How Few Remain (3 page)

He fired again at the Kiowas, and shouted in exultation as one of them slid from his horse’s back and thudded to the ground, where, after rolling a couple of times, he lay still. “Good shot,” his brother said. “Hell of a good shot.”

“We’ve got ’em now,” Custer said. The first Kiowas had to be over the line. He didn’t care. “We won’t let ’em get away. Every last redskin in that band is ours.” How his men cheered!

And then all of Custer’s ferocious joy turned to ashes. Tom pointed off to the east, from which direction a squadron of cavalry was approaching at a fast trot. All the Kiowas were over the line by then. They reined in, whooping in their incomprehensible language. They knew they were safe.

Custer knew it, too. Chasing the Kiowas into Indian Territory, punishing them, and then riding back into Kansas with no one but the Indians the wiser, was one thing. Doing it under the watchful eyes of that other cavalry squadron was something else again. Hating those horsemen, hating himself, Custer held his hand high to halt his men. They stopped on the Kansas side of the line.

The approaching cavalrymen wore hats and blouses of a cut not much different from those of Custer’s troopers. Theirs, though, were gray, not the various shades of blue the U.S. cavalry used. And a couple of their officers, Custer saw, were in the new dirt-brown uniforms the Confederate States had adopted from the British. The limeys called that color khaki; to the Rebs, it was butternut.

One of those Confederate officers rode toward Custer, waving as he moved forward. Custer waved back: come ahead. The Rebel captain proved to be a fresh-faced fellow in his twenties; he would have been wearing short pants during the War of Secession. Seeing him made Custer feel every one of his forty-one years.

“Good mornin’ to you, Colonel,” the captain drawled, nodding
in a way that looked friendly enough. “You weren’t planning on riding over the international border by any chance, were you?”

“If I was, you’ll never prove it, Captain—” Custer tried for cool detachment. What came out was a frustrated snarl.

By the way the Confederate cavalryman smiled, he heard that frustration—heard it and relished it. He bowed in the saddle. The Rebs were always polite as cats … and always ready to claw, too. “I’m Jethro Weathers, Colonel,” he said. “And you’re right—I’ll never prove it. But you and the United States would have been embarrassed if I’d come along half an hour later and found your men inside the territory of the Confederate States.”

He sounded disappointed he and his troopers hadn’t caught Custer
in flagrante delicto
. Custer’s frustration boiled into fury: “If your government would keep those murdering redskinned savages on your side of the border, we wouldn’t want to go over yonder”—he waved south, into Indian Territory—”and give ’em what they deserve.”

“Why, Colonel,” Captain Weathers said, amusement in his voice, “I have no proof at all those Kiowas ever entered the territory of the United States. As far as I can see, you were leading an unprovoked punitive expedition into a foreign country. Richmond would see things the same way, I’m sure. So would London. So would Paris.”

Tom Custer spoke up: “There’s a dead Kiowa, maybe half a mile north of here.”

That didn’t faze Weathers a bit: “For all I know, you’ve already been into the Confederate States, murdered the poor fellow, and then hauled him back into the USA to justify raiding Confederate soil.”

A flush spread up Custer’s face; his ears went hot at the sheer effrontery of that. “You—dashed Rebs will pay one day for giving the redskins guns and letting them come up and raid white men’s farms whenever it strikes their fancy.”

“This is our territory, Colonel,” Captain Weathers said, amused no more. “We shall defend it against the incursion of a foreign power—by which I mean the United States. And you have no call—none, sir, none whatever—to get up on your high horse and tell me what my country ought and ought not to be doing, especially since the United States harbor swarms of Comanches in New Mexico and turn them loose against west Texas whenever it strikes your fancy.”

“We didn’t start that until those outrages in Kansas grew too oppressive to ignore,” Custer answered. “Why, on this very raid—this raid you have the gall to deny—the savages made two white women minister to their animal lusts, then cut their throats and worked other dreadful indignities upon their bare and abused bodies.”

“You think the Comanches don’t do that in Texas?” Captain Weathers returned. “And the way I heard it, Colonel, they started doing it there first.”

