'What you were going to say-what else?' Lincoln answered. 'I spread oil on the waters where I could. Now you go on and stir them up to a storm again.'
And Sorge did his best. It was a speech that would have set a torch under one of the small crowds of dedicated men he was used to addressing, and it did set a torch under some of the crowd in Washington Park. When he spoke of Marx, when he spoke of 1848, when he decried the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune, he struck chords in many of them. To many who heard him, though, those were foreign things of little meaning, and he did nothing to relate them to the experience of the working man in the United States.
Listening to him, Lincoln understood why Socialism had remained so small a movement for so long: it simply was not, or had not been, aimed at the common American labourer. He aimed to change that. He thought he'd made a good start.
On and on Sorge went, considerably longer than Lincoln had done. People began drifting out of the park. When the Socialist finished-'Join with us! You have nothing to lose but your chains!' some of the applause he got seemed more relieved than inspired.
Policemen began shouting: 'Now you've heard 'em! Now get the hell out of here! Show's over. Go on home.' Near the platform, one of those policemen turned to his pal and said, 'Anybody wants to know, we ought to take all these crazy bomb-throwing fanatics and string 'em up. That'd go a long way toward setting the country to rights.'
He made no effort to keep his voice down; if anything, he wanted the men on the platform to hear. Sorge turned to Lincoln and said, 'You see how the oppressors' lackeys have learned their masters' language. You also see how they ape their masters' thoughts. When we go to the barricades-'
But Lincoln shook his head. 'You notice he does not do anything about it. The first amendment to the Constitution protects our right to speak freely.' He let out a chuckle the wind flung away. 'The first amendment also protects his right to speak freely, however distasteful I find his opinion.'
Sorge made a sour face. 'Bah! You Americans, I sometimes think, suffer from an excess of this freedom.'
'If you feel that way, you should have allied yourself with Benjamin Butler or with the Democrats, not with me,' Lincoln answered. 'And when you say you Americans, you show why the Socialists have not made a better showing up until now. You must remember, you arc not looking at the United States and their citizens from some external perspective. You are-we are-a part of them.'
Had he spoken angrily, the union between his wing of the Republican Party and the Socialists might have broken down then and there. As it was, the look Sorge sent him was thoughtful rather than irate. 'Perhaps you touch here on something important. Perhaps you do indeed,' the newspaperman said. In musing tones, he went on, 'Socialism from France is different from Socialism in Germany. Perhaps Socialism in the United States will prove different from both.'
'Come on down from there, you damned crazy loons,' said the policeman who'd called a moment earlier for hanging them, 'before you both freeze to death, and before I do, too.'
Sorge might not have heard him. 'When the time comes for it to grow, as the dialectic proves that time will come, I wonder what face Socialism will wear in the Confederate States.'
Lincoln paused halfway down the steps. 'A black one,' he predicted. 'If ever there was a proletariat ruthlessly oppressed and valued only for its labour, it is the Negro population of the CSA.'
'An interesting notion,' Sorge said. 'It is for now a lumpen-proletariat, one without an intelligentsia through which to vent its rage. But, in the fullness of time, this too may change.' He suddenly seemed to realize he was alone on the platform. He also suddenly seemed to realize how cold he was. 'Brr! Let us be off.'
Surrounded by their supporters, Sorge and Lincoln made their way out of Washington Park. Cabs waited to take them back into Chicago. Friedrich Sorge jumped into one. He waved to Lincoln. 'Today the city, tomorrow the world,' he said gaily, then gave the driver his address. The cab clattered off.
Ducking his head to fit through the short, narrow doorway, Lincoln climbed into another cab. 'Where to?' the driver asked him. He gave his son's address. The driver said nothing, but flicked the reins and got rolling.
