How Few Remain (41 page)

“It is good,” Geronimo said through Chappo. “We, most of us, will ride north now. When you are at the canyon, you will see what sort of place it is. You will see where to place your men where they can kill the bluecoats without being seen. You will see where to place your big rifles on wagons so the bluecoats do not know they are there till too late.”

Even though Stuart could not understand a word of the Apache lingo, he paid close attention to Geronimo’s tone. The Indian sounded as if he was trying to reassure himself that Stuart, though only an ignorant white man, would indeed be able to see these things and do what was required of him. The Confederate general, civilizedly certain of his own expertise, smiled at the savage’s conceit.

“I will see these things,” he answered gently, trying to ease Geronimo’s mind. “You will bring me the U.S. soldiers, and I will kill them.”

That seemed to satisfy the Apache. Geronimo and the war leaders exchanged a few words, which Chappo did not translate. Stuart resolved to scare up some interpreters who would be on his side, not the Indians’. Half-breeds, Mexicans … one way or
another, he’d manage. If his allies let something slip, he wanted a chance to know about it.

Geronimo was as good as his word. Most of the Apaches rode out inside the hour. About thirty stayed behind under Naiche. Chappo stayed, too, to translate, though Naiche and some of the others spoke Spanish. Batsinas also stayed, for no better reason Stuart could find than that he was fascinated by everything the white men did, and wanted to learn from them.

A lot of the Indians, though, found the Confederates more amusing than instructive. While the army broke camp, Horatio Sellers came up to Stuart shaking his head. “One of those red devils used a farmer to ask me what I’d do if I heard a gunshot,” he said indignantly. “I told him I’d go over and see what in blazes had happened, of course. He thought that was the funniest thing he’d heard in all his born days. So I asked him what he’d do, if he was so blasted smart. He said he’d scout around and find out what was going on without letting anybody ever know he was there. Looked at me like I was a chuckleheaded nigger; and him with a line of yellow paint across his face to show he was on the warpath, the damn savage.” Sellers sounded like a man on the warpath himself.

“Don’t worry about it, Major,” Stuart said soothingly, using much the same tone of voice he had with Geronimo. “We’ll position ourselves in this canyon and lick the stuffing out of the damnyankees. That will make the redskins respect us, and I don’t think anything else will.”

Riding to battle, Stuart felt the same exhilaration he’d known during the War of Secession. Somewhere back in Kentucky, his young son and namesake was going up against the Yankees, too. He hoped Jeb, Jr., would be all right. The boy—no, not a boy, not if he was fighting—had all of his own impetuous spirit, and hardly any years to temper it.

Stuart would have navigated by map and compass. The Apaches knew the country as well as—better than—he knew northern Virginia. He got the feeling they could have ridden along with their eyes closed and found their way across three hundred or three thousand miles of desert by the way the dust smelled and how the echoes from their horses’ hoofbeats came back to their ears. They’d been here a long time; the roadrunners probably talked with them.

As far as he was concerned, they and the damnyankees were
welcome to the country, if you took it strictly as country. Rocks and sand and dust and cactus and brush and lizards and rattlesnakes and endless sun pounding down out of the sky so that, nearly as reliable as clockwork, every hour a Confederate would slide from the saddle and plop to the ground. Most of them recovered after they’d been splashed with precious water and ridden in the wagons for a while, but a couple had died, running unquenchable fevers that cooked them from the inside out.

It was, in fact, country for camels. The Fifth Confederate Cavalry’s humped livestock flourished here. The camels ate cactus, thorns and all, with every sign of relish. They didn’t need much water, and the succulent pulp gave them a lot of what they did need. They were gloriously bad-tempered, reveling in the heat where the horses labored under it.

The Apaches found them endlessly fascinating. The Indians admired the animals’ ability to handle the rugged terrain, but thought them the ugliest things they’d ever seen. Chappo rode up alongside Stuart after traveling with the Fifth Camelry for a while and said, quite seriously, “The god who made those beasts was trying to shape horses, but did not know how.”

Stuart started to laugh, then checked himself. He didn’t want to offend Geronimo’s son. And it was a better explanation of how camels had got to be the way they were than anything else he’d heard.