Custer scowled. “We killed off the buffalo to deny the Kiowas a livelihood, and you gave them cattle to take up the slack.”

“The Comanches are herding cattle these days, too.” Weathers made as if to go back to his troopers, who waited inside Confederate territory. “I see no point to continuing this discussion. Good day, sir.”

“Wait,” Custer said, and the Confederate captain, polite still, waited. Breathing heavily, Custer went on, “When our two nations separated, I had a great deal of sympathy and friendship for many of the men who found high rank in the Army of the Confederate States. I hoped and believed that, even though we were two, we could share this continent in peace.”

“And so we have,” Jethro Weathers said. “There is no war between my country and yours, Colonel.”

“Not now,” Custer agreed. “Not yet. But you will force one upon us if you continue with this arrogant policy of yours here in the West. The irritations will grow too great, and then—”

“Don’t speak to me of arrogance,” Weathers broke in. “Don’t speak to me of irritation, not when you Yankees have finally gone and put another one of those God-damned Black Republicans in the White House.”

“Blaine’s only been in office a month, but he’s already shown he’s not nearly so bad as Lincoln was,” Custer answered, “and he’s not your business anyhow, any more than Longstreet’s ours.”

“Blaine talks big,” the Confederate captain answered. “People who talk big get to thinking they can act big. You talked about war, Colonel. If your James G. Blaine thinks you Yankees can lick us now when you couldn’t do it twenty years ago, he’d better think twice. And if you think you can ride over the line into Indian Territory whenever it strikes your fancy, you’d better think twice, too, Colonel.”

When Weathers moved to ride back to his squadron this time,
Custer said not a word. He stared after the Indians whom Weathers’ timely arrival had saved. His right hand folded into a fist inside its leather gauntlet. He pounded it down on his thigh, hard, once, twice, three times. His lips shaped a silent word. It might have been
dash
. It might not.

    As the train rattled west through the darkness over the Colorado prairie, the porter came down the aisle of the Pullman car. “Make you bed up, sir?” he asked in English with some foreign accent: Russian, maybe, or Yiddish.

Abraham Lincoln looked up from the speech he’d been writing. Slowly, deliberately, he capped his pen and put it in his pocket. “Yes, thank you,” he said. He rose slowly and deliberately, too, but his lumbago gave a twinge even so. As best he could, he ignored the pain. It came with being an old man.

Moving with swift efficiency, the porter let down the hinged seat back, laid a mattress on the bed thus created, and made it up in the blink of an eye. “Here you are, sir,” he said, drawing the curtain around the berth to give Lincoln the chance to change into his nightshirt in something close to privacy.

“I thank you,” Lincoln said, and tipped him a dime. The porter pocketed it with a polite word of thanks and went on to prepare the next berth. Looking down at the bed, Lincoln let out a rueful chuckle. The Pullman attendant had been too efficient. Lincoln bent down and undid the sheet and blanket at the foot of the mattress. Pullman berths weren’t made for men of his inches. He put on his nightclothes, got into bed, and turned off the gas lamp by which he had been writing.

The rattling, jouncing ride and the thin, lumpy mattress bothered him only a little. He was used to them, and he remembered worse. When he’d gone from Illinois to Washington after being elected president, Pullmans hadn’t been invented. He’d traveled the whole way sitting upright in a hard seat. And when, four years later, the voters had turned him out of office for failing to hold the Union together, he’d gone back to Illinois the same way.

Ridden out of town on the rails
, he thought, and laughed a little. He twisted, trying to find a position somewhere close to comfortable. If a spring didn’t dig into the small of his back, another one poked him in the shoulder. That was how life worked: if you gained somewhere, you lost somewhere else.

He twisted again. There—that was better. He’d had a lot of
experience on the railroads, these sixteen years since failing of reelection. “Once you get the taste for politics,” he murmured in the darkness, “everything else is tame.”

He’d thought he would quietly return to the law career he’d left to go to the White House. And so he had, for a little while. But the appetite for struggle at the highest level he’d got in Washington had stayed with him. Afterwards, legal briefs and pleadings weren’t enough to satisfy.

