'I've heard it was pretty grim, all right,' Clay Herndon allowed.
'Grim?' Clemens said. 'Why, it made dying look like a circus with lemonade and elephants, because once you were dead you didn't have to try and pay your bills with greenbacks worth a hot four cents on the gold dollar-oh, they dropped down to three cents on the dollar for a week or two, but by then everybody who could be scared to death was already clutching a lily in his fist.'
'Hard times,' Herndon said. 'Every time somebody who went through it here starts talking about it, you wonder how people got by.'
'You hunker down and you hang on tight to what you've got, if it isn't that damn lily,' Sam answered. 'The great earthquake of '65 didn't do us any good, either. You'll have felt 'em here now and again, but there's never been anything like that since, thank heavens, not even the quake of '72, which wasn't a piker. I don't reckon we'll see the like again for another couple of hundred years, and, if God pays any attention to what I think, that'd be too soon, too.'
'Even the common, garden-variety earthquakes are bad enough,' Herndon said with a shudder. 'Makes me queasy just thinking about 'em.' He deliberately and obviously changed the subject: 'What's the war news?'
'They're killing people,' Sam said, and let it go at that. When his friend coughed in annoyance, he blinked, as if surprised. 'Oh, you want the details.' He pawed through the blizzard of telegrams on his desk. 'General Willcox has proved he can get stuck in two different places at the same time-a lesser man would have been incapable of it, don't you think? The British gunboats on the Great Lakes have bombarded Cleveland again, though Lord knows why, having visited the place once, they felt inclined to come back. The Indians arc on the warpath in Kansas, the Confederates are on the warpath in New Mexico Territory, and Abe Lincoln's on the warpath in Montana Territory. And, with ruffles and flourishes, the War Department announced the capture of Pocahontas, Arkansas.'
' Pocahontas, Arkansas?' Clay Herndon asked in tones that suggested he hoped Sam was kidding but didn't really believe it.
And Sam wasn't. He waved the telegram to prove it. 'In case you're wondering, Pocahontas is almost halfway from the border down toward the vital metropolis of Jonesboro,' he said solemnly. 'I looked it up. At first I thought it was only a flyspeck on the map, but I have to admit that further inspection proved me wrong. Hallelujah, I must say; no doubt the shock waves of the seizure are reverberating through Richmond even as I speak.'
' Pocahontas, Arkansas?' Herndon repeated. Sam nodded. 'Ruffles and flourishes?' the reporter asked. Clemens handed him the wire. He read it, grimaced, and handed it back. 'Ruffles and flourishes, sure enough. Good God Almighty, we shouldn't cackle that loud if we ever do take Louisville.'
'You can't cackle over the egg you didn't lay,' Clemens pointed out. 'We haven't got Louisville, but Pocahontas, Arkansas, by thunder, is ours.' He clapped his hands together, once, twice, three times.
'Sam…' Herndon's voice was plaintive. 'Why do we have such a pack of confounded dunderheads running this country?'
'My theory used to be that we get the government we deserve,' Sam said. 'Bad as we are, though, I don't think we're that bad. Right now, I'm taking a long look at the notion that God hates us.' He glanced up at his friend. 'I know somebody who's going to hate you if you don't set your posteriors in a chair and get some work done.' To soften that, he added, 'And I'd better do the same.' Returning his attention to Edgar Leary's story, he killed seven adjectives at one blow.
A brisk crackle of gunfire came from the northern outskirts of Tombstone, New Mexico. Major Horatio Sellers turned to Jeb Stuart and said, 'You were right, sir. They are going to try and hold the place. I didn't reckon they'd be such fools.'
'I think we rolled most of the real Yankee soldiers back toward Tucson — the ones we didn't capture at Contention City, I mean,' Stuart answered. 'What we've got left in these parts is mostly Tombstone Rangers and the like, unless I miss my guess. They'll be fighting for their homes here.'
'And they haven't got the brains God gave a camel,' Sellers said, with which Stuart could not disagree, either. His aide-de-camp rubbed his hands together in high good cheer. 'They'll pay for it.'