Friedrich Sorge lived in a cramped, cluttered, dingy South Side flat. Lincoln had visited him there. He had not visited Lincoln in turn; Robert had made it very plain that, while his father was welcome at his luxurious home, his father's political associates were not. Lincoln sighed. He would, sometime soon, have to find a place of his own. The idea of a Socialist leader operating out of a mansion struck him as too absurd for words.
The cab made its slow way through the bustle of Chicago. The deeper into the city it got, the more streaked with soot the snow on the ground was. Lincoln peered out through the smeary window at bustle and filth alike. 'Tomorrow the world,' he said softly. 'Tomorrow — the world.'
Jeb Stuart surveyed the magnificent terrain surrounding him with an emotion closer to despair than admiration. The Sierra Madre Mountains, the extension of the Rockies south of the U.S. border, were steep and treacherous and full of endless trails not wide enough for two men to ride abreast-often barely wide enough for one man on camelor horseback-and full of endless valleys where endless numbers of Indians could camp and elude his men. And moving guns was even harder than moving men.
Colonel Calhoun Rugglcs rode only a couple of men ahead of him. 'I wish the Camelry had been able to run down the damned Apaches,' Stuart said. He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth; he knew Ruggles had done everything he could to run the red-skinned warriors to earth.
The commander of the Fifth Confederate Cavalry looked back over his shoulder. 'Sir, I honest to God thought we'd run 'em the way hounds run a coon. They made fools out of me and my troopers, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Any men who can make fools out of my troopers-well, they're men in my book.'
'They made fools of the Yankees for a lot of years,' Stuart said, doing his best to encourage Ruggles after tearing him down. 'They helped us make fools of the Yankees, too, remember. Maybe they decided it was our turn now.'
Colonel Rugglcs shook his head. 'That's not it, or not all of it, anyway. After they burned Cananea, they knew damn well we couldn't let them get by with it, and so they lit out for the mountains.' His head went this way and that, too, with no sign whatever that he was enjoying the scenery. 'And now we're supposed to dig them out. Rrr.' The noise he made was very unhappy.
From behind Stuart, Major Horatio Sellers spoke up: 'There is one good thing about this whole business.'
'What? About wandering through the mountains for more than a month, with damn near the only times the Apaches show themselves the times when they bushwhack some of our scouts?' Stuart exclaimed. Calhoun Ruggles also shook his head in disbelief.
But, sure enough, Sellers came up with one, saying, 'If we do flush the Apaches out of their hiding places here, there's not a chance they'll ever come up with new ones, because there can't be any better in the whole wide world.'
'By God, Major, you're right about that,' Ruggles said. Stuart found himself nodding, too. In an odd sort of way, Sellers' words offered consolation. The aide-de-camp was right: ground just didn't come any worse than this.
Slowly, tortuously, the troopers descended into a valley where they'd camp for the night. Stuart did not have nearly so big a force with him as had set out from Cananea in pursuit of the Apaches. For one thing, supplying a large force in this cut-up land was impossible. For another, guarding the supplies that did come in required a lot of soldiers. Some of those supplies, inadequately guarded, were now in the Apaches' hands.
Something small and bright and colorful as a jewel hovered in front of Stuart for a moment. It stared at him for a moment out of beady black eyes, then shot off impossibly fast at an equally impossibly angle.
'Hummingbird!' he said, startled. He'd seen hummingbirds back in Virginia, of course, the familiar ruby- throats; El Paso had others, occasionally glimpsed as they buzzed from flower to flower like oversized bees. But he'd never seen one with a purple crown and brilliant green throat before. He wondered what other strange creatures the mountains harbored.
He must have said that aloud, for Major Sellers grunted laughter. 'Well, there's the Apaches, for starters,' he said. He took the saddle off his horse and set it down on a round brown rock, then started currying the animal. As with any good trooper, his horse came first.
A scout came up to Stuart. 'Sir,' he said, 'there's a trail up ahead, looks like one the Apaches used once upon a time, anyway. Got Mexican plunder all along it: dresses, saddles, flour sacks, things like that. None of it's what
