has a thing or two to say on the subject of a free press. Has either of you blockheads ever heard of it?'
Reporters, typesetters, and printers had been edging through the Morning Call offices toward the altercation. A savage grin stretched across Sam's face. If these hooligans tried hauling him away by force, they'd have a battle on their hands. Newspapermen looked after their own.
But then the bigger intruder said, 'We ain't here on account of what you write, Mister Clemens.' Unexpectedly, he had the wit to load that with irony, and to add, 'Hell, nobody reads it, anyways. We're here on account of it's done been reported that you are a veteran of the Confederate States of America. Is it so or ain't it that you were in the Confederate Army during the War of Secession?'
Clemens started to laugh. Then he got a look at the faces of the men who worked with him at the Morning Call. None of them had ever heard the story of his brief, absurd stint as a Rebel private in Missouri. None of them looked interested in hearing it, either. Even before he could answer, they started slipping back toward the places where they worked.
'Is it or ain't it?' the ruffian repeated.
'Not to speak of,' Sam said at last. 'The company I was in never did more than mooch around a bit to impress the girls.'
'But you were in, were you?' the big man with the revolver said. 'You come along with us, then, pal. You can do your explaining to the soldiers. If they reckon you're on the up and up, then they do, is all. But if they don't, they'll put you away where you can't get into any mischief.'
'This is an outrage!' Clemens thundered. Nobody else in the offices said anything at all. The smaller ruffian seemed to remember he had a gun. He jerked the muzzle in the direction of the doorway. With a sigh, Clemens walked to the door. He grabbed his hat off the tree as he went by. 'Let's get this over with. The sooner we do, the sooner I can come back here and let the world know what a pack of damned fools we've got running around loose these days.'
The men with revolvers didn't seem inclined to argue with him. As long as he did what they said, they didn't care what else he did: stacked against a Colt, what did an insult or two matter? They had a buggy tied up outside the building. The silence behind Sam as he shut the door hurt him worse than his sallies hurt the spy-hunters.
'The both of you are plumb loco,' Clemens said as the smaller fellow took up the reins and began to drive. 'If I've been such a grand and dreadful terror to the United States lo these many years, what in sweet Jesus' name was I doing as assistant to the governor's secretary in Nevada Territory even before the blamed war was over?' That the secretary had been his brother Orion, after whom his son was named, he did not bother mentioning.
'Don't know,' replied the bigger gunman, the one with some trace of wit. 'What were you doing there?' By his tone, Sam might have been sending a daily telegram to Richmond from Carson City.
Clemens replied only with dignified silence. He also did not ask where they were going, as he had intended. He judged that would become obvious in short order, a judgment vindicated when the little ruffian headed north and west, away from the heart of the city. The only thing of any consequence in that direction was the Presidio, the Army base charged with defending San Francisco.
No matter how long Sam had lived in these parts, he never ceased to marvel at the beauty of the view across the Golden Gate, looking north toward Sausalito: blue sky, green-blue sea, the wooded headland rising swiftly above it. A ferry boat, thin black plume of smoke rising from its stack, gave a touch of human scale to nature's grandeur.
So did the stone walls of Fort Point. When a sentry came forward to demand the business of the new arrivals, the bigger of Sam's captors said, 'We got a feller here might be a spy.'
'Like hell I am!' Sam shouted. As far as the sentry was concerned, he was invisible and inaudible. The bluecoat waved the wagon into the fort.
Having reached the garrison commander's waiting room in jig time, Clemens proceeded to put it to the purpose for which it was named: he waited, and waited, and waited. The bravos who'd shanghaied him didn't wait with him: they had better things to do. When he poked his head out of the door to the parade ground through which he'd come in, a soldier pointed a bayoneted Springfield at him and growled, 'You get back in there. The colonel'll see you in his time, not yours.' Fuming, Sam retreated.
