“Crabb’s playing politics,” McDowell said. “He’s trying to play Pesquiera off against Gandara. But it won’t work, because Gandara doesn’t have a thimbleful of supporters left. Crabb was hoping that they’d weaken each other enough so that we could step in against nothing more than token opposition. But it didn’t work out that way. Damn it, when we started this thing I knew what was up. I expected all along that we’d find ourselves trying to boost Henry Crabb into the Governor’s Palace at Ures, or maybe the U. S. Senate from Sonora. It was a risky thing then, but it’s a fool’s play now. Pesquiera isn’t half so weak as we thought he’d be. But Crabb goes right on ahead as if nothing had happened. I don’t think he’s fooling anybody—and I want to know if all of you are willing to take the risks.”
“Are you?” McKinney countered.
Holliday’s drawl broke in between them. “If you gents haven’t got the guts for it, what are you doing here in the first place?”
“I just want to know how far out I’m going to have to stick my neck—and how many men I can count on to stand with me,” McDowell said. “Does that make me a coward?”
It was Norval Douglas who answered. “You’re the only one who can answer that, Dave. But it seems to me that if you signed up to follow Crabb, then you’re duty-bound to follow him wherever he heads.”
“Is that the way you feel about it, Norval?”
“It is. I took a job. I intend to fulfill my end of the contract.”
McDowell turned his troubled gaze out from the tent, across the brush-studded desert toward the westward peaks across which they had come. Ahead, southeast, lay the salt flats, the sand dunes that led finally to the banks of the Rio Colorado. The sun was down and indigo shadows spread thick along the ground. He thought of these men, his fellow officers. McKinney was an ex-member of the California legislature, one of Crabb’s fellow politicians. He would probably follow Crabb’s lead—or would he? Bob Holliday was a man of varied backgrounds; he had been a scout with Cooke’s Mormon Battalion and he had fought with Frémont in California, but essentially he did not own the military mind. Of the other officers, not gathered here, he thought he might be able to count on Will Allen, his lieutenant and friend, and perhaps on Quarles and Porter, who were Holliday’s lieutenants. Of the others he was not so sure. John Henry, from Mariposa, was McKinney’s lieutenant and also an ex-member of the state legislature, as was the surgeon, Dr. Oxley. Colonel W. H. McCoun, whom Crabb saw fit to call his Commissary General, was likewise a former legislator, and had at one time stood tall in the state house. He would no doubt follow Crabb to the shores of the Styx if he had to. Other officers—Tozer and Bob Wood and Nat Wood and Ted Johns—were present at Crabb’s suffrage. McDowell thus felt in the minority. He said as much: “The general’s got himself surrounded by friends. But I don’t want to be the sacrifice of a fool’s mission.”
“What do you want to do about it?” countered Holliday.
“I wish I knew.”
“Why don’t you sleep on it?” McKinney said. That was McKinney’s answer to a good many things.
“I’ve slept with it for weeks,” McDowell told him. “I’m at the point where I don’t like it. I think we ought to find out exactly what the general has in mind before we go any farther.”
“As I said before,” Holliday drawled, “why don’t you ask him?”
McDowell made no reply. The trouble was, he was afraid of what Crabb’s answer might be—and he did not wish to be the only man in the party in disagreement with the general. He did not want events to make him out a coward; it was that simple. If at this point he refused to follow Crabb further, it would be akin to mutiny. If, thereafter, Crabb proved successful, McDowell would be behind, a castaway; and if Crabb proved unsuccessful, McDowell would be a scapegoat. He feared both consequences. He pounded his fist into an open palm. “Isn’t anybody else interested in what we’re headed for?”
“Maybe you should have thought all that out before you came along, Dave,” said McKinney. “The rest of us did.”
McDowell rolled out of the tent opening and stood up. In the east, over the desert flats, the moon was coming up with a soft ring of dust around it. He felt the pressure of time. Along the tent streets fires glittered, red gleams like eyes winking at him. Soft laughter swept across the evening and somewhere down the row a harmonica made sad melodies. Norval Douglas came out of the tent and put his light eyes on him; Douglas said, “Whatever you decide to do, Dave, don’t let public opinion push you around.” Then he swung away, a buckskinned figure moving through the night with a cougar’s grace. The moonlit plain glimmered silver. When Bob Holliday appeared at the front of the tent, he merely showed a bleak expression, saying nothing, disappearing toward his own tent. Finally McKinney came out, moonlight glancing off the dome of his head, and stood with a musing pucker to his lips while he packed his pipe. “Dave.”
