Sundance 20

by Peter McCurtin

  ‘A good reason to stay is Bannerman would like you to walk out. But you’re right about Colomo. This is his first court day in Las Piedras, but he knew your name and that you came here from Morelos. That means he’s been talking to Bannerman’s friends or to Bannerman himself.’

  ‘Then I haven’t a chance?’

  ‘I’d have to say no. But you have to see this thing out. If you don’t stay, you can’t complain later. But, if Colomo rules against you, there will be some kind of record that he did. That’s why you have to stay. You said if you lost in this court you would appeal to a higher court or go to the governor, even to President Diaz.’

  ‘Looks like that’s what I’ll have to do. I know I don’t have a chance with Colomo, but it’ll be interesting to see how he turns me down. He may be a judge, but he’s a rotten lawyer.’

  They went back to court and had to wait an hour before Judge Colomo came out of his chambers, rubbing his eyes and yawning. It was then two-thirty in the afternoon and five other cases were called before the court clerk demanded that Jorge Amadeo Calderon step up to the bench. By then the judge had been to his chambers several times. Each time he returned to the courtroom he was more bleary eyed than when he left.

  ‘Proceed,’ he told Jorge and settled back in his chair.

  Ten

  Jorge unfolded his brief and began to read from it. He said he was appearing as an ‘interested party’ on behalf of certain United States citizens being held captive in the State of Sonora. He demanded that a court order be issued, requiring that said United States citizens be returned to American territory.

  Feigning surprise, Judge Colomo sat forward in his chair, ‘Who are these United States citizens you speak of, Señor Calderon?’

  ‘They are Indians,’ Jorge said, ‘abducted from the American territories of New Mexico and Arizona.’

  Judge Colomo smiled and got ready to deliver a joke. ‘Yes, Señor Calderon, the court is aware that New Mexico and Arizona are American territories. As you know, they used to be Mexican.’

  After the ripple of laughter washed away, Judge Colomo asked, ‘Since when have American Indians become American citizens? Is their legal status not “ward of the government”?’

  ‘For most of them it is,’ Jorge answered, ‘but in the American Southwest the situation is different. Many of the tribes there were Mexican citizens before the War of 1846 and they became United States after the cessation of the war. Their status—their special legal status—has not changed since then. Those living at the time became United States citizens—and so did their children. This is the law.’

  Jorge had brought his law books into court, but first he began to read from his brief. One of his books was entitled Laws Relating to Treaties With the Republic of Mexico.

  Judge Colomo’s jowly face darkened as Jorge read on. Up in the front row of seats Lucas Bannerman sat very still. It seemed to Sundance, watching from midway in the court, that for a moment Judge Colomo looked directly at Bannerman, as if asking for instructions.

  ‘The law is quite clear ...’ Jorge was saying. Judge Colomo held up his hand and cleared his throat. ‘Señor Calderon, what you are describing is an interesting sidelight in our history, and I shall certainly study it, but I am afraid this court has no jurisdiction.’

  The judge paused so Jorge could speak. ‘With your permission,’ Jorge said, ‘I must insist that this court has jurisdiction. The Indian captives I speak of are being held within the boundaries of this state. Therefore, this court—the Provincial Court of Sonora—has the power to hear this case.’

  Judge Colomo did not agree. ‘Where these captives—if indeed they exist—are being confined is not the concern of this court. What you are describing is a federal matter, perhaps a diplomatic one. I repeat, Señor Calderon, this court has no jurisdiction. Of course you are free to take your case into the federal courts. In time, I’m sure your case will be heard, however long it takes. First, however, I would like to make a few remarks before court is recessed until next month. In the law books there are dusty, all-but-forgotten laws that should never have been passed in the first place. Many were passed because of the passion of the times, or for political expediency. To invoke laws that have no true merit is, in my opinion, an attempt to use the law for a devious purpose. And, sir, you may take that statement any way you like. Case dismissed!’

