How Few Remain (52 page)

Inside, the place was full of the good odors of roasting pork and fresh-baked bread. It was, however, empty of customers. In a way, that was too bad: it deserved better. In another way, though, it was perfect for the meeting Custer had in mind.

Hearing the door open and close, the proprietress came out from the back room: a redheaded woman in her late twenties, the map of Ireland on her saucy face. She walked up to Custer and asked, “And what can I do for you today, sir?”

“Ah, Katie, my very dear, it’s what we can do for each other,” he replied, and took her in his arms.

The first time he’d tried the cafe, he’d been after nothing more than dinner. He’d got that—and a fine one it was, too—and a deal of friendly banter from Katie Fitzgerald besides. That and the food had brought him back. On his second visit, he’d learned she
was a widow, doing her best to make ends meet. On his fourth visit …

Now, their lips clung, their hands clasped, their bodies molded to each other. Custer, exulting in his strength, picked her up and carried her back to the bedroom. She laughed. She’d squealed, the first time he did it.

“Hurry,” she said when he set her down. He needed no urging along those lines. Fast as he could, he divested himself of blouse and shirt, of boots and socks, of trousers and drawers. He was fast enough to be ready to help her loosen the stays of her corset and slide it down over her hips before they embraced again, naked this time, and tumbled down onto the bed.

Custer had strayed off the path of perfect rectitude before, sometimes with Indian women, sometimes with whites. When Libbie was close by, he made himself a model of circumspection. When she wasn’t, he did what he did, as discreetly as he could, and worried about it very little afterwards.

“I love you,” Katie Fitzgerald breathed into his ear. He had never said that to her. He was, in his own fashion, honest. But the way his fingers stroked the softness not quite hidden in the fiery tuft of hair between her legs might almost have been an equivalent. Her soft moan said she took it for one.

She moaned again when he went into her, and shut her eyes tight, lost in her own world of sensation. Custer laughed, deep in his throat. Libbie did the same thing. Then he stopped thinking about Libbie, or about much of anything at all. His hips pistoned, faster and faster. Beneath him, Katie yowled like a catamount. Her nails scored his back.

At the last possible moment, he pulled out of her and spurted his seed over her soft, white belly. He prided himself on his control there as much as he did on his skill with a gun or on horseback.

“It’s a sin,” Katie whimpered halfheartedly. She was a good Catholic, but she did not want to find herself in a family way. One side of her mouth quirked upward. “It’s messy, too. Get off me, so I can clean myself.” She did just that, with a rag and some water from the pitcher on the bedside nightstand.

As fast as he’d got out of his uniform, Custer got into it again. As he’d helped Katie undress, he helped her dress, too. When they were both fully clothed once more, he said, “My brother thinks I’m out hunting John Taylor.” He found that deliciously
funny; a reputation for singleminded devotion to the task at hand was a disguise as effective as false beard and wig. There were tasks, and then there were tasks.

“Well, when you’re not here, that’s a good thing for you to do,” she answered seriously. “The sooner he’s on the end of a rope, the better off this place will be.” Custer had never yet heard any Gentile with a good word to say about the Mormon president.

“Now I’ve got to go,” he told her. He kissed her and caressed her and pretended he didn’t see the tear slide down her cheek. He’d never told her he was married, not in so many words, but he hadn’t pretended to be a bachelor, either. He said, “I’ll see you again as soon as I can.”

“What if I have a customer?” she asked with a sly little smile.

“I’ll be disappointed,” he answered, which changed the smile to a different sort. She hugged him one more time, fiercely, then let him go.

No one paid any more than the usual attention to him as he rode back up to Fort Douglas. He whistled “Garry Owen,” as he might have done going into battle. But he’d fought his battle here, fought it and won it.

When he got back to the fort, his younger brother collared him at once, as he’d known Tom would. “Any luck?”

Yes, but not the sort you’re thinking of
. “Not so much as I should have liked,” Custer said, and made himself look unhappy with the world.

“They’re wily devils, the Mormons,” Tom said sympathetically. “But you have more luck than you know, as a matter of fact.”

“Do I?” Custer looked up his sleeve, as if hoping to find it lurking there. As his brother laughed, he asked, “Whereabouts?”

To his surprise, Tom turned and pointed across the parade ground. “Here it comes now,” he said.

“Hello, Autie, darling!” Libbie Custer waved to her husband. “They finally let me escape from Fort Dodge, so here I am, with all the animals in tow. I expect they’re unpacking the trophies even now.” She hurried forward to give Custer a hug.