He yawned, then grimaced. The way the Democrats had fawned on the Southern Confederacy grated on him, too. And so he’d started speechifying, all across the country, doing what he could to make people see that, even if the war was lost, the struggle continued. “I always was good on the stump,” he muttered. “I even did some good, I daresay.”

Some good. The United States had eventually emancipated the thousands of slaves still living within their borders. The Confederate States held their millions in bondage to this day. And a lot of Republicans, nowadays, sounded more and more like Democrats in their efforts to put the party’s sorry past behind them and get themselves elected. A lot of Republicans, these days, didn’t want the albatross of Lincoln around their necks.

He yawned again, twisted one more time, and fell asleep, only to be rudely awakened half an hour later when the train hissed and screeched to a stop at some tiny prairie town. He was used to that, too, even if he couldn’t do anything about it. Before long, he was asleep once more.

He woke again, some time in the middle of the night. This time, he swung down out of his berth. Once a man got past his Biblical threescore-and-ten, his flesh reminded him of its imperfections more often than it had in his younger days.

Sliding the curtain aside, he walked down the aisle of the sleeper car, past the snores and grunts coming from behind other curtains, to the washroom at the far end of the car. He used the necessary, then pumped the handle of the tin sink to get himself a glass of water. He drank it down, wiped his chin on the sleeve of his nightshirt, and set the glass by the sink for the next man who would want it.

Up the aisle he came. Someone was getting down from an upper berth, and almost stepped on his toes. “Careful, friend,” Lincoln said quietly. The man’s face went through two separate
stages of surprise: first that he hadn’t seen anyone nearby, and then at whose feet he’d almost abused.

“Damned old Black Republican fool,” he said, also in a near-whisper: he was polite to his fellow passengers, if not to the former president. Without giving Lincoln a chance to reply, he stalked down the aisle.

Lincoln shrugged and finished the short journey back to his own berth. That sort of thing happened to him at least once on every train he took. Had he let it bother him, he would have had to give up politics and become as much a hermit as Robinson Crusoe.

He got back into bed. The upper berth above his was empty. He sighed as he struggled for comfort again. Mary had been difficult all the years of their marriage, and especially in the years since he’d left the White House, but he missed her all the same. He’d got over the typhoid they’d caught in St. Louis four or five years before. She hadn’t.

The next thing he knew, daylight was stealing through the curtains. His back ached a little, but he’d had a pretty good night—better than most he spent rolling from one town to the next, that was certain.

He got dressed, used the necessary again, and was back in his berth when the day porter came by. “And the top o’ the mornin’ to you, sir,” he said. Lincoln had no trouble placing
his
accent. “Will you be wanting a proper seat the now, ‘stead o’ your bedding and all?”

“That I will.” A natural mimic, Lincoln needed an effort of will not to copy the porter’s brogue. After he tipped the fellow, he asked, “How much longer until we get into Denver?”

“Nobbut another two, three hours,” the porter answered. Lincoln sighed; he was supposed to have arrived at sunrise, not mid-morning. Well, no doubt the people waiting for him knew of the distant relationship between scheduled and actual arrival times.

“Time enough for breakfast, then,” he said.

“Indeed and there is, sir, and to spare,” the porter agreed.

Lincoln went back to the dining car. He did appreciate the bellows arrangements the railroads were using between carriages these days. Going from car to car on a jolting train had been a dangerous business even a handful of years before. More than a few people had slipped and fallen to their death, and a cinder in the eye or a face full of soot was only to be expected.

After ham and eggs and rolls and coffee, the world looked a more cheerful place. He was leaving behind the prairie now, going up toward the mountains. The locomotive labored over the upgrades and then, as if relieved, sped down the other side of each rise. Watching trees and boulders flying past was exhilarating, even if Lincoln knew how many accidents happened on such downgrades.

At last, nearer three hours late than two, the train pulled into Denver. The depot was small and dilapidated. A broad stretch of empty ground on the other side of the tracks would, Lincoln had heard, be a fancy new station one day. At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, it was just empty ground. Wildflowers and weeds splashed it with color.

“Denver!” the conductor shouted, as he had for every hamlet along the way to the biggest city in the heart of the West. “All out for Denver!”