No Place for a Hero

by Niven Busch

 

The Creation

"Would you consider writing a Bicentennial novel for the San Jose Mercury News?"

The low-key voice was that of Fred Dickey, Mercury News Sunday Editor, and the question seemed sensible enough — but for a minute I didn't get the gist of it.

"You mean, a novel written to your order?"

"That was what we had in mind."

A newspaper commissioning a novel! That had to be a breakthrough in modern publishing, it hadn't happened, as far as I knew, since Victorian times, if ever.

"This has to be an act of faith on your part," I said.

"Oh, we have confidence in you," said Dickey.

As I thought over the proposition, a statement of Joseph Conrad's came to mind: ". . . as soon as one other person believes in my undertaking, the task is lightened by half."

All right! But what sort of novel should it be? Something with an historical background, of course: something appropriate for the Bicentennial.

Dickey and I discussed the project for a while. I said I would submit an idea. Truth was, I already had one. Before I'd ended the phone conversation it was taking shape.

I'd always been fascinated with the life and character of John Charles Fremont, particularly in his early California activities. Mercurial and unstable — talented, arrogant, ambitious and hopelessly complex — he has always presented a riddle to historians: leader or pitchman, what was he? A pathfinder of unbelievable courage and vision or a mutineer who offended his superiors and led trusting men to their deaths? What trails does his soul walk alone? Research supplies many clues, intuition some answers. For the rest, the reader must draw his own conclusions.

It will be obvious that though certain liberties are taken with the players in this drama, the bases for this novel are factual. Of the principal characters in No Place for a Hero only that of Juan Harrigan is fictional.

Niven Busch

 

Chapter 1

Late afternoon sun slanted through the narrow windows of Washington Armory as the court martial proceedings adjourned for the day — another day in a long, long trial.

The end was in sight now, a verdict pertinent to the career of a popular public figure. They called him "The Pathfinder" in the newspapers. In this military courtroom, adjunct to the nation's capitol, he was accused of high crime.

Behind the court's improvised bench the colors of the United States hung listless as the presiding officer arose and strode from the chamber. The judge advocate, his assistant prosecutor, the defense attorneys, witnesses and spectators were free to mill around. Only the man on trial was standing motionless.

The glancing ray of dying sunshine had crept across the room and on to the gleaming defense table where the accused stood in uniform but stripped of the insignia which had meant so much to him.

Even here, under attack and subject to indignity, he was a man in possession of himself, calmly surveying his battle scene, yet curiously detached.

It was the same mixture of interest and aloofness I had seen one afternoon out west when I had looked dead center at his face along the barrel of a Hawken rifle while my trigger finger squeezed, gently, firmly, relentlessly and my shoulder braced for the recoil.

This was the face and this was the man who had brought me back across the mountains and the desert to this new and mediocre city on the lower Potomac — brought me back from the California I had grown to love and where I hoped soon to return.

My gaze went up to the armory window and I mentally followed the sun across the wide, raw soil of America. It would be early afternoon out where the Pacific Ocean crashed onto its long and nearly virgin shore — siesta time in the pueblo of San Jose. My ranch was there, my wife and presumably my future.

But my present was right here where the "Pathfinder" struggled for his honor in the face of a great deal of very logical and very adverse evidence.

The courtroom was beginning to empty now. Fremont's own witnesses were on their feet and ready to move toward the door. They would move silently with the litheness of a cougar. These were the mountain men and adventurers who had followed him on paths never before trodden and into the curious, almost ridiculous military antic which brought disaster on his head but would probably add a state to the expanding Union.

And Jessie . . . Jessie Benton Fremont, daughter of a senator, a belle of Washington and St. Louis and wife of the beleaguered hero, she, too, was much in the room.

One thing about this court martial, it was high calibre. The charges were grave and the President of the United States kept close watch on all that went on.

Men put to death for some crime they have committed share, traditionally, two characteristics — they are poor, and they have few friends. Neither condition applied to the officer arraigned in the present trial. Still the fact remained: execution was the prescribed penalty for two of the three charges lodged against him in the case filed by the Army and the possibility of its exercise, however remote, shed a sullen elegance on the proceedings.

He was a small man, springy and quick, very well and compactly built, and extraordinarily handsome — though his handsomeness now was flawed by a look of strain or worry. That he should have such a look, in view of his present circumstances was hardly surprising, yet one had the feeling that his predicament hadn't caused it, that it was a permanent thing with him. He was in his mid-thirties, his hair brown and curly, his hair slightly greying.

By the rules of the court only he and the prosecutor could address the judges, appeal for rulings, enter exhibits and examine or cross-examine witnesses. Most people without legal training would have botched this badly, but he made an advantage of it; it enabled him to focus attention on himself, a job he was very good at. Not that he did it in a show-off way. Far from it. His effectiveness lay in keeping in a low key. He moved, of course — that was part of his formula — he dared you to stop watching him. You couldn't do it. Every turn of his head or movement of his hands was riveting, every one of the short, straying steps with which he tracked and retracked the space between the defense table and the judges' box. Though the trial had stretched on now for nearly three tense, stressful months his voice was still clear and well modulated, a private voice rather than an orator's — the controlled, confident voice of a man wrongly accused. You never lost the feeling that at any moment he might point up some new aspect of the testimony or some significant reading of the evidence, hidden till now but certain to be found, which would forever exonerate him and make the deeds charged against him suddenly redound to his credit. Brevet Brigadier General Brooke, Colonel, 5th Infantry, was an officer well designed by nature to preside at this detail. He had the face for it, the precise barracks-clerk facade, waxy and jowly. He had done his tour of combat duty, like everyone content to be exempted from the rigors of the United States' first major war in thirty years, since the War of 1812. No bullets whizzed about, no malaria rose from the ground here in the Washington Arsenal, cold, high and dim, but honorable service could be registered here, too. Nor was further promotion unlikely for a man designed to preside at a court-martial so sensational that it had relegated the news of distant and momentous victories to the back pages of the newspapers.

