pay if he did not obey Jackson 's order in every particular. Old Stonewall had sacked one of his officers during the war for failing to deliver an ordered attack even though the fellow had learned he was outnumbered much worse than Jackson thought he was. Jackson did not, would not, take no for an answer.

By the time Stuart was done drafting telegrams, he had shifted troops all over the landscape. He took the text of the wires over to the telegraph office, listened to the first couple of them clicking their way east, and then went off to watch the cavalry regiment regularly stationed at El Paso go through its morning exercises.

Troops began arriving a couple of days later. So did cars filled with hardtack, cornmeal, beans, and salt pork for the men, and with oats and hay for the horses and other animals. Every time he looked across the river into Chihuahua province, he wondered how he could keep his soldiers supplied there. He also sent out orders accumulating wagons at El Paso. If he didn't bring food and munitions with him, he suspected he'd have none.

No troop movements on this scale had been seen in the Trans-Mississippi since the end of the war, not even during the great Coman-che outbreak of 1874. Some officers had been rusticating in their fortresses since Lincoln abandoned the struggle to keep the Confederacy from gaining its independence. All things considered, they did a good job of shaking off the cobwebs and going from garrison soldiering to something approaching field service.

By the tenth of May, Stuart was convinced he would have all his troops in place before the deadline General Jackson had sent him. On that day, a messenger came galloping into El Paso. "Sir," he said when he came before Stuart, "Sir, Lieutenant Colonel Foulke has crossed the border from Las Cruces under flag of truce and wants to speak with you."

"Has he?" Stuart thought fast. There were any number of places where the Yankees could have sneaked an observer over the border to keep an eye on the one railroad into El Paso; spotting troop trains would have given them a good notion of the force he had at his disposal. But what the United States knew and what they officially knew were different things. "I want his party stopped four or five miles outside of town. I'll ride out and confer with him there. Hop to it, Sergeant. I don't want him in El Paso."

"Yes, sir." The noncommissioned officer who'd brought him the news hurried away to head off the U.S. officer.

Stuart followed at a pace only a little more leisurely. Accompanied by Major Sellers and enough troopers to give the idea that he was someone of consequence, he rode up the dirt track that led northwest toward New Mexico.

He met Lieutenant Colonel Foulke's party nearer three miles outside El Paso than five. One of Foulke's aides was peering toward the Confederate garrison town with a telescope he folded up and put away when Stuart and his retinue came into sight. He could have done it sooner without Stuart's seeing it. That he'd waited meant he wanted Stuart to know the Yankees had him under observation.

"Wait here," Stuart told the troopers when they drew close to the U.S. soldiers. "They didn't come here to start a fight, not under flag of truce." He and his aide-de-camp rode on toward the men in blue.

Lieutenant Colonel Foulke and the officer who'd been using the telescope imitated his practice, so that the four leaders met between their small commands. "A very good morning to you, General," Foulke said politely; seeing his baby-smooth skin and coal-black mustache reminded Stuart he himself would be fifty soon.

He didn't let himself dwell on that. "The same to you, Lieutenant Colonel," he answered. "I hope you will not mind my asking the purpose of your visit to the Confederacy here."

"By no means, sir." Hearing the polite phrase in Foulke's Yankee accent- New York, Stuart thought-was strange. The U.S. officer went on, "I have been instructed by the secretary of war, Mr. Harrison, and by the general-in-chief of the United States Army to inform you personally that the United States will view with great concern any movement of Confederate forces into the territory of the Empire of Mexico."

"I would point out to you, sir, that, when and if the purchase arrangements between Mexico and the Confederacy are completed, the provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora shall no longer be the territory of the Empire of Mexico, but rather that of the Confederate States of America." Stuart's smile looked ingratiating, but was anything but. "Surely, Bill-"

"William," Foulke said. "I prefer William. William Dudley Foulke, sir, at your service."

"Beg your pardon, William," Stuart said easily, wondering what such a pompous little fellow was doing so far out West. "As I was saying, surely the United States cannot be thinking of forbidding the Confederate States from moving their forces from one part of their own territory to another."

William Dudley Foulke took a deep breath. "I am requested and required to inform you, General, as the government of the United States has informed President Longstreet in Richmond, that the United States consider the sale of Sonora and Chihuahua to be made under duress, and therefore to be invalid and of no consequence."

"Oh, they do, do they?" Stuart had understood that to be the position of the United States, but had never heard it explicitly till now. The way it was stated… "William, I assure you I mean no offense by this, but you talk more like a lawyer than a soldier."

