How Few Remain (62 page)

“Easy, old fellow, easy,” he said, patting the horse on the neck. “We’ve got a long road ahead. If you go too fast now, you’ll wear yourself down to a nub long before we get there.”

The horse didn’t want to listen to him. It wanted to run. Roosevelt laughed as the fort disappeared behind a swell of prairie. He was the same way. When anyone told him to slow down, he
generally went faster. And not a man in the world had the right to rein him in.

He checked himself. That wasn’t quite true. Military discipline did for him what reins did for the horse. Without it, he would have charged into Canada by now. But the cases weren’t identical. He’d submitted to military discipline of his own free will. The horse didn’t have a choice.

Jackrabbits bounded over the plains, sensibly taking no chances on whether he might try to shoot them if they stayed around to watch him ride by. He didn’t need to bother with jackrabbits, not today, not with fresh-baked bread and several chunks of fried chicken in his saddlebag. If he spied a herd of pronghorns on his way north, though …

He saw some antelope off in the distance, but too far off for him to bother chasing them. Welton had sent a courier up to the headquarters of the Unauthorized Regiment, letting Lieutenant Jobst and the rest of the men know he would be spending some time at Fort Benton. He couldn’t help feeling he’d been away too long. One thing he emphatically did not want was for his regiment to discover it could get along just as well without him.

Walk, canter, trot. Walk, canter, trot. Mile after mile of prairie unrolled behind him. More miles lay ahead. The horse was still willing, but no longer eager. Roosevelt rode north by the sun and by his compass; not nearly enough horsemen had traveled back and forth between Fort Benton and his headquarters to wear even the beginnings of a trail into the grass. Walk, canter, trot.

Every hour or so, he gave his mount a few minutes’ rest and let it snatch at clumps of grass. The grass was still green. It wouldn’t stay green forever, nor even much longer. Winter came early to Montana Territory, just as it left late. Blaine had rejected the Confederates’ peace offer: well and good. Despite that, though, Roosevelt still hadn’t been able to do any fighting. If the damned British didn’t get moving, or if his own orders didn’t change, he wouldn’t be able to start till spring.

When he came to the Marias River, he stowed the compass in his saddlebag. He wouldn’t need it any more. He rode northwest along the southern bank of the river till he came to a ford. With the water so low in summer, that didn’t take long. His boots stayed dry while his horse splashed across. No steamboat had ever made it up the Marias. “And I know steamboats,” he told the
horse, “that can pour a barrel of beer into a dry riverbed and make fifty miles on the suds.”

The horse snorted. He couldn’t tell whether it was derision or appreciation.

He rode up the northern fork of the Marias, which was the Willow. “Almost there now,” he told the horse as the sun sank toward the Rockies. The horse didn’t answer, not this time. It had worked hard all day. He patted its neck. “Come on—not much farther.”

He strayed away from the riverbank after dark, and almost rode past the camp. The night was mild—milder than the past few had been—and the men had let the fires die back to embers. He spied their red glow off to his left only a moment before a challenge came out of the night: “Halt! Who goes there?”

“Hello, Johnny,” he answered, recognizing the sentry’s voice. “It’s Colonel Roosevelt, back from Fort Benton.”

“Advance and be recognized, Colonel,” Johnny Unger said, playing the game by the rules. His voice held a grin, though. As Roosevelt rode slowly forward, he whistled to the next nearest sentry and called, “Hey, Sean—the Old Man’s come back from town.”

“Bully!” Sean said. Neither of their voices would have disturbed the men sleeping back at regimental headquarters.

A booted foot crunched a twig. Johnny Unger materialized, one moment invisible, the next standing right beside Roosevelt. “Yes, sir, it’s you, all right,” he said, and chuckled. “Go on in. Did you do the trip in one day, or stretch it out over two?”

“Started this morning,” Roosevelt answered. “Never waste time, Johnny. It’s the one thing in the whole wide world you can’t get back.”

“Yes, sir,” the sentry said. “If you’ve been riding that horse all day, I was just thinking, he’ll need more seeing to than if you’d done it the easy way.”

“I’ll tend to him, never fear,” Roosevelt said. He asked for very few of the privileges to which his rank might have entitled him. When the sentry vanished once more, Roosevelt rode the beast into camp.

