The Red Cross ship the State of Texas, filled with food and clothing for the suffering Cubans, daily awaits the order to sail—as do our troops.
The State of Texas is not, as people suppose, a hospital ship, but was chartered solely to carry medicines, clothing, and food to the reconcentrados, about whose plight you can read in last week’s edition. However, the troops were so convinced that any ship bearing the insignia of the Red Cross must be intended for the treating of their ills that the doctors and nurses on board bowed to the inevitable and converted the smoking room into an operating room, the purser’s room into a dispensary, and state rooms into wards where our patients might receive rest, quiet, and watchful care under the expert eye of the nursing sisters.
Nonetheless, none of us has forgotten our true mission, or that of our brave boys in uniform: to free the people of Cuba.
Due to a lack of transports, not all of our boys will make it over, and it would do your heart proud to see them fight over who should have the honor of liberating the reconcentrados from the suffocating yoke of Spain. . . . Millionaires’ sons and cowboys alike beg for the privilege of firing a shot for freedom.
The word about who will go and who won’t changes daily, but this reporter has heard that among the chosen are William Tiffany of the New York Tiffanys, Oklahoma broncobuster Bill McGinty, Harvard football player and famed yachtsman Woodbury Kane, and the fearless bounty hunter Hold ’Em Holt, who brought the Jakes Brothers to justice.
Let’s hope he can do the same for the reign of Spain. . . .
—Miss Katherine Carson for the St. Louis Star Ledger, June 7, 1898
* * *
Tampa, Florida
June 8, 1898
“Better put on your hat before you get sunstroke,” said Holt.
Paul obediently crammed his hat down on his head, squinting along the tracks. “I’m sure the train will be here any time now.”
“Uh-huh,” said Holt. There was dust in his eyes, dust in his nose, dust in places he didn’t want to think about there being dust. They’d been standing on this train siding since midnight the night before, waiting for a train they’d been told was coming to take them the nine miles to Port Tampa for immediate departure for Cuba.
“You don’t happen to have a cracker on you?” asked Paul hopefully.
“Not a crumb.” They’d left in such haste, so sure they’d be on shipboard by dawn, that no one had bothered to pack any provisions. It was the coffee Holt missed; it helped keep the headaches at bay.
Paul shrugged that aside, undaunted. “It could be worse. At least we get to go. Think of those poor mugs back in camp missing all the fun.”
“You call this fun?” But Holt knew what he meant. Back at the camp were men who’d rushed from all over the country to join up, and, after all that, they wouldn’t even get to be part of the big moment. There’d been a problem with the boats, the problem being that there weren’t enough of them. There were rumors that Colonel Wood and Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt had tossed a coin to see which troops would go.
But Troop L was safe. Troop L was without their horses—there was no room for horses—clumsily hauling unaccustomed packs, staggering bandy-legged on boots that felt odd without their spurs, but they were on the move.
Paul raised his voice to be heard over the rattle of a series of coal cars chugging up the line from Port Tampa. “You’ll see; Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt will get us over there.”
The coal cars clanked to a stop. And then came the distinctive voice of their lieutenant colonel, who was waving his hat and shouting, “All aboard! Our chariot awaits!”
There was a mad scramble for the coal cars, men hoisting themselves up over the sides, grappling and slipping, plunking themselves grimy but triumphant on top of the mountains of coal. A cheer went up from the men as the train began chugging backward toward Port Tampa, laden with coal and volunteer cavalry.
“Told you he’d do it!” Paul bounced on his throne of coal, waving his hat and cheering himself hoarse. “Told you our Teddy would find a way!”
“Bass-ackwards,” said Holt drily. Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt and Colonel Wood were leading their regiment from the caboose, to the great hilarity of all.
“Yes, but it’s getting us there, isn’t it?” said Paul blithely. “And that’s all that matters.”
“Right,” said Holt, and tried to mean it. Ends and means and all that. It wasn’t the manner of their going that mattered. It was that they got there.
