How Few Remain Read Online Free PDF Page A

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evidence a woman was fast. The rules were different here, and no wonder, for a woman could go—and several had gone—straight from strumpet to nabob’s wife.
    In its ornate pretentiousness, the Hôtel Métropole matched anything anywhere in the country. “Here you go, Mr. Lincoln,” Fred Cavanaugh said. “You’ll be right comfortable here, get yourself all good and ready for your speech tonight. You’d best believe a lot of folks want to hear what you’ve got to say about labor nowadays.”
    “Hear me they shall,” Lincoln said. “What they do if they hear where I’m staying, though, may be something else again. Are they not liable to take me for one of the exploiters over whom they are concerned?”
    “Mr. Lincoln, you won’t find anybody in Colorado got a thing to say against living soft,” Cavanaugh answered. “What riles folks is grinding other men’s noses in the dirt to let a few live soft.”
    “I understand the distinction,” Lincoln said. “As you remindme, the essential point is that so many in the United States, like virtually all the whites in the Confederacy, do not.”
    The Hotel Métropole met every reasonable standard for soft living, and most of the unreasonable ones as well. After a hot bath in a galvanized tub at the end of the hall, after a couple of fried pork chops for lunch, Lincoln would have been happy enough to stretch out on the bed for a couple of hours, even if he would have had to sleep diagonally to keep from kicking the footboard. But the speech came first.
    He was still polishing it, having altogether forgotten about supper, when Joe McMahan knocked on the door. “Come on, Mr. Lincoln,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves a full house for you tonight.”
    The hall was not so elegant as the opera house near the Hotel Métropole. It was, in fact, a dance hall with a podium hastily plunked by one wall. But, as McMahan had said, it was packed. From long practice guessing crowds, Lincoln figured more than a thousand men—miners and refinery workers, most of them, and farmers, with here and there a shopkeeper to leaven the mix—stood shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow, to hear what he had to say.
    They cheered loud and long when McMahan introduced him. Most of them were young. Young men thought of him as labor’s friend in a land where capital was king. Older men, like the beggar in the railway depot, still damned him for fighting, and most of all for losing, the War of Secession.
I
‘d have been a hero if
I
won, he thought. And I’d have been a housewife, or more likely a homely old maid, if I’d been born a woman. So what?
    He put on his spectacles and glanced down at the notes he’d written on the train and in the hotel. “A generation ago,” he began, “I said a house divided against itself, half slave and half free, could not stand. And it did not stand, though its breaking was not in the manner I should have desired.” He never made any bones about the past. It was there. Everyone knew it.
    “The Confederate States continue all slave to this day,” he said. “How the financiers in London and Paris smile on their plantations, their railroads, their ironworks! How capital floods into their land! And how much of it, my friends, how much drips down from the eaves of the rich men’s mansions to water the shacks where the Negroes live, scarcely better off than the brutebeasts beside which they labor in the fields? You know the answer as well as I.”
    “To hell with the damn niggers,” somebody called from the audience. ‘Talk about the white man!” Cries of agreement rose.
    Lincoln held up a hand. “I am talking about the white man,” he said. “You cannot part nor separate the two, not in the Southern Confederacy. For if the white laborer there dare go to his boss and speak the truth, which is that he has not got enough to live on, the boss will tell him, ‘Live on it and like it, or I’ll put a Negro in your place and you can learn to live on