How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

but also the common people remembered and appreciated what he’d done in the War of Secession. In a world where memory was fleeting and gratitude even more so, that was no small thing.
    An iron fence surrounded the grounds of the presidential mansion. At the gateway, guards in the fancy new butternut uniforms stiffened to attention. “General Jackson, sir!” they exclaimed in unison. Their salutes were as identical as if they’d been manufactured in succession at the same stamping mill.
    Conscientiously, Jackson returned the salutes. No doubt the guards were good soldiers, and would fight bravely if the need ever came. When he measured them against the scrawny wildcats he’d led during the War of Secession, though, he found them wanting. He was honest enough to wonder whether the fault lay in them or in himself. He’d turned fifty-seven earlier in the year, and the past had a way of looking better and the present worse the older he got.
    He rode up to the entrance to the president’s home. A couple of slaves hurried forward. One of them held his horse’s head while he dismounted, then tied the animal to a cast-iron hitching post in front of the building. Jackson tossed him a five-cent piece. The slave caught the tiny silver coin out of the air with a word of thanks.
    Tied close by was the two-horse team of a landau with which he was not familiar. The driver, a white man, sat in the carriage reading a newspaper and waiting for his master to emerge. Thathe was white gave Jackson a clue about who his passenger might be, especially when coupled with the unfamiliar carriage.
    And, sure enough, out of the president’s residence came John Hay, looking stylish if a little funereal in a black sack suit. The new minister from the United States was a strikingly handsome man of about fifty, his brown hair and beard frosted with gray. His nod was stiff, tightly controlled. “Good day, General,” he said, voice polite but frosty.
    “Your Excellency,” Jackson said in much the same tones. As a young man, Hay had served as Abe Lincoln’s secretary. That in itself made him an object of suspicion in the Confederate States, but it also made him one of the few Republicans with any executive experience whatever. Jackson hoped the latter was the reason U.S. President Blaine had appointed him minister to the CSA. If not, the appointment came perilously close to an insult.
    Hay had bushy, expressive eyebrows. They twitched now. He said, “I should not be surprised, General Jackson, if we were seeing President Longstreet on the same business.”
    “Oh? What business is that?” Jackson thought Hay likely right, but had no intention of showing it. The less the enemy—and anyone in Richmond who did not think the United States an enemy was a fool—knew, the better.
    “You know perfectly well what business,” Hay returned, now with a touch of asperity: “the business of Chihuahua and Sonora.”
    He was, of course, correct: an enemy he might be, and a Black Republican (synonymous terms, as far as the Confederacy was concerned), but not a fool. Jackson said, “I cannot see how a private transaction between the Empire of Mexico and the Confederate States of America becomes a matter about which the United States need concern themselves.”
    “Don’t be disingenuous,” Hay said sharply. “President Longstreet spent the last two hours soft-soaping me, and I’m tired of it. If you don’t see how adding several hundred miles to our common border concerns us, sir, then you don’t deserve those wreathed stars on your collar.” Giving Jackson no chance to reply, he climbed up into the landau. The Negro who had helped the Confederate general undid the horses. The driver set down his paper and flicked the reins. Iron tires clattering, the wagon rolled away.
    Jackson did not turn his head to watch it go. Diplomacy was not his concern, not directly: he dealt only with its failures. Backstraight, stride steady, he walked up the stairs into