How Few Remain Read Free Page B

high horse and tell me what my country ought and ought not to be doing, especially since the United States harbor swarms of Comanches in New Mexico and turn them loose against west Texas whenever it strikes your fancy.”
    “We didn’t start that until those outrages in Kansas grew too oppressive to ignore,” Custer answered. “Why, on this very raid—this raid you have the gall to deny—the savages made two white women minister to their animal lusts, then cut their throats and worked other dreadful indignities upon their bare and abused bodies.”
    “You think the Comanches don’t do that in Texas?” Captain Weathers returned. “And the way I heard it, Colonel, they started doing it there first.”
    Custer scowled. “We killed off the buffalo to deny the Kiowas a livelihood, and you gave them cattle to take up the slack.”
    “The Comanches are herding cattle these days, too.” Weathers made as if to go back to his troopers, who waited inside Confederate territory. “I see no point to continuing this discussion. Good day, sir.”
    “Wait,” Custer said, and the Confederate captain, polite still, waited. Breathing heavily, Custer went on, “When our two nations separated, I had a great deal of sympathy and friendship for many of the men who found high rank in the Army of the Confederate States. I hoped and believed that, even though we were two, we could share this continent in peace.”
    “And so we have,” Jethro Weathers said. “There is no war between my country and yours, Colonel.”
    “Not now,” Custer agreed. “Not yet. But you will force one upon us if you continue with this arrogant policy of yours here in the West. The irritations will grow too great, and then—”
    “Don’t speak to me of arrogance,” Weathers broke in. “Don’t speak to me of irritation, not when you Yankees have finally gone and put another one of those God-damned Black Republicans in the White House.”
    “Blaine’s only been in office a month, but he’s already shown he’s not nearly so bad as Lincoln was,” Custer answered, “and he’s not your business anyhow, any more than Longstreet’s ours.”
    “Blaine talks big,” the Confederate captain answered. “People who talk big get to thinking they can act big. You talked about war, Colonel. If your James G. Blaine thinks you Yankees can lick us now when you couldn’t do it twenty years ago, he’d better think twice. And if you think you can ride over the line into Indian Territory whenever it strikes your fancy, you’d better think twice, too, Colonel.”
    When Weathers moved to ride back to his squadron this time,Custer said not a word. He stared after the Indians whom Weathers’ timely arrival had saved. His right hand folded into a fist inside its leather gauntlet. He pounded it down on his thigh, hard, once, twice, three times. His lips shaped a silent word. It might have been
dash
. It might not.
        As the train rattled west through the darkness over the Colorado prairie, the porter came down the aisle of the Pullman car. “Make you bed up, sir?” he asked in English with some foreign accent: Russian, maybe, or Yiddish.
    Abraham Lincoln looked up from the speech he’d been writing. Slowly, deliberately, he capped his pen and put it in his pocket. “Yes, thank you,” he said. He rose slowly and deliberately, too, but his lumbago gave a twinge even so. As best he could, he ignored the pain. It came with being an old man.
    Moving with swift efficiency, the porter let down the hinged seat back, laid a mattress on the bed thus created, and made it up in the blink of an eye. “Here you are, sir,” he said, drawing the curtain around the berth to give Lincoln the chance to change into his nightshirt in something close to privacy.
    “I thank you,” Lincoln said, and tipped him a dime. The porter pocketed it with a polite word of thanks and went on to prepare the next berth. Looking down at the bed, Lincoln let out a rueful chuckle. The