“What?”
“It’s likely to be a rough road. I suggest you make up your mind.”
“I see,” McDowell said slowly. “You don’t trust me.”
McKinney, for a politician, was blunt enough. “That’s right,” he said without malice. “If we ride into trouble, I want to know that the man who commands the left flank isn’t occupied with trying to balance his own skin against the company’s. Maybe you ought to figure out where your loyalties lie before we hit the Mexican line. I think you ought to do that, Dave.”
“Thanks,” he said drily.
McKinney made no reply. He put a match to the bowl of his pipe and when it was going to his satisfaction, he walked away.
CHAPTER 12
At the gray break of dawn the column moved out. Past Warner’s Ranch and Sackel’s Well now, they pushed southeastward toward Jeager’s Ferry at the Yuma Crossing. Horsemen rode in a column of twos; out ahead of the regiment rode a single buckskin-clad man: Norval Douglas, trail scout. In the midst of the column plodded five Studebaker wagons, each drawn by eight spans of mules, with the driver riding the off wheel animal. On these laden wagons rode bedrolls, clothes, horse feed, tools, kegs of gunpowder, surgeon’s supplies, water barrels, spare wheels and axles, flour barrels and salt pork and food to provision a hundred men for two months less the fortnight they had already traveled, and planks—many stout planks lashed beneath the wagons. When Charley had asked the meaning of these planks he had learned that they were to be used as rails for the wagons when they reached the forty-mile stretch of the soft sand-dune country. January—and the desert was smoky with ninety-degree heat. It was unseasonable and dismal; not a cloud appeared anywhere on the topaz expanse of the sky. Catclaw, greasewood, prickly pear, jointed cholla, barrel cacti—these seemed the only vegetation studding the gentle undulations of the land. “The land that God forgot,” muttered Jim Woods, riding at Charley’s stirrup. Dust, kicked up by the column of horses ahead, filled his nostrils and caked his skin and formed a salty grit against his eyelids and tongue. There was the muffled tramp of hoofs, the creak of saddle leather, now and then a soft jingle of bit chains, the scrape of big wagon wheels and the listless flap of canvas.
The earth, tan-gray and rocky, became steadily softer underfoot as they moved into the rising sun morning after morning. Dull heat smothered the plain from midmorning to sundown. Mica particles in the ground flashed painfully against the eye. Seldom was there any wind; now and then came a sluggish current of air to scorch dry skin. Powerful sunlight burned their hands and faces and shoulders. Once, some distance back, Charley caught sight of Bill Randolph and Chuck Parker. Parker rode the tailgate of a wagon; Randolph, alongside, rode with his shirt off, his massive brown torso gleaming with brown sweat.
On the nineteenth they hit the dunes.
Wagon wheels sank almost hub-deep in the soft sand. The column halted. From the head of the line came commands, relayed back man to man. Charley found himself detailed with a small group of men near the second wagon. He stepped down and handed the reins of his horse to old John Edmonson, who scraped the back of
his hand across a sweating weathered brow and attempted a smile. Leaving his rifle in the saddle boot, Charley plodded forward through the sand while it sucked at his boots.
Lieutenant Will Allen came up, a trim little man who twisted the points of his brown droopy mustache and said, “All right. Untie those planks under the wagon bed.”
He had to crawl under the wagon to undo some of the knots. There was not much space between the wagon’s floor and the tops of the sand dunes; the wagon had sunk practically to its axles. He had to dig his way in. His fingers were clumsy with the knots. He heard Lieutenant Allen’s impatient voice: “Hurry it up, can’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” he muttered, and presently the ropes came loose. The planks almost dropped on his upturned face. He scrambled out from under the wagon and pulled the planks out, seeing another youth—Carl Chapin—doing the other side of the wagon.
Chapin ignored him. Charley went in again, and again, and after four trips had a stack of planks lying behind the wagon—four planks, each almost eighteen feet long. Chapin had the same kind of stack on his side. Charley stood breathing heavily, awaiting a command, curiously regarding the pale thin youth with the underslung chin. Chapin seemed more surly than ever; he glared with open malice at the lieutenant, who was motioning to Bill Randolph and three or four other men. “You’ll find shovels in the wagon,” the lieutenant said. “Dig it out.”
Bill lifted his hat and scratched his head. “That’s a powerful lot of diggin’, Lieutenant.”