They’d be all right once they got to Cuba. Once they were there, on the ground, doing what they were trained to do.
Without their horses. Without most of their gear.
Facing Spaniards far more experienced and far better trained than they.
Just like the Charge of the Light Brigade. They can write a lovely poem about you when you’re all rotting beneath the palm trees.
“That friend of yours,” Holt said abruptly. “The girl.”
“Girl?” Paul was extracting a large piece of coal from a sensitive part of his posterior. “Ouch! You mean the one from Ybor City who—”
“No. The one we met at the train the night we came to Tampa.” Those big, hollow eyes. Holt saw them in his nightmares. He’d roll over on his bedroll in the tent he shared with Paul and there she’d be, like a drowned woman, floating just beneath the water. “The one you took to the Yale prom.”
“What, Betsy?”
“Yes. That’s the one. Is she all right?”
“Why wouldn’t she be? Betsy is . . . well, she’s Betsy.” Seeing that wasn’t going to do, Paul added heartily, “She’s bully, just bully.”
Paul had adopted a tiresome habit of imitating their assistant commander in all his more obvious eccentricities. Holt was only surprised Paul hadn’t started sewing fifteen pairs of eyeglasses into his hat and the lining of his clothing in emulation of the famously nearsighted Roosevelt.
Holt refrained from comment. “She didn’t seem that bully to me.”
“Well, she’d just got off a train. Betsy’s a great girl. Almost not like a girl at all.” Paul grinned, his teeth very white in his coal-grimed face. “It’s hard to imagine her nursing, though. Can’t think why she took it up. She’s not exactly the sort to mop the old fevered brow. She’s more likely to order you to get well and then scold you if you don’t.”
The haunted woman he had met outside the Tampa Bay Hotel had nothing at all in common with Paul’s great girl. Except possibly the scolding. “She didn’t seem well.”
“Don’t let her lack of inches and that milk-and-water complexion deceive you,” said Paul wisely. “She’s strong as a mule and just as stubborn. Hoy! Why are they pulling us over?”
Their dusty cavalcade was shunted to a siding as a passenger train barreled past, bearing the 71st New York Volunteers. The men leaned out the windows, waving madly and shouting, “It’s the Rough Riders! Hallo, Teddy! Speech! Speech! Show us your teeth, Teddy!”
Laughing, they left the Rough Riders behind in a cloud of dust.
Paul scrambled up to his feet on the pile of coal, cupping his hands around his mouth to shout, “We’ll see you in Cuba!” and then overbalanced as the train started up again, sliding madly toward the ground.
Holt grabbed him by the collar before he could tumble over the side. “Fine lot of good you’ll do us in Cuba with a broken leg.”
Paul plunked back down on his bottom, bright-eyed and energized. “Right you are. Don’t want Betsy to bandage me up. She’d probably break the other one as a lesson to me for being so stupid.”
Was he going mad? Maybe Holt was the one suffering from heat exhaustion. He’d experienced that his first month in the New Mexico territory, when he was too stupid to know to get out of the sun.
Paul was right; the woman had just come off a sleepless night on a train, followed by a strange city and oppressive heat. She was tired, she was cross; it was Holt’s own demons that made him see a damsel in distress where there was none.
Guilt stabbed him in the gut, still sharp after all this time. Over the past three years, he’d tried to drink himself numb; he’d tried to fight himself clean; he’d tried to escape by putting miles in between. But if he’d learned anything, it was that there was no wilderness far enough, no oblivion deep enough; he took his sins with him, like the pack on his back, welded there for eternity.
The coal cars shuddered toward the end of the line. Holt could see the gleam of water, the harbor thick with ships, waiting to carry them across to Cuba. To free starving women and children from the yoke of Spanish tyranny.
If he could strike a blow for them, if he could relieve one woman of her suffering, he would have, not atoned—there was no atoning—but he would have done something. He might be able to look himself in the mirror again.