Foulke smiled: he was amused, not angry. "I considered a career in the law in my early days, General Stuart. In the aftermath of the War of Secession, I determined that I could better use my talents in the service of my country as a soldier than as a jurist. As I am of Quaker stock, my family was distressed at my choice, but here I am today."

"Here you are," Stuart agreed. "And since you are here, Lieutenant Colonel Foulke, I have to tell you that the view of the Confederate States is that, if the sale of Sonora and Chihuahua be completed, those two provinces become territory belonging to the Confederate States of America, to be administered and garrisoned at the sole discretion of the government of the CSA. In plain English, sir, once they're ours, we'll do with them as we please."

"In plain English, sir, the United States do not aim to let themselves be outflanked on the south," Foulke said. "The United States do not aim to let the Confederacy take advantage of a weak neighbor, as you did when you bullied Cuba out of Spain a few years ago. I expect you will wire a report of this meeting back to Richmond. Rest assured that I am telling you nothing different from what Minister Hay is telling President Longstreet there, or for that matter what President Blaine is telling Minister Benjamin in Washington."

Major Horatio Sellers spoke up: "You Yankees keep barking that way, Lieutenant Colonel, you're going to have to show whether you've got any bite to go with it."

Foulke flushed: with his fine, fair skin, the darkening was quite noticeable. But his voice was cool as he replied, "Major, if your nation persists in its unwise course, you will feel our teeth, I assure you."

"The United States have already felt our teeth, sir," Jeb Stuart said. "It has been a while, I admit; perhaps you've forgotten. If you have, we are prepared to remind you. And, I will point out, we have good friends, which is more than the United States can say."

Lieutenant Colonel Foulke shrugged. "Sir, I have delivered to you the message with which I was charged. I personally have no great use for war, nor does any man, nor any nation, of sense. But you are to know that the United States are firmly resolved in this matter. Good day." Without waiting for a reply, he and the captain with him rode back toward their men.

Stuart watched until all the Yankees started riding off in the direction of New Mexico. When he'd been Foulke's age-Lord, when he'd been even younger-he'd loved nothing better than riding to war. Now that he had sons of his own growing to manhood, he was no longer so sure.

He turned to Major Sellers. "The next time we see that Yankee, it will be on the battlefield."

His aide-de-camp gave a sharp, short nod. "Good," he said.

Colonel Alfred von Schlieffen had heard that the British government designated diplomatic service in Washington, D.C., a hardship position on account of the abominable climate of the capital of the United States. He didn't know for a fact that that was true. If it wasn't, though, it should have been. The weather had already got hotter and muggier than it ever did in Berlin, and May was only a bit more than half done. Kaiser Wilhelm I's military attache in the United States ran a finger under the tight collar of his blue Prussian uniform to try to let in some air. That helped little, if at all.

Sweating, Schlieffen stepped onto the black cast-iron balcony outside his office. He startled a pigeon on the rail. It flew away, wings flapping noisily. Schlieffen reckoned that a victory of sorts. Too many pigeon droppings streaked the dark red brick of the German ministry.

Against the humidity and heat, though, he won nothing. No breeze stirred the air; it was as hot outside as back in the office. Horses and buggies and wagons rattled up and down Massachusetts Avenue. The street was paved with bricks, so they didn't raise great choking clouds of dust as they might have done, but the racket of iron-shod hooves and iron tires on the paving was terrible.

That racket drove whatever thoughts Schlieffen had had clean out of his head. For a man so intensely intellectual, that could not be borne. He went back inside, closing the French doors behind him. As the air was so still, he made the office no hotter, and, since they were almost all glass, he hardly made it dimmer.

Above his desk hung three framed portraits. A Catholic might have thought them images of a secular Trinity. That had never occurred to Schlieffen, a devout Hutterite. To him, they were merely the most important men in his life: ascetic-looking Field Marshal von Moltke, whose victories over Denmark, Austria, and France had made Prussian-led Germany a nation; plump, imperious Chancellor von Bismarck, whose diplomacy had made von Moltke's victories possible; and, above them both, the Kaiser, bald now, his fringe of hair, mustache, and fuzzy side whiskers white, his chest full of well-earned medals, for he had been a formidable soldier in his own right before succeeding his brother as King of Prussia.

Whenever Schlieffen thought of the Kaiser's soldierly career, he could only marvel, for Wilhelm had first seen action in the Prussian puppet forces that fought under Napoleon's command when the century was young. "How many men still living can say that?" Schlieffen murmured. And afterwards, Wilhelm had helped guide Prussia 's rise to greatness, had known when to urge his brother to decline the throne of a united Germany after the revolutions of 1848, and had known when to accept it himself a generation later.