He poked and fed one of the fires up to brighter life so he could see what he was doing as he brushed down the horse and checked its hooves. One of them had a pebble caught in the horseshoe. He
dug it out with a curved steel pick. The beast couldn’t have had it long, or it would have started favoring that leg.

Roosevelt tried to be as quiet as he could, but a couple of men sat up in their bedrolls to see what was going on. “Good to have you back, Colonel,” one of them said softly. Roosevelt waved and went back to work.

After an hour or so, the horse was settled. Roosevelt patted him one last time, then got out his blanket, wrapped himself up in it like a papoose, and fell asleep even while still wriggling around to get comfortable.

He woke with the sun shining in his face, the smell of coffee in the air, and First Lieutenant Karl Jobst standing only a couple of feet away. “Good morning, sir,” Jobst said while Roosevelt stretched and yawned. “By what the courier had to say, you found yourself a livelier time than you looked for when you went down to Fort Benton.”

“That’s nothing but the truth,” Roosevelt said. “I rode down to Great Falls with Colonel Welton, as you’ll have heard, to listen to Abe Lincoln. Very fine speaker—no two ways about that—but he spouts nonsense, nothing but Socialistic nonsense. Let him rave, I say. If he keeps at it, he’ll split the Republican Party right down the middle, or I’m a Dutchman.”

“Uh, sir … you are a Dutchman,” Jobst pointed out. Of German blood himself, he got called a Dutchman a lot, but Roosevelt was the genuine article.

“Proves my point, doesn’t it?” Roosevelt said gleefully as he got to his feet. Over coffee and hardtack and antelope, he asked, “Anything new on patrol that’s worth hearing?”

“No, sir,” his adjutant answered. “All routine. No, I take that back. Somebody in D Troop got bitten by a rattlesnake, but it’s not a bad bite, and they’re pretty sure he’ll pull through.”

“I’m glad to hear it—not that he got bitten, but that we won’t lose him. The rattlesnakes north of the border are quiet, though?” When Jobst nodded, Roosevelt went on, “In that case …” He set out the scheme for leave Colonel Welton had accepted.

Karl Jobst blinked. Plainly, such an idea would never have occurred to him. Once he heard it, he liked it. “What a clever notion, sir. You’re right—I’m sure it will have a tonic effect on the men’s spirits.”

“I’ll draft the necessary orders,” Roosevelt said. Jobst looked slightly miffed; a lot of regimental commanders would have let
him do the job. Everything Roosevelt could do himself, he did do himself. Inside of an hour, one courier was on his way to A Troop, announcing a week’s leave for its men, and another to B Troop, ordering it to stretch out to cover the ground A Troop would be clearing.

Half an hour after that, another courier rode into regimental headquarters at a pounding gallop: Roosevelt’s farmhand, Esau Hunt, who was serving in B Troop. “Boss!” he shouted, and then, remembering himself, “Colonel Roosevelt, sir! The limeys are over the border, sir. Whole great big column of ’em crossed yesterday. We took a few shots at ’em, but they got a hell of a lot more men than we do.”

Theodore Roosevelt stared, briefly speechless. “All leaves canceled,” he murmured. Half a moment later, he was bellowing for couriers at the top of his lungs, some to concentrate his regiment and set it in motion against the British, another to ride down to Fort Benton and bring the rest of the Army the news. That done, he threw back his head and laughed out loud. “God delivered the Midianites into Gideon’s hands, and He has delivered the British into mine.” He raised his voice to a great shout: “For the Lord, and for Gideon!”

    Colonel George Custer had a splendid view of the hanging of the Mormon traitors in front of Fort Douglas, but could not watch it so closely as he should have liked. He was too busy keeping an eye on the crowd that pressed up against the restraining rope a couple of hundred yards from the gallows.

“Be ready, men,” he called to his Gatling-gun crews. “If anyone crosses that barrier, we are to open fire without warning and without mercy. The scoops know as much. They had better—we’ve warned them often enough.”

The Mormons were splendidly law-abiding—except when their church elders led them astray. If John Taylor, who remained at large, wanted martyrs in large numbers, he would have them. The believers were likelier to heed his admonitions than those of the hated U.S. Army.

“We’ll get ’em, sir,” Sergeant Buckley said, and the other gunners nodded.

They were not alone out there. Riflemen stood between the Gatlings, and several cannon shotted with canister bore on the crowd. Custer wished the Gatlings weren’t there at all. Their
absence would have let him pay more attention to the Mormons’ getting what they deserved. But General Pope had assigned him the miserable gadgets, and so he had to make the best of it.

