between carriages these days. Going from car to car on a jolting train had been a dangerous business even a handful of years before. More than a few people had slipped and fallen to their death, and a cinder in the eye or a face full of soot was only to be expected.
After ham and eggs and rolls and coffee, the world looked a more cheerful place. He was leaving behind the prairie now, going up toward the mountains. The locomotive laboured over the upgrades and then, as if relieved, sped down the other side of each rise. Watching trees and boulders flying past was exhilarating, even if Lincoln knew how many accidents happened on such downgrades.
At last, nearer three hours late than two, the train pulled into Denver. The depot was small and dilapidated. A broad stretch of empty ground on the other side of the tracks would, Lincoln had heard, be a fancy new station one day. At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, it was just empty ground. Wildflowers and weeds splashed it with color.
' Denver!' the conductor shouted, as he had for every hamlet along the way to the biggest city in the heart of the West. 'All out for Denver!'
Lincoln put his speech in a leather valise, got up, grabbed his bulky carpetbag, and made his way out of the Pullman car. After a couple of days on the train, solid ground felt shaky under his feet, as it was said to do for sailors just off their ships. He set his stovepipe firmly on his head and looked around.
Amid the usual scenes on a railway-station platform-families greeting loved ones with cries of joy, bankers greeting capitalists with louder (if perhaps less sincere) cries of joy-Lincoln spotted a couple of rugged fellows who had the look of miners dressed up in their best, and probably only, suits. Even before they started moving purposefully through the crowd toward him, he had them pegged for the men he was to meet.
'Mr. McMahan and Mr. Cavanaugh, I presume?' he said, setting down the carpetbag so he could extend his right hand.
'That's right, Mr. Lincoln,' said one of them, who wore a ginger-colored mustache. 'I'm Joe McMahan; you can call Cavanaugh here Fred.' His grip was hard and firm.
'Long as you don't call me late to supper,' Cavanaugh said agreeably. He was a couple of inches taller than McMahan, with a scar on his chin that looked as if it had come from a knife fight. Both men were altogether unselfconscious about the revolvers on their right hips. Lincoln had been in the West a good many times, and was used to that.
'Come on, sir,' McMahan said. 'Here, let me take that.' He picked up the carpetbag. 'We'll get you to the hotel, let you freshen up some and get yourself a tad more shut-eye, too, if that's what you want. These here trains, they're all very fine, but a body can't hardly sleep on 'em.'
'They're better than they used to be,' Lincoln said. 'I was thinking that last night, when the porter made up my berth. But you're right-they're not all they might be.'
'Come on, then,' McMahan repeated. 'Amos has the buggy waiting for us.'
As they walked out of the station, they passed a beggar, a middle-aged fellow with a gray-streaked beard who had both legs gone above the knee. Lincoln fumbled in his pockets till he found a quarter, which he tossed into the tin cup on the floor beside the man.
'I thank you for your kind-' the beggar began in a singsong way. Then his eyes-eyes that had seen a lot of pain, and, by the rheumy look in them, a lot of whiskey, too-widened as he recognized his benefactor. He reached into the cup, took out the quarter, and threw it at Lincoln. It hit him in the chest and fell to the ground with a clink. 'God damn you, you son of a bitch, I don't want any charity from you,' the legless man snarled. 'Wasn't for you, I'd be up and walking, not living out my days like this.'
Fred Cavanaugh took Lincoln by the arm and hurried him along. 'Don't take no notice of Teddy there,' he said, the beggar's curses following them. 'He gets some popskull in him, he don't know what the hell he's talkin' about.'
'Oh, he knows well enough.' Lincoln 's mouth was a tight, hard line. 'I've heard that tune before, many times. The men who suffered so much in the War of Secession blame me for it. They have the right, I think. I blame myself, too, though that's little enough consolation for them.'
Amos, the buggy driver, was cut from the same mold as Cavanaugh and McMahan. The horses clopped up the street. Mud kicked up from their hooves and the wheels of the buggy. For all the wealth that had come out of the mines nearby, Denver boasted not a single paved road. Streams of water ran in the gutters. Trees shaded the residential blocks. Most of the houses-and the public buildings, too-were of either bright red brick or the local yellow stone, which gave the town a pleasingly colorful look.