At last, after what had to be closer to two hours than one, the door to Colonel William T. Sherman's office opened. 'Come in, Mr. Clemens,' Sherman said. Lean and erect, he wore a close-trimmed beard that had once been red and was now mostly white. His mouth was a thin slash; his pale eyes did their best to stare through Sam. Harsh lines ran down his pinched cheeks, losing themselves in his beard near the corners of that narrow mouth. The word that sprang to Clemens' mind for him was bitter.
His office presented a stark contrast to the genial clutter that made finding things on Sam's desk an adventure. Everything here was obviously just where it belonged. Sam was sure anything that had the gall to go where it didn't belong, even to sidle an inch out of place, would end up in the guardhouse to teach it never to get gay again.
Sherman sat; he did not invite Clemens to sit. Glancing down at the beginning of the editorial the smaller gunman had purloined, and also at a large, neatly written sheet of paper on which Sam could make out his name, he said, 'Why don't you tell me why you're here, sir?'
Clemens normally wisecracked without thinking, much as he breathed. Facing this man, he restrained himself. 'I am here, Colonel, because I served something less than a month in the Marion Rangers, a Confederate unit of sorts in Missouri, during the War of Secession. Because of that, someone has decided I must be a spy.'
Sherman said, 'When Louisiana seceded, I was teaching at a military academy there. I resigned at once, and came north to serve my country as best I could. How is it that you fought under the Stars and Bars?'
'I never fought under them,' Sam replied. 'I marched a bit and rode a horse a bit, but I never once fought. Governor Jackson called for soldiers to repel the U.S. invaders-so he named them-which is how the Marion Rangers came to be. It was a grand and glorious unit, Colonel-there were fifteen of us, all told. The one time we got near a farmhouse that some U.S. troops were guarding, our captain-Tom Lyman, his name was-told us to attack it. We told him no; to a man, we said no. The rest of my so-called military career was cut from the same stuff. I never fired a shot at a soldier of the United States. None of us did, before the Marion Rangers became as one with Nineveh and Tyre.'
Sherman 's jaw worked. 'You put this down to youthful indiscretion, then? — for you would have been a young man in 1861.'
'That's just what I put it down to, Colonel,' Sam said with an emphatic nod.
'And you did serve the U.S. government in Nevada,' Sherman said, checking that paper again. Sam wondered how much of his life's story was contained thereon. In musing tones, Sherman continued, 'Yet these days, you speak out strongly in the papers against the war, as you have here.' He let a finger rest on the editorial fragment for a moment. 'What connection, if any, has the one to the other?'
'Colonel, you've seen real war at first hand, which is far more than 1 ever did,' Clemens said. 'What is your opinion of it?'
'My opinion?' He'd startled Sherman. But the officer did not hesitate long; Sam got the idea he seldom hesitated long about anything. 'War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. Its glory is all moon-shine. Only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded cry aloud for blood, vengeance, and desolation. War is as close to hell as a merciful God allows upon this earth.'
That was more than Sam had bargained for. 'If you can speak so strongly and still defend our country, how does questioning the wisdom and conduct of this war make me a Confederate agent?'
Sherman stroked his chin. 'You might be an agent, using such a pretext as concealment.' His mouth thinned further; Clemens had not thought it could. 'But I have no evidence to say you arc, not a particle. What you say of the Marion Rangers squares with what I have on this sheet here-the men who brought you in were overzcalous. We were all quite mad twenty years ago. It should never have happened.' That thin mouth twisted. 'I shall write you a good character, Mr. Clemens, which you must show to be released from this fortress, and may show to anyone seeking to trouble you hereafter.' He inked a pen and began to write.
'Thank you, Colonel,' Clemens said fervently. 'One thing more?' Sherman looked up from his work. Sam went on, 'May I beg the use of a horse or buggy? The gentlemen who brought me here did not wait upon the outcome of your hearing.' He said not a word about how long he'd waited himself.
'I'll see to it,' Sherman said. The pen scratched over the paper. Sam did not mind waiting now, not a bit.
