How Few Remain (49 page)

By the time Sam finished butchering the story, he felt better. He took it over to Leary. “See if I’ve done anything to it that you can’t stand. If I have, tell me about it. If I haven’t, clean it up and take it to the typesetters.”

“All right, boss,” Leary said. Clemens’ tone warned him he would not be wise to defend his original version too strenuously. He looked down at the paper, then up at his editor. His unlined face turned red. “Did I write that?”

“The apostrophe, you mean? It’s not in
my
handwriting.” Sam strode off.

He spent the rest of the morning arguing with people who didn’t want their stories shortened; with people who hadn’t finished stories that would eventually need shortening; with typesetters who, by all appearances, couldn’t spell
cat
if he spotted them the
c
and the
a;
and with printers who hadn’t tightened the nine wood blocks of an engraving of the ruins of Louisville enough to keep the spaces between them from showing on the page as thin white lines.

“No, of course it wasn’t you fellows,” he said when the printers tried to deny responsibility. “A British spy sneaked in and did it while you weren’t looking. If he’s hiding under one of your presses and jumps out and does it again, though, I’m going to be very unhappy—and so will you.”

Quarreling till noon helped him work up an appetite—or maybe his stomach was growling from nerves because he still didn’t know which way President Blaine would jump. However that was, he’d grown ravenous by the time twelve o’clock rolled around. He collared Clay Herndon and said, “Let’s go over to the Palace for lunch.”

“Bully!” Herndon lifted a gingery eyebrow. “Are you counterfeiting double eagles down in your cellar, or is Mayor Sutro paying you not to run that picture of him and Limber Hannah?”

Clemens’ ears burned. He rallied quickly, saying, “If I had that picture, I’d run it on the front page, and I’d make damned sure the printers screwed the engraving blocks together good and tight. In a manner of speaking. Come on. If we’re going to live, let’s live a little.”

“Sold!” Herndon sprang from his seat.

Being on Market Street, the Palace Hotel was only a few minutes’ walk from the
Morning Call
offices. Going into the restaurant, though, was entering another world. Sam felt released from prison: no more dingy cubbyholes crammed with wisecracking newspapermen and smelling of printer’s ink. The restaurant was bright and airy, full of starched white linen and gleaming cutlery, and as full of the odors of good food and even better tobacco. In such surroundings, Sam was almost ashamed to light up one of the cheap cheroots he enjoyed more than any other cigars—almost, but not quite.

He ordered toasted angels—oysters wrapped in bacon, flavored with red peppers and lime juice, and grilled on skewers—and deviled pork chops. Herndon chose oysters, too, in an omelet with flour and heavy cream. The waiter started to suggest that might make a better breakfast than a luncheon. Herndon fixed him with a steely glare. “If I wanted advice, pal, I’d have ordered some,” he said. The waiter bowed and retreated. The reporter got his omelet.

“That’s telling him,” Clemens said, lifting a sparkling tumbler of whiskey in salute. “Put a fancy suit on some people and they
think they own the world—and they make you believe it, too.” He sipped from his drink, looked thoughtful, and went on, “That’s probably why generals look like gold-plated peacocks.”

“You’re likely right,” Herndon answered. Struck by the aptness of his own thought, Sam looked around the restaurant for officers. There wouldn’t be any generals here, not with Colonel Sherman commanding the garrison, but the principle applied, in diminishing degree, to other ranks as well. He spotted a major, a couple of captains, and a lieutenant commander from the small Pacific Squadron of the U.S. Navy: all in all, enough in the way of epaulets and gold buttons and plumed hats to convince him he’d stumbled across a new law of nature.

Then the food arrived, and he stopped worrying about the U.S. Army, or even the Navy. The toasted angels were perfect, or maybe a little bit better: the bacon brought out the delicate, oceanic flavor of the oysters, with the pepper and lime juice adding a piquant counterpoint. And the pork chops, served in a sauce of mustard, horseradish, and chutney, had a solid, fatty taste that made him demolish them one after another.

Across the table from him, Herndon was methodically laying waste to the omelet. “God damn, Sam,” he said, features working in the throes of some deep emotion, “why don’t we do this more often?”

“Only reason I can think of is that I’m not stamping out double eagles downstairs,” Clemens answered, real regret in his voice. “I felt like it today, that’s all. I’ll feel like it tomorrow, too, but my wallet won’t.”

After more whiskey, Turkish coffee, and zabaglione, the two newspapermen sorrowfully paid the bill and even more sorrowfully walked back to the
Morning Call
As soon as they came through the door, Edgar Leary all but leaped on them. He was waving a telegram in his hand and dancing around as if about to hit the warpath.

“Easy, there,” Sam said. “Get the rattlesnake out of your unmentionables and tell us what the devil’s going on.”

