How Few Remain (18 page)

“Surrender!” the militiaman shouted again. When the
Queen of the Ohio
kept steaming along, the fellow turned to his battery and waved. The gun crews had been standing around watching the sidewheeler. Now one crew sprang into action.

“Are they going to shoot at us?” an unshaven desk passenger in dirty overalls asked.

“They can’t,” his equally grubby female companion answered. “They wouldn’t.”

The Napoleon roared. Flame and smoke belched from its muzzle. The cannonball splashed into the river in front of the steamboat. The gun rolled backwards with the recoil. The artillerymen began reloading. The other three crews were serving their pieces, too.

“That one was a warning,” the Kentuckian shouted to the
Queen of the Ohio
. “Surrender or we blow y’all out of the water.”

Passengers cried out in alarm and dismay. From the pilothouse up above came an order delivered with such furious vehemence that it cut through the rising din: “Tie down the safety valves and pour on the ether! Get us the hell out of here!”

An order like that meant the steamboat was liable to explode even if the boiler didn’t take a hit from the Confederate guns. Douglass couldn’t have cared less. He clapped his hands together, applauding the captain’s good sense: surrender, for him, was unthinkable. The sooner they got out of range of those Napoleons, the better.

The rest of the battery opened up on the sidewheeler, in earnest this time. One ball whizzed over her, a clean miss. Another went into the river just short of her, throwing water up onto Douglass and the other passengers standing nearby. The third carried away the top couple of feet of one smokestack. The Rebels jumped up and down as if they’d sunk the
Queen of the Ohio
. Their commander’s furious yells set them to swabbing out and reloading again.

“My God!” Jack’s groans from above reached Douglass’ ears. “What do we do?”

“I think we’d better get down onto the main deck,” his wife answered—she, evidently, had sense enough for both of them. “If the boat catches fire, we’ll have to go into the river.”

Passengers by the score flooded out of the steamboat’s cabins
and salons, down the stairs, and onto the main deck. Some went to starboard, to stare across the river at the militiamen shooting at them. Some ran to port, as if they were assured of safety because they couldn’t see the Confederate guns from there.

Those guns proved any such safety illusory a moment later. A ball slammed into the
Queen of the Ohio’s
superstructure and tore through the boat’s timbers as if they were made of pasteboard. A fusillade of screams—some women’s, some men’s—from the port side said the ball had torn through one of the passengers, too.

“Dear sweet Jesus!” somebody shouted. “If we take a hit in the boiler, this whole damn boat’ll go up like it was filled with powder.”

That had already occurred to Douglass. He wondered if it had occurred to the Confederate gunners, too. Maybe, to them, it was all good fun, like boys gigging frogs. But the frogs died in earnest—and so would a couple of hundred civilians, if the Rebs chanced to make a lucky, or rather an unlucky, shot … or if, in their exertions to flee the battery, the crew overstrained the boiler and it went up without being hit.

On the heels of that thought came another, even worse. “How many guns await us around the
next
bend of the river?” the Negro orator asked the heavens.

“Shut your mouth, you damn nigger,” snapped a white woman who looked like somebody’s maiden aunt. Douglass fell silent, but that didn’t matter. If one battery of guns was out along the Ohio, scores would be—U.S. guns as well as C.S., he supposed, but the Confederate cannon were the ones that worried him.

Boom! Wham!
A cannonball slammed into the steamboat’s starboard paddlewheel. Wood splinters flew. One of them stabbed a man, who shrieked like a damned soul. The wheel kept turning, though now it put Douglass in mind of a man smiling with a missing tooth.

Under his feet, the
Queen of the Ohio
quivered like a racehorse suddenly given the whip. She fairly leaped forward in the water. Great gouts of smoke and sparks poured from her newly uneven stacks. The riverbank seemed almost a blur, such was the sidewheeler’s speed.

But the boat’s fastest clip was a pathetic creep when measured against the speed of a twelve-pound iron ball. More splashes around the
Queen of the Ohio
said the crews firing at her were not masters of their trade. But more crashes and screams said they
didn’t need to be masters to score hits. “Have we got a doctor on board?” somebody shouted.