From the Kaiser's portrait, Schlieffen's eyes fell briefly to the small photograph of a pretty young woman on his desk: the one bit of sentiment he permitted himself in a room otherwise utterly businesslike. Anna had been his cousin as well as, for four wonderful years, his wife. In the nine years since her death in childbed, he'd found it easier to care for the ideal of Germany than for any merely human being.

He inked his pen and wrote the last few sentences of the report he'd been working on. After scrawling his signature at the bottom, he checked his pocket watch: a few minutes past ten. He had a ten-thirty appointment at the War Department.

Precise as always, he signed the daybook in the front hall, noting his departure time to the minute. The guards outside the door saluted as he left the embassy. He punctiliously returned the courtesy.

He walked half a block southeast on Massachusetts, then turned right onto Vermont, which cut diagonally across Washington 's square grid and led straight toward the White House and the War Department building just west of it. Civilians waved to him, mistaking his light blue uniform for one belonging to the U.S. Army. He'd had U.S. soldiers make the same mistake and salute him.

He ignored the misdirected greetings, as he ignored most human contact. Then a fat man on a pony that didn't seem up to bearing his weight recognized the uniform for what it was. "Hurrah for the Kaiser!" the fellow called, and tipped his hat. Schlieffen acknowledged that with a polite nod. The Kaiser was popular in the United States, not least because his army had beaten the French.

Newsboys hawked papers on every corner. Headlines screamed of coming war. Schlieffen's glance lifted toward the Arlington Heights on the far side of the Potomac. Buildings screened most of his view of them, but he knew they were there. He also knew the Confederate States had guns mounted on them, and on other high ground along the southern bank of the river. If war came, Washington would suffer.

More soldiers were on the streets than usual, but not many more. Unlike Germany, the United States had no conscription law, relying instead on volunteers to fill out the relatively small professional army once war was declared. That struck Schlieffen as the next thing to insane, even if the Confederacy used the same system. Mobs, he thought scornfully. Mobs with rifles, that's what they'll be.

The War Department was a four-story brick building with a two-story entranceway fronted by half a dozen columns. To Schlieffen's way of thinking, it would have been adequate for a provincial town, but hardly for a national capital. The Americans had talked for years of building something finer: talked, but spent no money. Still, the soldiers on duty at the entrance were almost as well drilled as the guards in front of the German embassy.

"Yes, Colonel," one of them said. "The general is expecting you, so you just follow Willie here. He'll take you to him."

"Thank you," Schlieffen said. The soldier named Willie led him up to the third-floor office where the general-in-chief of the U.S. Army carried out his duties. "Guten Tag, Heir Oberst," said the general's adjutant, a bright young captain named Saul Berryman.

"Guten Tag," Schlieffen answered, and then, as he usually did, fell back into English: "How are you today, Captain?"

"Ganz gut, danke. Und Sie?" Berryman kept up the German for the same reason Schlieffen spoke English-neither was so fluent speaking the other's language as he would have liked, and both enjoyed the chance to practice. "Der General wird Sie sofort sehen."

"I am glad he will see me at once," Schlieffen said. "He must be very busy, with the crisis in your country."

"Ja, er ist." Just then, the general opened the door to the outer room where Berryman worked. Seeing him, his adjutant returned to English himself: "Go ahead, Colonel."

"Yes, always good to see you, Colonel," Major General William Rosecrans echoed. "Come right in."

"Thank you," Schlieffen said, and took a chair across the desk from Rosecrans. The military attache's nostrils twitched. He'd smelled whiskey on Rosecrans before, but surely at a time like this-He gave a mental shrug.

"Good to see you," Rosecrans repeated, as if he'd forgotten he'd said it the first time. He was somewhere in his early sixties, with graying hair, a fairly neat graying beard, and a nose with a formidable hook in it. His color was very good, but the whiskey might have had something to do with that. He looked shrewd, but, Schlieffen judged, wasn't truly intelligent; he owed his position mostly to having come out of the War of Secession less disgraced than any other prominent U.S. commander.

"General, I am here to present my respects, and also to convey to you the friendly good wishes of my sovereign, the Kaiser," Schlieffen said.

"Of your suffering Kaiser?" Rosecrans said. "I hope he gets better, with all my heart I do. Germany has always been a country friendly to us, and we're damned glad of that, believe me, considering the way so many of the other countries in Europe treat us."