“Do what you’re told,” Allen said, and swung away to inspect the next wagon down the line. His horse’s hoofs kicked up high splashes of loose white sand; it plodded away as though half swimming.
Charley went back to his horse and stood by the stirrup while Bill and his crew poked their shovels into the sand beneath the wagon. In ten minutes Bill was swearing in a steady monotone. With every shovel of sand that was taken away, half a shovelful sifted back into the hole. “Jesus,” Bill said. “This will take a week.”
Old John Edmonson, holding Charley’s horse, smiled gently and murmured, “The devil’s work is never done.” His talk was not loud enough to reach Bill’s ears, and Charley felt thankful for that. He said, “Have you got any idea how far the dunes go?”
“About forty miles, I understand,” said Edmonson.
By midafternoon the wagons were shoveled almost clear. Lieutenant Allen came back up the line, ordering the lounging men back into their saddles. When he came by, he stopped and spoke to Charley: “You and these five men will lay rails for this wagon.” It was all he said; he reined his horse around and went forward toward the point.
The sun slapped hard against the earth, against the men. A tired stream of insects, they wound slowly forward across the sea swells and troughs of the white glittering dunes. With each ten feet the wagon traveled, a board had to be taken up behind it and carried around to the front, where a man had to avoid somehow the plodding hoofs of the mules and still get the plank laid butt against the previous plank, which would by then be disappearing under the wheel. Thus continuous rails were kept under the wheels; and the expert muleskinners did their best to keep the heavy Conestogas on the tracks. On the uphill slopes men had to dismount and put shoulders to the wagon tailboards; on the downhill slopes the muleskinners leaned forward braced against the ropes of the brake handles, and men rode behind with ropes dallied from saddlehorns to the wagon. Horses waded almost to the stirrups in the liquid sand. The westering sun stretched shadows and poured rivulets of sweat down the flesh of straining, red-eyed men.
Often a plank would tilt, slide, slip away; the wagon would sag; men would ride up, dab ropes over the wheel hub and haul the wheel up out of the dry quagmire until the plank could be righted. Once, resetting a plank in this way, Charley almost lost his hand under a wheel that came plunging away from a rope that slipped loose.
Night made its approach. In five hours the train had advanced less than half a mile. The mules were unhitched, fed and watered, and hobbled with the horse stock. Campfires blossomed in the evening and over the desert, indigo and violet twilight swept in a last retreating defense. Charley ate his meal and sank back on his blanket exhausted, his muscles trembling. Norval Douglas crouched cross-legged frowning into the fire, his eyes gleaming frostily. Jim Woods came up from the wagon and packed his tin utensils away, scrubbed clean with sand, and joined the small group around the fire. Around them the tent streets were quiet and lonely. The wheezing harmonica that they had become accustomed to was silent tonight. Charley stretched his shoulders. The air turned crisp and the fire’s warmth made him immediately sleepy. A newcomer drifted up and stood a diffident six paces from the fire, looking forward inquiringly, and when Charley turned to look at him he recognized old John Edmonson. When he had taken time to study Edmonson, Norval Douglas said, “Rest a while.”
“Thanks,” Edmonson said, and crouched down, turning his open palms toward the blaze. Downslope beyond the tents, guards walked slow circles around the picketed horses, now and then stopping close to one another to converse. A final ribbon of cobalt dusk faded away westward. John Edmonson stared into the fire. His cheeks were stubbled with gray and his face seemed even more deeply lined than Charley remembered it. Edmonson nodded courteously to Jim Woods and a moment later pulled out a briar pipe and packed it with care, leaning forward then to poke a twig into the fire. He put it to his pipe and puffed deeply until a red-gray spiral of smoke began to rise from the bowl, whereupon he tossed the twig on the fire and sat back, pulling contentedly on the smoke. Red-bearded Captain McDowell came up looking troubled and dipped his head to them all, and made a space for himself, saying, “This will be the last fire we’ll be able to build for some time. There’s no fuel on the dunes. We ought to roll in soon—we’ll be on the move at sunrise. We’ll be lucky to make a mile a day.” He stared across the fire. “Norval, you’ll ride out at midnight. I want you to find the shortest route across the dunes.”
“Due east,” Douglas said promptly. “Thirty-eight miles. After that, Yuma Crossing and the Sonora desert. We’re starting a little late in the season, I’m afraid—the desert will be damned hot by the time we reach it.”