Then another shout rose, far more terrible: “Fire!” Not all the smoke shrouding the steamboat was coming from the stacks, not any more. She was built of wood and bore many coats of paint. One of those hits from hot iron might have ignited her. Or a cannonball might have spilled the coals from a stove in the galley or broken a kerosene lamp or … When he thought about it, Douglass realized how many unpleasant possibilities there were.

“Buckets!” somebody shouted. “The pump!” someone else yelled. Douglass hadn’t known the boat carried a pump, but it was irrelevant, anyhow. Peering back, he saw the whole stern of the
Queen of the Ohio
engulfed in flames. A glance told him no one would be able to put out that fire.

A glance must have told the steamboat captain the same thing. The
Queen of the Ohio
turned hard to port, making straight for the U.S. bank of the river. A steward shouted, “Brace yourselves, folks! We’re going to ground, and we’re going to ground hard. Soon as we do, everybody off by the bow. Gentlemen, help the ladies, please.” He might have been talking about dance figures, not a matter of life and death.

The
Queen of the Ohio
ran aground with force surely great enough to tear the bottom out of her—not that that mattered at the moment. Douglass had been grasping a pillar. The impact tore his grip loose. He landed on one ham, hard. Scrambling to his feet, he struggled toward the rail. A drop of about ten feet separated the deck from the muddy riverbank.

“May I assist you, ma’am?” he asked the woman closest to him: the sour spinster who’d cursed him for daring to suggest the Confederates might have more guns along the Ohio than this one battery.

She climbed over the rail, nimble despite her long skirt and petticoats, and jumped down on her own without even bothering to give him a no.
A woman of strong convictions
, he thought. Others were not so fussy about letting him take their pale hands in his dark ones and letting him put his black arms around their waists to help them down to safety. Some of them even thanked him.

After a while, the white man next to him said, “Well, Sambo, I reckon it’s about time we light out for the tall timber ourselves.” Douglass didn’t think the fellow intended to offend; he likely
would have called someone from the Emerald Isle
Mick
or a Jew
Abe
in the same way—classification, not insult.

Whatever the case there, he was right. Despite the best efforts of the men fighting the flames, they were racing forward. The crackling roar dinned in Douglass’ ears; he could feel the heat on his skin and through his clothes. A hot cinder landed on the back of his hand. With an oath, he brushed it away.

He looked around to make sure no women were left on the sidewheeler. He saw none. When he looked back, the man who’d called him Sambo had already gone over the rail. Other men shoved forward, intent on doing the same. Douglass decided he could honorably leave. He swung over the rail, sat on the very edge of the bow, and jumped.

He landed heavily in the mud, going down to one knee and fetching up against someone who’d abandoned the
Queen of the Ohio
a moment before. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, picking up his hat.

“Don’t mention it,” the man said. “God damn those cursed Rebels to hell!” As if to punctuate his words, another cannonball screamed past.

A man landed right behind Douglass, staggered, and trod on his toes. He didn’t bother to excuse himself. Douglass said, “Perhaps we should get clear of this vicinity, to let those escaping the steamboat more readily descend in safety.”

No one argued with him, which was a pleasant novelty. Limping a little, he walked away from the sidewheeler. He didn’t look back. All he had left here were the clothes on his back, and they were muddy and torn. He’d had no more when he fled his master, and then he’d had nothing more anywhere. Now he was comfortably well off, and only a telegram away from being able to draw on his resources.

“Rebs must’ve thought the boat was a troopship,” somebody not far from him said. That made a certain amount of sense; the U.S. and the C.S. both moved soldiers by steamboat.

“Maybe they’re just a filthy pack of stinking bastards,” somebody else said savagely. To Douglass, that made sense, too, a lot of sense: he was always ready to believe the worst of the Confederate States.

“Whatever they are, the whole Ohio’s gonna be shut down as tight as a man’s bowels with an opium plug up his ass,” the first
man said. That was crude, but true without any doubt whatsoever: if one side started shooting at steamboats, the other surely would.

And one other thing was also true without any doubt whatsoever: he was going to be very, very late to Cincinnati.

    The Handbasket rattled toward Helena.
“Get
up, there!” Theodore Roosevelt called to the horses. They snorted resentfully as he flicked the reins and cracked the whip above their backs. Not only was he making them go faster than they usually did on a trip to town, they were pulling a heavier load.