Schlieffen gave him a sharp look, or as sharp a look as could come from the military attache's nondescript, rather pinched features. Rosecrans showed not the slightest hint of embarrassment, nor even that he noticed the glare. Schlieffen concluded the fault lay in his own accented English, which Rosecrans must have innocently misunderstood. Having concluded that, the colonel dismissed the matter from his mind. If no insult had been offered, he could not take offense.

"I would be grateful, General, if you could make arrangements so that, in the event of war between the United States and the Confederate States, you might transport me to one of your armies so that I can observe the fighting and report on it to my government," he said.

"Well, if the war's not over and done with before you catch up to it, I expect we'll be able to do that," Rosecrans said. "You'll have to move sharp, though, because we ought to lick the Rebs in jig time, or Bob's your uncle."

Although Schlieffen knew he was missing some of that-the English spoken in the United States at times seemed only distantly related to what he'd learned back in Germany — the root meaning remained pretty clear. "You believe you will win so quickly and easily, then?" He did his best to keep the surprise he felt out of his voice.

"Don't you?" Rosecrans made no effort to hide his own amazement. Very few Americans, as far as Schlieffen could see, had even the least skill in disguising their thoughts and feelings: indeed, they took an odd sort of pride in wearing them on their sleeves. When Schlieffen didn't answer right away, Rosecrans repeated, "Don't you, sir? The plain fact of the matter is, they're afraid. It's plain in everything they do."

"I am nothing more than an ignorant stranger in your country," Schlieffen said, a stratagem that had often given him good results. "Would you be so kind as to explain to me why you think this is so?"

Rosecrans swelled with self-importance. "It strikes me as an obvious fact, Colonel. The government of the United States told Richmond in no uncertain terms that there would be hell to pay if a single Confederate soldier crossed over the Rio Grande. Not a one of 'em has done it. Q.E.D."

"Is it not possible that the Confederate soldiers have not yet moved only because their own preparations remain incomplete?" Schlieffen asked.

"Possible, but not likely," Rosecrans said. "They put a large force of regulars into El Paso a couple of weeks ago-that was before we warned 'em we wouldn't stand for any funny business in Chihuahua and Sonora. And since that day, Colonel, since that day, not a one of the stinking sons of bitches has dared stir his nose out of their barracks. If that doesn't say they're afraid of us, I'd like to know what it does say."

Schlieffen thought he'd already told General Rosecrans what it said. To the American, evidently, preparations meant nothing more than moving troops from one place to another. Schlieffen wondered if his own English was at fault again. He didn't think so. The problem lay in the way Rosecrans-and, presumably, President Blaine-saw the world.

"If you fight the Confederate States, General, will you fight them alone?" Schlieffen tried to put the concept in a new way, since the first one had met no success.

"Of course we'll fight 'em alone," Rosecrans exclaimed. "They're the ones who suck up to foreigners, not us." That he was speaking with a foreigner did not cross his mind. His voice took on a petulant tone, almost a whine, that Schlieffen had heard before from other U.S. officers: "If England and France hadn't stabbed us in the back during the War of Secession, we'd've licked the Confederates then, and we wouldn't have to be worrying about this nonsense now."

"That may be true." Schlieffen felt something close to despair. Rosecrans was not a stupid man; Schlieffen had seen as much. But it was hard to tell whether he was more naive than ignorant or the other way round. "Could your diplomacy not try to keep Great Britain and France from doing in this war what they did in the last, or even more than they did in the last?"

"That's not my department," Rosecrans said flatly. "If they stay out, they stay out. If they come in, I suppose we'll deal with 'em. Stabbed in the back," he muttered again.

"You have, I trust, made plans for fighting the Confederate States by themselves, for fighting them and Great Britain, for fighting them and France, and for fighting them and both Great Britain and France?" Schlieffen said.

Rosecrans gaped at him. After coughing a couple of times, the American general-in-chief said, "We'll hit the Rebs a couple of hard licks, then we'll chase 'em, depending on where they try to run. Whatever they try themselves, we'll beat that back, and… Are you all right, Colonel?"

"Yes, thank you," Schlieffen answered after a moment. He was briefly ashamed of his own coughing fit-was he an American, to reveal everything that was in his mind? But Rosecrans apparently saw nothing more than that he'd swallowed wrong. As gently as he could, Schlieffen went on, "We have developed in advance more elabourate plans of battle, General. They served us well against the Austrians and later against the French."

