by John Buchan
“But do none of their planes get abroad and discover your real whereabouts? Magdalena, for example — or Loa?”
“So far we haven’t let them. We can beat anything they’ve got in pace and we seem to have more appetite for a scrap. There’s been one or two very pretty dog-fights. Besides, it don’t signify if they spot Magdalena or Loa or even Pacheco. We could shift somewhere else in a couple of hours.”
“But you have a base.” It was Castor who spoke. “Where we are sitting now is your base. If they take this, you are lost. If they even bomb it, you are deeply embarrassed.”
“I think that’s right,” said Latimer. “Therefore it’s up to us to let no enemy planes north of Loa. So far they haven’t shown any inclination in this direction. They’re too much occupied with General Peters.”
“Yet at any moment they may discover it?”
“There’s no reason in the nature of things why they shouldn’t,” said Archie. “But it’s one thing for a chance plane to spot us and another thing for Lossberg to exploit his knowledge.”
Three days later Archie returned in high spirits. He had two pieces of news. The first was that Bobby Latimer had brought down an enemy plane north of Loa. The pilot and observer were alive, and the plane was not too badly damaged, so they had added one to their stock of aircraft — a Seaforth monoplane, in the mechanism of which he discoursed at length. Happily they had the spares for it. He welcomed this new sign of enterprise on the part of Olifa as likely to relieve the tedium of his job. When Janet observed that, if one enemy could get as far as Loa, a second might get farther, Archie was reassuring.
“The way I look at it is this. They’ve spotted Loa — they were bound to hear of it from spies and such-like. But they’re so darned unenterprising that only one of their planes gets through. If these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? Loa is an easy mark, but this place from Lossberg’s lines would be dashed difficult, even for a swell like Bobby.”
The other news was startling. Peters’s raiders had made the garrisons at the Mines nervous, and, since it was assumed that the guerrillas were based on the villages in the Indian reserve and drew their supplies thence, it was resolved to clear that country and bring the women and children into a huge concentration camp near the city.
Archie was triumphant. “It’s what Sandy has been playing for, but he scarcely hoped to bring it off...Lossberg thinks the Tierra Caliente is an asset to us. Good Lord! it’s a millstone round our necks. Presently we should have had to feed these villages — a thing we had budgeted for — and this means that we shall now be a thousand per cent. better off for supplies. He’s a humane man, your General Lossberg. The concentrados will be a long sight better off with him than on their own, and if they get pinched a little when he gets pinched, we had made our book for that. Soon we’ll all have to draw in our belts...Sandy has made Lossberg hold the baby for him, which is what you might call strategy.”
A light of reminiscence woke in his eyes.
“That was always old Sandy’s way. Once at Crask, I remember, he fairly did me in. We were out rough shooting together and it was a blistering hot day. When we turned at the march burn, we were both a little bored, for we had seen very little, so by way of putting a spice of interest into the game, we agreed that I should carry what he shot and he what I shot, and I backed myself for a fiver to give him the heavier load. Well, I soon presented him with a hill partridge and a snipe, while he hadn’t let off his gun. Then I’m blessed if he didn’t shoot a roebuck and I had to sling the infernal brute on my back. After that he couldn’t miss, and I hadn’t the proper use of my arms. I staggered into Crask just about dead with heat, and laden like Balaam’s ass — roebuck on back, string of grouse and blackcock round my neck, rabbits in my pockets, and one and a half brace of snipe in my hat.”
For a day or two the plateau drowsed in its bright aromatic heat, and no news arrived except what the Olifa wireless told — how Lossberg had begun to clear the Indian country, and the rebels, baseless and foodless, were for certain no more now than bands of refugees clinging to the mountains’ skirts. Fort Castor, their chief centre, had been occupied without serious opposition. It was anticipated that soon there must be a general surrender. Olifa was marching to an easy victory, and the President, in a public speech, spoke contemptuously of the rabble of amateurs which had attempted to defy the disciplined forces of the republic.
