insurrection that broke out.
Custer rode into the fort like a conquering hero. 'Another Mormon villain captured!' he cried in a great voice. The soldiers manning the gates and up on the stockade raised a cheer. Custer took off his hat and waved it about. That drew another cheer.
Hearing the commotion, Brigadier General John Pope came out of his office to see what was going on. 'Ah, Colonel Custer!' he said, and then looked past Custer to the prisoner. 'So this is the famous George Cannon of whom you telegraphed me, is it? He doesn't look so much like a wild-eyed fanatic as some of the ones we snared before.'
'No, sir,' Custer agreed: close enough for his superiors to hear him, he made a point of agreeing with them. 'But without their coldhearted, cool-headed comrades egging them on, the wild-eyed fanatics could not do so much damage.'
'That, as we have seen here, is nothing less than the truth,' Pope said heavily. 'Well done, Colonel. Get him down from his high horse'-the military governor laughed at his own wit, and so, of course, did Custer-'and take him to the stockade. In due course, we shall try him, and, in due course, I have no doubt we shall hang him by the neck until he is dead.'
Politely, Cannon said, 'I presume you shall be the judge at these proceedings? Good to know you come into them unbiased.'
'You Mormons have corrupted courts in Utah Territory too long,' Pope replied. 'You shall not have the opportunity to do so any more.'
Dismounting, Custer walked over to George Cannon's horse and cut the ropes that bound his feet. He helped the manacled prisoner get down from the animal, then started to lead him to the row of cells that had been intended for drunk soldiers who got into brawls but now held as many Mormon leaders as the U.S. Army had been able to track down.
After a couple of steps across the parade ground, Custer stopped dead. Since he had his arm hooked to Cannon's, the Mormon bigwig perforce stopped, too. Custer, for the moment, entirely forgot the prisoner he'd been so proud of capturing. Pointing across the grounds, he growled, 'What in blazes is he doing here?'
John Pope's gaze swung toward the tall figure walking along at a loose-jointed amble. In something approaching a purr, the military governor answered, 'Honest Abe? He's under arrest for consorting with John Taylor, and for refusing to tell us the miserable rebel's whereabouts.'
'Is that a fact, sir?' Custer's eyes glowed. 'Can you hang him, too? Heaven knows he's deserved it, these past twenty years. If it hadn't been for him, we wouldn't have had to fight the War of Secession-and, if it hadn't been for him, I think we should have won it.' By putting it that way, he managed to blame Lincoln for his treatment of both McClellan and Pope.
'I am forbidden to hang him,' Pope said unhappily. 'I am even forbidden formally to keep him under lock and key, though President Blaine in his generosity does permit me to retain him in custody here at the fort.' He muttered something into his beard. Aloud, he added, ' Blaine is a Republican, too.'
'Republicans,' Custer made the word a venomous oath. 'They get us into wars, and then they fight them every wrong way they can find. If half-if a quarter-of what the wires are saying about the fighting in Louisville is true-' He kicked up a small cloud of dust, then rubbed his boot clean on the back of his other trouser leg.
'Orlando Willcox always was better at praying than he was at fighting,' Pope said. 'That impressed the redskins when he was out here in the West. He's not fighting the redskins any more. He's fighting Stonewall Jackson.'
'We both know about that,' Custer said with a grimace. He abruptly seemed to remember he still had hold of George Q. Cannon. 'Come along, you.' He jerked the Mormon prisoner forward.
Once he had raced through the formalities of turning Cannon over to the warder, he hurried out to the parade ground once more. He needed only a moment to spot Lincoln, who was strolling along with as little apparent concern as if in a hotel garden. Custer trotted over to him. 'How dare you?' he demanded.
Lincoln looked down at him: a long way down because, even though beginning to be shrunken by age, the former president was still the taller of them by half a foot or more. 'How dare I what?' he asked now, his voice mild. 'Take a walk here? I didn't know it was private property, and I'm not stepping on the grass to any great degree.'
The parade ground being bare dirt, there was no grass on which to step. Custer scowled at Lincoln, who bore the glower with the air of a man who had borne a lot of glowers. 'How dare you treat with the Mormons without leave?' he snapped.
'I hoped I might persuade Mr. Taylor to yield in such a way as to make this occupation do as little damage to the Constitution as possible,' Lincoln answered. 'In this, I fear, I was unsuccessful, Mormons possessing the same aversion to having their necks stretched as any other segment of the populace.'
'Force is the only lesson the Mormons understand,' Custer said.
'He who sows the wind will one day reap the whirlwind,' Lincoln returned. 'The store of hatred the U.S. Army builds for itself will come back to haunt it.'
'As the Confederate States ought now to be reaping the whirlwind whose wind you sowed,' Custer said. That got through to Lincoln; Custer smiled to watch him grimace. He went on, 'How dare you presume to hide from us John Taylor's whereabouts?'
To his surprise, Lincoln laughed at that. 'My dear Colonel, do you mean to tell me you believe Taylor will still be where he was?'
Custer felt foolish. He covered that with bluster. 'Now, of course not. Had you come to the U.S. military authorities directly you returned from this illicit meeting, we might have been able to capture the traitor, as he would have had only a short head start on our men.'
'There you may possibly be correct, Colonel Custer,' Lincoln answered. 'But, in his seeking to use me as an intermediary, I judged-and judge still-that Mr. Taylor in effect made me his client, and I would be violating my responsibility to him in revealing where we met.'
'If you are going to hide behind every jot and tittle of the law to save a criminal and a traitor from his just deserts, then in my view you deserve to go up on the gallows with him when we do seize him,' Custer said. 'I have no patience with legalistic folderol and humbug.'
'If we do not live by law, what shall we live by?' Lincoln asked.
'When the law fails us, as it has plainly done in Utah Territory, shall we live by it no matter how dear that may cost us?' Custer returned.
Lincoln sighed. 'There, Colonel, you pose a serious question, whether that be your intention or not. Much of the history of the law in the United States — and, indeed, in the world, or what I know of itsprings from the dialectical struggle between your observation and mine.'
'The what kind of struggle?' Custer asked.
'Never mind,' Lincoln said. 'I would not expect you to be a student of either Hegel or Marx. Their works have come late to this side of the Atlantic, and are not yet appreciated as they should be.'
Custer had not heard of either of them. That made him feel smugly superior, not ignorant. 'We've got no need for a pack of damned foreign liars. We've got enough homegrown liars, seems to me.' He glared fiercely up at the former president. 'And if you didn't have a president of your own miserable party to protect you from the consequences of your treason, we would see if we could build a gallows tall enough to stretch you on it.'
'My legs have always been long enough to reach the ground,' Lincoln said. 'I should prefer that they continue to do so.'
'I shouldn't,' Custer said, and turned his back on the man he blamed for so many of the country's misfortunes of the previous generation. He strode off. Although he thought he heard Lincoln sigh again behind him, he didn't turn around to make certain.
Instead, he sought out General Pope, who was glad enough to see him after his capture of George Cannon. 'One by one, Colonel, they fall into our hands,' Pope said, 'and one by one we shall dispose of them.'
'Yes, sir,' Custer replied. 'It is truly a pity we can't dispose of Lincoln in the same way, or perhaps have him meet with an accident while attempting escape.'
'I have been specifically cautioned against letting any such accident befall him, though he does not know that,' Pope said. 'It's too bad, isn't it?'
'Hiding behind the law to break the law,' Custer muttered. Lincoln could put whatever fancy name on it he