He had faced death more times than he could count, against Confederates and Indians both. What he did now, he thought, took more courage than any of those desperate fights. He threw his arms wide. “Ah, Libbie, my very dear!” he said enthusiastically, and smiled a big, broad smile.

* * *

“Tombstone is still ours,” Theodore Roosevelt said, the name tolling like a mournful bell in his mouth. “Let’s hope plenty of Rebel tombstones will go up there if General Stuart does choose to attack it.”

“Hasn’t happened yet, like I told you,” the courier from Fort Benton said.

“I pray to the Lord it does not happen,” Roosevelt declared. “I pray to the Lord that we instead attack the Confederate forces in New Mexico Territory and drive them from our soil.”

Lieutenant Karl Jobst had been taking a swig of coffee. When he lowered the tin cup from his lips, he said, “We already tried that, sir, and got licked. That’s why Tombstone is in so much trouble now.”

“A shame and a disgrace,” Roosevelt growled. “Wherever the fighting truly matters—wherever it’s bigger than I’ll raid your farms and you raid mine—the damned Rebels have the bulge on us.”

“There’s a reason for that, sir,” Jobst said. Roosevelt raised an eyebrow. His adjutant went on, “Wherever the fighting matters, it’s fighting between enough men on each side to have a general commanding them. Our generals fought in the War of Secession and lost. Theirs won. Need I say more?”

“That’s pretty damned cynical for so early in the morning,” Roosevelt said. Lieutenant Jobst grinned at him. His own smile was on the strained side. “It also has the unpleasant ring of truth.”

The courier spoke up: “Sir, have your men seen any sign that the British are likely to move soon? Colonel Welton asked me to ask you special.”

“Nary a one.” Roosevelt sprang to his feet and paced around the cookfire. When he’d recruited the Unauthorized Regiment, his head had been full of the rasping roar of the rifles and the fireworks smell of burnt gunpowder. He’d wanted battle. What he’d got was boredom, and he was beginning to chafe under it. “If he hadn’t told me they were in Lethbridge, I’d have guessed they hadn’t come any closer than Labrador, or maybe London.”

“Yes, sir. That’s right good, sir.” The soldier chuckled. “Sir, if it’s like you say and them bastards are being quiet, Colonel Welton asks if you reckon you can leave your command for a couple-three days, come down to the fort and talk things over:
how it’s all working out up here and what you’ll do if the limeys ever should decide to get off their asses and try something.”

“Yes!” Roosevelt sprang into the air. This was action. If not the action against the British his heart wanted as much as his body craved a woman—which was no small yearning—it was something different from what he was doing now. After sameness that seemed unending, that drew him like a magnet. “Let’s be off. I can leave as soon as I saddle my horse. We’ll get you a fresh animal, so you won’t slow the journey with your worn one. Aren’t you done with that coffee yet? Good heavens, man, hurry!”

That was pushing things somewhat, but when any idea bit Roosevelt, it bit him hard. Inside half an hour, he and the courier, him with a Winchester on his back, the other man with a Springfield, were riding south toward Fort Benton. Roosevelt pounded a fist down onto his thigh in anticipation of his first return to the civilized world since taking the field. Then he laughed at himself. If Fort Benton counted for civilization, he’d been out in the wilderness too long.

Walk, trot, canter, walk, trot, canter. The two men kept their horses as fresh as they could by varying their gaits. Roosevelt held his mount to a canter longer than usual: as long as his kidneys could stand the jarring. No matter how rough it was, it ate up the miles.

He got into Fort Benton a little past sundown, riding along the Missouri the last few miles. When he dismounted, he discovered his own gait resembled nothing so much as that of a bear with the rheumatism. As a couple of enlisted men took the horse away to be seen to, he stumped across the parade ground to Colonel Welton’s office.

“My dear fellow!” Welton exclaimed. “You look as if you could use a good brush-down and a blanket across your back, and to the devil with your horse.” He reached into a desk drawer. The kerosene lamps that lighted the chamber sent shadows swooping in every direction. Welton pulled out a corked bottle full of tawny liquid. “Can’t give you that, I’m afraid, but what do you say to a small restorative?”

