How Few Remain (25 page)

“What about me, Pa?” Orion jumped up and down. “Pa, what about me?”

“Well, what about you?” Clemens spun his son around and around, too. By the time he put Orion down, the boy was too dizzy to walk, and had had all thoughts of soldiering whirled out of his head. Sam hoped they wouldn’t come back. Having been a small boy himself, he knew what a forlorn hope that was.

When Orion was steady on his pins, Sam took both children
back to Alexandra. As if by magic, she produced two more cream puffs. That partially reconciled Ophelia and Orion to going home.

Alexandra was putting the picnic hamper back in the buggy and Sam folding the blanket so he could lay it on top of the hamper when a great roar, like a rifle shot magnified a hundredfold, smote the air. Even the gulls in the sky went silent for a moment, then screeched their anger at being frightened so.

Ophelia squealed. Orion jumped. “Good heavens!” Alexandra said. “What was that?”

“One of the big guns up at the Presidio,” Sam answered. “They’ve had guns there since this place belonged to Spain—never mind Mexico. I don’t think any of them have ever shot at anything.” Another roar, identical to the first, disturbed the tranquility of Golden Gate Park—and of the rest of San Francisco, and, no doubt, of a good stretch of surrounding landscape as well. Sam thoughtfully peered northward. “Sounds like they’re getting ready to, though, doesn’t it?”

“Golly!” Orion said. “It’d be fun to shoot one of those.” This time, Ophelia agreed with her brother.

“How much fun do you think it would be to have somebody shooting one at you?” Sam asked. His children stared at him. That side of war meant nothing to them. It seldom meant anything to anyone till the first bullet flew past him.

The coast-defense guns kept firing as Sam drove home. “By the sound of them,” Alexandra said, “they think we’re going to be attacked tomorrow.”

“Whatever else may happen in this curious world of ours, my dear, I don’t expect the Confederate Navy to come steaming into San Francisco Bay tomorrow, flags flying and guns blazing.” Sam winked at his wife. “Nor the day after, either.”

“Well, no,” Alexandra said. “Hardly.” Another gun boomed. “I suppose they have to practice, the same as the soldiers you were watching.”

“If they’re no better at their jobs than those poor lugs, the Indians could paddle a fleet of birchbark canoes into the Bay and devastate the city.” Sam held up a forefinger. “I exaggerate: a
flotilla
of canoes.” That made Alexandra laugh, which was what he’d had in mind.

When they got back to the house on Turk Street, Ophelia and Orion ran themselves and the pets ragged. Watching them, listening to them, Sam wondered where they came by the energy;
even though they’d torn up Golden Gate Park all afternoon, they were still going strong. But, by the time he and Alexandra went through the house lighting the gas lamps, the children were fading. They went to bed with much less fuss than they usually put up, and fell asleep almost at once. Ophelia snored, but then Ophelia always snored.

Once things had been quiet for a while, Alexandra said, “Shall we go to bed, too?” By her tone of voice, she didn’t mean,
Shall we go to sleep?

“Yes, let’s.” Sam sounded casual, or thought he sounded casual, but the alacrity with which he leaped up and turned off the lamps they’d lighted not long before surely gave him away.

He turned off the bedroom lamp, too, before he and his wife undressed and lay down together. A thin stripe of moonlight came in through the window, just enough to make Alexandra’s body, warm and soft in his arms, a more perfect mystery than complete darkness would have done.

She sighed and murmured when he kissed her, when he fondled her breasts and brought his mouth down to them, when his hand found the dampness at the joining of her thighs. As always, her excitement excited and embarrassed him at the same time. Doctors swore on a stack of Bibles that most women knew little or nothing of sexual pleasure, and did not care to make its acquaintance. But then, considering the track record doctors had elsewhere, how much did that prove?

With Alexandra, it proved very little. “Come on, Sam,” she whispered after a while, and took him in hand to leave no doubt as to her meaning. Her legs drifted farther apart. He poised himself between them and guided himself into her. Her breath sighed out. When their lips met, she kissed him as she did at no other time. She worked with him while their pleasure built, and moaned and gasped and called his name when she reached the peak. Her nails were claws in his back, urging him on till he exploded a moment later.