Miners in collarless shirts and blue-dyed dungarees mingled on the streets with businessmen who would not have been out of place in Chicago or New York. No, after a moment, Lincoln revised that opinion: some of the businessmen went armed, too.
When he remarked on that, Joe McMahan's mouth twisted in bitterness. 'A man has more'n what he deserves and don't see fit to share it with his pals who ain't got so much, Mr. Lincoln, he's a fool if he don't reckon they're liable to try and equalize the wealth whether he likes it or not.'
'True enough,' Lincoln said. 'So true, it may tear our country apart again one day. Slave labour comes in more forms than that which still persists in the Confederate States.'
Amos shifted a wad of tobacco into his cheek, spat, and said, 'Damn straight it does. That's why we brung you out here-to talk about that.'
'I know.' Lincoln went back to watching the street scenes. Miner, merchant, banker-you could tell so much about a man's class and wealth by how he dressed. Women were sometimes harder to gauge. Who was poor and who was not gave him no trouble. But if a woman dressed as if she'd come from the pages of Leslie's Illustrated Weekly but painted her face like a strumpet, was she a strumpet or the wife of some newly rich mining nabob? In Denver, that was less obvious than it would have been farther east, where cosmetics were prima facie evidence a woman was fast. The rules were different here, and no wonder, for a woman could go-and several had gone- straight from strumpet to nabob's wife.
In its ornate pretentiousness, the Hotel Metropole matched anything anywhere in the country. 'Here you go, Mr. Lincoln,' Fred Cavanaugh said. 'You'll be right comfortable here, get yourself all good and ready for your speech tonight. You'd best believe a lot of folks want to hear what you've got to say about labour nowadays.'
'Hear me they shall,' Lincoln said. 'What they do if they hear where I'm staying, though, may be something else again. Are they not liable to take me for one of the exploiters over whom they are concerned?'
'Mr. Lincoln, you won't find anybody in Colorado got a thing to say against living soft,' Cavanaugh answered. 'What riles folks is grinding other men's noses in the dirt to let a few live soft.'
'I understand the distinction,' Lincoln said. 'As you remind me, the essential point is that so many in the United States, like virtually all the whites in the Confederacy, do not.'
The Hotel Metropole met every reasonable standard for soft living, and most of the unreasonable ones as well. After a hot bath in a galvanized tub at the end of the hall, after a couple of fried pork chops for lunch, Lincoln would have been happy enough to stretch out on the bed for a couple of hours, even if he would have had to sleep diagonally to keep from kicking the footboard. But the speech came first.
He was still polishing it, having altogether forgotten about supper, when Joe McMahan knocked on the door. 'Come on, Mr. Lincoln,' he said. 'We've got ourselves a full house for you tonight.'
The hall was not so elegant as the opera house near the Hotel Metropole. It was, in fact, a dance hall with a podium hastily plunked by one wall. But, as McMahan had said, it was packed. From long practice guessing crowds, Lincoln figured more than a thousand men-miners and refinery workers, most of them, and farmers, with here and there a shopkeeper to leaven the mix-stood shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow, to hear what he had to say.
They cheered loud and long when McMahan introduced him. Most of them were young. Young men thought of him as labour's friend in a land where capital was king. Older men, like the beggar in the railway depot, still damned him for fighting, and most of all for losing, the War of Secession. I'd have been a hero if I won, he thought. And I'd have been a housewife, or more likely a homely old maid, if I'd been born a woman. So what?
He put on his spectacles and glanced down at the notes he'd written on the train and in the hotel. 'A generation ago,' he began, 'I said a house divided against itself, half slave and half free, could not stand. And it did not stand, though its breaking was not in the manner I should have desired.' He never made any bones about the past. It was there. Everyone knew it.
'The Confederate States continue all slave to this day,' he said. 'How the financiers in London and Paris smile on their plantations, their railroads, their ironworks! How capital floods into their land! And how much of it, my