“I say, ‘Yes, sir!’ I say, ‘Thank you, sir!’ “Roosevelt sank into a chair. Sitting hurt as much as moving did. “Oof! I say, ‘Good God, sir!’ “

“Don’t blame you a bit.” Welton poured him a restorative that
might have been small for a rhinoceros. “I didn’t expect you till tomorrow morning some time. That’s a long ride for one day, but you are a chap who takes the bull by the horns. Wouldn’t have eagles on your shoulder straps if you didn’t, eh?”

“That’s about the way I see it, sir.” Roosevelt drank. Fire ran down his throat and exploded into contentment in his belly. “Ahh. I say, ‘God bless you, sir!’ You’re right. A man without pluck goes nowhere.”

Henry Welton sipped at his own glass of whiskey. “If that’s the measure of success, you’ll go far—and heaven help anyone who stands in your way.” He took another sip. He was still behind Roosevelt, but he didn’t need the drink so badly and was wise enough to remember he carried twice his guest’s years. “So the British are quiet, are they?”

“Yes, sir—quiet as the tomb.” Roosevelt did not even try to keep the regret from his own voice.

“I know how tempted you’ve been to go over the border and take a whack at ’em, the way a boy whacks a hornets’ nest with a stick.” Welton chuckled. “Be glad you’ve restrained yourself. Were you foolish enough to try anything of the sort, you’d get what the hornets would give the boy—if not from the British, then from your own side for disobeying orders.”

“I understand that, sir. I’m switched if I like it, but I understand it.” Roosevelt stared at his glass. Where had the whiskey gone? “When President Blaine told Longstreet we weren’t whipped yet, I thought the Englishmen would come down over the border, to try and make us change our minds. Er—I say, ‘Thank you again, sir!’ “Welton had restored the restorative.

Setting the bottle back on the desk, the commander of the Seventh Infantry studied Roosevelt with considerable respect. “I looked for the very same thing, as a matter of fact,” he said slowly. “You may be an amateur strategist, Colonel, but you’re a long way from the worst one I’ve ever seen. If you can lead your men in action, too—well, in that case, you’ll make a first-rate soldier.”

“And I thank you yet one more time for that, sir.” Roosevelt made himself be deliberate with his second glass of whiskey. After getting such a compliment, the last thing he wanted was to act the drunken fool—the young drunken fool—before his superior. “You called me down—that is, you said I might come
down—so we could confer on how best to resist the British should they happen to recall they are men.”

“Your men delay them and concentrate against them, mine join you, we pick the best ground we can, and we fight them,” Henry Welton said, ticking the points off on his fingers. “How does that sound to you?”

“It sounds bully,” Roosevelt said, “but, begging the colonel’s pardon, I don’t see how it’s any different from what we’d planned before the Unauthorized Regiment went up to watch the border.”

“It’s not,” Welton admitted cheerfully, “but I figured a few days in town—even so small a town as Fort Benton—would do you a world of good. You’re not used to going off on your lonesome for long stretches. Blowing off steam while everything’s quiet won’t hurt the war, and it’ll help you.”

As Roosevelt had seen, the fleshpots of Fort Benton were nothing to threaten New York City, or even Great Falls. But Welton was right—the little town by the fort seemed positively sybaritic when set beside a regimental headquarters out in the middle of the empty Montana prairie.

Still … “Sir, if you’re generous enough to give me a few days of ease like this—and I do thank you for them; don’t mistake me—might I give the troops in the regiment leave to come into Fort Benton one at a time, to blow off their steam? The troops adjacent to that coming in on furlough could spread themselves thinner to cover its ground. I should hate to take advantage of a privilege my men cannot enjoy.”

“Well, I hadn’t thought of it, but I don’t see why not,” Welton said. He stared across the desk at Roosevelt. “Colonel, have your troopers any conception of how fortunate they are in their commanding officer?”

“Sir, in this request I am only seeking to apply the Golden Rule.”

“You
are
a young man,” Henry Welton said. He raised a hand. “No, I mean nothing by that but praise. We need young men, their energy and their enthusiasm and their idealism. Without them, this part of the country will never come to its full growth.”

Had Welton meant nothing by the remark but praise, he wouldn’t have felt the need to amplify and justify it so. Roosevelt was not so young as to fail to understand that. But, even with whiskey burning through him, he refused to take offense. Instead, he answered, “Some few men are fortunate enough to retain their
youthful energy and enthusiasm and idealism throughout the whole span of their lives. They are the ones the history books written a hundred years after they are dead call great. I cannot judge the course of my life before I run it, but that is the goal to which I aspire.”