Eagle's Cry: A Novel of the Louisiana Purchase by David Nevin Page B

dashing, and touched with the gift of command. But he made good decisions, if he always found many a pro and con to weigh. Indeed, he doubted the competence of men who saw issues as simple and made decisions in a finger snap. He didn’t decide things in any finger snap, you may be sure.
    Anyway, the current problem was of his own making. Of course they should have foreseen the rise of parties, which are just vehicles to express different views, but they hadn’t. Failure of imagination then impaled him now. But he wouldn’t be deciding in any finger snap. A cold breeze arose. He tightened the saddle girth and turned the horse toward Richmond, as chilled by the decision ahead as by the wind.
    At the inn’s stables, he swung down and gave the groom a coin to give the horse a good currying and brushing. Billy Blackleg, so called for some presumably forgotten episode, was a skinny man with hard, horny hands and rheumy eyes, his drooping mustache gray at the top and stained brown at the ends from the chaw always in his cheek. He lived in the stables and he washed his shirt every week or so.
    He slipped the coin into his pocket like a sharpster palming a card, pulled off the saddle, and said from the corner of his mouth, voice very low, “Mr. Madison, I guess you’re watching out pretty good this business don’t fall into no tie between Mr. Jefferson and that New York feller.”
    Startled, Madison said, “We certainly don’t want one, Billy. What brought that to your mind?”

    “Well, thing is, most rich folks ain’t like you. They hold ‘emselves special. They don’t even look down on you.”
    Madison waited.
    “Know what I mean? They don’t even see you. ‘Lessen you make a mistake. Then they act like you was a dog shat on the floor.”
    Madison nodded, waiting.
    “So they talk in front of you, see what I mean? Now, most folks stay at Swan’s they’re going to be Federalists. I guess that ain’t any news to you. And they come out for their mounts and they don’t give me no warning, so I’m scrambling around getting them saddled and all and they go to talking like I ain’t got ears, know what I mean?”
    Madison nodded.
    “And they’re saying the electors—them that cast the electoral votes, ain’t that right?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Well, they’re saying the electors likely will cast votes two for two, see, every man for Mr. J. and the New Yorker. And then it would be a tie and they’d be on horseback.”
    “Horseback, eh?”
    “They’re saying maybe it ain’t over yet—they get a tie and they say they can find some way to set it on its ear—keep the government in their own hands, see? So it seems like us Democrats would be smart not to let no tie develop. I don’t know if you’ve thought on that or not.”
    “Billy,” Madison said, shaking his hand, “that’s very good thinking. I’m in your debt.”
    Billy gave him a grand smile. “Don’t think nothing of it, Mr. Madison. We’re all in this together.”
    Dolley watched Jimmy chew over the dilemma. She thought it incredibly selfish for Aaron to expose them to danger for reasons of shabby pride. Twenty as opposed to twenty-one would shatter the republic? Really! The tail wagged the dog.
    Still, there was tension in the air. An old friend, a Federalist—which had never mattered before—set up a whist game
that turned into an awkward disaster. The other women seemed to feel they were sitting with the devil’s handmaiden. In a millinery shop that same afternoon a fierce old woman in an expensive hat of apricot velvet put a claw on her arm and hissed, “I just want to tell you, we all of us, the sensible people, the right people, think it’s terrible what you and your husband and the rest of them are doing!”
    Men milled about the streets, laughing Democrats celebrating victory with bottles in hand, Federalists with downturned mouths. Several street fights became one with the whist game, the old woman, the newspaper venom, the