Before he got to the white clapboard building, a man came out, spotted him, and extended a forefinger in his direction. "Colonel Roosevelt!" the fellow called. "Merry Christmas! May I speak with you for a moment?"
"And a merry Christmas to you, Zeke," Roosevelt replied. Zeke Preston wasn't the preacher. He was a reporter. Most of the men who had swarmed into Montana Territory to cover the British invasion were gone now. Of the handful still in Fort Benton, Preston was probably the best. Not only that, a lot of papers back in New York State printed what he wrote. Thus Roosevelt knew it behooved him to stay on the reporter's good side. "What can I do for you today?"
Preston came down the steps and kicked his way through the snow. "Can I trouble you with a couple of questions before you go in?" He was a lean man in his thirties who wore a walrus mustache that didn't go with his pale, narrow face; Roosevelt wondered if he was consumptive.
"Go ahead," Roosevelt said. "You've caught me fair and square."
"Good." The reporter reached into an overcoat pocket and drew out a notebook and pencil. "Lucky I don't have a pen," he remarked. "Weather like this, the ink'd freeze solid as Blaine 's head." He waited for Roosevelt 's chuckle, then said, "The more time passes after the battle by the Teton, the more credit General Custer takes for himself. What do you think of that?"
He'd told Colonel Henry Welton exactly what he thought of it. Welton was his friend. He knew reporters well enough to know they had their own axes to grind. "He was the overall commander, Zeke. If we'd lost, who would have ended up with the blame?"
"He says your men fought well-for Volunteers." Sure as hell, Preston was trying to goad him into saying something that would make a lively story.
"It's Christmas. I'm not going to pick a quarrel on Christmas." But Roosevelt couldn't quite leave that one alone. "I will say that the Unauthorized Regiment was the force running Gordon and his men back toward Canada when word of the cease-fire reached us and made us hold in place."
Preston scribbled, coughed, scribbled again. "What's your opinion of Gatling guns, Colonel?"
Roosevelt had been over that one with Henry Welton, too. For the reporter, he put on a toothy grin and answered, "My opinion is that I would much rather be behind them than in front of them. If you ask General Gordon, I expect you will find his opinion the same."
"I've heard some argument about how those guns should have been positioned," Preston remarked after an appreciative chuckle at Roosevelt 's comment. "Where do you stand on that?"
"They did well where they were," Roosevelt said. "I saw no point to moving them from the front line-and they were not moved, if you'll recall. General Custer was persuaded they belonged there."
He waited for Zeke Preston to ask him about that persuading. Maybe, belatedly, Colonel Welton wouldn't be an unsung hero after all. But Preston flipped the notebook shut and stuck it and the pencil back in his pocket. "Thanks very much, Colonel. I won't bother you any more, not today I won't. Merry Christmas to you." Off he went, breath smoking in the chilly air.
Roosevelt sighed and went up into the church. It was Methodist, which would have to do; that faith certainly came closer to his own than the one preached in the two Catholic churches Fort Benton also boasted. When he walked in, the congregation was singing "Away in the Manger," a good deal more tunefully than the same carol would have been managed in the saloon.
He added his own booming baritone to the song. His voice, his uniform, and his upright carriage drew the notice of the folk who crowded the little church, almost all of them in their holiday best. Roosevelt gave notice as well as drawing it; some of the women were worth noticing. A blonde in a deep blue princess dress with a satin jabot and laced, pleated cuffs-it would have been the height of style in New York City five years earlier-caught his eye and held it.
When he'd had enough of caroling-and more than enough of the prune-faced Methodist preacher-he made his way toward the door. The pretty young woman contrived to leave the church at the same time. They walked down the narrow stairway side by side. She smelled of rosewater.
"Merry Christmas to you, miss," Roosevelt said when they were down on the tracked, snowy ground once more.
"The same to you, Colonel." She kept walking along beside him. His hopes rose. In a casual tone of voice, she went on, "If you care for some mince pie, I baked one yesterday. I'd be days and days eating it all by my lonesome."
"Why, that's very kind of you-very kind of you indeed." He smiled. "If your family won't mind sharing, I'd be delighted."
"I am a widow," she answered.
Sometimes that was a euphemism for a streetwalker. Sometimes it wasn't. If she was a woman of easy virtue, she was cleaner and, by all appearances, better-natured than most of her fallen sisters. "Mince pie, then," Roosevelt said-and if she felt like giving him more than mince pie, that would be fine, too.
She lived in a tiny, astringently neat cabin next door to a saloon- not that anything in Fort Benton was far from a saloon. Sure enough, a mince pie sat on the table. She cut Roosevelt a slice. It was good. He said so, loudly, adding, "Thank you for making a soldier far from home happy."
"How happy would you like to be?" she asked, and walked around the table and sat down on his lap.
The bed was close to the stove. Everything in the cabin was close to the stove, which helped keep the place tolerably warm. Roosevelt had had a couple of other women throw themselves at him since he rode down to Fort Benton a hero, or as much of a hero as this hash of a war offered. The experience had been both new and delightful. He wasn't sure whether this was another hero's reward or a business transaction. As he fumbled with the buttons of his trousers, he resolved to worry about it later.
"Oh," she said when, presently, he went into her. She was quiet after that, working intently beneath him, till she stiffened again and quivered and cried out, "Oh, Joe! Oh, God, Joe!" He didn't think she knew what she was saying; he hardly knew what she was saying himself then. His own ecstasy came less than a minute later. Afterwards, he decided she probably was a widow after all.
Being twenty-three, he would have been ready for a second round in short order, but she got off the bed and started dressing again, so he did, too. He was left with a puzzling problem in etiquette after that. If she was a streetwalker as well as a widow, he'd anger her if he didn't offer to pay. If she wasn't, he'd offend her if he did.
He stood irresolute, a rare posture for him. Without answering the question behind it, she solved the problem for him: "Merry Christmas, Colonel Roosevelt."
"Thank you very much," he said, and kissed her. "I don't think I've ever had a nicer present, or one more charmingly wrapped." She smiled at that. He opened the door, and grunted at the cold outside. He'd gone several steps back toward the Unauthorized Regiment's encampment before he realized he'd never learned her name.
Chapter 19
T he clock in Frederick Douglass' parlor chimed twelve. All over Rochester, clocks were striking twelve. Douglass raised a glass of wine to his wife and son. "Happy New Year," he said solemnly.
"Happy New Year, Frederick," Anna Douglass said, and drank. "When I was young, I never reckoned I'd live to see such a big number as
1882."
"May you see many more new years, Mother," Lewis Douglass said.