Grant: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

feet.
    What had crazy old Sherman said? He would follow Grant into battle as if he were the Savior himself?
    Across the hall a man hurried past with a poster: GRANT
WILL
!
    Cadwallader smiled again, because that was the headline from one of the best-known dispatches he himself had ever written—at the disastrous Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, when Grant lost fifteen thousand men in two days and everybody else in the country thought he was bound for defeat and disgrace. They talked about George Washington’s
will
as the thing that had held the new Republic together in the first days of the Constitution. They talked about Andy Jackson’s
will
that had crushed the Choctaws and the Cherokees, and knocked the British backwards at New Orleans. But they were nothing, Cadwallader thought,
nothing
compared to the will of U. S. Grant, because he had been there and seen it, and Sherman was almost right.
    Down below, the band was winding in and out of the lobby, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Cadwallader drummed his fingers against the chair arm. Loyalty was a virtue too. They should have invited him into Cameron’s suite for a visit, Grant himself should have spotted him in the hall and sent for him. There were other headlines he could write if he cared to. If he weren’t such a corn-fed, true-blue patriot. Pop goes the—
    “By God, Caddy, I think you’ll be scratching in that notebook when you pass the Pearly Gates!”
    Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman, younger brother of William T., had the demented family grin. He stood in front of Cadwallader’s chair, hands on his hips, black silk top hat shoved back on his head like Pericles’s helmet, nodding cordially. Cadwallader put away the notebook he had just pulled out and sprang to his feet.
    “Mister Secretary,” he said with a genial bow. “Here to greet the General, no doubt?”
    Sherman’s grin stayed diplomatically in place. Even around the Sherman family, “the General” referred only to U. S. Grant, and if U. S. Grant had any important rivals for his third presidential nomination in the spring, one of them was John Sherman of Ohio, thirty “Jumbos” minimum.
    “You know my wife, Caddy,” the Secretary said, and Cadwallader bowed again to the voluptuously gowned lady on Sherman’s left arm. “And Mr. Washburne.”
    “Congressman,” said Cadwallader, and shook hands with Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois.
    “Just saw Bob Ingersoll,” Washburne announced gloomily. Bob Ingersoll, a former Union colonel, was to be the main speaker at the banquet later that night. He was also a notorious atheist and lover of whiskey, and Washburne was both a Methodist and a teetotaler.
    “With that awful Mark Twain,” said Mrs. Sherman. “Mr. Cadwallader,” she began, then broke off with a frown. “I can’t hear myself speak,” she shouted into her husband’s ear. Some spirit—Cadwallader guessed it was not unconnected with E. C. Booz & Co.—had seized the band, which was now marching up the grand staircase and playing a brigade call from General Butterfield’s old command, while all around them grown men were raising their glasses and chanting,
    Dan, Dan, Dan, Butterfield, Butterfield! Dan,
    Dan, Dan, Butterfield, Butterfield!
    Sherman gestured toward a side corridor. At the next alcove Mrs. Sherman tried again. “I have a favor to ask, Mr. Cadwallader,” she said. “The ladies are not permitted at the banquet tonight. I wonder if copies of the speeches—”
    From the top of the staircase now came a new chant, to the deafening tune of the army mess call:
    Soupy, soupy, soupy, without any bean,
    Porky, porky, porky, without any lean,
    Coffee, coffee, coffee, without any cream!
    Mrs. Sherman gave up. “This stupid,
stupid
war!”
    “Rain’s stopped,” Washburne called from a window. “Grant’s outside!”
    Fifty feet away the band wheeled toward them with a cheer.
    Ulysses leads the van!
    Ulysses is the man!
    VICT-O-RY!

CHAPTER FOUR

    G RANT