Boom! A roar louder than a dozen ordinary rifle shots and a large cloud of smoke rising from the graveyard north of Tombstone declared that the U.S. defenders had found a cannon somewhere. Stuart stayed unperturbed. 'I hope to heaven we know better by now than to pack ourselves together nice and tight for a field gun to mow us down.' His smile was almost found. 'Those smoothbore Napoleons did a good business during the last war, but we've come a long way since.'
His own field artillery, posted on the hills that led up to the Dragoon Mountains north and east of town, consisted of modern rifled guns that not only outranged the Tombstone Yankees' obsolete piece but were more accurate as well. No sooner than the Napoleon revealed its position, shells started falling around it. It fired a couple of more times, its cannonballs kicking up dust as they skipped along, then fell silent.
'So much for that,' Horatio Sellers said with a chuckle.
A couple of minutes later, though, the old-fashioned muzzle-loader came back to life. 'We must have knocked out their number-one crew,' Stuart guessed, 'and sent them scrambling around for replacements. They've got some brave men serving that gun.'
'Much good may it do them.' Sellers grunted. 'They likely never did have a whole lot of men with much notion of what to do with a cannon. If you're right, sir, and their best gun crew's down, they won't be able to hit a blamed thing now, not without fool luck they won't.'
'That makes sense to me,' Jeb Stuart agreed. 'We don't want 'em to get lucky, though.' He turned to Chappo, who, along with Geron-imo, was watching the fight for Tombstone alongside the Confederate commander. 'Will you ask your father if he can slide some Apaches forward and pick off the Yankees who are tending to their gun?'
'Yes, I will do that.' Chappo spoke to Geronimo in their own language. Young man and old gestured as they spoke back and forth. The Apaches used their hands as expressively as Frenchmen when they talked. Chappo returned to English. 'My father says he will gladly do this. He wants to punish the white men of Tombstone, to hurt them for all the times they have hurt us. If we take this place together, he will burn it.'
Stuart looked down at Tombstone 's wooden buildings, baking under the desert sun and no doubt tinder-dry. 'If we take this place, it's going to burn whether he burns it or not, I reckon.'
Even though he watched with a telescope, he could not spy any of the Apaches moving up toward the Napoleon the Tombstone volunteers were still firing. He wondered whether Geronimo had ordered them forward. The ground beyond the graveyard offered more cover than a billiard table, but not much. He wouldn't have cared to send his own men up to try to knock the gunners out of action.
That's why we're allied with the Apaches, the cold, calculating part of his mind said. Let them get hurt doing the nasty little jobs like that.
He glanced over at Geronimo. The Indian-medicine man, was the closest term Stuart could find for his position-was watching litter-bearers carrying wounded Confederate soldiers back toward the tents where the surgeons plied their grisly trade. When Geronimo felt Stuart's eye on him, the old Indian quickly moved his head and looked in a different direction.
He didn't do it quite quickly enough. I will be damned, Stuart thought. I know just what that dried-up devil of a redskin is thinking, and nobody will ever make me believe I don't. He's thinking, sure as hell he's thinking, That's why we're allied with the Confederates. Let them get hurt doing the nasty big jobs like that. To hell with me if he's not.
Stuart whistled ' Dixie ' between his teeth. Weeks of travel with Geronimo and the other Apache leaders had taught him they were more than the unsophisticated savages the dime novels made them out to be. They were, in fact, very sophisticated savages indeed. Not till that moment, though, had Stuart paused to wonder who was using whom to the greater degree.
Now Geronimo looked over toward him. The Apache seemed to realize Stuart had peered into his thoughts. He nodded to the white man, a small, tightly controlled movement of his head. Stuart nodded back. The two of them might have been the two sides of a mirror, each reflecting the other's concerns and each surprising the other when he realized it.
All at once, Stuart noticed the Napoleon had fallen silent again. Now Geronimo looked his way without trying to be furtive about it. The Apache raised his Tredegar to his shoulder and mimed taking aim. Stuart nodded to show he understood and doffed his hat for a moment in salute to the Apache warriors' skill. Geronimo's answering smile showed only a couple of teeth.