And as for Miss Betsy Hayes, she could just take her pronouncements of gloom and doom and stick to splinting legs.
In a spirit of exaltation, Holt swung himself off the coal car—and sank ankle deep into the sand. He had to do a fancy quickstep to keep his pack from bowling him over backward, flailing in the sand like a bug on his back.
Around him, the rest of the troop was floundering, trying to get their footing. One man fell flat on his face and was hauled up, spitting out mouthfuls of sand.
“I knew I should have brought my bathing costume,” gasped Paul. “Which one of these transports do you think is ours?”
“I don’t know.” Holt looked around for someone else who might.
It was hard to miss General Shafter. He had settled his bulk on a makeshift chair composed of two cracker boxes, overseeing the operation from a packing crate. He was surrounded by indignant, red-faced officers all demanding to know what to do with their troops. As for the twenty-odd thousand troops of Shafter’s army, ranks had long since broken. Some men made a beeline for the water, wading fully clothed into the surf in a desperate attempt to cool off; others had wandered off to a row of shanties that seemed to have sprouted from the sand overnight.
One of the other members of the troop came slinking over. Bill called himself a cowboy, but he was, as far as Holt could tell, more of a two-bit card shark, long on stories, short on action. He’d been running a good trade in bilking the credulous Ivy Leaguers, dazzled by their brush with the real Wild West.
Ignoring Holt, Bill sidled straight up to Paul. “This looks like it’s gonna take a while. You wanna come get some General Miles grape juice?”
The residents of Tampa, unnerved at the reputation of Roosevelt’s men for rough drinking as well as rough riding, had begged that spiritous liquors not be served. So the good bartenders of Tampa had gotten around it by creating innocent-sounding libations with a kick like a mule.
Paul’s flushed face lit up. “First round’s on me. General Robert E. Lee milkshakes all around!”
“Whoa.” Holt grabbed his bunkmate by the sleeve. Sweat dripped down his forehead, stinging his eyes and blurring his vision. “You want to miss the call to board?”
“Doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere fast,” said Bill, defending his right to Paul’s company, or, more accurately, Paul’s wallet.
Holt felt like a very unlikely nursemaid. But Paul was one of life’s innocents. It would be plain wrong to let him be fleeced by Bill. Besides, if Paul didn’t make it over, he might have to share his tent with someone else. “You never know. You want to tell your kids you didn’t make it to Cuba because you were caught with your pants down in a one-room whorehouse?”
Paul scratched his chin. “You put it that way . . .”
“We’ve come this far.” To rot beneath the palm trees. Holt pushed Miss Hayes’s voice out of his head. “Think of the boys back in camp cursing because they didn’t get to join us.”
“Well, if Holt says you can’t come out and play . . .” Bill shrugged, looking around for another Easterner to pay his bar bill. “Your loss.”
Paul looked longingly at a shack selling General Miles grape juice. “Maybe just a small one?”
“You drink liquor in heat like this, you’re going to feel a thousand times worse,” Holt said tersely. “What you want is water and lots of it. Coconut milk’s fine as long as no one’s put rum in it. Or juice. Actual juice.”
Paul looked at him as though he were an early saint dispensing the gospel. “Good thing I’ve got you to show me the ropes.”
“It’s just common sense.” He had never asked to be held up as an icon of the Wild West. He was about as much of a real cowboy as Paul. “Doesn’t take a genius to tell you that dehydration isn’t your friend.”
“My old nanny used to say there’s nothing common about common sense,” said Paul blithely. “Oh, look! What’s that?”
That was Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt, sprinting for all he was worth, shouting, “The Yucatan! The Yucatan! You! You there! Take a group of men and guard the train with our supplies! You! Round the boys up and get ’em on board! Double-quick! Step lively, men! Time and tide wait for no man!”
