'Well, the camels likely have something to do with that, but it's true enough, heaven knows,' Brien said. He waved out over the barren landscape. 'If you keep most of your men so far forward, sir, will you be able to provision them?'
'I certainly hope so,' Stuart said. 'I'm given to understand Hermosillo is in the center of a farming district. Whatever supplies you can send north will be welcome, the more so if the route west from El Paso is… interrupted.'
'Yes, sir,' Tiernan Brien said again. Most of two decades of garrison duty had laid a heavy patina of routine over the dashing young trooper he'd once been, but, like a lot of the other veteran officers in Stuart's force, he was starting to shine up once more. 'By your dispositions, sir, you really do think the Yankees will try to make good on their bluster.'
'No, Colonel, truth to tell, I don't,' Stuart answered. 'But I am going to act as if I did. If the United States are foolish enough to contest this annexation, my judgment is that they pose a greater threat to us than any disaffected Mexicans. That being so, I intend to keep the bulk of my forces where they can best respond to any moves by the USA.' He grinned. 'My dispositions reflect my disposition, which is cautious.'
Colonel Brien smiled, showing teeth stained brown by the plug of tobacco that swelled one cheek. 'Beg your pardon, sir, but we've been soldiering together for a long time, and I don't reckon cautious is a word I'd put together with your name up till now.'
'Maybe I'm getting old,' Stuart said. Then he grinned again, and barked a couple of times. 'Or maybe I'm learning a new trick.'
'Now you're talking, sir,' Tiernan Brien said enthusiastically.
'Wake up, Sam.' Alexandra Clemens nudged her husband, then nudged him harder when he didn't move. 'It's half past seven.'
Reluctantly, Samuel Clemens pried his eyes open. His nostrils twitched. 'You're an angel in human form, my dear. I say that, you understand, only because you've already got the coffee boiling.'
'You'd throw me in the street if I didn't.' Alexandra owned-and honed-a wit that could rival her husband's, and wasn't shy about using it. It was all the more effective because she looked so mild and innocent: wide, fair face; blue eyes mild as milk till the devil came out in them; golden hair that, let down for the night, spilled over her shoulders and onto her white nightdress so that, but for wings, she really did have something of an angelic aspect at the moment.
When Sam, still in his own nightshirt, came downstairs for that coffee, his son Orion leaped into his lap and almost made the cup and contents end up there, too. Not a thing angelic about Orion; sometimes all that kept Sam from strangling him was remembering he'd been even worse at the same age. 'Why aren't you busy getting ready for school?' Sam demanded.
Orion withered him with a glance. ' 'Cause it's closed for the summer,' he said triumphantly.
'I know that,' his father answered. 'But if you were, you'd be out of my hair.' With six-year-old gusto, Orion stuck out his tongue.
Ophelia, who was four, came into the dining room a little later: of the family, she was fondest of sleeping late. She looked like her mother, with a child's sweetness thrown in for good measure. Walking up to her father, she took his big hands in her little ones and said, 'Hello, you old goat.'
'Hello, yourself,' Sam said gravely. However much Ophelia looked like Alexandra, she behaved more like Orion, which horrified her mother and-most of the time-amused her father. 'If you live, you'll go far, my dear.' Sam tousled her golden curls, then added, in meditative tones, 'Of course, the penitentiary is pretty far from here.'
Ophelia, for once, missed the joke. So did Orion. Alexandra, who didn't, sent her husband a severe look he ignored.
Sometimes getting out of the house on Turk Street and heading over to the Morning Call offices on Market felt more like escape than anything else. Despite going uphill and down, Sam enjoyed the walk. Going uphill was harder work for heavily laden horses. Teamsters' whips cracked over and sometimes on the backs of the straining beasts. Then, brakes squealing on the wagons they pulled, the horses had to ease the loads downhill.
Fifteen minutes after kissing his wife good-bye, Clemens walked into the office. When he got there, Clay Herndon leaped at him with almost as much terrifying enthusiasm as Orion had shown. Herndon, though, had an excuse any newspaperman would have forgiven: the telegram he waved in Clemens' face. 'You've got to see this!' he shouted.
'How can I argue with logic like that?' Sam took the thin sheet of paper and rapidly read through it. When he was done, he nodded a couple of times, then said, 'A lot of people must be surprised today: everybody who didn't think Blaine knew a four-syllable word, for instance.'
'If he only knows one, he picked the right one to know,' retorted Herndon, a resolute Republican. 'I'd say it gives us the headline for the next edition, wouldn't you?'
''Ultimatum'?' Clemens said. 'Now that you mention it, yes. If ever a word screamed for seventy-two-point type, that's the one.' He took off his derby and hung it on the hat tree just inside the door. As soon as he got to his desk, he slid off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. Then he removed the studs from his cuffs, put them in a vest pocket, and rolled up his sleeves.
'Ready to give it a go, are you?' Herndon said.
His tone was mildly mocking, but Sam ignored that. 'You bet I am,' he said. 'Give me that wire again, will you? I want to make sure I have everything right.' He paused to light a cigar, then reread the telegram. 'Always a good day when the editorial comes up and whimpers in your face, begging to be set at liberty.'
'If you say so, Sam,' Herndon replied. 'Makes me glad I'm nothing but a humble scribe.'
'Get over to City Hall, scribe,' Clemens said. 'Get the mayor's reaction. In other words, give me the statement that goes with this.' He donned an expression somewhere between dumbfoundment and congenital idiocy. The San Francisco Morning Call did not love Mayor Adolph Sutro. It was mutual.
Herndon struck a pose that might have been a politician on the stump or a man waiting with concentrated urgency to use the privy. ' T am opposed with every fiber of my being to the war that may come, and I expect us to gain great and glorious triumph in it,' ' he declaimed. 'There. Now I don't need to make the trip.'
Sam blew cigar smoke at him. 'Go on, get out of here. His Honor might have got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, and if he did he'll say he's all for the war but calculates we'll take a licking. God forbid we should misquote him. He wouldn't notice, since he can't remember on Tuesday what he said the Friday before-figures that's the papers' job-but some of his friends-well, cronies; a creature like that's not likely to have friends-just might.'
Snickering, Herndon grabbed his hat, slung his jacket over his shoulder-it was another of those seasonless San Francisco days, not quite warm, not quite cool-and departed. Clemens drew on the cigar again, absentmindedly tapped its ash into a brass tray, and set it back in the corner of his mouth. He knew he was liable to forget about it once he started writing.
Pen scraped across paper.
President Blaine has told the nation and the world that, if the Confederate States do not withdraw their soldiers-soldiers they deployed without the consent of the United States, and against the express wishes of the same-from the provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora within ten days, he will ask Congress to declare a state of war in existence between the United States and the Confederate States.
He fails to include the Empire of Mexico in his ultimatum, which is no doubt only an oversight on his part. After all, leaving the disputed provinces out of the bargain, the United States do still abut Maximilian's dominions where our Upper California touches his Lower, whose cactuses arc every bit as dire a threat to the United States as any now sprouted in Sonora.
As noted before in this space, acquiring Sonora and Chihuahua represents-or, at least, may represent in the future-a new access of strength for the Confederate Sates, as did their purchase of Cuba a few years ago, a purchase to which the United States consented without a murmur. But we were then under a Democratic administration, and a Congress likewise Democratic: a party whose attitude toward the Confederacy has always been that the blamed thing would not be there if anybody had listened to them in the beginning and patted the then-Southern states on the head and told them what good boys they were until they eventually believed it and went to sleep in place of seceding, and has dealt with them since the War of Secession as if they were so many percussion caps filled with fulminate, and liable to explode if stepped on or dropped.
