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

“We came on Redhead Finnegan on the road. Pulling down one of your fences.”

“Then we’ll just have to string it up again,” Johnny said with his usual equanimity.

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 Johnny Goodall. From this distance Huidekoper couldn’t tell if he was amused or irritated; Johnny’s Texas twang seldom gave away his feelings.

“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,” Johnny Goodall replied without heat. He glanced at Huidekoper and gave him the benediction of his brief polite nod. Johnny Goodall stood a head taller than most others in the room. He had a big man’s slow way about him. He was smiling courteously and he had a good-humored manner; but Huidekoper had caught the brief pale dancing flash of danger in his eyes.

Coming to the beer keg Johnny moved with the slow wary caution of a dog amid an unfriendly pack. For—despite the fact that he was generally liked and respected—Johnny Goodall was range foreman for the Marquis De Morès, and his presence put tension in the house. Men spoke guardedly so long as he was present.

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 running a sandy on me.”

“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 cannot recall: a politician not only incorruptibly honest but also soporifically dull—was not merely defeated but squashed on the final convention ballot. And by that time, so much scandal—none of it attached to Roosevelt, so far as I know—had been exposed in the press that quite a few of the most influential Republicans bolted the party. In fact all that remains is a skeleton crew. It was a debacle. Are you sure you don’t—”

“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 running for office, is he.” Huidekoper moved closer to his companion and dropped his voice another pitch. “A few years ago, you see, his father died.”

“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 Savannah. Heroic ancestors in abundance … Anyhow that boy there went back to Harvard after his father passed on—completed his studies and met a young lady up there and married her—Alice Hathaway Lee by name. Hopelessly enchanting girl, I have heard. And by the by a close relation to the Cabots and Saltonstalls.”

“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 Pennsylvania we heard tales about it—sonnets and songs, romance of the season, so on. An authentic love match.”

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

“Last year that would have been.”

“How’d you know that?”