The Vanquished

by Brian Garfield

  Smoke settled down in the convent. Small and Chaney and two others were making a rapid investigation of the rooms. They flushed two children and four nuns and drove them out of the place. Crabb was talking: “Randolph—set that powder keg by the door to the church.”

  Crabb came across to that door and used a knife to poke a hole in the keg. He inserted the slow-match and tried to ignite it, but by some curious twist of fate it was wet with blood and would not light. Crabb sat down and wrote a note on a leaf of his notebook. Clark Small and Norval Douglas came out of a corridor with a small boy they had caught hiding somewhere. Crabb waved them over to him and said to Douglas, “Tell the boy to take this note across the square. I’m asking them to send back another slow-match fuse for the powder.”

  “He may not go,” Douglas said.

  Crabb spoke in the same businesslike tone: “Tell him he’ll be shot if he doesn’t obey. Tell him to bring back the fuse as quickly as he can.”

  Douglas relayed the instructions to the boy in Spanish. The boy looked around helplessly with the wild glance of a trapped animal; he took the note and waited by the front door until Douglas opened it for him, and then bolted across the square. Watching all this, McDowell had sunk down with his back against a wall. Waves of weakness came upon him. He looked across the room at Jim Woods, but Woods was dead. Norval Douglas crouched down beside McDowell and ripped off his shirt and made a bandage for the wounded arm. McDowell said weakly, “Thanks.”

  There was a rending sound in the back of the room. The Mexicans were breaking down the door. Crabb and Douglas wheeled to face that attack and then the splintering door crashed downward, falling on top of Jim Woods’s body. Troops rushed in, trampling the door. McDowell grimaced, lay still, and pointed his freshly loaded revolver at the charging Mexicans. They spilled into the room like an overflowing stream of water. Will Allen spun back, wounded somewhere, and fell to the floor. When McDowell lost sight of him in the tangle, Allen was crawling toward the front door.

  The Mexicans were shouting like Indians. Powdersmoke made a heavy fog in the room. A small wooden cross was smashed by a bullet and tumbled off its hook on the wall, glancing off McDowell’s shoulder. He took aim on a shouting open mouth and fired. The mouth disappeared.

  William Chaney, the gray-eyed Nevadan, plunged into the fight with knife and fist, having exhausted his ammunition. Norval Douglas was braced against the wall wielding his reversed rifle like a club, batting Mexicans away with great sweeps. Chaney went down under half a dozen men and died with a knife in his chest. The front door came open, admitting a band of light, and McDowell saw the wounded Allen tumble out through the opening. Crabb, his gun empty, sat down deliberately at the church door and proceeded to reload. McDowell saw a man taking aim on Crabb, and he brought his gun around, but not before the Mexican fired. Crabb took the bullet in his right elbow. McDowell shot the Mexican. Clark Small wheeled and screamed and fell over, his head almost severed from his body by a sword thrust. McDowell glimpsed big Bill Randolph, shouting with huge oaths, wading through the crowd and batting heads together. A dead Mexican fell across McDowell’s legs. He grunted and crawled away toward the front door. Crabb was coming that way, backing up slowly, firing at the Mexicans. Individuals were lost in the slurred outlines of the fight. Noise and stench and carnage filled McDowell’s senses. Bill Randolph and Norval Douglas stood back to back fighting off attackers. A gun went off and Randolph sagged at the waist; McDowell knew he was dead by the way he fell.

  A young Mexican soldier loomed before McDowell. Fear was a glaze on the youth’s eyes; his mouth hung open, dragging in air, and a gun hung empty in his hand. McDowell killed the youth with his last shot, and backed out through the doorway. Crabb and Douglas were with him. They picked up Will Allen. Other Americans, pitifully few in number, spun onto the square, coming out through windows and the door. McDowell turned and walked on wavering legs toward the house. The men in the windows there kept up a savage fire, pinning the Mexicans down, preventing pursuit. Crabb and McDowell, with one good arm each, carried Will Allen between them. Guns roared. McDowell looked dismally at Crabb, who had surprised him by his cool display of courage under fire. When they re-entered the big house, someone barred the door behind them. McDowell released Allen to abler hands, and sank slowly to the floor in great weariness. His arm throbbed and he felt an overpowering hunger.

  CHAPTER 21

  The last thing Charley recalled about Jim Woods was the good-humored remark Woods had made about it being April Fool’s Day. He looked out through the window; in the night he could see the outline of the church. The Mexicans had stopped shooting, either because their ammunition was running low, or because they knew that in the dark their muzzle-flashes gave away their locations to American riflemen who were quick to shoot back. And so a cool and threatening truce had settled down. It was past midnight, and Charley’s eyes ached. His shift would last another hour before someone would relieve him.

  He remembered standing in front of Jim Woods’s saloon on a cool rainy morning, just before he had met Norval Douglas. He found himself wanting to know, with a savage desire, what trick of fate it was that had brought such men to this place far from home and killed them without purpose. None of it was fair. He remembered that rainy morning’s conversation with Woods; it had been months ago; the words and the voice tones came back to him.

  All packed.… Going somewhere, Charley?

  Back East.