Judge Advocate was Captain John F. Lee, Ordnance Department. Though younger than Brooke, and considerably more attractive, he was the same type — Captain Lee was very clever, a formidable prosecutor. Left to himself, he would likely have followed the law rather than chosen to bear arms. He was fussy and a little chubby, with long sideburns and a propensity for legal facts. He had built a massive case for the Army and rested on it with composure. He was a West Pointer and of the thirteen officers of the court, including Brooke, six more were West Pointers. They, at least, were with him to a man. Day after day they filed in here at ten, recessed at noon for lunch, stood up in late afternoon to be dismissed. Their faces, to which the light from the high, narrow windows against the mustard-colored walls lent the harsh clarity of a steel engraving, were seen to ponder, to deliberate, properly conscious of Justice with her lifted scales. But privately, well, privately they wouldn't easily be moved to change the decision they had reached on the day they were first sworn in, namely, that this uppity, impudent Lieutenant Colonel of the Mounted Rifles, John Charles Fremont, was guilty as charged. Naturally! Else why was he here? Officers who were innocent, who behaved properly, who were obedient, loyal and decently trained, by God, were not stood up in front of a court and asked why they had done thus and so, why they hadn't done this or that, and why they had been mutinous, insubordinate, churlish, stupid, arrogant and disrespectful, and why, in short, they should not be hustled out some place where six bullets could crash into vital areas of their bodies, and a seventh if necessary.

That was the gist of it.

Court stood adjourned, to reconvene at ten tomorrow. We all stood aside until General Stephen Watts Kearny, Fremont's accuser, could pass us from his seat in the front row, against the rail. With him was his staff and principal witnesses, Colonel W .H. Emory and Colonel H. S. Turner and Captain Philip St. George Cooke, famous soldiers all. Kearny looked ill. He was fifty-six but seemed at least ten years older. He had a western face, a fighter's face, long nose, long chin, the rest case also in long, drooping lines in a skin so taut it seemed made of material stronger, longer lasting than skin, some stuff that had been leather cured. But there were dark brown pouches under his eyes. He wore his full dress blues with epaulets and decorations, as did his staff.

Fremont delayed at the defense table, gathering his papers and speaking in low tones with his counsel: his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, and his brother-in-law, William Carey Jones.

Jessie brushed past me, starting down to him. I could smell her hair and the perfume of the French soap she used and something else, the secret fragrance of her body in her clothes. She went straight to her husband and said something to him, her red-brown head with its heavy mass of hair close to his greying one, and being almost on the same level, they were of equal height. Through the trial they had deferred to each other with an affectionate formality, but today . . . today in the drafty corridors, during one of the interminable intermissions, they'd gone off by themselves several times to talk, and I'd felt they were disagreeing.

The spectators were all in the aisles now, moving toward the doors where the carriages were being called. Though there were only two hundred seats (a Senate page had been caught scalping a pair for forty dollars!) most of Washington society had been here today. It was the place to be, only the President and Cabinet stayed away. The city had been gay all month, coming alive after the Christmas break. The hotels were full, with famous faces in many: Douglas of Illinois, the little giant, at Coleman's; Clingman of North Carolina at Brown's; Bishop Polk of Louisiana at Gadsby's. My lodging place, the National, ran its own charabanc daily to the Arsenal, saving us from coping on our own with the mud on Pennsylvania avenue: would Congress never provide the money to pave it? I gulped fresh air, cleaning my lungs of the Arsenal's reek of mildewed pine boards and too many people. The judges were entering their special omnibus. Behind it was Tom Benton's brougham, then my conveyance. I was pressing along toward it when one of the military guards caught my arm.

"Colonel Fremont wishes to speak with you, Mr. Harrigan."

He stood just inside the doorway, smiling and shaking hands right and left, Jessie beside him, Senator Benton behind. It was like some sort of private fete — you would have thought he had already been acquitted Reluctant to force my way through, I lingered on the edge of the group, in the draught from the street. He saw me and came up to me at once.

"Juan, you're coming tonight?"

"If you want me."

"Yes, yes of course. We need you desperately."

His verbs always carried imperative modifiers: you must answer "instantly", you must proceed "urgently". "Desperately" was only a secondclass crisis.

I told him again that I'd be there.

"Early," he insisted. "We'll have a bang-up dinner, then we'll work all night."

He shook hands with me, delightedly, as if he'd just made the most enticing suggestion imaginable. His eyes flashed. What eyes he had!

I remembered the first time I'd taken note of those eyes, or they of me. I'd been brought into his camp, injured, and saw him sitting with his back against a tree. He had on a blue woolen shirt, a pair of old, dirty buckskin pants, and moccasins worn without socks or stockings; the big Negro, Jake Dodson, who went everywhere with him, had just handed him his dinner. Kit Carson said something to him and he turned and looked at me. He looked, he looked hard and alertly because he felt something coming from me, something that wasn't good. He looked, in a flash, into my soul, and in that one look he knew my secret. He looked at me and he knew everything and the burning look turned to one of distaste, contempt.

Was all this imagination on my part, caused by my pain and my jittery nerves? No, there must have been something in it, I thought. Later I was sure of it.

But I'm getting ahead of my story.

 

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