  Sundance had to dig his fingers into Jorge’s arm to keep him from saying something that would give the crooked judge a chance to put him in jail. Once in jail, he would never come out again except in a coffin.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Sundance said, when the judge went into his chambers and the court clerk closed his big book with a bang. They got out before most of the crowd. Jorge was still trembling with anger when they got to the bottom of the courthouse steps.

  ‘That fat pig, you heard what he said,’ Jorge raged. ‘¡That puerco! – Devious purpose! He said I was free to go into the federal courts. Who the hell is he to tell me what I can do! The federal courts mean Mexico City. It may take months, maybe as much as a year, before my case comes up. By then Bannerman may have run out of Indian slaves. So even if I win my case it won’t make any difference to the Indians. Bannerman will have sold them far south of here. There is a big market for slaves in Yucatan. What the hell am I going to do?’

  They had reached the other side of the plaza. ‘You are going to go ahead with it. I don’t mean the federal courts but a -direct appeal to the governor of the state and to President Diaz. Don’t write to Washington until you have appealed to the governor and to Diaz. But let them know that’s what you’ll do if they turn you down.’

  ‘Blackmail the President?’

  Sundance smiled. ‘Not blackmail. What you do is give the President all the information he needs, then let him decide. Diaz is very popular with American businessmen and politicians. The businessmen—the cattlemen, mine operators and railroad people—like him because he lets them plunder Mexico in return for millions in bribes. Diaz won’t want any trouble with Washington just because of a few thousand Indian slaves.’

  Jorge said, ‘It can be dangerous to take such a strong line with Diaz. The secret police—the special branch of the federates—do anything he orders. Men disappear and are never heard of again.’

  Sundance was thinking of General Crook. ‘My friend, the general, has a few powerful friends in Washington. Also, Crook has a few good friends in Mexico City, mostly generals. If the word is passed along then you are not without influence, the federates won’t harm you. I’d say you have to worry more about Bannerman than Diaz.’

  They got back to the street where Jorge lived and while the coffee was cooking they talked about what Jorge’s next move should be. ‘I am thinking that an appeal to the governor of the state would be a waste of time,’ Jorge said. ‘I have written to him many times and have never received an answer. He lives in a fine house—a mansion—in Durango, which is many miles from here. He does not want to concern himself with what happens in a dusty little town like Las Piedras. I am told that he has never visited this town in all the twelve years he has been governor. I have decided I must be daring. I must go to Diaz. But getting to see him won’t be easy. The Indian boy who was going to remake Mexico is now hidden away behind layers of politicians and soldiers. Men—lawyers, politicians, peasants—sit in his antechamber for weeks and months hoping to be granted an audience. That would be hell. You mentioned General Crook a moment ago. Will he really help?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sundance answered. ‘If I ask him he will—but I have to be sure I’m doing the right thing. Like I said, there are men in Washington—powerful enemies—who would like to destroy him. All he has to do is make one bad mistake and they’ll be after him like wolves in winter. Crook can take up for you, Jorge, but it has to be done carefully. I won’t ruin Crook’s career, not for you, not for your Indians. Maybe that’s wrong—but that’s how it is.’

  ‘Do what you can,’ Jorge said.

  ‘We have to w
atch ourselves from now on,’ Sundance said. ‘Bannerman is far from being a fool. He knows of my friendship with General Crook and what that can mean to you. When he had Silvestra tortured and killed, he probably thought that would put the fear of God into you as nothing else could. But today in court he saw he was wrong. I’m not sure we should stay in this place. Montoya and his men won’t be any help if Bannerman’s riders attack. Maybe they’ll use dynamite.’

  ‘But where would we go, Sundance?’

  ‘To a safer place.’ Sundance smiled as he took the coffee pot off the bed of glowing charcoal. ‘Wherever that may be. Meantime we have to think about getting you to Mexico City and Diaz.’

  ‘Ah, Mexico City,’ Jorge said. ‘It will be good to see it again.’

