He landed heavily in the mud, going down to one knee and fetching up against someone who'd abandoned the Queen of the Ohio a moment before. "I beg your pardon, sir," he said, picking up his hat.
"Don't mention it," the man said. "God damn those cursed Rebels to hell!" As if to punctuate his words, another cannonball screamed past.
A man landed right behind Douglass, staggered, and trod on his toes. He didn't bother to excuse himself. Douglass said, "Perhaps we should get clear of this vicinity, to let those escaping the steamboat more readily descend in safety."
No one argued with him, which was a pleasant novelty. Limping a little, he walked away from the sidewheeler. He didn't look back. All he had left here were the clothes on his back, and they were muddy and torn. He'd had no more when he fled his master, and then he'd had nothing more anywhere. Now he was comfortably well off, and only a telegram away from being able to draw on his resources.
"Rebs must've thought the boat was a troopship," somebody not far from him said. That made a certain amount of sense; the U.S. and the C.S. both moved soldiers by steamboat.
"Maybe they're just a filthy pack of stinking bastards," somebody else said savagely. To Douglass, that made sense, too, a lot of sense: he was always ready to believe the worst of the Confederate States.
"Whatever they are, the whole Ohio 's gonna be shut down as tight as a man's bowels with an opium plug up his ass," the first man said. That was crude, but true without any doubt whatsoever: if one side started shooting at steamboats, the other surely would.
And one other thing was also true without any doubt whatsoever: he was going to be very, very late to Cincinnati.
The Handbasket rattled toward Helena. "Get up, there!" Theodore Roosevelt called to the horses. They snorted resentfully as he flicked the reins and cracked the whip above their backs. Not only was he making them go faster than they usually did on a trip to town, they were pulling a heavier load.
From the back of the wagon, Esau Hunt said, "Easy, boss, easy. Slow down. We'll get there quick enough, any which way." The other five farmhands who sprawled in the back with him loudly agreed. Only Philander Snow had chosen to stay back at the ranch, and he'd already seen the elephant. The rest of the hands, like Hunt, like Roosevelt himself, were young men one and all.
"I'm not going to slow down for anything-not for one single thing, do you hear me?" Roosevelt declared. "Our country needs us, and I intend to meet the call, and to meet it as quickly as I possibly can."
"Can't meet it if you drive us off the road into a ditch," said Charlie Dunnigan, another hand.
Roosevelt didn't answer. He didn't slow down, either. When he conceived in his own mind that something needed doing, he went and did it, and he didn't waste time about it, either. He came up on another wagon heading toward Helena -but not fast enough to suit him. He didn't have much room between the road and the trees alongside it there, but he pulled out and passed, leaving the other driver to cat his dust. The fellow shouted angrily. Roosevelt waved his hat in a derisive salute.
"That's showing him, boss!" Hunt exclaimed. Roosevelt grinned, though he didn't turn back to show the hand he was pleased. Straightforward action, that was the ticket. People who accomplished anything in this world grabbed with both hands. If you didn't, you got left behind with your face dusty.
This time, Roosevelt steered away from the Gazette office when he got into Helena, heading toward the territorial capitol, farther south and cast. "I only hope they still have slots open for us," he said, for about the dozenth time since setting out. Then he went on, again for the dozenth time, "By thunder, if they haven't got any, we'll make our own, that's what we'll do."
"Doesn't look packed to the rafters, anyway," Dunnigan remarked.
Sure enough, Roosevelt had no trouble hitching the buggy close to the capitol. He saw no line snaking out of the small stone building, either. "Is patriotism dead everywhere in the country, save my ranch alone?" he demanded, not of the farmhands but perhaps of God.
He leaped out of the wagon, tied up the horses, and led his men toward the capitol. As they charged up the steps, a man he knew came out: Jeremiah Paxton, a neighbor. "I know what you're here for, Roosevelt," he said: "the same thing I was, or I'm a Chinaman. You ain't gonna have any better luck'n I did, neither."
"What do you mean?" Roosevelt asked.
All Paxton said after that was "You'll find out." He spat into the dirt, then strode over to his horse, untied it from the rail, swung up onto it, and rode back toward his ranch. His stiff back radiated disgust with the world.
"Follow me!" Theodore Roosevelt said. He led his men up the steps to the capitol as if they were charging to the crest of an enemy-held hill. Stopping the first person he saw inside who looked as if he belonged there, he asked, "Where in blue blazes do I find the volunteer office hereabouts?"
"Third door on the left-hand side," the man answered. "But I have to tell you-"
Roosevelt pushed past him, as he'd pushed past the slow wagon. He opened the third door on the left-hand side, which was indeed emblazoned u.s. MILITIA, with an obviously new addition below: amp; VOL
UNTEERS.
Inside the little office sat two clerks. The brass namcplatc on the closer one's desk proclaimed him to be Jasper St. John. "Good day to you, Mr. St. John," Roosevelt boomed. "These gentlemen and I are here to offer our services to the U.S. Volunteers. High time we taught our high-handed neighbors not to get gay with the United States of America."
Jasper St. John did not look like a clerk. Except for spectacles much like Roosevelt 's, he looked like a barroom brawler. His voice was a bass rumble: "We aren't accepting applications right now."
"What?" Roosevelt dug a finger in his ear, as if to assure himself he was hearing correctly. "You're not taking volunteers? Why the devil aren't you?"
"We haven't got any orders to do it," St. John returned stolidly.
"Good God in the foothills!" Now Roosevelt clapped a dramatic hand to his forehead. "We're at war with the Confederate States-by what I've heard, they're shooting up everything that moves on the rivers-we're at war with England and France, and, for good measure, we're at war with the Dominion of Canada. Have we declared war on ourselves, too? Is that why we don't want volunteers?"
"In the Montana Territory, volunteers are only being accepted at U.S. Army posts," Jasper St. John said. "This is by order of the secretary of war, as received here when war was declared against the Confederate States."
Roosevelt felt ready to explode. "But there aren't any forts within fifty miles of Helena!" he shouted.
"I understand that." St. John was as unmoving as a hilltop fortress. "I can only follow the orders I was given. You are not the first patriotic citizen I've had to turn away, believe me."
"Mr. St. John, sir, use your reason," Roosevelt said, doing his best to keep a rein on his temper. "That order may possibly have made some sense when we were at war with only the Confederate States. I do not say it did; I deny it did; but it is a point on which reasonable men might differ. I understand that we are a long way from the Southern Confederacy here in Montana. But good God in the foothills, Mr. St. John"-he was shouting again; not for the life of him could he keep from shouting again-"that's Canada right up over the border there! Has anyone back in Washington bothered to look at a map since England and the Dominion declared war on us? If they put a proper army over the border, the handful of regular troops we have in the Territory won't be able to stop them. They'll hardly be able to slow them down."