They crossed the Santa Cruz River, such as it was, not long before nightfall, and camped close by. The next morning, Naiche and the rest of the Apaches led the Confederates into the desert east of the little town that had grown up around the stagecoach station at Sahuarita, about twenty miles south of Tucson.

About nine o’clock the next morning, Naiche trotted his horse back to Stuart with a broad smile on his wide, Roman-nosed face.
“Aquí está,”
he said, and then, to his own obvious delight, came up with a word of English: “Here.”

Stuart rode ahead with him. The farther ahead he went, the better the place looked. It wasn’t one of the narrow valleys down which no pursuers in their right minds would follow fleeing redskins for fear of being bushwhacked. But it wasn’t so wide as to make an ambush impossible, either. As Geronimo had said he would, he spotted just the place to site his horse artillery, too: a low rise off to one side with a good view of the track down which
the enemy would likely come, but not a feature of the landscape that would draw the Yankees’ notice too soon.

“Water?” he asked, and made his canteen slosh.

“Ah.
Agua. Sí,”
Naiche said. And
agua
there was: two springs, as Geronimo had promised. Stuart’s force would have no trouble waiting a couple of days, until the Apaches who had gone on to raid Tucson could bring the damnyankees back here in hot pursuit.
“¿ Está bien?”
Naiche asked. He grinned, finding another English word: “Good?”

“Yes.
Sí.”
Stuart didn’t have a dozen words of Spanish himself, but that was one of them. “Good. Very good.”

    “There it is!” Theodore Roosevelt swept out his right hand in the sort of dramatic gesture that came so naturally to him. “There it is, straight ahead: the Promised Land!”

Probably never before had anyone called Fort Benton the Promised Land. But it was as dear to Roosevelt as the land of Israel could ever have been to the Hebrews. And Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment had wandered in the bureaucratic wilderness: not for the forty years Moses’ followers had endured, true, but everything moved faster in the bustling, mechanized, modern world of the nineteenth century. The weeks that had passed before the volunteers were accepted were far too long.

Behind Roosevelt, the men of the Unauthorized Regiment raised a cheer. Many of them, like their colonel, were delighted at finally becoming U.S. Volunteers. And others (and some of the same men, too, perhaps) were also delighted at the prospect of mustering close by a town, with all the pleasures attendant thereto. Out on Roosevelt’s ranch, they’d been living a life not far removed from the monastic.

“The Promised Land!” Roosevelt shouted once more, and his troopers cheered louder than ever. He nodded in enormous satisfaction and spoke again, this time more quietly: “If you want something done, by jingo, you have to pitch right in and do it yourself.”

Soldiers up on the mud-brick wall of Fort Benton were staring at the oncoming cavalry regiment. Roosevelt could see their arms outstretched as they pointed to the cloud of dust in which the horsemen traveled. He was still too far away to make out the amazement on their faces or to hear their exclamations, but his active imagination had no trouble supplying the lack.

Not far from the fort was a stretch of level ground where the Seventh Infantry was in the habit of practicing its maneuvers. Roosevelt led the Unauthorized Regiment toward it. “Assemble by troops!” he shouted, and the trumpeters amplified the command.

He’d made sure the troopers practiced that evolution every day of the journey along the Missouri from the ranch outside of Helena to Fort Benton. They performed it flawlessly now. He grinned from ear to ear. Maybe the only uniform they had at the moment was a red bandanna on the sleeve, but he’d turned them into soldiers, not an armed mob.

“If at the age of twenty-two I can bring order to a cavalry regiment,” he murmured, suddenly thoughtful, “what will I be able to do when I have Lieutenant Colonel Welton’s years behind me?”

But those years, as yet, lay ahead of him. He rode toward Fort Benton, to bring the commander of the Regular Army garrison out to inspect the Unauthorized Regiment.

Henry Welton did him the courtesy of meeting him halfway. Now Roosevelt was wearing his colonel’s uniform. Nevertheless, he saluted Welton first—and, as he did so, noticed the Regular officer had eagles on his shoulder straps, too, not the silver oak leaves he’d worn when they met before. “Congratulations, Colonel Welton!” Roosevelt exclaimed.

