The Vanquished

by Brian Garfield

  “I see,” Gabilondo said. “You no doubt have proof of this allegation?”

  “I do.” Crabb reached awkwardly into his vest with his left hand and pulled out an oilskin pouch. From this he extracted a sheaf of papers and stepped forward to place them on Gabilondo’s desk. Gabilondo picked up the papers and made a show of reading them. It took some time. Giron was aware of the rise and fall of his own chest, the flicker of oil in the lamps, the sleepy attention of the junior officers who were probably longing to return to their blankets and go to sleep. A young lieutenant sat back at a small writing table under a lamp, taking down testimony. His expression was bored, tired; he had marched for a week. Giron was thirsty for beer. He licked his lips.

  “Forgeries,” Gabilondo said in a bland tone. “Naturally you would prepare yourself with such so-called documentary evidence before embarking on such a ruthlessly daring expedition. But this signature is definitely not that of Ignacio Pesquiera, and for myself, señor, I deny ever having affixed my signature to such a paper.”

  Crabb stood calmly and said nothing.

  Gabilondo took the hood off the desk lamp. Crabb said, “The documents are not forgeries, General, and you know that fact as well as I. We were both present when they were signed.”

  “Your memory must be at fault, señor,” Gabilondo murmured, and set a corner of the sheaf of papers afire. He let them burn up until the flames reached his fingers; then he dropped them on the desk and let the flames consume the last corners. “So much for that evidence,” he said. “Have you anything else to say in your defense?”

  “Only that I am innocent, that you know I am innocent, and that if the people of Sonora ever discover what treacherous dogs they have elected in you and Pesquiera, you will both find yourselves rotting in the earth.” Crabb’s words were forceful; his voice was calm. He seemed to recognize the futility of protest. Giron looked away and studied the crucifix on the wall.

  Gabilondo turned to the lieutenant at the writing table. “You may strike the defendant’s last remark from the record, Lieutenant.”

  “Sí, General”

  Crabb said, “You may do with me as you wish, General. I do not deny that my motives may have been base. But I ask that you honor your terms of surrender to my men. They did not come here expecting to fight against troops. They had no political objectives in mind. They are innocent of any crime against the state. I hold you to your word to release them on American soil.”

  “Your heroics are touching, amigo,” Gabilondo murmured. “But I have the feeling that the spirit of filibustering remains strong in the barbaric hearts of your countrymen north of the border. I believe they need a lesson. It is time they learned that Mexico is not a savage free land open to the greedy clutchings of misguided filibusters. We are a sovereign people, señor, and it is time the United States was made aware of that fact.”

  “Marvelous sentiments,” Crabb drawled. Giron cringed; he wished the man would break down.

  “Gentlemen of the jury,” Gabilondo said, his tone as dry as the desert winds, “I will have your verdict.”

  One of the junior officers nodded his head. Gabilondo said, “It is the verdict of a jury of regularly appointed officers that you are guilty of the charges brought against you by the state. Have you anything to say before I prescribe punishment?”

  “Nothing,” Crabb said.

  “Then it is the sentence of this court-martial that you and your followers be executed by rifle fire at dawn.”

  Giron felt he should speak. He looked at the slitted eyes of Gabilondo and held his tongue. He was very thirsty and wondered if the cantina was still open to the soldiers. He would go there afterward and drink enough beer to knock him out.

  “Adios, Señor Crabb,” Gabilondo murmured.

  “I doubt,” Crabb said, “that you can know the consequences of this inhuman act, General.” He turned on his heel and went out between the two silent guards.

  “Very well, José,” said Gabilondo. “Are you satisfied? The trial has been held. The verdict goes on record.”

  Giron said nothing. He picked up his hat and sword and turned to the door, flicking his dry tongue around his teeth. It was better not to mix in political things.

  CHAPTER 23

  Crabb was returned to the barracks at one o’clock in the morning; he was kept by himself and was not allowed to communicate with the men. Charley lay awake and listened to the snoring of a man nearby. Someone came in with a lamp and a Mexican read in halting English the official sentence of the court-martial, that the entire company was to be shot at sunrise. A dozen guards stood at the front with shotguns. Several more lamps were brought. Charley saw bearded faces, open red mouths, weeping eyes; men cursed and men cried; some just sat. In half an hour some soldiers came in and looked around and picked out the sallow youth, Carl Chapin, and took him outside with them. Soon they returned and Chapin walked directly to Charley. “He’s younger than I am,” Chapin said, and went back to fade into the crowd. The soldiers took Charley with them and sudden fear made his legs go limp; he concentrated all his attention on a livid hatred of Chapin.

  But the soldiers only took him back to the big adobe house with its roof blown off where he had spent the previous days in siege. Nine of the wounded were there, and Charley remained under guard until just before dawn a man came and took him to another large house beyond the church. A squat, powerful man in a creased uniform took him by the arm and sat him down and spoke brusquely. “My name is Hilario Gabilondo. I am in charge here. What is your name?”