From the back of the wagon, Esau Hunt said, “Easy, boss, easy. Slow down. We’ll get there quick enough, any which way.” The other five farmhands who sprawled in the back with him loudly agreed. Only Philander Snow had chosen to stay back at the ranch, and he’d already seen the elephant. The rest of the hands, like Hunt, like Roosevelt himself, were young men one and all.

“I’m not going to slow down for anything—not for one single thing, do you hear me?” Roosevelt declared. “Our country needs us, and I intend to meet the call, and to meet it as quickly as I possibly can.”

“Can’t meet it if you drive us off the road into a ditch,” said Charlie Dunnigan, another hand.

Roosevelt didn’t answer. He didn’t slow down, either. When he conceived in his own mind that something needed doing, he went and did it, and he didn’t waste time about it, either. He came up on another wagon heading toward Helena—but not fast enough to suit him. He didn’t have much room between the road and the trees alongside it there, but he pulled out and passed, leaving the other driver to eat his dust. The fellow shouted angrily. Roosevelt waved his hat in a derisive salute.

“That’s showing him, boss!” Hunt exclaimed. Roosevelt grinned, though he didn’t turn back to show the hand he was pleased. Straightforward action, that was the ticket. People who accomplished anything in this world grabbed with both hands. If you didn’t, you got left behind with your face dusty.

This time, Roosevelt steered away from the
Gazette
office when he got into Helena, heading toward the territorial capitol, farther south and east. “I only hope they still have slots open for us,” he said, for about the dozenth time since setting out. Then he went on, again for the dozenth time, “By thunder, if they haven’t got any, we’ll make our own, that’s what we’ll do.”

“Doesn’t look packed to the rafters, anyway,” Dunnigan remarked.

Sure enough, Roosevelt had no trouble hitching the buggy close to the capitol. He saw no line snaking out of the small stone building, either. “Is patriotism dead everywhere in the country, save my ranch alone?” he demanded, not of the farmhands but perhaps of God.

He leaped out of the wagon, tied up the horses, and led his men toward the capitol. As they charged up the steps, a man he knew came out: Jeremiah Paxton, a neighbor. “I know what you’re here for, Roosevelt,” he said: “the same thing I was, or I’m a Chinaman. You ain’t gonna have any better luck’n I did, neither.”

“What do you mean?” Roosevelt asked.

All Paxton said after that was “You’ll find out.” He spat into the dirt, then strode over to his horse, untied it from the rail, swung up onto it, and rode back toward his ranch. His stiff back radiated disgust with the world.

“Follow me!” Theodore Roosevelt said. He led his men up the steps to the capitol as if they were charging to the crest of an enemy-held hill. Stopping the first person he saw inside who looked as if he belonged there, he asked, “Where in blue blazes do I find the volunteer office hereabouts?”

“Third door on the left-hand side,” the man answered. “But I have to tell you—”

Roosevelt pushed past him, as he’d pushed past the slow wagon. He opened the third door on the left-hand side, which was indeed emblazoned u.s.
MILITIA
, with an obviously new addition below: &
VOLUNTEERS
.

Inside the little office sat two clerks. The brass nameplate on the closer one’s desk proclaimed him to be Jasper St. John. “Good day to you, Mr. St. John,” Roosevelt boomed. “These gentlemen and I are here to offer our services to the U.S. Volunteers. High time we taught our high-handed neighbors not to get gay with the United States of America.”

Jasper St. John did not look like a clerk. Except for spectacles much like Roosevelt’s, he looked like a barroom brawler. His voice was a bass rumble: “We aren’t accepting applications right now.”

“What?” Roosevelt dug a finger in his ear, as if to assure himself he was hearing correctly. “You’re not taking volunteers? Why the devil aren’t you?”

“We haven’t got any orders to do it,” St. John returned stolidly.

“Good God in the foothills!” Now Roosevelt clapped a dramatic hand to his forehead. “We’re at war with the Confederate States—by what I’ve heard, they’re shooting up everything that moves on the rivers—we’re at war with England and France, and, for good measure, we’re at war with the Dominion of Canada. Have we declared war on ourselves, too? Is that why we don’t want volunteers?”