When he would have flopped limply down onto her as if she were a feather bed, she poked him in the ribs. “Terrible woman,” he said, and rolled off. It was mostly but not entirely a joke; the delight he took with her sometimes seemed scandalous, married though they were. If she felt any similar compunctions, she’d never once shown it.

They used the chamber pot under the bed and got into their
nightclothes in the dark. “Good night, dear,” Alexandra said, her voice blurry.

“Good night,” Sam answered, and kissed her. “Work tomorrow.” In its own way, that was a curse as vile as any the foul-mouthed sergeant had used in Golden Gate Park.

    Reveille blared from the bugler’s horn. Theodore Roosevelt bounded out of his cot and groped for the spectacles on the stool next to it. “Half past five!” he exclaimed as he threw on his uniform: an obliging tailor in Helena had fitted him out. “What a wonderful time to be alive!”

He rushed from his tent into the cool sunshine of early morning. The ranch house stood, comfortable and reassuring, less than a hundred feet away. Roosevelt was glad to have an excuse to avoid comfort. Were comfort all he wanted, he could have stayed in New York State. When the men of Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment lived under canvas, their equally unauthorized colonel would not sleep in an ordinary bed with a roof over his head.

The men of the Unauthorized Regiment lived under a great variety of canvas. Some slept in tents that dated back to the War of Secession. Some, prospectors who’d heard of the Regiment when they came into Helena or another nearby town, had brought the tents in which they’d sheltered out in the wilderness. There were even a few who shared buffalo-hide teepees that might easily have belonged to the Sioux.

They came tumbling out now, routed by the strident notes of the morning call. The only thing uniform about their shirts and trousers and hats was a lack of uniformity. Some of them had one article or another of military clothing. Some were veterans, while others had acquired the gear from soldiers either leaving the service or selling it on the sly. Most, though, wore civilian clothes of varying degrees of quality and decrepitude. The variety in hats was particularly astonishing.

Whatever else the men had on, though, each of them wore a red bandanna tied around his left upper arm. That was the mark of the Unauthorized Regiment, and the men had already made it a mark to respect in every saloon within a day’s ride of Roosevelt’s ranch. Several loudmouths were nursing injuries of various sorts for having failed to respect it. No one was dead because of that, and, by now, odds were no one would be: roughnecks had learned
the men of the Regiment looked after one another like brothers, and that a challenge to one was a challenge to all.

“Fall in by troops for roll call!” Roosevelt shouted. The men were already doing precisely that. They’d picked up the routine of military life in a hurry. Some, of course, had known it before, either half a lifetime earlier in the War of Secession or in the more recent campaigns against the Plains Indians. Their example rubbed off on the new volunteers—and on Roosevelt, who had everything he knew about running a regiment from tactical manuals by Hardee (even if he was a Rebel) and Upton. “Fall in for roll call!” he yelled again.

“Listen to the old man,” one of the Unauthorized troopers said to a friend, who laughed and nodded. Roosevelt grinned from ear to ear. Both men were close to twice his age. That they granted him an informal title of respect usually given to an officer who
was
well up in years showed he’d won their respect as a commander: so he assured himself, anyhow.

Troop officers and noncoms—elected by their comrades, as had been done in volunteer regiments during the War of Secession—went through the men. They brought Roosevelt the returns: half a dozen sick, three absent without leave. “They’re probably hung over in Helena, sir,” one of the captains said.

“So they are,” Roosevelt said grimly. “They’ll be even sorrier than that when they turn up wagging their tails behind them, too.” The manuals stressed an officer’s need to be strict in the way he dealt with his men. The manuals, of course, were written for regulars; volunteers needed a lighter touch. Roosevelt’s own inclination was to keep a light rein on his troopers as long as they went in the direction in which he wanted to guide them, but to land on them hard when they strayed from the straight and narrow.

After roll call, the bracing smell of brewing coffee filled the air as the men lined up for mess call. Along with the coffee, the cooks served up beans and salt pork, hardtack, bread, and rolls, and oatmeal. The road between Helena and Roosevelt’s ranch was getting deep new ruts in it from supply wagons rattling back and forth. His bank account back in New York was getting deep new ruts in it, too. He noted that without worrying about it unduly; the country came first.

