"Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I accept you and your friends here as U.S. Volunteers, Mister…?" St. John paused.
" Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt. Now you're talking, sir!" Roosevelt said enthusiastically.
But the clerk shook his head. "No, not yet," he said. "I'm just beginning. If I do that, you still will not be U.S. Volunteers, because I have no authority to make you such. And, as soon as the people above me find out I have done it, they will give me the sack for exceeding what authority I do have. You will be no better off, and I will be worse. Do you see my trouble now?"
"I see it, all right," Roosevelt said, breathing hard. "The trouble is, you're one hidebound paper-shuffler in a regime full of petty paper-shufflers. If your sort is the best this nation can afford to send out to the Territories, we deserve to lose this war. A stronger and more able race will supplant us here, as surely as we have supplanted the savage red man."
Roosevelt 's farmhands burst into cheers. Jasper St. John remained unmoved. "That's very pretty, Mr. Roosevelt," he said, and paused to spit, almost accurately, at the cuspidor next to the desk of the other clerk, who, with his papers, seemed oblivious to the argument. "It's very pretty," St. John repeated. "You could run for the Territorial Legislature on it, no two ways about that. But it cuts no ice with me. I have not the power to do what you want. Good day." He inked the pen that had been lying on his desk, ready to go back to his own bureaucratic minutiae.
"God damn it, you stupid fool, I am trying to help my country!" Roosevelt yelled.
Slowly, St. John put down the pen. Slowly, he got to his feet. He was half a head taller than Roosevelt, and looked half again as wide through the shoulders. "And I," he said pointedly, "am tired of being shouted at. No matter how much you want to help your country, I am not authorized to help you do it."
Regardless of his size, Roosevelt was about to punch him in the nose. He would have felt the same had he been in the office alone; that he had his men with him never entered his mind. But something else did, so the punch remained unthrown. "Then I'll raise my own troops!" he exclaimed. " Roosevelt 's Unauthorized Regiment, that's what I'll call "em!"
His men pounded him on the back and shouted themselves hoarse. "Do whatever you please," Jasper St. John said. "Do it somewhere else."
"Come on, boys," Roosevelt said. "We'll show him not everybody in Montana Territory is stuck in the mud."
As they left the Territorial capitol, Roosevelt 's mind whirled with plans. If he was going to recruit the Unauthorized Regiment, he would have to wire back to New York for money: the ranch, though profitable, didn't make nearly enough to support a project of that size. He didn't think he would have to arm the men he raised, not with Winchesters as common as weeds out here. A Winchester didn't have the range or stopping power of an Army Springfield, but, with their tubular magazines, Winchesters put more bullets in the air than single-shot Springfields. The regiment could take its chances there.
He would have to feed and shelter the men till such time as the Unauthorized Regiment really did pass under U.S. control. And not men alone-"We'll be a cavalry regiment, of course," he said, as if he'd known as much all along. "No use pounding along wearing out boot leather."
"That's it, boss," Esau Hunt said. "First class all the way, that's how the Unauthorized Regiment goes."
The nucleus and, at the moment, the entire membership of Roosevelt's Unauthorized Regiment piled into Roosevelt 's Ranch Wagon (he was, he knew, thinking in capital letters). He drove over to the Gazette office, more sedately now than before: the horses hadn't had a chance to cool down fully during his brief, unfortunate visit to the capitol.
At the newspaper, he bought a large advertisement seeking recruits for the unit he was forming. " Roosevelt 's Unauthorized Regiment?" said the printer who took down the text he dictated. "I know they aren't accepting volunteers-I tried-but this here-"
"May light a fire under them," Roosevelt interrupted. "And even if it doesn't, I'll still have the troops to present to the U.S. Army. I'll also want you to print up some handbills with the same information as goes into this advertisement. Can you hire someone to paste them up here in town?"
"Sure can," the printer said, "but it'll cost you two dollars extra per five hundred."
"I'll take a thousand," Roosevelt declared. "I don't want a man to be able to walk down any street in Helena without seeing one of them."
"A thousand should do it," the man in the ink-stained apron said, nodding. "That'll be ten dollars for the advertisement, eight for the handbills-we'll print from the same type, so I'll cut you a break on that; would be ten otherwise-and four more to paper the town with 'em. Comes to twenty-two altogether… Colonel."
Roosevelt had already tossed a double eagle and two big silver cartwheels onto the counter when that registered. "By jingo!" he said softly. If he was raising the regiment, he would be its colonel. That was how things had worked in the War of Secession, and the rules hadn't changed since.
He stood straighter and pushed out his chest. Though he'd never fired a shot at anything more dangerous than a coyote, suddenly he felt as one with Washington and Napoleon and Zachary Taylor: a leader of men, a conqueror. This was what he was meant to do with his life. He could feel it in his marrow.
He'd already felt a couple of other callings-writer, rancher-in his marrow during his twenty-two years on earth, but so what? He'd obviously been mistaken then. He wasn't mistaken now. He couldn't be mistaken now.
"Let's find a saloon, boys," he said. In Helena, that was harder than finding air to breathe, but not much. He had his choice, only a few doors away from the Gazette. He and the farmhands strode into the Silver Spoon. "Drinks on me!" he yelled, which made him friends in a hurry. "Let me tell you about Roosevelt 's Unauthorized Regiment, gents, if you'll be so kind." His new friends listened. Why not? He was buying.
Up in Front Royal, Virginia, far to the northwest of Richmond, General Thomas Jackson felt like a man released from prison. Once real fighting started, he'd taken advantage of it to escape from the capitol to the front line. President Longstreet hadn't liked that decision, not even a little.
Jackson smiled at the memory of how disingenuous he'd been. "But, Your Excellency," he'd said, "surely the telegraph can bring me the same intelligence in the field as it can far behind the lines here. It can also convey to me any instructions you have as to the prosecution of the war. And I shall gain the important advantage of viewing some segments of the action at first hand."
"You don't fool me a bit," Longstreet had answered. "You want to get out from under my thumb, and you want to get back into a camp."
Having been a garrison soldier for more years than he cared to recall, Jackson had picked up a certain measure of guile. "Mr. President, my desires, whatever they may be"-he was not about to admit that Longstreet had hit the nail on the head-"are of no importance. All that matters is the country's need. Can you deny my proposal possesses military merit?"
Try as he would, Old Pete Longstreet hadn't been able to deny it. And so Jackson was encamped just north of Front Royal, in charge of a Confederate force that had fallen back in the face of the larger Yankee army that had come out of West Virginia and Maryland and was now occupying Winchester, near the head of the Shenandoah Valley.
More than the Confederate defenders had fallen back. Half the civilian population-half the white civilian population, at any ratehad fled Winchester before the invaders. Their tents and lean-tos were scattered promiscuously over the ground around the neat rows of gray and butternut canvas that marked the Confederate bivouac.