"I did enjoy watching the froggies get their ears pinned back," Rosecrans agreed. "But, Colonel, you don't understand." He spoke with great earnestness: Americans weren't always right, any more than anyone else was, but they were always sure of themselves. "Can't just go and plan things here, the way you do on your side of the Atlantic. The land's too big here, and there aren't enough people to fill it up. Too much room to manoeuvre, if you know what I mean, and that's hell on plans."

He had a point-no, he had part of a point. "We face the same difficulty when we think of war with Russia," Schlieffen said. "There is in Russia even more space than you have here, though I admit Russia has also more men. But this does not keep us from developing plans. If we can force the foe to respond to what our forces do, the game is ours."

"Maybe," Rosecrans said. "And maybe you're smarter than the Russians you'd be fighting, too. The next general who's smarter than Stonewall Jackson hasn't come down the pike yet, seems to me."

"I do not follow this," Schlieffen said, but then, all at once, he did. His own ancestors must have gone off to fight Napoleon with that same mixture of arrogance and dread. Comparing a backwoods Confederate general to the great Bonaparte, though, struck him as absurd-until he considered that Rosecrans and his ilk were hardly a match for Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Bliicher.

"But we will lick 'em." Suddenly, Rosecrans was full of bluff confidence again. "We outweigh 'em two to one, near enough, and that's plenty to make any general look smarter than he really is-even an old ne'er-do-well like me." The grin he sent Schlieffen had a self-deprecating charm to which the German military attache could not help responding.

And Rosecrans was right. An army with twice the men and guns of its foe went into a war with an enormous advantage. As Voltaire had said, God was always for the big battalions. Even Frederick the Great, facing odds like those, had been at the end of his tether during the Seven Years' War till the opportune death of the Tsarina and her abrupt replacement by a successor who favored the Prussian king made Russia drop out of the war.

"I repeat the question I asked before," Schlieffen said again: "What will you do if England or France or both of them at once should enter the war on the side of the Confederate States?"

"The best we can," Rosecrans answered. Brave, Schlieffen thought, but not helpful. But then the American Army commander looked sly. "Between you, me, and the wall, Colonel, I don't think it's going to happen. The reports we're getting from London and Paris say both governments over there are sick to death of the Confederacy keeping niggers as slaves, and they won't lift a finger unless the Rebs say they'll turn 'cm loose. Now I ask you, sir, what are the odds of that? Biggest reason they fought the war was on account of they were afraid the United States government would make 'em do something like that. If they wouldn't do it for their own kith and kin, why do you think the stubborn bastards'll do it for a pack of foreigners?"

"This may be an important point," Schlieffen said. It was, at any rate, a point interesting enough for him to take it up with Minister von Schlozer when he got back to the brick pile on Massachusetts Avenue. He concerned himself with politics as little as he could. Political considerations could of course affect military ones, but the latter were all that fell within his purview. Civilians set policy. He made sure the armed forces could do what the leaders required of them.

Rosecrans said, "If you'll excuse me, Colonel, I do have a deal to see to here, just on the off chance the Confederates get frisky after all."

"I understand." Schlieffen rose. So did Rosecrans, who came around the desk to shake hands with him again. "One more question, General?" the attache asked. "In case of war, you are rather vulnerable to the foe while here in Washington. What would the signal be for shifting your headquarters up to Philadelphia, which is less likely to come under attack?"

"It had better not," Rosecrans exclaimed. "Soon as the first shell falls, we all pack up stakes and head north. Everything will go smooth as clockwork, I promise you. We aren't fools, Colonel. We know the Rebs will shell this place."

"Very good," Schlieffen said. As he left the War Department, he wondered whether both of Rosecrans' last two sentences were true.

Black smoke-and showers of sparks-pouring from her twin stacks, the Liberty Bell steamed down the Mississippi toward St. Louis. When he'd boarded the sternwheeler in Clinton, Illinois, Frederick Douglass had taken her name as a good omen. With every mile closer to the Confederate States he drew, though, his doubts increased.

He stood on the upper deck, watching farms and little towns flow past. He was the only Negro on the upper deck, the deck that housed cabin passengers. That did not surprise him. But for one of the men who fed wood to the fire under the Liberty Bell 's boiler, he was the only Negro aboard the steamboat. He was used to that, too. Over the years since the War of Secession, he'd grown very used to being alone.

"Look," somebody not far away said. "Look at the nigger in the fancy suit."

Douglass turned. He was, he knew, an impressive man, with handsome features whose leonine aspect was enhanced by his silvery beard and mane of hair. That silver, and his slow, deliberate motions, told of his age. He thought he was sixty-four, but might as easily have been sixty-three or sixty-five. Having been born into slavery on Maryland 's Eastern Shore, he had, to put it mildly, not been encouraged to enquire into the details of his arrival on the scene.

