"Set one up, then," Richardson snapped. An instant later, he was all affability again. "Come with me, Mr. Douglass."

Douglass came. He found Brigadier General Orlando Willcox slogging down a mountain of papers, a scene he remembered from visiting head-quarters during the War of Secession. He wondered how generals ever got to fight; they seemed too busy filling out forms and writing reports to have the time for it.

Willcox was a roly-poly man six or eight years younger than Douglass, with a high forehead that looked higher because his hair had retreated from so much of it. "Mr. Douglass!" he exclaimed, putting down his pen with every sign of delight. "God be praised that you have been able to join us before the commencement of the great struggle."

"I had worried about that, yes," Douglass said, "knowing how celerity is so vital a constituent of the military art."

"We are less hasty than we might have been under other circumstances, there being so many volunteers to weave into the fabric of the Regular Army," Willcox said. "But the mingling of warp and weft proceeds well, and I still have every confidence that the good Lord will grant our arms and our righteous cause the victory they deserve."

"May it be so," Douglass agreed. "If, however, you will forgive my speaking on a matter where I am the rankest amateur and you learned in every aspect, much the same sort of talk was heard in General McClellan's headquarters during the War of Secession. The Lord is, as the saying has it, in the habit of helping them that help themselves."

Captain Richardson sent Douglass a venomous glance that made him suddenly surer than he had been where his difficulties in making arrangements had arisen. General Willcox did not see that glance; he was answering, "I forgive you readily, as it is my Christian duty to do. But if you knew how many hours I have spent on my knees in prayer, beseeching God to grant me the answers to the riddles of this campaign, you would be more certain I am acting rightly."

Douglass had nothing against the power of prayer: on the contrary. He did wish, though, that General Willcox also spoke of how many hours he'd spent studying maps, examining the enemy's positions on the far side of the Ohio, and sending over spies to examine them close up.

"The event will prove my strategy," Willcox declared.

"Very well, sir," Douglass replied. As he'd said, he was no soldier himself. And Orlando Willcox was certain to be right… one way or the other.

Philander Snow leaned out to spit over the side of the Handbasket. "Six days on the road!" he said. "Reckon my backside's as petrified as some of the bones them perfessers dig out of the ground."

"If my hindquarters were that petrified," Theodore Roosevelt said, "I wouldn't be able to feel them, and I most assuredly can. But six days of hard riding would have left us just as worn, and we can carry more supplies in the wagon. Besides, Fort Benton can't be much farther, not when we passed through Great Falls day before yesterday."

"If it was much further, I expect I'd be too crippled-up to walk a- tall by the time we got there," Snow said.

"If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, Mohammed has to go to the mountain," Roosevelt said. He saw at once that his traveling companion had not the slightest idea what he was talking about. Suppressing a sigh, he made himself what he thought was remorselessly clear: "If forts are the only places in Montana Territory where volunteers may be enrolled into the U.S. Army, then I needs must go to a fort to remove the unfortunate adjective from Roosevelt's Unauthorized Regiment."

"Yeah, and all your toy soldiers'll be a real part of the Army then, too," Snow said, which made Roosevelt swallow another sigh. The ranch hands were good men, honest men, true men: he'd seen as much many times. Just as many times, though, he'd tried to hold any sort of intelligent conversation with one of them, and just as many times he'd failed.

With or without intelligent conversation, he and Phil Snow rattled north east close by the north bank of the Missouri River, on toward Fort Benton. They'd followed the river all the way from the farm; except for enormously overdeveloping the buttocks and every single circumadjacent nerve, the trip was easy.

Snow pointed ahead. "Smoke on the horizon, boss. If that don't mean we're about there, I'll swallow my chaw."

"What would happen if you did?" Roosevelt asked, as usual curious about everything.

"I'd sick my guts up, and pretty damn quick, too," Snow said, expecto rating for emphasis. "I done it once, when I got throwed off a horse." His tone turned mournful: "It ain't somethin' you want to do twice."

As he must have known, he didn't have to make good on his promise. Inside of half an hour, the Handbasket rolled into Fort Benton. A considerable town had grown up around the fort, which lay as far west along the Missouri as even the shallowest-draft steamboat could reach. The same thing happened around the legionary camps in the days of the Roman Empire, Roosevelt thought. He glanced over to Philander Snow and shook his head. Snow's many admirable qualities did not include an interest in ancient history. Roosevelt kept the thought to himself.

Snow was glancing around, too, into the back of the wagon. "You gonna put on your fancy uniform, boss?" he asked. "Hope it ain't got too wrinkled from sittin' there bundled up this past week."

"I think I'll be smarter leaving it bundled up," Roosevelt answered. "By what I heard in Great Falls, this Henry Welton in command of the Seventh Infantry is only a lieutenant colonel himself. I don't want to go in there looking as if I'm claiming to be his superior officer."

"That's clever. That's right clever." Philander Snow shifted the reins to his left hand so he could slap the other down on his thigh. "You don't mind my sayin' so, you're wasting your time runnin' a ranch. You ought to be in politics."

"The thought has crossed my mind," Roosevelt admitted. "If I hadn't decided to come out here, I might have run for the Assembly back in New York. I'll tell you this much-we need to see some changes made, and that's a fact. If the people who are running things now won't make 'em, we need to throw the rascals out and put in some people who will."

Snow brought the wagon to a stop across the street from the timber gate and adobe walls of Fort Benton. Perhaps not coinciden-tally, he brought it to a stop directly in front of a saloon. "You won't need me to go in and talk with this lieutenant colonel, whatever his name was, will you, boss?"

"No, I don't suppose I will." Roosevelt stuck out his lower jaw and looked fierce. "But I will need you in some sort of state to travel when I come out again. Have a few drinks. Enjoy yourself. But if I have to pour you into the wagon, you will regret it, and not only on account of your hangover."

"I'll be good," Snow said. "Don't really fancy the notion of heading back toward the ranch with my head poundin' like a stamping mill." Next to that prospect, nothing Roosevelt threatened could put fear in him.

But he hurried into the saloon with such alacrity that Roosevelt clicked his tongue between his teeth. Then he shrugged. He'd see when he came out of Fort Benton.

"Mornin' to you," the sentry at the gate said when he approached. "State your business, if you please." The soldier did not stand aside.

"I wish to speak with Lieutenant Colonel Welton," Roosevelt answered. "I have assembled a body of volunteer troops to offer to the U.S. Army."

"How big a body of troops?" the sentry asked, unimpressed. "You got five men? Ten? Fifteen, even? Dribs and drabs is what we're get-tin', and they're hell to put together."

Roosevelt 's chest inflated with pride. "My friend," he boomed, "I have a complete and entire regiment of cavalry, ready for action. Your colonel has only to give us our orders, and we shall ride!"