“We’ll do all right,” McDowell said in a way that at first sounded confident; afterward Charley began to feel the man was trying to reassure himself. “Those of us who are strong enough, anyway,” McDowell added. “And the others have no business coming.” His glance drifted across the face of old Edmonson; there was no visible break in his expression. He stood up and said, “Good night, gentlemen,” and went away into the night.
“Checking on the troops,” Jim Woods observed. “McDowell takes things too damned seriously, I think.”
“That’s his job,” Norval Douglas murmured. Charley sat up to let his belly bake against the fire. He looked at Edmonson, who sat drawing on his pipe, apparently at peace with himself and ignoring the comment that McDowell seemed to have directed at him; Edmonson appeared to be a good deal older than he should have been for this kind of an expedition. He said now, “I gather that our friend the captain believes that things must be done in a hurry.”
“That’s Crabb’s belief,” Woods said. “It rubs off on the officers.”
“Many a mistake has been made because of haste,” Edmonson said, squinting through his pipe smoke.
Douglas was leaning back with one elbow on the ground, looking off across the swells of the dunes. “I expect you’ll find the world’s work gets done by men in a hurry, Mr. Edmonson,” he said.
“Perhaps,” Edmonson said. He did not appear to agree.
Douglas said, “I recall that we were too slow on the march in Lower California, in ’Fifty-four. That was why we were defeated.”
“You were with the William Walker party?”
“I was.”
“You must be a filibuster at heart, then,” Edmonson said.
Douglas poked a twig into the corner of his mouth and let it tilt there; it waggled when he talked. “Adventu
re is where you find it.”
“What happened to that expedition?”
“We were licked,” Douglas said. His tone indicated no particular regret. “We landed down there and Walker proclaimed it an independent republic—all of Baja and Sonora. But that’s a bitter country and he hadn’t brought enough food or water. You can’t live off the land when the land supports nothing but twigs and spines and rocks. The Mexicans starved us out and we had to retreat overland to San Diego. It was a rough hike.”
“Walker’s done better since then,” Jim Woods said.
“That he has,” Edmonson agreed. “I understand he’s got control of the Nicaraguan government.”
Douglas’s shoulder moved. “He won’t last. The natives are against him.”
“They’ll be against us too, more’n likely,” Woods said.
“We can handle it, if it comes to that.”
“What makes you so sure?” Edmonson said.
“Just a feeling,” Douglas told him. “I think we all need sleep. Let’s turn in.”
Planks broke or overturned. Wagon wheels slipped off and sank hub-deep in sand. In the depths of the dunes, each such occurrence meant the wagon must be unloaded, for there was no shoveling this loose liquid sand. The wheels had to be reset on the plank rails and the wagon reloaded. Days passed with a dreadful monotony. Toward the end of January the weather turned cool and cloudy, but there was no rain. Nighttime temperatures plunged down into the thirties; men shivered by night and sweated by day. McDowell’s estimate had been correct; there were days when they did not make a full mile. By the tenth day of February, with the Colorado still twenty miles distant, water for the animals was reduced to one ration every forty-eight hours. Mules began to drag in their traces and had to be shot. The column moved day and night now; one shift of men would sleep, then catch up and relieve the other half of the party. The shifting, treacherous sandhills made of it a trek through hell. Food spoilage made scurvy a danger. On the seventeenth, they found that too many planks had splintered; they could not move all the wagons at the same time. With ten miles yet to go, the pace slowed again; each wagon in turn had to wait on its rails while the spare planks were carried to other wagons. Norval Douglas led a party ahead to the military post above Jeager’s Ferry, but there was little food to be spared at that outpost. It was all Douglas and his detail could do to return with four water barrels filled at the river, two sacks of flour and a side of bacon. Men ate sourdough biscuits and gnawed on strips of leather-hard beef jerky. On the twenty-seventh of February they rolled out of the desert and turned upstream to Jeager’s Ferry. At the Army post they recruited a few mules. Crabb sent a dispatch to San Francisco, and directed Charles Tozer and Robert Wood to ride with all possible speed to Tucson, where they were to recruit additional men to reinforce the column when it reached Mexico. George Alonzo Johnson’s clumsy steamboat was moored above the ferry, which had a bloody history of its own; Captain Johnson grinned and waved a hand as the column marched upriver. The river was rising with the first of spring’s melted snow from the mountains up the Colorado and Gila and Salt. Arizona lay ahead of them, sunlit and brassy.
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