Page 20 of Two Wars and a Wedding

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.