  You’re doing the Triple Ace out of a chore boy, then.

  They’ll find another one.

  I reckon.… Funny-looking moon, all by itself. Tired of the job, Charley?

  You might say.

  Got money for the trip?

  I’ll work my passage.

  That’s a hard row.… Good luck to you, then, Charley.

  Well, then, he thought, why hadn’t he gone back East? What had changed him? Was the future so unimportant that he had just let himself drift into this little unknown war?

  Norval Douglas was at his shoulder. Douglas moved without sound, so that he had a way of startling Charley with his sudden appearances. Douglas said quietly, “Trying to get it figured out, kid?”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Maybe you won’t, right away. A lot of things don’t make sense. It’s Jim Woods and Bill, isn’t it?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “It’s easy enough to see when a man’s thinking. You can learn a lesson from those two.”

  “What lesson?” Charley asked.

  “Bill was a failure. Jim wasn’t; he made something out of his life before he died. But he slowed down. The taste went out of life for him. That’s why he gave up his business and came along with us. Even if he hadn’t been killed, he wouldn’t have found anything here that he couldn’t have had at home.”

  “Then what’s the point of it?”

  “It doesn’t make much difference, does it? He had to die somewhere.”

  Brief anger stirred Charley’s lips. “That’s all it ever amounts to, isn’t it?”

  “You don’t matter after you’re dead,” Douglas said. “After you die it’s not up to you any more. That’s why you’ve got to make sure you get things done beforehand.”

  “Aagh,” Charley said in disgust. “What if I die tonight?”

  “You won’t,” Douglas told him. “You haven’t made your mark yet.”

  “You’ve got a lot of faith,” Charley said, surprised.

  “Well, maybe I do. Faith in myself, faith in you a little.”

  “And faith that a bullet won’t cut me down in the next minute or two.”

  “There’s been enough killing for one day,” Douglas said. “Get some rest. I’ll watch here for you.”

  Charley was tired enough not to protest. He went back through the house, past the rooms where the wounded men were abed, and felt his way to a vacant spot on the corridor floor. He lay down with his rifle and canteen at hand. A small flame sputtered nearby and he saw the youth, Carl Cha
pin, putting a light on the tip of a brown-paper cigarette. Chapin’s eyes reflected the little flame frostily. His expression was unfathomable. Charley remembered seeing him at one of the windows during the convent fight, firing savagely at the Mexicans, his lips drawn back in a strange, distorted smile. It made Charley recall the fact that Chapin had once refused to shoot at a jack-rabbit.

  The red button of the cigarette tip alternately glowed and dimmed in the corridor. Presently it went out in a crush of sparks. Charley put his head back. The floor was hard, he thought; he came awake and it was daylight.

  The entire day passed with little more than a peevish exchange of shots. When Charley took his turn at a front window, Crabb and some of the others were in conference; they seemed to have been there all day. McDowell’s arm was bandaged from wrist to shoulder, but he was on his feet. Crabb had his own right arm in a sling. Guards were posted at close intervals all the way around the house. Dr. Oxley puttered around the wounded men. Charley spent part of the afternoon dozing in the courtyard, which struck him as an incongruous dark garden; a group of men played cards in the shade of a tree.

  During the night a small party slipped out past the corrals to get water from the well. There was a volley of shots, but the men returned with water buckets full, unharmed. A man named Seaton was killed by a random gunshot from the church. Charley stood guard in the early morning hours. His thoughts kept drifting and for an hour he fought out with himself whether he should have volunteered to join the attack on the convent. Nothing made sense.

  On the third day a small detachment of Mexican regulars rode in from the south, bringing two small cannon which they set up behind the church. The cannon were not powerful; the general effect of them was noise and a few dents in the front of the house. One ball came through a window, spent, and rolled across the floor; Captain McDowell picked it up in his good hand and tossed it to Norval Douglas. “Feel how hot the damned thing is.”

  There seemed to be no place closer to the house where the Mexicans were willing to set up their artillery; they probably could not have done so without exposing the cannoneers to American rifle fire. At any rate the cannon stayed where they were and after a short while the Mexicans stopped using up ammunition in them. Nonetheless the rumor trickled around, reaching Charley in midafternoon, that Crabb was worried by the arrival of the regulars, because he had hoped they would lift the siege under Pesquiera’s order. Charley learned that evening that some of the officers—Johns and McCoun in particular—wanted to retreat to the border. Crabb, McDowell, Oxley, and a few others were fighting this idea. Charley formed no opinion of his own; he stayed largely by himself.

  By the end of the fourth day, the fourth of April, tempers were plainly raw. The men were hungry and word circulated that some of them were willing to overthrow Crabb and let McDowell take over the company and lead a massed attack on the church. To forestall that kind of hasty action, Crabb promised a decision by the following morning. That evening a man called John George was picked off by a Mexican rifleman who had climbed to the roof of a building down the square. George died within a half hour; a small party under Norval Douglas drove the sniper back. After supper the news reached Charley that Lieutenant Will Allen had died in bed of wounds suffered at the battle in the convent. Later on at night, helping to dig graves in the courtyard, he wondered at his own indifference to the deaths around him.