The comments of the foreign press were no longer guarded. The military critics congratulated themselves on their prescience, and wrote, almost with regret, of the mathematical certainties of modern warfare. Their views did not disturb Janet’s peace of mind, but she had her own anxieties. She had an apprehension of some calamity approaching, and studied the blue sky for that enemy plane which might break through their guard. The drone of a machine arriving sent her hurrying out-of-doors, and she would wake with a start in the night and listen for the beat in the air which would be different from the beat of their own planes. Castor seemed to share her excitement; his eyes also were always turning skyward.
Then came two days of storm, when the thunder rattled among the crags of Choharua, and the rain fell in torrents, and the outlook was limited to six yards of swirling vapour. After that came a wind which threatened to uproot the huts, and which brought the sound of a furious sea even up to that ledge of mountain. During these days the wireless was disordered by atmospherics, but from its broken messages one thing emerged. Something had happened, something of vital importance, something which had got on Olifa’s nerves. It could not be a battle? Surely Sandy had never been betrayed into measuring his meagre strength in lists chosen by the enemy.
Then one afternoon Archie arrived, a weary Archie who could scarcely speak for drowsiness.
“Has there been a battle?” Janet demanded.
“Not likely. But we’ve begun the offensive.”
“What losses?”
“None. Practically none on either side. But there’s been the deuce of a lot of destruction of property. Sandy says it’s cheaper than human life and just as effective.”
“What have you done? Quick! Tell me.”
“We’ve cut the enemy’s communications. I’m dropping with sleep, Janet. In six hours you’ll hear everything.”
In six hours a washed, shaven, fed, and refreshed Archie told this story.
“Ever since Lossberg started pushing out from the Gran Seco city, our army has more or less disappeared. He felt us, but he didn’t often see us, barring, of course, our planes. Yet he was being sniped and shelled and bombed a good deal and Peters kept him lively at the Mines. Two things accordingly happened. The first was that Lossberg, not being able to get us into the open, thought we were far stronger than we were and grew more cautious than ever. The second was that he thought we had all our men in two places — up in the hills north-east of Fort Castor and in the eastern end of the Tierra Caliente. In that he was right — more or less — but he didn’t know the length of our range. The consequence was that he thought that the city and everything south and west of it were safe, but that the east and north-east were formidable and needed a big striking force. So he held the railway with only three garrisons between the city and the frontier — at San Luca, at Villa Bar, and at Gabones itself — and small posts of six men each every four miles.”
Archie with pencil and paper drew a sketch of the railway.
“You remember the big dry valley twenty-five miles down the line. I believe there’s occasionally a trickle in it in January, but just now it is like the Prophet’s Valley of Dry Bones. There’s a big viaduct crosses it — sixteen arches, the biggest and costliest piece of engineering on the whole line. It would have taken a cog-and-pinion arrangement or miles of circuitous gradients to get the railway across the valley. So the engineers very properly decided on a bridge.
“Blenkiron always had his eye on the San Luca bridge, and so had Lossberg, for he had a post at each end, twenty men with machine guns at San Lu
ca station — that’s the north end — and thirty-five at the south end, at a place called the Devil’s Ear. It was the only part of the line about which he showed any nervousness. But his posts weren’t very well placed, for they were at the abutments of the bridge, and the bridge has sixteen arches, and the valley is more than half a mile wide, so that if there was trouble about the middle of the viaduct it would be some little time before the ends heard of it and arrived to help.
“Blenkiron — the scheme was his principally — wanted to cut the line at a place where it would be hard to mend. San Luca was an obvious spot, especially as the bridge was unguarded in the middle, since it was calculated that wandering bandits could do no harm to the huge stone piers.
“Lossberg’s engineers in the Gran Seco could do any ordinary repairs that were required, but something very big would want help from Olifa. So Blenkiron’s second job was to make it pretty hard for Olifa to get to San Luca, and that meant a simultaneous bedevilment of the railway somewhere well to the south of the Devil’s Ear.”
Again Archie had recourse to pencil and paper.
