"Good," Roosevelt answered, and tossed him a ten-cent tip. Since the supply wagons had started coming up from Helena every day, he was far less cut off from the world than he had been before. Now, instead of waiting a week or two between looks at a newspaper, he got word of what was going on as fast as the telegraph brought it into town and the typesetters turned it into words on paper.
What Roosevelt read now made him paw the ground like one stallion challenging another over a mare. He felt that full of rage, too. " Richardson!" he roared. "Get your damn bugle, Richardson!" He fumed until the trumpeter came dashing up, horn in hand, then snapped, "Blow Assembly."
"All right, Colonel," Richardson answered. "What's up and gone south on us now?" Roosevelt glared at him till he raised the bugle to his lips and blasted out the call.
Men came running; a summons during morning fatigues was out of the ordinary and therefore a good bet to be interesting and maybe even important. The troopers buzzed with talk until Roosevelt strode out before them, Helena Gazette clenched in his left fist. "Do you men know-do you men have any idea-what the Confederate States, the English, and the French have had the infernal impudence to do?" he demanded.
"Reckon you're gonna tell us, ain't you, Colonel?" a trooper said.
Roosevelt ignored the distraction, which, for a man of his temperament, wasn't easy. But fury still consumed him. "They have had the gall, the nerve, to declare a blockade against the coasts and harbors of the United States of America -against our coasts and harbors, gentlemen, saying we have not got the right to conduct our own commerce." He squeezed the Gazette in his fist and waved it about, as if it were the criminal rather than the messenger. "Shall this great nation let such an insult stand?"
"No!" shouted the cavalry troopers, who were about as far from any coast as men in the United States could be.
"You're right, boys!" Roosevelt agreed. "We won't let it stand. By jingo, we can't let it stand. These vile foreign dogs will see they're barking at the wrong hound if they think they can impose themselves on the United States that way. We'll lick 'em back to their kennels with their tails between their legs."
By the time he was done whipping up the men, they were ready to ride for the Canadian border and shoot everybody they could catch who followed Queen Victoria instead of President Blaine. By the time he was done whipping himself up, he was ready to lead them over the border. He needed a distinct effort of will to remember his Regiment was still Unauthorized. If they went over the border, it wouldn't be war; it would be a filibustering expedition, and the enemy would be within his rights to treat them as bandits. He sighed. He hated having to remember such fine distinctions.
"Let's ride," he shouted. "To horse and let's ride! We cannot fight the backstabbing Englishman and complacent Canuck, not yet, not until we are formally invested with the mantle of the government of the United States. But we can ready ourselves so that, when the investiture comes-as it certainly shall-we'll be ready to do our all for the land we hold dear."
It wasn't what he'd planned to do with the day. It also wasn't the first time his impetuosity had run away with him. He knew himself well enough to be sure it wouldn't be the last time his impetuosity ran away with him. The tide of cheers the men unleashed made breaking routine seem worthwhile.
Almost as fast as he would have liked, Roosevelt 's Unauthorized Regiment was mounted and pounding north along the road in a long, sinewy column of fours. They thundered past wagons and buggies and lone horsemen who stared and stared at the power Roosevelt had assembled and now controlled. Those stares left him happier than the whiskey that flowed like water in the Montana mining towns. Anyone could get a drink of whiskey. Only a few men, special men, great men, attracted the awe the Regiment gained for him.
"Heavens above, this is bully!" he cried in a great voice. Just then, he would gladly have kept riding all the way to Canada. He would gladly have kept riding all the way through Canada. With the men he had at his back, he was sure he could do it.
Prudence prevailed, though. Montana Territory was as yet thinly settled; finding open land on which the Regiment could practice its evolutions was only a matter of riding out past the little farms and herds of livestock that clung close to running water. Once out on the prairie, the horsemen went through the tedious but vital business of shifting from column into line, of moving by the left flank and the right, and also, much to Roosevelt 's delight, of charging straight at an unfortunately imaginary enemy.
But, because Roosevelt had read the latest tactical manuals, the Unauthorized Regiment also practiced fighting as dragoons: mounted infantry. With some of their number left behind to hold horses, the rest tramped in skirmish lines through the grass and brush. The troops' captains had to rotate the job of horse-holder through their units, because everyone wanted to go forward and no one was keen to be left behind.
As the afternoon wore along, Roosevelt came to another of his snap decisions. "We'll sleep here in the open tonight, men," he announced. "We need to be hardened, to ready ourselves against the rigors of the field."
Some of the men-the lazy ones who hadn't bothered packing hardtack and salt pork in their knapsacks, unless Roosevelt missed his guess-grumbled at that, but their comrades' jeers squelched them. The soldiers (so Roosevelt insisted on thinking of them, though they remained Unauthorized despite telegrams to the War Department in Philadelphia) were getting the idea that they had to be prepared when they took the field.
"You never know what may happen," Roosevelt said. "You simply never know." He was looking north, toward Canada.
Chapter 6
A nna Douglass shook her finger at her husband. "you ain't never gonna ride on no steamboats no more," she said severely, as if to an errant child. "Never, do you hear me?"
"Yes, dear, I do," Frederick Douglass answered, his voice dutiful. "I am not traveling anywhere for the time being. I'll stay here in Rochester with you."
"That's not what I mean," his wife said in tones that brooked no argument. "Sooner or later, out you'll go again-but not by steamboat. Promise me, Frederick, as one Christian to another."
"I promise," Douglass said. These days, he refused Anna nothing she asked. Her health was visibly failing, while he remained robust. He let out a small sigh. He'd never meant to eclipse her, to have her live her life in his shadow, but that was how things had happened. In the beginning, she'd been above him: when they first came to know each other, back in Baltimore almost half a century earlier, she had been free while he still toiled in bondage. After his escape, he'd sent for her, and she'd come. In all the years since then, she'd given him a comfortable home from which he was too much absent and a fine family he'd had too small a part in raising. And now she got feebler by the day. He sighed again. There was nothing he could say, nothing he could do. It was years-decades-too late to say or do anything.
"Don't you worry about me," she said, picking a thought from his mind as a cunning thief might pick a wallet from a pocket. "I'll be fine. Whatever happens, the Lord will provide. But whatever happens, I don't want you ridin' on no steamboats."
"I already promised once," Douglass said. "The vow will not be made twice as strong by my repeating it."
"You just remember, that's all," Anna said, and hobbled back toward the kitchen, leaning heavily on her stick. Rheumatism made her joints ache.