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
Anna 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.
Douglass knew he should have been writing, transmuting his few minutes of fear aboard the Queen of the Ohio into prose that would galvanize men both black and white to the effort needed to overthrow the Confederate States and thereby ameliorate the plight of the millions of Negroes still enslaved. His first pieces, which had talked of his own fear of re-enslavement if the steamboat went aground on Confederate soil, had won wide notice and praise. The newspapers and magazines eagerly awaited more, and had made it plain they would pay well.
But, at the moment, the urge to write was not upon him. He shook his head and grimaced wryly. As a veteran newspaperman, he knew you wrote when you had to write, not when the Muse sprinkled fairy dust in your hair and tapped you with a magic wand. He also knew he didn't have to write quite yet. Instead of going upstairs to his study, he walked outside.
Out on the street, the grandson of one of his neighbors was trying to stay upright on an ordinary. The huge front wheel of the bicycle was almost as tall as its rider. As he pedaled along on a wavering course, he waved proudly to Douglass.
Douglass waved back. He'd lived in Rochester for almost thirty-five years, long enough for most people to have come to take him for granted in spite of his color. These days, the city did not separate Negroes by race on trolleys or omnibuses or in places accommodating the public. It hadn't been that way when Douglass first came to upstate New York. He knew no small pride in having had a lot to do with the changes over the years.
'Look out, Daniel!' he called, just too late. The ordinary went into a pothole and fell over, dashing its rider to the street from a considerable height. The boy picked himself up, picked up the bicycle, and sturdily clambered aboard once more. You fall down till you do it right, Douglass thought with an approving nod. That's the only way to learn.
Aside from a couple of church steeples, the biggest buildings on the skyline were boxy flour mills. Grain came into Rochester from all the surrounding countryside- the Genesee Valley held some of the finest farmland in the United States — and went out again by way of the Erie Canal, the railroads, and the Great Lakes. From his home, which stood near the crest of a small hill, Douglass could look out across the city to the gray-blue waters of Lake Ontario. But for those waters' being fresh, he might have been looking out at the sea.
As always, barges and small steamers glided slowly across the lake. Pillars of smoke rose from their stacks, as they did from the stacks of Rochester 's factories. The air, though, was far better than that in St. Louis or other western towns, for the coal burned here was of higher grade than what they used along the Mississippi.
Several unusually large plumes of smoke out on the lake caught Douglass' eye. The vessels from which those plumes sprang were also unusually large, and appeared to be moving together. They made Rochester seem more like a seaside town than ever; when he'd been in Boston and New York, he'd often watched flotillas of Navy ships steaming into port in tight formation like these.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than fresh clouds of smoke billowed from the ships. Douglass was seeing them from a long way off. For a moment, he wondered whether their boilers had burst. Then the roars, which took some little time to cross that distance, reached his ears. He froze in place, the ice of remembered terror