With a whoop, the Rough Riders charged toward the ship, fatigue forgotten, heat forgotten, their thick coating of coal forgotten, hats waving, voices hoarse with cheering as they picked up the cry, “The Yucatan!” They thronged the gangway as the ship moved with painful slowness to the dock, and two other groups of soldiers advanced.
“Guard the gangway, boys,” muttered Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt, striding to the front, as the men clustered around the gangway in the unforgiving sun.
“Tell your men to move aside,” barked the colonel in charge of the 71st New York. Holt recognized some of the men who had been shouting for Teddy that morning as they chugged past the Rough Riders on their comical coal cars. “We’ve been assigned this ship.”
“So were we,” said Roosevelt serenely. The gangplank was being laboriously attached to the ship. Roosevelt made shooing motions behind his back, urging the men to board. “You may have been assigned it, but we seem to have it.”
“Wait!” It was the commanding officer of the 2nd US Infantry. “Just a minute! That’s our transport! As your ranking officer . . .”
“I’m sure we can fit some of your boys aboard,” said Roosevelt calmly. “After we get settled. You over there! What are you young men up to?”
Two men were in the process of setting a hand-cranked camera on a tripod by the side of the gangplank. One looked up from his work. “We’re from the Vitagraph Company, Colonel Roosevelt,” he said tentatively, as if waiting for Roosevelt to bite. “We’re going to Cuba to take moving pictures.”
The lieutenant colonel stepped aside, motioning them to proceed up the gangplank. “I can’t manage a regiment, but I’m sure I can squeeze in two more,” he said genially.
“This is absurd,” blustered the commanding officer of the 71st New York. “It’s nothing short of highway robbery!”
“My apologies,” said Roosevelt, showing all his teeth, just as the men of the 71st had demanded that morning. Holt doubted they liked it so much now, standing there in the sun, balked of their boat. “I’m under orders from my commanding officer to hold the gangplank. My hands are tied.”
He spread his hands, which were very clearly not tied. Colonel Wood might technically be commanding officer, but there was very little doubt who really ran the regiment.
The commanding officers of the 71st and the 2nd US Infantry stomped off to complain to General Shafter as the Vitagraph men cranked their camera and Roosevelt turned his wide grin to his men.
“Individual initiative, boys. That’s what it’s about. Now let’s get our gear on board before someone else tries to steal our ship!”
A great cheer shook the ship. Men were hanging from the sides, hollering their approval, as the weary 71st tramped away in search of another transport.
From the ship, the dock looked even more chaotic than before, companies broken up between ships, men staggering out from the makeshift bars trying to find their regiments. Holt found himself wondering whether individual initiative was really the best way to organize an invasion and hoping that wouldn’t be the order of the day when it came to battle.
Paul slung an arm around Holt, yanking him into an exuberant hug. “You’re my lucky charm, Holt. Just think if I’d had my pants down and missed this! Huzzah for Colonel Roosevelt! Huzzah for the Rough Riders!”
As the Yucatan began to back slowly away from the pier, toward Cuba and glory, the 2nd Infantry’s band struck up the opening strains of “A Hot Time in the Old Town.” It did seem a bit skewed to Holt that there hadn’t been room for the 71st on the ship, but they’d managed to fit in the Vitagraph men and the 2nd Infantry band.
“You’re singing it wrong!” shouted Paul with glee. “There’ll be a hot time in Cuba next week!”
And the whole company took up the refrain, “A hot time in Cuba next week!”
Port Tampa, Florida
June 16, 1898
“Cuba? Now?”
“What else could it be?” Kit shoved an armload of bandages into the cupboard and slammed the door with a triumphal bang. “Miss Barton is finally back and the stevedores have been loading like nobody’s business.”
Betsy stared dumbly at Kit, her own burden of blankets all but forgotten. They’d been on the State of Texas for two weeks now, long enough for their life on the ship to settle into a routine. “But—we can’t leave. We haven’t got orders. And what about the other nurses? The New York contingent?”