“You see this point here, twelve miles north of Villa Bar and about twenty-three from San Luca. The railway runs in a deep cutting, the beginning of the long climb to the watershed. On the east side there’s a considerable mountain with a shaly face, which is shored up to prevent it slipping on to the metals. There was a little post about a mile off at a place called Tombequi — half a dozen sleepy Oliferos who spent their days playing spadillo and begging for drinks from the passing trains.
“Well, it was Peters’s outfit that got the job, and it was decided to make it a long-range business. You see, not one of our fellows had so far been seen within fifty miles of the railway after the city was surrendered, so Lossberg assumed that all was well there and took no precautions.
“We didn’t want to alarm him, so we took Pacheco for a base, the better part of one hundred and fifty miles off. It’s an ugly bit of country from there to the railway — the south rim of the Gran Seco basin, and on the north face of the rim an abomination of desolation, all pitted and tortured red rocks like the Sinai desert. The crest, however, is flattish, with a good deal of scrub on it, and there’s water in one or two places — the actual springs, I fancy, of streams that go down into the Vulpas valley. There used to be posts there, but Lossberg had no use for them, and on that bit of frontier all he has is a few mounted patrols which keep to the low ground on the north side under the rocks. Accordingly we fancied the high ground above the rocks, where there was nobody to spot us except vultures.
“We left Pacheco last Tuesday night with Sandy in command. He insisted upon taking charge — said he wanted a little fresh air and exercise — I flew him over from Magdalena that evening. I never saw a fellow in such spirits — filled with ‘em, drunk with ‘em. There were two parties — one under a chap called Jervoise, mounted on wiry little Indian ponies, with some queer kit on their saddles. That was the Tombequi outfit. The San Luca crowd were coming in cars and weren’t due to start from Pacheco till twenty hours later. A place had been agreed on as a rendezvous.
“It was a mad ride, and Sandy was the maddest thing in it. It looked as if he had been getting charged with electricity till he could hold no more and had to give some of it off in sparks. He’s fit again too, fitter than I’ve ever seen him before...We climbed out of the levels up long glens of loess till we struck the stony corridor that runs between the ridges. There was a big white moon, and the shale looked like snowdrifts and ice couloirs. There wasn’t a sound, for there are no beasts or birds up there — only the thud of hoofs, an occasional clash of buckles, and Sandy humming his crazy songs.
“We did fifty miles before dawn, and then lay up for most of the day on the top of the ridge, where there were water and scrub. We were off again at nightfall, and next morning came to the place they call Tulifa, where there is a bad foot-track zip from the Vulpas valley. Here we had to go cannily, for we had to get off the hills, which had become a series of knife-edges, and take to the sandy valleys to the north of ‘em. Yet they made pretty fair cover for men in open order, and we had goodish guides, and by nightfall we weren’t twenty miles from the railway. The staff-work had been top-hole, for we got to the appointed rendezvous just fifteen and a half minutes late. The cars had come through without a hitch and had been hiding all day in a ravine. There were three of ‘em — Rolls-Royce chassis and bodies that looked like a travelling circus.
“At the rendezvous we separated. Sandy transferred himself to the cars, for San Luca was the main objective, and I went with him. Jervoise trotted off with his bandits according to plan. They had to work exactly to schedule, for there was a big freight train due to pass Tombequi at forty-three minutes past nine. The plan was to let it pass and blow up the line behind it, while we blew up the San Luca bridge in front, and so bottled it up. Our motto was ‘Anything to give pain!’...
“I wasn’t an eye-witness of Jervoise’s show, but it ran like a clock. The roads were difficult and the party had to split up, but the sections arrived to a tick, and the only chaps who could complain were the poor devils of horse-holders, and the Olifa post, who were surprised at supper and put in the bag. No — there were no casualties, and we don’t take prisoners. Jervoise annexed their trousers, and turned them loose. He don’t like the raggedness of his outfit, and consequently has the eye of an old-clothes man for pantaloons. His lot made a fearsome mess, blew up the rack in twenty places over a three-miles stretch, and tumbled down half the mountainside on it. Sandy reckons it will take a fortnight’s hard work to clear it.