“We’ve got Blaine’s answer,” Leary said, waving it in Clemens’ face. “Came over the wire not five minutes ago.” Before Sam could snatch it out of his hand, he went on, “Blaine says no—a big, loud, no. We aren’t licked anywhere, he says—”

“Anywhere but New Mexico Territory,” Sam broke in. He
checked himself. “Never mind. I’ll shut up. What else does he say?”

“Says we were right to fight at the beginning, and says we’re still right now. Says we’re going to make the Confederate States cough up what they had no business taking in the first place. Says—”

Clemens could restrain himself no longer: “He says we’ll make the Empire of Mexico keep those two worthless provinces if we have to kill every man in the United States to do it.”

“That’s not quite how he put it,” Leary said.

“No, but that’s what it means.” Now Clemens did take the telegram from him. He rapidly read through it, then nodded. “Yes, that’s what it means, all right. If we’d spent five millions a few months ago, we could have made Maximilian happy and taken all the steam out of Longstreet’s boiler. Now we’ll spend ten or twenty or fifty times that much, and for what? What do we get? A war that isn’t going anyplace, soldiers maimed and murdered by the thousands, and tomorrow’s editorial for me. Isn’t that grand?”

Without waiting for an answer, he carried the telegram back to his desk, read it again, and began to write:

He rubbed his chin, studying what he’d done. “Will this cause them to make me out to be a Confederate spy again?” he murmured. He read the words once more. “To hell with that. It’s the truth.” He inked his pen and kept on with the editorial.

XI

Abraham Lincoln watched the soldiers building the gallows outside Fort Douglas. It was a touch of General Pope’s, either extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad, depending on how things worked out, for Lincoln was not the only one watching that exercise in practical carpentry. Far from it: the work had to be visible from a goodly part of Salt Lake City, and those of the Latter-Day Saints who could not see it would have heard of it.

As Lincoln watched the men labor, stripped to their shirts, a guard in a blue blouse watched him. He suspected the guard had stretched the truth about his age to get into the Army. The fellow was trying to raise a mustache, but had only a little pale fuzz on his upper lip. His eyes never left Lincoln. It was as if he were tracking a nine-point buck, a resemblance only strengthened by the loaded Springfield he carried. The index finger of his right hand never got far from the trigger.

“You want to be careful with that,” Lincoln said mildly, “lest something happen we would both regret afterwards.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Lincoln.” The guard shook his head. “I wouldn’t regret it one bit.” His smile was wide and bright and pitiless and about half crazy. “So you’re the one who wants to be careful.”

“Believe me, I shall,” Lincoln said.
Shot while trying to escape
. How many murders hid behind that stern mask of rectitude? He did not care to add another to the number.

Half a dozen traps on the gallows. Half a dozen nooses, though the ropes were not yet in place. Half a dozen Mormon leaders to dance on air at a time, though they were not yet in place, either. Lincoln knew John Pope wanted to hang him, too. Had Pope had his way, he would soon climb those steps with Orson Pratt and George Cannon and the rest of the high-ranking Mormons the
U.S. Army had managed to run down. A Democrat in the White House might have let Pope hang him.

Of course, with a Democrat in the White House, the United States would no doubt have passively acquiesced to the Confederacy’s acquisition of Chihuahua and Sonora. The Mormons would not have gained an excuse for showing their disloyalty to the government that loved them so little. Would that have been better? Lincoln shook his head. The United States should have resisted the expansion of the slave power, and should have started resisting long since. His smile reached only one corner of his mouth. The United States should have done a better job of resisting, too.

One of the soldiers up on the multiple gallows tried a trapdoor. It didn’t drop. “God damn it,” he said, as any workman would have when what he was making didn’t perform the way it should. He called to another soldier: “Hey, Jack, bring me over that plane, will you? Got to smooth this old whore down.” Yes, it was just work to him. If he thought about what the work would do, he didn’t show it.

Lincoln turned away from the gallows and slowly walked back into the fort. The guard followed, finger still near the trigger of his rifle. “Son, I am not going to run away,” Lincoln told him. “I am seventy-two years old. The only way I could move faster than you would be for someone to throw me off a cliff yonder.” He pointed north and east, toward the brown, sun-baked Wasatch Mountains.

“That’d be good,” the guard said, showing his teeth. Lincoln kept quiet.

Inside Fort Douglas, Colonel George Custer was strutting across the parade ground. When he saw Lincoln, he scowled and trotted toward him. For a moment, Lincoln thought the cavalry officer would collide with him. But by what he’d seen, Custer lived his entire life going straight ahead at full throttle. That struck Lincoln as needlessly wearing, but the cavalryman wasn’t going to ask his advice.

Custer wanted to go chest-to-chest with him, but wasn’t tall enough. He had to content himself with going chest-to-belly and fiercely scowling up into Lincoln’s face, as he’d done several times before. “If it were up to me,” he growled, “you’d swing.”

“I thank you kindly for the vote of confidence, Colonel,” Lincoln said.