“You mean your friend?” Kit asked shrewdly. “I guess they’ll join us when they join us. You really think Clara Barton is going to wait around for a group of auxiliary nurses when the army is on the move?”
“But are they? Really?” The army had boarded over a week ago and been sitting there, sweating on their ships, ever since. There’d been news of a Spanish warship sighted. Betsy knew it was unpatriotic but she was grateful for that Spanish warship if it kept the fleet from doing whatever it was fleets were meant to do. “They’ve said they’re going before and haven’t.”
“This time it’s for real.” Under her tidy cap, Kit was fizzing with excitement. “They’ve sailed already. No one knows where they’ve gone. Goodness only knows if they know where they’re going! But wherever it is, we’ll be there too.”
“I thought the secretary of the navy hadn’t answered any of Miss Barton’s letters.” The scuttlebutt among the nurses was that their services had been tendered to the army—and ignored.
Kit grimaced. “He still hasn’t. Just like a man. But Miss Barton is made of sterner stuff. When he changes his mind, we’ll be there.”
“But . . .” Betsy looked down and realized she’d unraveled a whole corner of the blanket. They couldn’t be sailing. Not yet. Ava wasn’t here.
She should be glad of that. Ava wasn’t here. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? To stop Ava coming to Cuba.
Only, Betsy realized, with a sickening lurch of her stomach that had nothing to do with the movement of the ship, it wasn’t. Not really.
She hadn’t come to save Ava. She’d come because, as much as she’d hurt Ava, as much as she’d pushed Ava away, she’d hoped, deep down, that Ava would say, “Oh, Betsy,” in that exasperated way of hers, and then hold out her arms and let her rest. She’d come because she’d trusted that Ava would forgive her, as she’d always forgiven her before. Even if the offenses this time had been so much worse.
If she didn’t have Ava, she didn’t have anyone.
“Are you all right? You’re looking green about the gills.”
Betsy made an effort to pull herself together. “Is that your official assessment as a trained nurse?”
“That’s my assessment as someone who’s held more heads over buckets than you’ve had hot dinners,” said Kit, unimpressed. “My oldest gets sick the second she gets in a carriage. She goes about the same color you are now.”
She’d told herself she didn’t need anyone. She’d told herself this was all a noble act of self-sacrifice. But it wasn’t. Betsy could feel the despair pulling her under. She couldn’t even do noble sacrifice right.
You’ve been given everything, Ava had said furiously. You’ve been given everything and you’re throwing it away.
“Look,” said Kit, putting a hand on Betsy’s arm. Her fingers were stained with ink from the dispatches she’d been writing up in between her nursing shifts. “There’s no guarantee we’ll be in on any fighting. We’re a relief force. There’s always a chance it will be all over by the time we get there and we’ll go in with our medical supplies and our barrels of jerked beef and tour orphanages and feed hungry children like Miss Barton meant to do in the first place.”
Betsy made a choking sound she hoped would pass for a laugh. “If there’s no war, then what will you write about?”
“Angels of mercy saving starving children,” said Kit calmly, but Betsy could tell she was watching her. “Readers love that sort of thing. Come on, let’s go hear what Miss Barton has to say. The word is that she’s going to make some sort of formal address now she’s back.”
Betsy held up her pile of blankets. “You go ahead. I need to get these stowed.”
What she really needed was to curl up in a ball, her arms over her head like a little girl hiding from the monsters under the bed.
“You’re sure?” Kit’s notebook was already in her hand. Betsy could see her shifting from foot to foot, torn between staying with Betsy and not missing the latest scoop.
“You go on.” Betsy did her best to look calm and competent and not the least bit green. Cuba. She’d never bothered to think what would happen if they went. All her imaginings had ended with Ava. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“All right,” said Kit, but she didn’t sound convinced. “I’ll see you up there. Don’t do anything stupid.”
She left before Betsy could tell her she already had.