“I was in the San Luca push myself. There was a dust-storm blowing up from the east and the moon was covered, and as we had no lights and the road was naked prairie I’m bound to say I felt a bit rattled. If you’re loaded up with guncotton and blasting gelatine it isn’t much fun to be ricocheting from boulder to boulder. We couldn’t go slow and feel our way, for we had to keep to schedule time. But the weather was a godsend, for the wind drowned the noise of our wheels, and when we got to the bridge, the lights were burning clearly at each end and everything as peaceful as Clapham Junction.
“We didn’t take long about the job, for the whole thing had been arranged to the last detail, with the help of a plan of the bridge provided by one of our fellows who had been in the railway shops. We laid the charges, lit the fuses, and, if you believe me, when we started off on the return journey we weren’t two minutes out in our reckoning.
“It was all too easy, and that made me nervous. But we didn’t miss fire. In the War I saw a good many mines go up, but never anything like this. The empty valley became suddenly like Tophet, spouting sheets of greeny-yellow flame, while a mushroom of black smoke wavered above it. Then the wind blew the mushroom aside, and we saw that two of the arches had gone and that the viaduct was like a man’s mouth with the front teeth drawn...
“After that there is nothing to tell. The posts on each side of the bridge started shooting into vacancy, and just as we left there came an agonised whistle from the south. It was the freight train slowing down to discover what the devil had happened.”
Thus Archie to Janet. Before dinner he repeated the tale in its main features to Castor, who heard it with drawn brows.
“I make you my compliments,” the latter said. “You have certainly instituted a new kind of war. Can Lord Clanroyden repeat the performance?”
“Whenever he pleases. You see, we have the real mobility, and we have also knowledge of the country on our side. Lossberg already finds it hard to know what to do. He can’t police the whole Gran Seco, and as soon as he gets away from his bases we give him beans. We’re not too well off for stores, but we can always replenish at his shop...No, we don’t mean to make the railway unworkable. We can’t afford that, for we want Lossberg to supply himself — that he may supply us. He’s our Q. side. But we shall make it so difficult that the job will take up a lot of his time. He’s vulnerable, you see, and we’re not. We’
re not in the same elements. It’s like a fight between a wolf and a shark.”
“Then how can you hope for a decision?”
“We don’t want any dramatic coup. We want to tire him out so that he’ll see it’s hopeless, and Olifa will make peace. On our terms, of course...On your terms, that is to say,” Archie added.
Castor smiled at the correction.
“You are convinced that you are invulnerable?” he asked. “What about the air? Olifa has twice your number of machines.”
“She can’t use ‘em properly. That’s our almighty luck. They’re good average flying men, but they’ve no genius for the thing, and we’ve got the pick of the American fliers. Blenkiron saw from the first the necessity of that.”
“If you had a genius against you it might be uncomfortable?”
“To be sure. In the air you don’t reckon by quantity. One airman like Lensch — you remember? — the Boche who was killed in April ‘18 — would put a different complexion on the business.”
It was Janet who first saw the stranger. She had gone on a before-dinner scamper on the downs, and had turned for home, when her eye caught sight of a small monoplane coming in from the sea. That was not a route taken by their own planes, and the girl halted and had a look at it through her glasses. It was a strange make, one she had never seen before, and suddenly she realised what it meant. Lossberg had at last broken the cordon, and the Courts of the Morning were discovered.
As she galloped furiously towards the huts, she saw that the alarm had become general. The visitor had dropped low and was cruising scarcely two hundred feet up, getting a full view of the details of the place. There were no anti-aircraft guns, and the rifle shots from the sentries left him unharmed...Then one of their own planes rose, and the girl checked her horse to watch. The stranger let it approach, and then — contemptuously, it seemed — flew towards it. There was a burst of fire, the two planes seemed about to collide, and then by a curious manoeuvre the stranger slipped out and turned his head for the sea. She thought she saw a hand wave in farewell. It was indeed farewell, for the pursuing plane was utterly outclassed in speed. Almost in a minute, it seemed to her, the stranger was a speck in the pearly haze which marked the meeting of sea and sky.