Softly, his brother Tom said, “Here they come, Autie.”

And indeed, out through the gate, guarded and led by more soldiers with Springfields, came George Q. Cannon, Orson Pratt, a Mormon apostle named Daniel Wells, Cannon’s brother (whose Christian name—if Mormons’ first names deserved that description—Custer had never bothered to learn) and two other leaders of the Latter-Day Saints. Their hands were bound behind them. John Pope followed in dress uniform.

None of the Mormons hesitated in mounting the thirteen steps to the multiple gallows; their steps were firm and sure. Each leader took his place at a noose, beside which stood a hangman in a black hood—Pope, sensibly, did not want the grimly silent crowd to be able to recognize the executioners.

Each hangman offered his Mormon a hood without eyeholes. Wells, Cannon’s brother, and one of the men whose names Custer had not noted accepted; Pratt, George Cannon, and the other stranger refused. The hangmen set the nooses around the Mormons’ necks.

In a voice just loud enough for Custer to hear, Orson Pratt asked General Pope, “May I speak to my people one last time? I give you my sacred oath the words shall be of reconciliation, not of strife.”

Custer turned his head and watched Pope mull. He would have said no. But Pope answered, “Speak, then. Be brief, though, and remember that your people shall answer if you betray them into madness.”

“I remember, and I thank you,” Pratt said, quietly still. The salt-smelling breeze ruffled his bushy white beard. He cried out to the throng who believed as he did: “My brethren, my friends, I leave you today for a better world to come, and give you these words from the second book of Nephi as my parting gift: ‘O then, if I have seen so many great things, if the Lord in his condescension unto the children of men hath visited men in so much mercy, why should my heart leap and my soul linger in the valley of sorrow, and my flesh waste away, and my strength slacken, because of mine afflictions? And why should I yield to sin, because of my flesh? Yea, why should I give way to temptations, that the evil one have placed in my heart to destroy my peace and afflict my
soul? Why am I angry because of mine enemy? Awake, my soul! No longer droop in sin. Rejoice, O my heart, and give place no more for the enemy of my soul. Do not anger again because of mine enemies.’ “He bowed his hoary head. “Amen!” George Cannon cried.

“Amen!” the other Mormon leaders echoed more quietly. “Amen!” It rippled through the crowd, along with the sound of weeping.

“He kept his word,” Tom Custer murmured, his voice more serious than was his wont. “That’s not the worst prayer I ever heard, either.”

“It is nothing but a mockery and an imitation of the Good Book.” George Custer remained unmoved.

So did Brigadier General John Pope. “These men have been convicted of treason and insurrection against the United States of America,” he declared in a shout that would have been huge had it not followed Orson Pratt’s. “For their crimes, I, under the authority given me by President James G. Blaine, have sentenced them to death by hanging. President Blaine having reviewed and confirmed these sentences”—he raised his right hand high in the air—”let the punishment be carried out.” The hand dropped.

So did the traps beneath the six condemned Mormons as the hangmen worked their levers. So did the Mormons’ bodies. Custer heard neck bones snap; the men who’d tied the hangman’s nooses had known their business. The bodies kicked and spasmed briefly, then were still.

No one surged forward out of the crowd. The sound of weeping grew louder. “Shame!” someone shouted. In an instant, men and women alike took up the call: “Shame! Shame! Shame!” It washed over the soldiers and their weapons and the military governor of Utah Territory and the gallows and the bodies dangling from it. For a quarter of an hour, the Mormons repeated their one-word answer to what they had just witnessed.

John Pope had grit. He walked out in front of his men, advancing on the rope barrier till he was within easy pistol range of the crowd that hated him. He raised his hand, as he had done to order the executioners to ready themselves. “Hear me!” he shouted. “People of Utah, hear me!” And the people did grant him something close to quiet. “Go home. All is over here. Live in peace, and obey the laws and authority of the United States of America. Go home.”

Some of the Mormons kept on calling. “Shame!” More, though, began the walk back down to Salt Lake City. Little by little, the crowd melted away.

Tom Custer whistled softly. “We got by with it, Autie. I was a long way from sure we would.”

“So was I.” Custer didn’t know whether to be relieved the Mormons had not erupted at the execution of their leaders or disappointed the U.S. Army had not had the chance to teach them precisely how much rebellion could cost.