Two young white men, both dressed like drummers or cheap confidence men (there sometimes being little difference between the two trades) were gaping at him, their pale eyes wide. "May I help you gentlemen?" he asked, letting only a little irony seep into his deep, rich voice.

Despite his formidable presence, despite the rumbles of oratorical thunder audible in even his briefest, most commonplace utterances, the whites were unabashed. "It's all right, it's all right," one of them said, as if soothing a restive child-or a restive horse. "Dick here and me, we're from St. Paul, and ain't neither one of us ever got a good look at a nigger before."

"I can sec as much," Douglass said. "I also discern that you have never had occasion to learn how to speak to a Negro, either."

That went right past the two men from St. Paul. They kept on staring, as if he were a caged monkey in a zoo. He'd had that feeling too many times in his life already. Seeing they would be rude, no matter how unintentionally, he turned his back, set both hands on the rail, and peered out over the Mississippi once more.

Ain 't neither one of us ever got a good look at a nigger before. His fingers clamped down on the white-painted cast iron with painful force. He'd heard that, or variations on it, hundreds of times since the war.

He let out a long sigh punctuated by a couple of short coughs. Before the Southern states left the Union to form their own nation, he had been a spokesman for one man in eight in the United States. Now, ninety percent of the Negroes on the North American continent resided in a foreign country, and most of the white citizens of the USA were just as glad it was so. They might have been gladder yet had the figure been one hundred percent. As often as not, they blamed the relative handful of blacks left in the United States for the breakup of the nation.

And if a Negro, tormented beyond endurance, tried to flee from, say, Confederate Kentucky across the Ohio into the United States and freedom, how was he greeted? With congratulations for his love of liberty and a hearty welcome to a better land? Douglass' laugh was sour. If a U.S. Navy gunboat didn't sink his little skiff or raft in midstream, white men with guns and dogs would hunt him down and ship him back over the river to the CSA. Why not? As an inhabitant of a different nation, he had no claim on the United States.

Douglass laughed again-better that than weeping. Before the war, the Fugitive Slave Act had been a stench in the nostrils of most Northerners. Now, though the law was no longer on the book, slavery having at last become extinct in the USA, fugitive slaves found less sympathy than they had a generation earlier. Did calling them foreigners make such a difference? Evidently.

Not wanting to know whether the two white men had finished their examination of him or whether others, equally curious and equally rude, had taken their place, Douglass looked ahead. The dark cloud of smoke and haze blowing west across the Mississippi was not a reflection of his mood. It was a reflection of the soft coal St. Louis, like so many Western cities, burned to heat its homes, cook its food, and power the engines of its factories. The Liberty Bell would be landing before long.

Past the northern suburb of Baden steamed the stcrnwheeler. Over there, black roustabouts carried cargo off barges and small steamers. Douglass warmed to see men of his own color once more, even if those men were doing labour of a sort their brethren still in bondage might have performed at lonely little landing stations along the Confederate-held reaches of the southern Mississippi.

Then across the water came the ingenious curses of the white men who bossed those roustabouts. Douglass' mouth tightened into a thin, hard line. He'd had curses like those fall on his own head back in the days when he was property, before he became a human being of his own. He'd also known the lash then. That, at least, these bosses, unlike the overseers still plying their trade in the CSA, were forbidden. Perhaps the prohibition made their curses sharper.

Other Negroes floated on the Mississippi in rowboats. Douglass watched one of them draw a fish into his boat: the day's supper, or part of it. Blacks and whites both plied larger skiffs, in which they went after the driftwood that always fouled the river. They would not make much money from their gleanings, but none of them, it was likely, would ever make, or expect to make, much money till the end of his days.

St. Louis sprawled for miles along the riverbank. The riverbank had long been its raison d'etre. On the Mississippi, close to the joining of that river with the Missouri and not too far above the joining with the Ohio, it was at the center of a commerce stretching from Minnesota to New Orleans, from the Appalachians to the Rockies. Railroads had only added to its importance. Smoke belching from the stack of its locomotive, a loaded train chugged north. The engineer blew a long blast on his whistle, apparently from nothing more than high spirits.

