Lincoln towered over Henry Welton and both Custers. Tipping his hat to George, he said, "I know you find my good wishes superfluous, Colonel Cus-" He caught himself. He was an observant man. "Excuse meGeneral Custer. Congratulations. In any case, I do hope you enjoy all good fortune in driving the invader back from our soil."

"I aim to do exactly that, Mr. Lincoln," Custer said. "And when I have done it, and when our great nation is once more free to turn to the things of peace, I expect you, sir, will go right on setting class against class and preaching hatred and strife until they plant you in the ground."

"I preach neither of those things," Lincoln said quietly. "I preach justice and equality for all men in the United States."

"Yes, for the Mormons," Custer jeered. "We gave them justice and equality, all right-they were plenty equal at the end of a rope."

Lincoln 's long, sad face grew longer and sadder. "I had already heard of that. May it not come back to haunt us."

"Pah! You care for the Mormons more than for the decent citizens of the United States." With a fine show of contempt, Custer turned his back. "I've wasted enough time. Now to get this regiment moving." Behind him, he heard Lincoln walk away. The ex-president's step was that of a much younger man, firm and regular. As long as he was leaving, Custer didn't care what he sounded like.

Cavalry troopers filed out of the cars behind the one housing the regimental officers. They hurried back to the freight cars that held their mounts. From one freight car emerged not horses but the regiment's Gatling guns and limbers, carefully guided down special, extra-wide ramps by their crews.

"Heavens!" Henry Welton's eyebrows rose in surprise. "You've got enough of those contraptions, don't you?"

"Enough and to spare," Custer answered, not altogether happily. "I had two in Kansas, and went down into Indian Territory and did good work with them. After my regiment got sent to Utah to help overawe the Mormons, the other half dozen were attached to me, for no better reason than that the first two had done good work. And when I was ordered here, I was ordered here with the Gatling guns specifically included."

Welton asked the first question that would have entered any good soldier's mind: "Can they keep up?"

"The first two did well enough in Kansas," Custer said. "I made sure the gun carriages had good horses, not screws. I've been doing the same with all of them, but now, with eight guns and eight limbers, we have four times as many things that can go wrong." He affected a tone of ruthless pragmatism: "If they cause trouble on campaign, I'll leave them behind, that's all."

"That makes good sense, sure enough," Welton said. "Well, we'll have a chance to see how well they travel from here up to join with the Seventh Infantry. From that point on, we'll be moving against the British, so if they can't keep up, they will have to fall back."

Custer's face crinkled into a frown. "I haven't been so well briefed as I would have liked," he said, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along. He exulted at having the command in Montana, but with command went responsibility. "You're not in contact with the enemy?" He didn't care for the sound of that.

"My infantry Regulars aren't, no, sir," Welton replied, which made Custer like it even less. Then the infantry officer went on, "But the First Montana Volunteer Cavalry are skirmishing with the limeys-that's the Unauthorized Regiment, you know."

"Volunteer cavalry?" Custer said scornfully-he didn't know, and had no way of knowing. "Unauthorized volunteer cavalry?"

"They're good men, sir-as good as a lot of the troopers you have," Welton said. Custer didn't believe that last for a minute, but, if the commander of the Seventh Infantry thought it was true, they might prove better than their name suggested. Welton next addressed that very point: "They started calling themselves the Unauthorized Regiment because they had a devil of a time getting into U.S. service after their colonel recruited them. They still wear the name with pride-a finger in the eye of the War Department, you might say."

"All right, Colonel-for the time being, I have to take your word about such things, not having seen them myself." Custer's tone remained dismissive.

Henry Welton held up a warning hand. "Sir, they truly are a fine-looking unit. And their colonel, the fellow who recruited them and organized them, is a lad to watch out for. One way or another, you mark my words, he will make the world notice him."

"Their colonel-a lad?" Custer wasn't sure he'd heard right.

"Theodore Roosevelt is twenty-two… though he will be twenty-three soon." Welton spoke with a certain somber relish.

"By Godfrey!" Custer exploded.

"That's right, one of those." Welton nodded. "He will run rings around any three ordinary men you could name. He's run rings around me more than once, I'll tell you that. Do you know what he puts me in mind of? He puts me in mind of you, sir, the day you got yourself onto General McClellan's staff. Do you remember?"

"I'm not likely to forget," Custer said with a smile.

Welton went on as if he hadn't spoken: "There we were, on the banks of the Chickahominy, and Little Mac wondered how deep it was. And what did you do? You spurred your horse into the river, got to the other side-God knows how, because it wasn't shallow-and then came back across and said, 'Thai's how deep it is, General.' Roosevelt would have done the same thing there. I can't think of anyone else I've ever seen who would."

"Hmm." Custer wasn't sure he liked that; he preferred to think of his headlong bravado as unique. "Well, we shall see. A man who goes hard at the foe will find a place for himself, sure enough."

"Yes, sir." Welton looked around. "Your regiment is shaping with remarkable speed. Won't be long before you're ready to move out, will it?"

"We're not Volunteers, unauthorized or otherwise," Custer said with more than a hint of smugness. "By God, it will be good to get out in the clean air on a horse's back, instead of sitting cooped up in a rolling box breathing the fumes of other men's tobacco until it was as if I were doing the smoking myself."

Welton chuckled. "Well, then, sir, I shan't offer you a cigar, as I was about to." He got one out, lighted it, and puffed up a happy cloud of smoke.

"Never took the habit," Custer said, "though I really am thinking of starting now, having made such a good beginning at it."

"Here's a habit I know you have." Henry Welton took a flask off his belt. It gurgled suggestively.

But Custer shook his head again. "I was a man who'd raise Hades, sure enough. But I haven't touched spirits and I haven't cursedmuch-since I married Libbie right after the War of Secession."

"Well, well," Welton said. "Should I congratulate you or commiserate with you?"

"One of those should do it," Custer answered. "But I'll tell you this, Henry-if we don't lick the British, we may as well get drunk, because the whole country will be up the smokestack." Henry Welton solemnly nodded.

Jeb Stuart took off his hat and fanned himself with it. " El Paso was hot," he said to Major Horatio Sellers. "Cananea's hotter. Don't know whether I'd have believed that if someone told it to me last spring, but it's so."

His aide-de-camp nodded rueful agreement. With his chunky build, the heat told harder on him. When he spoke, he spoke of a different sort of warmth: "Latest wagon train from El Paso is overdue, too. If the Yankees hit us now, they could make things hot. We still haven't caught up with all the munitions we used against them in New Mexico Territory."

"I sent a wire off yesterday, asking where the wagons were," Stuart said. "Haven't had an answer yet. Maybe the line's down again; heaven knows how it stays up, strung from cactus to fence post the way it is. Maybe a cow tripped over a wire. And maybe the Yankees are up to something farther east. If I don't hear anything from El Paso by this time tomorrow, I'm going to send out a troop of cavalry and see what's up."