“It’s your fault, Colonel Roosevelt,” Welton answered with a smile, returning the salute. “The War Department had to accept you as a colonel in the U.S. Volunteers, so they gave me the same brevet rank, and made me five minutes senior to you while they were about it.”

“As I told you when we first met, sir, that is as it should be,” Roosevelt said.

“I’d be lying if I told you I thought you were wrong,” Welton said. Roosevelt nodded; he had nothing but approval for a man who knew his own worth. Welton went on, “Now, by thunder, let’s have a look at the men who stirred up all this fuss.”

“With great pleasure, sir.” Side by side, the two colonels rode out toward the regiment Roosevelt had raised. They were drawing near when Roosevelt, unwontedly hesitant, said, “Even after our formal incorporation into the U.S. Army, sir, might we continue to style ourselves the Unauthorized Regiment? I believe it would have a salutary effect on the men’s morale.”

“I don’t see why not,” Welton said. “If you look at things from England’s point of view, we’re an unauthorized country, wouldn’t
you say? Formally, what we have here is the First Montana Volunteer Cavalry. I can’t do anything about that. Informally—well, since it is informal, no one will fuss, at what you call yourselves. Plenty of regiments—even companies—in the War of Secession had nicknames by which they were better known than by their official titles.”

Roosevelt started to say something more, but checked himself, for Welton and he had come up to the troops, who, as one man, saluted them. Henry Welton rode gravely from troop to troop. He was not a cavalry officer, but his examination struck Roosevelt as being as thorough as the grilling to which he himself had been subjected. Welton had been assessing soldiers for as long as Roosevelt had been alive, and knew what he was doing.

He puzzled the commander of the Unauthorized Regiment for a moment when, instead of keeping on the open path between troops, he rode through one, pausing every now and then to examine one man’s Winchester, another’s saddle, the cartridge belt of a third. And then enlightenment struck Roosevelt almost as abruptly as it had struck Paul on the road to Damascus. “Colonel Welton, had you asked, I would have told you that I did not place the best men on the outer edges of the troops, as a dishonest grocer will place a few pieces of good fruit on top of a great many bad ones.”

“Had I asked, Colonel Roosevelt, I’m sure you would have told me that, whether it was so or not.” Welton softened the words with a disarming grin. “I’d sooner see for myself. If you possibly can, you should always see for yourself. If you don’t make a habit of that, you
will
be disappointed, generally when you can least afford it.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll remember that.” Doing as much as he could by and for himself was always one of Roosevelt’s guiding principles. Having the veteran espouse it only strengthened it in his mind.

Not satisfied with riding through one troop, Henry Welton rode through another. That done, he gave his verdict: “These men are not up to the standards of the Regular Army, Colonel, but they are some of the finest volunteer troops I have ever set eyes on, especially for volunteers who have yet to see the elephant. If and when they do, I believe they’ll manage as well as anyone could hope.”

“Thank you again, sir,” Roosevelt said. “You make me feel my efforts on our beloved country’s behalf have proved worthwhile.”

“And so they have.” Welton rode out before the assembled troopers. “Men of Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment,” he began, and then had to stop while the cavalrymen yelled themselves hoarse and several of the officers made their mounts caracole. “Men of the Unauthorized Regiment, will you take the oath that makes you into U.S. Volunteers?”

“Yes!” the men cried: one great roar of sound. Roosevelt shouted as loud as he could, but even in his own ears his voice was small and lost amid the others.

Colonel Welton administered the oath to them, one ringing phrase at a time. Behind his spectacles, Roosevelt felt his eyes fill with tears as he spoke the words that took him into the service of the United States. Reaching this point had proved a greater struggle than it ever should have, but, unlike Moses, he, having overcome every obstacle, was allowed to enter the land of milk and honey—or, the U.S. Army being what it was, at least the land of hardtack, salt pork, and beans.

The oath completed, he gave Henry Welton another crisp salute. “What are your orders, sir?”

“For now, Colonel, my orders are going to be very simple, very unexciting, and, I fear, very unwelcome,” Welton answered. “Your men are to bivouac by troops here on this plain until such time as my regimental clerks have completed the boring but necessary business of taking down their names and other particulars. This will, among other things, put them on the government’s payroll and get them off of yours, and will assure pension benefits to their next of kin in the event of their becoming casualties of war.”