Not even the rupture of the Union had for long interrupted St. Louis ' riverine commerce. Many of the steamers chained up at the landing-stages along the stone-fronted levee-no regular wharves here, not with the Mississippi's level liable to fluctuate so drasticallywere Confederate boats, with names like Vicksburg Belle, New Orleans Lightning, and Albert Sidney Johnston. The Stars and Bars fluttered proudly at their sterns. As they had in the days before the war, they carried tobacco and cotton and rice and indigo up the river, trading them sometimes for wheat and corn, sometimes for iron ore, and sometimes for the products into which that ore was eventually made. The Confederate States had their own factories these days (some of them, to Douglass' unending mortification, with Negro slaves as labour), but their demand remained greater than their own industry could meet.

Names were not the only way to tell Confederate steamboats from their U.S. counterparts. None of the boats from the United States posted armed guards on deck to keep parts of their crews from escaping. The welcome newly fled blacks would receive in St. Louis was no warmer than anywhere else in the United States, but that did not keep some from trying their luck.

To Douglass' mingled pride and chagrin, the Liberty Bell pulled in alongside one of those Confederate boats, an immense sidewheeler emblazoned with the name N.B. Forrest. The escaped slave wondered how his brethren still trapped felt about sailing in a vessel named for a dealer in human flesh who had also proved a successful officer in the war.

One of the guards aboard the Forrest, looking over to watch the Liberty Bell tie up at the landing-stage, saw Douglass standing at the upper-deck rail. He gaped at the spectacle of a colored man there rather than on the main deck, where the poor and the engine crew spread their blankets. Douglass sent an unpleasant smile his way. The guard was close enough to recognize it as unpleasant. He scowled back, then spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into the equally brown Mississippi.

Berthed on the opposite side of the Liberty Bell from the Confederate steamboat was the USS Shiloh, one of a number of river monitors that made St. Louis their home port. The gunboat's dark iron armor plating and starkly functional design made a sharp contrast to the N.B. Forrest's gaudy paint and gilding and gloriously rococo woodwork.

Among the crowd waiting at the top of the gently sloping levee for the Liberty Bell to disembark her passengers was a small knot of black men in clothes much like Douglass': undoubtedly the clergymen he was to meet. He hurried back to his cabin to retrieve his carpet bags. He carried them to the gangplank himself. Though porters-immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of them-were eager enough to assist the whites traveling with him, they were more often than not reluctant to serve a Negro. How quickly they learn the ways of the land to which they came seeking freedom, Douglas thought with a bitterness now dull with scar tissue but no less true and real on account of that.

The ministers, by contrast, were eager to relieve him of his burdens. "Thank you, Deacon Younger," he said as he shook hands with them. "Thank you, Mr. Towler. Good to see you gentlemen-and you, too, of course, Mr. Bass; I don't mean to forget you-again. It's been four or five years since I last had the pleasure, has it not?"

"Fo' years, Mistuh Douglass," Deacon Daniel Younger answered. "It sho' enough is a pleasure to set eyes on you again, suh, I tell you truthfully." Like his colleagues, Younger was a man of education. He wrote well, as Douglas knew. His grammar and vocabulary were first rate. But he, like Towler and Bass, retained most of the intonations of slavery in his speech.

Douglass' own Negro accent was much less pronounced; as a boy, he'd learned white ways of speaking from his master's daughter. Over the years, he had seen many times how that made people both white and black take him more seriously. He found it useful and unfortunate at the same time.

"Come on to the carriage wid us," Washington Towler said. "We'll take you over to the Planter's Hotel on Fo'th Street. They know you're a-comin', and they will be ready fo' you." By that, he meant the hotel wouldn't make a fuss about having a Negro use one of its rooms for a few days. Douglass, of course, was not just any Negro, either, but as close to a famous Negro as the United States boasted.

The Reverend Henry Bass drove the buggy. He was younger than his two colleagues, both of whom were not far from Douglass' age. He said, "Don't know what all the excitement of the past few weeks will do to your crowds, Mistuh Douglass. What has yo' experience been in the other towns where you were?"

"It would be hard to state a general rule," Douglass answered. "Some people-by which I mean white people, of course-"

"Oh, of course," Bass said. He and the other two ministers rolled their eyes at the never-ending indignities of living on sufferance.

"Some people, I say," Douglass resumed, "take the threat of renewed war as a chance to punish the Confederate States, which works to our advantage. Others, though, continue to make the Negro the scapegoat for the dissolution of the Union, and because of that discount every word I say."

"You will see a deal o' dat last here, I am afraid." Deacon Daniel Younger's broad shoulders-the man was built like a barrel-moved up and down as he sighed. "During the war, there were plenty who fought"-he pronounced it fit, as did many, black and white, in the West and in the CSA-"to make Missouri a Confederate state. They have made up their minds to be part o' de Union now, but they are still not easy about it."