From breakfast, the troopers went to tend their horses. Along with beans and other provender for men, those wagons brought in hay by the ton, and oats to go with it. No one within a couple of
miles downwind of the ranch could have had the slightest doubt that a great many horses were dwelling there. Flies got bad when the weather warmed up, but they hadn’t started buzzing yet.

Philander Snow came up to Roosevelt; to Roosevelt’s disappointment, he still showed no interest in joining the Regiment. Working in the fields and with the livestock—what the troopers hadn’t eaten of it—contented him. Pausing now to spit, he observed, “One thing’s plain as day, boss—you ain’t gonna need to go out and buy manure for about the next hundred years.”

“That’s a fact, Phil,” Roosevelt allowed. “A regiment’s worth of horses leaves a lot on the ground, don’t they?” A regiment’s worth of cavalrymen left a lot on the ground, too. They’d already had to dig a couple of new sets of slit trenches. Roosevelt didn’t want those too close to the creek or the well. That way lay sickness; the Roman legionaries had known as much. If typhoid—or, worse, cholera—broke out, he’d be down to half a regiment in nothing flat.

The first wagon of the day came rattling up from Helena a little past eight in the morning. Roosevelt’s quartermaster sergeant, a skinny little fellow name Shadrach Perkins who was a storekeeper down in Wickes, took charge of the sacks of beans and crates of hardtack it contained. The teamster who’d driven the wagon to the ranch handed Roosevelt a copy of the
Helena Gazette
. “Hot off the press, Colonel,” he said.

“Good,” Roosevelt answered, and tossed him a ten-cent tip. Since the supply wagons had started coming up from Helena every day, he was far less cut off from the world than he had been before. Now, instead of waiting a week or two between looks at a newspaper, he got word of what was going on as fast as the telegraph brought it into town and the typesetters turned it into words on paper.

What Roosevelt read now made him paw the ground like one stallion challenging another over a mare. He felt that full of rage, too. “Richardson!” he roared. “Get your damn bugle, Richardson!” He fumed until the trumpeter came dashing up, horn in hand, then snapped, “Blow Assembly.”

“All right, Colonel,” Richardson answered. “What’s up and gone south on us now?” Roosevelt glared at him till he raised the bugle to his lips and blasted out the call.

Men came running; a summons during morning fatigues was out of the ordinary and therefore a good bet to be interesting and
maybe even important. The troopers buzzed with talk until Roosevelt strode out before them,
Helena Gazette
clenched in his left fist. “Do you men know—do you men have any idea—what the Confederate States, the English, and the French have had the infernal impudence to do?” he demanded.

“Reckon you’re gonna tell us, ain’t you, Colonel?” a trooper said.

Roosevelt ignored the distraction, which, for a man of his temperament, wasn’t easy. But fury still consumed him. “They have had the gall, the nerve, to declare a blockade against the coasts and harbors of the United States of America—against
our
coasts and harbors, gentlemen, saying we have not got the right to conduct our own commerce.” He squeezed the G
azette
in his fist and waved it about, as if it were the criminal rather than the messenger. “Shall this great nation let such an insult stand?”

“No!” shouted the cavalry troopers, who were about as far from any coast as men in the United States could be.

“You’re right, boys!” Roosevelt agreed. “We won’t let it stand. By jingo, we
can’t
let it stand. These vile foreign dogs will see they’re barking at the wrong hound if they think they can impose themselves on the United States that way. We’ll lick ’em back to their kennels with their tails between their legs.”

By the time he was done whipping up the men, they were ready to ride for the Canadian border and shoot everybody they could catch who followed Queen Victoria instead of President Blaine. By the time he was done whipping himself up, he was ready to lead them over the border. He needed a distinct effort of will to remember his Regiment was still Unauthorized. If they went over the border, it wouldn’t be war; it would be a filibustering expedition, and the enemy would be within his rights to treat them as bandits. He sighed. He hated having to remember such fine distinctions.

“Let’s ride,” he shouted. “To horse and let’s ride! We cannot fight the backstabbing Englishman and complacent Canuck, not yet, not until we are formally invested with the mantle of the government of the United States. But we can ready ourselves so that, when the investiture comes—as it certainly shall—we’ll be ready to do our all for the land we hold dear.”