Manifest Destiny

As Huidekoper moved toward the drinks table with studied nonchalance—waiting his moment—he heard Joe Ferris tease Joh

“We came on Redhead Fi

“Then we’ll just have to string it up again,” Joh

Joe Ferris, unsmiling, was having his dour fun with De Morès’s man: “Redhead said a few unfriendly words about the Marquis.”

“I don’t expect the Marquis is fixin’ to lose a heap of sleep over that,” said Joh

“Being none of my concern,” Joe Ferris told him, “but you might give a mind to Redhead and his mates. They’re armed and they take their pleasures in making trouble. Trouble for the Marquis—trouble for you one day.”

“They do and I reckon they will end in a shallow grave,” Joh

Coming to the beer keg Joh

Theodore Roosevelt had penetrated deeper into the room and Huidekoper thought, It is better to get this over with. He poured his cheer straight and turned toward the young New Yorker. “Sorry to hear about your ladies. A terrible misfortune.” He drank his tot and felt the burn when it went down.

Roosevelt, turning to speak to someone else, stopped in midswing and blinked. Then he continued to pivot away, purporting not to have heard Huidekoper’s solicitous remark: he gave Huidekoper his back.

It was a blunt rebuff; Huidekoper thought, Why, I am a fool. He should have intuited that the young man might prefer not to discuss his personal tragedies.

So it would be necessary to come to him from another side; for it was important to get the New Yorker’s ear tonight, while he still had the fresh clean viewpoint of an outsider—before the damn fool dreamers could blind Roosevelt to the alarming truth.

Joe Ferris leaned over the table and had his look at the beer keg and the bottles. He seemed a bit lost; he nodded a greeting to Huidekoper and said, “Feel like I’m getting narrow at the equator. Anything to eat around here?”

“Bacon and beans in the kitchen.”

“I might have known,” Joe Ferris said. “Always a pot on the stove at Custer Trail.”

“If you can hold your horses, I’m sure Mrs. Eaton will be serving up supper in just a bit.”

“Then may be just one drink first.” Joe poured, tasted and considered.

Huidekoper offered, “Genuine forty-rod coffin varnish.”

“Two weeks old if it’s a day,” Joe Ferris agreed.

Huidekoper said, “Around here that’s aged whiskey, my friend.”

“No dispute it’d make powerful snake poison.” Joe Ferris did not smile. He rarely smiled. His demeanor appeared to derive from a fundamental recognition that life was neither frivolous nor amusing, but mainly a serious business.

Joe touched Huidekoper’s arm with a forefinger. “What was that you said to him about his ladies?”

“Didn’t you—no, I suppose you didn’t. They kept it mainly out of the newspapers, didn’t they. I had it in a long letter from one of my relations in New York.”

Joe Ferris watched him with a wry sort of patience. Huidekoper knew his own reputation for roundabout longwindedness. It didn’t trouble him. There was time enough for everything; in any discourse many things must be considered—especially here: it was a sudden country, where men often blurted and acted too swiftly.

Taking his own course, Huidekoper said, “He’s had dreadful political defeats. You know about those.”

Joe gave him a very quick nod and a very small smile, meant to show that he knew what Huidekoper was talking about; but it was clear Joe knew nothing of the kind. Huidekoper scolded him: “Joe—what do you know?”

“I don’t pay a lot of mind to your American politics.”

“Then allow me to be the instrument of your edification. You must know, of course, that your friend acquired a certain fame as the youngest Minority Leader in the history of the New York Assembly …”

“Well he told me he was Minority something. I thought he was ru

“Nothing of the kind. Why, that young idealist was so brash he out-politicked Tammany Hall—just about single-handedly passed a Civil Service Reform Act.” Huidekoper dropped his voice to a confidential drone. “But now you know he’s fallen as fast as he climbed. Did you follow the Republican Convention this year?”

“I had a few other things to do.”

“Well Theodore Roosevelt there was thought to be an important figure. But I can tell you that his hand-picked candidate for the presidential nomination—that Vermont Senator whose name even now I ca

“I’m fresh and green, A.C. You may as well finish my instruction. Make it faster before I fall down from the starvation!”

“It’s unforgivable that you don’t apprise yourself of these events. You may be a foreigner but you’re on American soil now.”

“We’re not in the States, A.C.”

“All the same. Why, some are opining the Republican Party has no future in American politics. And many more, I hear, are opining that Theodore Roosevelt has none.”

“Well, then,” Joe said uncertainly.

“Yes indeed. The question is—do we see the contentious young New Yorker coming west to lick his political wounds—or, as some of our Eastern cousins have been speculating, to build a new constituency?”

“You aiming to vote for him?”

“He’s not ru

“Mr. Roosevelt’s father?”

“Yes. In his forties. And the young fellow was just eighteen. They were very close. I understand he took his father’s passing very hard. But he still had a brother and his sisters and surely you’ve heard of the mother, very bright woman, a Southerner—one of the Bullochs of Sava

“Patrician stuff,” said Joe Ferris.

It took Huidekoper a bit by surprise. “Just so,” he said.

“One of those arranged marriages?”

“The contrary. He was expected to marry one of the Carow girls of New York, I can’t remember which one, but he left his sweetheart behind and went off to Boston and met the Lee girl and fell hopelessly out of control over her. Even out in the wilds of Pe

“Come to think of it he said something to me about his wife.”

“Last year that would have been.”

“How’d you know that?”