Pack was stunned. Jerry Paddock turned gravely and offered his right hand, and Theodore Roosevelt with a flash of his brilliant grin clutched the offered handshake and then Paddock like a trained dog stepped back behind the President and that was that.
After that the hecklers kept their peace. The rest of the crowd kept interrupting Roosevelt with applause. The President waited it out with a big smile. There were no more boos or hisses; Jerry Paddock’s malevolent two-gun glare silenced them immediately.
The speech reached its bully climax:
“I got a Spaniard or two. Bullets everywhere. Well some of you remember how I told the boys who enlisted with me in ‘98 it would be no picnic—and the place of honor was the post of danger, and we each must expect to die!”
A great roar went up.
At the President’s shoulder A.C. Huidekoper said, “You see they all feel you’re their man, sir.”
“They’re all my old friends,” said the President. Pack saw again the fabled grin when Roosevelt looked back to Jerry Paddock the two-gun man: “Even the ones who tried to kill me.”
The murderer smiled. “At your service, Mr. President.” He touched a finger to his hatbrim in obeisance.
And then the train was ready to leave; the President turned as if to go inside but then he stopped at the railing and peered uphill. When Pack followed the line of his glance he saw smoke rising from the chimney of the chateau.
A.C. Huidekoper said, “That’ll be the last of the servants. They’re about to leave for good. You missed Madame by about six weeks, Mr. President. She came out with two of her grown children to close up the place and take some of the furnishings back to France.”
“Is she in good health and spirits?”
“Very good indeed, and as beautiful as ever.”
“Chère Madame,” said the President. “She’s not had a happy life. I do wish her well.”
Pack got Roosevelt’s ear momentarily. “Sometimes when I think back on the Marquis and the Stranglers and all that, I still ask myself if now and then the Marquis may have been right, according to his own lights. Do you ever ask yourself about those days—if sometimes maybe the ends do justify the means?”
“No, Pack. You can’t tailor your code to fit the needs of the moment. Right and wrong exist. One need not apologize for espousing absolutes. Permit me, old fellow, to remind you that Moses did not come down off the mountain with The Ten Suggestions. The Marquis was wrong—dead wrong, and that’s all there was to it.”
With that and a flashing grin of his great tombstone teeth the President stepped inside. A moment later the train was away.
The crowd dispersed. Pack stood fast, watching the train dwindle.
Pack said to Joe Ferris, “Now wasn’t that singular—what Jerry Paddock did?”
“I guess may be Jerry’s always hankered to be on the winning side. That little show he put on—do wonders for public opinion. I wouldn’t be surprised he ran for public office one day soon. Why, they’ll probably name a creek after him.”
Pack said, “The thought makes me shudder.”
“Well hell, Pack, there’s nobody left around here except hermits and wild goats. Jerry Paddock can get himself elected sheriff of all that if it’s what he wants.”
A.C. Huidekoper pressed the reins of a saddle horse into Pack’s hand and Pack heard him say dryly, “Perhaps after all this time you can begin to admit that it was the ridiculous four-eyed dude there, and not the magnificent Marquis, who, by his example if not his manner, taught you what it really means to be an honorable man.”
“That is true,” Pack admitted—finally. “He was the better man, wasn’t he. And I was wrong in believing otherwise. And I’m prepared to buy you gentlemen a drink to that discovery.”
Joe Ferris said, “I have observed that it takes some people a mighty long time to grow up.” Pack felt the firm clasp of Joe’s arm around his shoulders. It made him smile. It was good to be among friends—and to know who one’s real friends were.
Postscript
The business ventures of the Marquis de Morès suffered their final collapse in 1886 and he departed for France in the fall of that year, having lost more than a million of his father-in-law’s dollars in an age when the value of the dollar could be measured by the fact that the average annual wage—a comfortable living wage—was $250. He said he would return to Dakota but he never did.
After he left the United States, De Morès went to India and hunted tigers. His fortunes were dissipated; his father-in-law refused to support his ventures any further. Nevertheless, increasingly paranoiac, he resumed his vain and somewhat absurd attempts to restore the French monarchy and ascend the throne. Perhaps the most extreme public bigot of his day, he stood for a Paris council seat on the “Pure Anti-Semite” ticket, killed at least one Jewish army officer in a duel and—curiously—helped stir up a scandal of charges of rampant corruption in connection with the financing of Suez Canal builder Ferdinand De Lesseps’s celebrated attempt to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. De Morès’s plots against De Lesseps and Clemenceau brought final destruction to the French attempt to build a Panama Canal—thereby opening the way for Theodore Roosevelt to complete the Canal two decades later.
De Morès served several months in prison for inciting a crowd to riot, and was instrumental in provoking the anti-Semitic frenzy that led to the infamous Dreyfus case that inflamed Zola to write J’Accuse.
In 1896, in a mirror-reversal of the ambush that killed Riley Luffsey, the Marquis was himself ambushed. At age thirty-eight, Antoine Amédée Marie Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis De Morès, was murdered in the Tunisian desert by Tuaregs, who hacked him limb from limb. He had gone to North Africa to lead a preposterous expedition whose objective was to form a Franco-Islamic alliance against the Jews and the British.
His widow Medora, faithful to the end, posted a reward for the capture of his killers. She saw them brought to justice and executed. They were reported to have been bandits but more likely they were hired assassins in the pay of the French government, to whom De Morès had become an embarrassment too vast to be tolerated.
De Morès had been in line to succeed his father as Duc de Vallombrosa but, as things worked out, his father survived him by a decade.
One suspects De Morès would not be amused to know that today his birthplace, a sturdy 250-year-old manor, serves as the Paris Embassy of the USSR.
Nearly all his evil schemes were frustrated; he saw himself as a tragic hero but the mustache-twisting Marquis, like other great evildoers, remains as absurdly and malevolently comical as Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.
I know of no evidence of any communication between Theodore Roosevelt and the lady Medora, Marquise De Morès, at any time after their Dakota adventures. It is a fact, however, that Madame De Morès paid her last visit to the town of Medora in 1903 not long before President Roosevelt made his pre-campaign swing through the West. On that final visit to Dakota, Madame De Morès was accompanied by her grown son Louis and daughter Athenais; she stayed six weeks and closed up the chateau, which had remained unchanged from seventeen years earlier—the De Morès servants had kept it intact, just as it had been on the day of the family’s departure in 1886.
Later, during the First World War, Lady Medora maintained the Vallombrosa family mansion in Paris as a hospital for wounded men. She ministered tirelessly to their injuries; she was wounded by a German shell when the house was bombarded. In March 1921, as a result of that wound, she died at the age of sixty-three; she had outlived Theodore Roosevelt by two years.