"I remember how Kentucky fell after Lincoln pulled troops easttoo little, too late-to try to halt Lee's army," Douglass said. "1 remember the talk about partitioning Missouri, too, on the order of what was done with Virginia and West Virginia. I thank God you were preserved entire for the United States."

"We praise Him every day," Washington Towler said. "Without His help, we should still be slaves ourselves." Henry Bass pulled up in front of the Planter's Hotel. Towler pointed to the entrance. "They bought and sold us, Mr. Douglass, right there, even in the days after the war, till emancipation finally became dc law of de land."

The Planter's Hotel had a Southern look to it even now. Its arches were of a style old-fashioned in the USA, incised into the fagade rather than raised in relief from it. Some of the men going in and out wore the white linen suiting common in the warm, muggy South, too, and spoke with drawls: traders up from New Orleans and Memphis, Douglass supposed. They stared at his companions and him as if a nightmare had come to life before their eyes-and so, Douglass hoped, one had.

He took his bags and went into the hotel. As he had on the steamboat, he carried them himself. Maybe the white porters assumed that, despite his clothes, he was a servant. Or maybe, and more likely, they just refused to lower themselves, as they saw it, by serving one of the Negroes who had served their kind for so many long, sorrowful years.

"I am Frederick Douglass," he said when he reached the front desk. "A room has been reserved in my name."

He waited for the clerk to shuffle through papers. The fellow lifted up his eyes now and again to stare at Douglass' dark countenance. What followed was as inevitable as night following day. "I'm sorry, s-" The clerk could not bring himself to say sir to a Negro. He started again: "I'm sorry, but I don't find that reservation."

"Young man," Douglass said coldly, "if you do not find it by the time I count ten, I promise you this hotel will be a stench in the nostrils of the entire United States by a week from Tuesday, when my next newspaper column goes out over the wires. Your superiors will not thank you for that. 1 commence: one, two, three…"

How the clerk stared! And how quickly the missing reservation appeared, as if by magic. Thoroughly cowed, the clerk even browbeat a white bellboy into taking Douglass' carpetbags from him and carrying them to the room. It was one of the smaller, darker rooms in the hotel, but Douglass had expected nothing better than that. Daniel Younger and his friends had probably been able to book no better.

After supper-which he ate at a table surrounded by empty ones-Henry Bass came by to take him to the Merchants' Exchange, where he would speak. St. Louis was a handsome city of gray limestone and a sandstone almost as red as brick, though soot dimmed its color on many buildings. The Merchants' Exchange proved to take up the whole block between Chestnut and Pine on Third Street. "We've got plenty of room for a good house, Mr. Douglass," Bass said. "President Tilden was nominated in the Grand Hall back in '76, he was."

But, when Douglass went into the hall, he was sadly disappointed. Plainly, every Negro in and around St. Louis who could afford a ticket was there. Somber-suited black men and their wives in fancy dresses filled to overflowing the seats allotted to them. Douglass had long prided himself, though, on his reputation for being able to speak to whites as well as blacks. Tonight, it failed him. The bright gaslights shone down on great empty rows of chairs, with here and there a clump of people.

He went ahead with his address; as a professional, he had no other choice. He sounded his familiar themes: tolerance, education, enlightenment, progress, the appropriateness of giving all their due for what they could do, not for the color of their skins. He drew rapturous applause from the Negroes in the hall, and got a polite hearing from the whites.

It could have been worse. He knew that. He'd started riots with his speeches now and again, sometimes meaning to, sometimes not. Tonight, he would have welcomed a riot in place of the near-indifference his white audience showed him. When U.S. whites had nothing else on their minds, they were sometimes willing to listen to tales of the Negro's plight and ways by which it might be alleviated. When they were distracted, they might as well have forgotten the USA still held any Negroes.

Once it was finally over, he stood down from the podium. To his surprise, one of the people who came up to speak with him was a gray-bearded white man, a former Army officer whom Douglass, after a bit, recognized from years gone by. "You must not take it to heart, sir," he said with touching sincerity. "Do remember, our present concern over the Confederate States is also, in its way, concern for your people."

Douglass smelled liquor on his breath. No wonder he is so sincere, the Negro thought. And no wonder he is a soldier no more, despite having won a couple of battles against the Rebels. By his rather worn suit, the fellow had made no great success of civilian life. Liquor again. But he had done his best to be kind on a dismal evening, and he did have a point of sorts. Exercising forbearance, Douglass said, "Thank you, General Grant."