  On the morning of April 5, a man whose name Charley did not know deserted. Charley spotted him crawling out between the corral bars with a white piece of cloth affixed to a stick. The man walked nervously across to the church, looking behind him at every few steps. “The son of a bitch,” someone said. The deserter was taken into the church. Ten minutes later a single shot boomed within that structure.

  Crabb’s promised decision was a thick measure of suspense hanging in the air when at nine o’clock a large body of horsemen entered town from the southwest. A large cry went up among the Mexicans and beyond the church, two blocks down a street, a crowd of women boiled out of shelter to welcome the newcomers. Charley heard the shouts: “Viva México! Viva Gabi-londo!” The soldiers dismounted and several men ran from the back of the church through the alleys of town to meet the arrivals. Crabb’s face had turned worried, then showed a visble relief. Charley kept his post. Men around him were talking excitedly; the prospect of rescue was in the air; but nothing seemed to happen until, almost at noon, a ragged volley of shots issued from the church. At the time, Charley was watching the discussion among the officers, and on the heels of the shots he saw Crabb’s face fall. A man in the belfry of the church was hoisting a Mexican flag, and someone shot him down. A stillness settled over the house and Crabb’s voice, quiet and calm, was distinctly audible: “I’m afraid that’s it.”

  Every time he rode horseback, Giron was reminded by the loose bouncing of his paunch of the many bottles of beer he had consumed; a thing which he regretted but did not resolve to change. He stood on the porch of the house they had commandeered, rubbing his hand against his belly, and thought, Lorenzo Rodriguez is dead. Well, he was not a very good soldier.

  A young lieutenant came quartering across the street and saluted him, reporting: “We have the Americans surrounded, sir.”

  “Excellent,” Giron murmured. “Hold your positions, Lieutenant.” He returned the man’s salute and went into the house.

  Gabilondo had Corella on the carpet. Corella was the stocky ex-miner who had been Lorenzo Rodriguez’ lieutenant. He and Gabilondo were of a build and of a size; but Corella’s chin was round, not square, and his eyes did not have the flash or intolerance of Gabilondo’s.

  Gabilondo sat hip-cocked on the edge of a handsomely carved dining table, softly pounding a silver candlestick into his open palm. Lieutenant Corella stood before him at a stiff position of attention; though he was motionless, he seemed to be cringing. Gabilondo was talking, his voice a rasp, when Giron came in.

  “Lieutenant, I regard you as a fool and a coward. For five days you have maintained contact with the gringos. You have had them outnumbered by a margin of seven or eight to one. You have had the advantage of two light cannon and superior firepower and manpower, and superior mobility. And yet what have you done? Nothing. You have retreated into the comforting shelter of the mission-church and plinked occasionally at the gringos. Lieutenant, listen to me!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you ever once mount an attack against the gringos?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “I had no orders, General.”

  “In the name of God! Does everything have to be spelled out? Did they not invade our country, shoot down your commanding officer in cold blood, and kill a score of your troops?”

  “They did.”

  “Then why did you not fight back, Lieutenant?”

  Corella’s chin trembled. “The men—”

  “Yes? Yes? Go on, Lieutenant. The men.”

  “The men were afraid, General.”

  “Of what? Of a little crowd of gringos whom they outnumbered vastly?”

  “Of the Americano rifles. They are much more accurate than our muskets. And the riflemen are expert, General. We have lost half a dozen men to their sniping. The men fear their marksmanship.”

  “Fool!” Gabilondo shouted. “Coward! You shall pay for this, all of you. I promise it. Now get out of here—out of my sight.”

  Corella saluted and went. Gabilondo cursed and slammed the silver candlestick into his hand. “Old women,” he said. “It is all the fault of Lorenzo Rodriguez. If he had trained his men properly in the first place it might have stiffened their backbones a little. God, I’m sick of cowards and weary of fools. Giron, we must put an end to this matter of the filibusters.”

  “Sí,” said Giron. “I had it in mind that we might offer surrender terms to them.”

  The candlestick paused in mid-strike and Gabilondo’s eyes lifted. He said, after a moment or two, “Just what terms did you have in mind to off
er, José?”

  “That is not up to me,” Giron said immediately.

  “There will be no terms,” Gabilondo said flatly. “We will attack the house, burn it down, and kill them. That is all. No terms.”

  “What?” Giron said, taken aback.

  Gabilondo showed a thin smile. “My friend José, you are an excellent soldier. I feel we are most fortunate to have you in our army. But in matters of statesmanship you are abysmally ignorant, amigo.”

  “What does that have to do with it? It is only common humanity to offer them the chance to surrender. It is the only honorable thing—”

  “Honor is secondary,” Gabilondo interrupted. “We must think first of our country.”

  “What about our country?”

  Gabilondo set the candlestick down. In its place he took out his pistol and began to slap it against his palm. “Whatever the present circumstances may be, we owe our first loyalty to Mexico. Is that not right?”

  “Of course. But—”

  “Loyalty to Mexico,” Gabilondo went on, “is roughly the same as loyalty to our governor, is it not? If we do not honor our leader, we open the door once again to chaos, to revolution, to war and death. You agree?”