  Sure, Sundance was thinking, if you ever get there. Always at the back of his mind was the feeling that there was only one way to deal with Lucas Bannerman. Like George Crook, he believed in force—“preventive force”, the general called it—when it looked as if nothing else would work. And yet he was forced by circumstances to give Jorge his chance. Though, by nature he cared for few people, he felt that he had a stake in this brave, drunken, often foolish Mexican. Jorge was a weak man who had forced himself to be brave, and to Sundance that meant a special kind of courage. There were men of courage who never thought about it—or very little—and they regarded death as inevitable and natural. Without pride, Sundance knew he was such a man. So, in a way, such men could be said to be men without a sense of courage. It was the weak men who were afraid to die and yet risked death willingly that Sundance admired. Jorge, the mad mescal drinker, was a very special man. Looking at Jorge, in his shabby black suit still smelling of benzene, and his scuffed boots, he felt a cold hatred for Lucas Bannerman. All his life he had fought against men, many of them as vicious as Bannerman, but he had been able to fight them in his own way, with nothing and no one to hamper him. It went against his savage nature, the Indian side of his nature, to hold back when everything he had ever learned told him what he should do. And yet …

  ‘We better get started to Meseta to telegraph General Crook,’ Sundance said. ‘You might get to see Diaz without Crook, but it wouldn’t be as easy.’

  Jorge looked impatient and showed it by scratching his head furiously, a habit of his when he was agitated. ‘Why Meseta? Meseta is north. If you want to come all the way to Mexico City with me, we can telegraph your general on the way. There’s a telegraph office in Durango.’

  ‘Takes too long to get that far south,’ Sundance said. ‘By the time we reach Durango, he may have started down from the Border.’

  ‘Then you ride to Meseta and I’ll head for Mexico City. I want to get this going.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Sundance said, shaking his head. ‘If you start for the railroad at Durango on your own—you probably won’t get there. First we’ll ride to Meseta, then we’ll wait for an answer from Crook. Then we’ll make for Durango. You can go on from there by yourself, if that’s what you want. That decision comes later. For now you stick with me. You’ve been in this fight a long time, so you can wait another four or five days. Don’t argue about it, Jorge.’

  Jorge picked up a heavy law book and slammed it on the table, almost breaking the top. ‘You should have stayed in the army, Señor Sundance. You’ve got a natural fondness for giving people orders.’

  ‘Don’t argue,’ Sundance repeated, but this time he grinned at the excitable Mexican. ‘We’ll fight out first thing in the morning, with your permission, of course. I don’t like traveling in country I don’t know that well after dark. Like I said, we’ll have to watch ourselves. Bannerman may not try to get at you so soon after you brought this new case into court, but don’t count on it. Don’t ever count on what a man like Bannerman will do. So much the better if he thinks he has you licked. Get some sleep, Jorge. Diaz will think he’s seeing a ghost if you walk in looking like the way you do now.’

  Jorge stretched out on the bed and Sundance turned down the lamp. After Jorge began to snore Sundance took the sawed-off and went down to the street to have a look. The moon was sailing across the sky and there was a dusty wind blowing in from the west. Washed by moonlight, the Sierra didn’t look real, but high in the peaks the tigers were prowling. He looked up at the faint light coming from Jorge’s quarters. Black beetles, drawn by the light, were ricocheting off the glass. The beetles fell to the street with broken wings, crunching under his feet. A huge brown rat ran across the street and disappeared into a doorway. Except for the sighing of the night wind, it was very quiet in the street.

  Back upstairs Sundance bolted the door and stretched out on the floor, with his head on a rolled blanket and the shotgun beside him, where he could lay hands on it in a second. It was hot in the room with the window only open a few inches. Law books were stacked high on the sill as a protection against a stick of dynamite being thrown in from the street. Sundance grinned in the darkness. Jorge, cranky as ever, had been indignant about having his law books used as sandbags.

  Now and then during the night Sundance woke, though not as an ordinary man might wake casually or nervously. It was something he had trained himself to do. Like his weapons, this special sense of time was part of his fighting man’s equipment. But later there was no feeling of fatigue because he fell asleep immediately after he was satisfied that there was no danger.

