The volunteers in Tombstone kept on putting up a brave fight. As they had been in the valley south of Tucson, the U.S. forces were caught in a box with opponents coming at them from three sides at once. Here, though, they had good cover. They also had no good line of retreat from Tombstone, which made them likelier to stand where they were. Whenever Confederates or Indians pushed them, they drove off their foes with an impressive volume of fire from their Winchesters.
But then more and more of the saloons and gambling halls and sporting houses-which seemed to make up a large portion of Tombstone 's buildings-on the northern edge of town caught fire. The flames forced the defenders out of those buildings and farther back into Tombstone. The smoke from them also kept the Tombstone Rangers from shooting as accurately as they had been doing. Confederates and Apaches began dashing between flaming false fronts and into Tombstone . As Stuart rode closer to the mining town, the cheers of his men and the Indians' war cries drowned the shouts of dismay from the U.S. Volunteers.
Major Horatio Sellers rode alongside him. "Sir, will you send in a man under flag of truce to give the Yankees a chance to surrender?"
Geronimo and Chappo were also riding forward with the Confederate commander. Before Stuart could answer, Chappo spoke urgently to his father in the Apache language. Geronimo answered with similar urgency and greater excitement. Chappo returned to English: "Do not give them a chance to give up. They have done us too many harms to have a chance to give up."
Sure as the devil, the Apaches were using the Confederates to pay back their own enemies. But then Major Sellers said, "It's not as if they were Regular Army men, sir, true enough. Probably better than half of them are gamblers or road agents or riffraff of some kind or another."
The spectacle of his aide-de-camp agreeing with Geronimo instead of trying to find a persuasive excuse to massacre him bemused Stuart. It also helped him make up his mind. "If the Tombstone Rangers want to surrender, they can send a man to us. I won't make it easy for them."
Chappo translated that for Geronimo. His father grunted, spoke, gestured, spoke again. Chappo didn't turn his response back into English. From the old Indian's tone and expression, though, Jeb Stuart thought he could make a good guess about what it meant: something to the effect of, Oh, all right. I'd sooner every one of them bit the dust, but if they give up, what can you do?
A dirty-faced Confederate came running back to Stuart. "Sir, the damn-yankees put a couple of sharpshooters up in that church steeple"-he pointed back through drifted smoke toward what was plainly the tallest structure in Tombstone -"and they've done hit a bunch of our boys."
"I can't knock 'em out by myself, Corporal," Stuart answered. He looked back to see where the field guns were. A couple of them had already taken up positions in the graveyard, not far from where the Napoleon had stood. "Go tell them. They'll take care of it."
The range was short; the gunners were barely out of effective Winchester range from the outskirts of Tombstone, and might have come under severe fire from U.S. Army Springfields. Stuart watched shells fall around the church. Then one gun crew made a pretty good shot and exploded their shell against the topmost part of the steeple. No further reports of Yankee sharpshooters there came to Stuart's cars.
That church, he found when he rode into town, was at the corner of Third and Safford. The Tombstone Rangers made a final stand a block south of it, at the adobe Wells Fargo office at Third and Fremont and the corral across the street from it, whose fences they'd reinforced with planks and stones and bricks and whatever else they could find. The OK Corral was a target artillerists dreamt of. After a couple of salvos turned the place into a slaughterhouse, the defenders raised a white flag and threw down their guns, and the fighting stopped.
Geronimo, seeing the men who had so tormented the Apaches now in his allies' hands, wanted to change his mind and dispose of them on the spot. "No," Stuart told him through Chappo. "We don't massacre men in cold blood."
"What will you do with them?" the medicine man asked.
"Send them down to Hermosillo, along with the rest of the U.S. soldiers we've captured," Stuart answered.
Geronimo sighed. "It is not enough."
"It will have to do," Stuart told him. "We haven't done too badly here, when you think about it. We've cleared U.S. forces from a big stretch of south-western New Mexico Territory, and we did it without getting badly hurt at all."
"Much of what you did, you did because we helped you," Geronimo replied through Chappo. "We should have some reward."
He could not force the issue; he had not the men for that. Stuart said, "You do have a reward. Here is all this land with no Yankee soldiers on it. Here are your braves with the fine rifles they have from us. How can you complain?"
"It is not enough," Geronimo repeated. He said nothing more after that. Stuart resolved to keep a close eye on him and his followers.
As soon as Abraham Lincoln saw the crowd that had come to hear him in Great Falls, he knew he would not have such an appreciative audience as he had enjoyed in Helena. By the standards of Montana Territory, Helena was an old town, having been founded just after the end of the War of Secession. Great Falls, by contrast, was so new the unpainted lumber of the storefronts and houses hardly looked weathered.
More to the point, though, Helena was a mining town, a town built up from nothing by the labourers who worked their claims-and who, most of them, worked luckier men's claims these days-in the surrounding hills. Great Falls, by contrast, was a foundation of capital, a town that had sprung to life when the railroad out to the Pacific went through. If it hadn't been for fear of the British up in Canada, the railroad would probably still remain unbuilt. But it was here, and so were the people it had brought. Storekeepers and merchants and brokers predominated: the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat.
Lincoln sighed. In Helena, he'd got exactly the response he'd wanted. He'd told the miners some home truths about the way the country treated them. Without more than a handful of Negroes to exploit, it battened off the sweat of the poor and the ignorant and the newly arrived and the unlucky. Capitalists didn't want their victims to know that.
Capitalists had reasons for not wanting their victims to know that, too. After he'd told the miners some things of which their bosses would have preferred them to remain ignorant, they'd torn up Helena pretty well. He smiled at the thought of it. He hadn't touched off that kind of donnybrook in years.
He'd won the supreme accolade from one of the local capitalists, a tough, white-bearded fellow named Thomas Cruse: "If I ever set eyes on you again, you son of a bitch," Cruse had growled, "I'll blow your stinking brains out."
"Thank you, sir," Lincoln had answered, which only served to make Cruse madder. Lincoln wasn't about to lose sleep over that. From what he'd heard, Cruse had once been a miner, one of the handful lucky enough to strike it rich. Having made his pile, he'd promptly forgotten his class origins, in much the same way as an Irish washerwoman who'd married well would come back from a European tour spelling her name Brigitte, not Brigid.
Another sigh came from his lips. No, no sparks tonight, not from these comfortable, well-dressed people. A couple of Army officers sat in the second row, no doubt to listen for any seditious utterances he might make. One of them looked preposterously young to be wearing a cavalry colonel's uniform. Lincoln wondered what sort of strings the fellow had pulled to get his command, and why he'd tied a red bandanna around his left upper arm.
Rather nervously, a local labour organizer (not that there was much local labour to organize) named Lancaster Stubbins introduced Lincoln to the crowd: "Friends, let's give a warm Montana welcome to the man who makes it hot for capital, the fiery champion of the working man, the former president of the United States, Mr. Abraham Lincoln!"