  By the time Jorge groaned himself awake at first light Sundance had coffee on the fire and meat in the pan.

  ‘Sometimes I don’t think you’re human,’ Jorge said.

  Eleven

  There were times, Sundance realized when Jorge could never leave well enough alone. This was one of them. They were crossing the plaza on their way to the north road and Police Chief Montoya was coming the other way on foot. The doors of the cathedral were open. People, many of them women, were going silently to early Mass. In the great tower of the centuries-old cathedral, the bell turned over and over, causing the morning air to shake with its vibrations.

  Jorge was feeling cocky. ‘Look at the hypocrite Montoya on his way to church. If he enforced the law as well as he sang hymns there might be some law in this mangy town.’

  Jorge’s voice was loud and Sundance told him to drop it. But instead of listening Jorge raised himself in his stirrups and called out, ‘Policia, can I depend on you to protect my property while I'm away? I would hate to come back and find my property—my law books—burned.’

  Montoya, so closely shaved that there were several specks of blood on his chin, regarded Jorge with distant eyes. ‘Your property will be looked after, abogado.’ Then he walked away.

  ‘Hypocrite!’ Jorge said, turning his horse’s head.

  ‘Jorge,’ Sundance said patiently as they got to the other side of the dusty plaza, ‘you don’t need any more enemies than you have now. You could be wrong about Montoya. He is a man caught between powerful forces. On one side there is this Colonel Almirante, on the other Bannerman and his politician friends. What do you want him to do?’

  Jorge was scornful. ‘His job. Do his job or give it up.’

  The town of Meseta was about seventy miles away, and to get there they had to cross arid country, hills and plains that ran clear all the way north to the Arizona border. This was hard country where there were few rivers—and they all disappeared into the burning sands before they had gone very far. Ironwood grew plentifully on the plains.

  They reached the mining town of Alamos after six hours in the saddle. They stopped there to water the horses and to drink very bad coffee in a ramshackle restaurant run by an old man with one arm and one eye. By then it was close to noon and the machinery at the two mines was silent as the men ate or slept in the shade. The old man who ran the restaurant was an American who said he had fought in the Juarez revolution. Sundance didn’t believe him. The old man looked and sounded like a man who had lost his eye and his arm running from the law.

  The old man had a round head on a long neck. His head was bald and shiny, his ear
s stuck out with batwings. His place was thick with flies and the smell of fried onions. ‘You hear about the Injun trouble?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Jorge asked irritably. ‘You mean up on the border? The last I heard everything was quiet up that way.’

  The old man’s single eye glistened with excitement. ‘Not up there, mister—down here. Last thing I hear, there’s a band of renegade Apaches, Comanches and halfwild Comancheros raidin’ and killin’.’

  Sundance couldn’t drink the rest of the coffee. ‘Did you see any of this for yourself?’

  ‘Nope—not me,’ the old man answered. ‘But I heard about it. A man come through here on his way south from Meseta.’

  ‘Had he seen it?’ Jorge asked, putting a coin on the counter.

  ‘I asked him that and he said no, but it’s happenin’. I tell you it’s happenin’. Soon it’ll be as bad as up in Texas and Arizona. Course they’ll have to get the army after them renegades. Goddamned red niggers!’

  He saw the look on Sundance’s face and turned away, mumbling an apology. Later, on their way out of Alamos, Jorge said, ‘What he said doesn’t make sense. Indian trouble has always been far north of here. And even that’s been quiet, if you can believe what you read in the papers.’

  Sundance was thinking. ‘It’s been quiet,’ he said. ‘Even Geronimo has been behaving himself since General Crook got finished with him. And why would Apaches be joining up with Comanches and halfbreed Comancheros? I never heard of Comanches ever leaving Texas. I don’t say it couldn’t happen, but if it did the natural place for them to go if they headed south would be Chihuahua, not here. And Comancheros don’t hook up with anybody for the good reason that just about everybody—white and Indian—hate their guts. Like you said, none of it makes sense.’

  Jorge looked at Sundance. ‘Are you thinking the same thing?’