  “Charles Evans.”

  “Your date of birth?”

  “December twenty-fifth, Eighteen Forty-two.”

  “Christmas Day, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are the youngest of the party, then.”

  “I guess I am. What about it?”

  “We have decided to spare one from among you,” Gabilondo said. “As the youngest, you have been chosen. I trust you will be thankful for your good fortune.”

  “Yeah,” Charley said numbly.

  “Eventually,” Gabilondo continued, “you will be released to return to your country. You understand it is a gesture of mercy on our part to show that we are not wolves here. I shall expect you to make a full report of what has happened here to the American newspapers—so that your countrymen will know better than to try invading Mexico again.”

  Charley said nothing. He hoped his expression was as cool as he intended it to be; he had that much caring left. In the past few hours he had not thought much about anything. He knew he was thirsty and hungry and in need of sleep, but those things did not matter. Nothing mattered.

  They took him outside and put him on a horse amid a column of soldiers.

  The window was high; the only thing he could see through it was sky. For hours he would watch clouds drift across, their shapes slowly changing. There were two cots in the cell, nailed to the floor, but Charley was alone. There was a tiny barred opening in the door. All he could see through it was the dim adobe wall on the far side of the jail corridor. With busy fingers he tied knots in pieces of straw that he had taken from the mattress ticking. The floor at his feet was littered with little bits of broken straw.

  Once in a while he would tell himself he was lucky to be alive.

  Usually he did not believe it. Lucky or unlucky, he did not know, what difference was there?

  One afternoon the door opened and someone stumbled into the dim room. The door closed quickly and tumblers clicked. Charley squinted up through the gloom.

  “Evans,” the man said hoarsely. “Evans?”

  “Yes.”

  “My God. I thought they were all dead.” It was, Charley saw, Sus Ainsa.

  “No,” Charley said, “not all of them.” He saw the tracks of pain and anger etched into Sus’ face and suddenly he wished very much that he could also be able to feel those things. He felt nothing.

  Sus lurched to the opposite cot and lowered himself onto it. He sat with
his elbows on his knees, hands dangling, jaw slack. He shook his head, blinked, and said, “How long have you been here?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t bother to start counting. Sooner or later they’ll let me out and send me back across the Line.”

  “Lucky,” Sus said.

  “Sure.”

  “Were—” Sus began, and stopped to clear his throat, and began again: “Were you there?”

  “Not when they executed them.”

  “Oh,” Sus said.

  “I was there afterward,” Charley said, finding himself unable to put tone into his voice. “It was the third day after the execution, I think. They took me back—they said they wanted me to have a good look.”

  “Who took you?”

  “Gabilondo.”

  Sus looked searchingly at him, as if he wanted Charley to go on, or rather, as if he didn’t truly want him to go on but had to know, and so Charley said, “The Mexicans hadn’t buried anybody. I guess maybe they were too busy celebrating the victory. The smell was pretty bad and we couldn’t get too close. It looked like the bodies had been chewed by animals, and I guess the pigs got at them. I saw a finger on the ground, I suppose they cut it off for a ring. I recognized McCoun and a few of the others. The people in town were wearing our people’s clothes. They had General Crabb’s head in a jar of vinegar, you know—a Mexican showed it to me. They made me wear a red jacket and dance around in the square.”

  Sus said nothing. After a stretch of dark silence he said tentatively, “I got word that they wiped out McKinney and his sixteen men. I guess they made a complete job of it. Eighty-odd men, and two of us left alive, Charley.” Sus looked as if he wanted to continue, but Charley gave him no encouragement. Sus said only, “They let me write a letter to my sister but I couldn’t think of what to tell her.”

  Neither of them spoke again. Outside, through the window Charley could see the heavy dark hang of thick clouds. At sundown a guard brought supper for them; Charley ate because it gave him something to do. Then he lay back and watched the small square patch of sky darken. There was a brief hole in the clouds through which stars winked like distant lamplit windows across the desert, brightening one by one until the overcast swept by and obliterated them.

  Every once in a while, at times like this one, he would think back on the night before the execution and remember young Chapin, pale and bent over his racking cough. Chapin had given Charley life by sacrificing his own: Why? Charley wondered if it meant there was something he should do with his gift of life. But none of them were there to answer him; only Sus was there, and Sus had not known the final truth of that night of surrender. Sus had been spared, probably because he was Mexican himself and had friends among the men of power. Sus had not been given the choice: it was Crabb who had chosen one way, Douglas and McDowell who had chosen the other. Each had chosen freely and the same fate had come to all of them.

  Sus’ voice cut across his thoughts: “Evans?”

  “What?”

  “I guess this all sits pretty hard with you.”

  “And?”

  “Don’t make up your mind too fast,” Sus said to him.

  “About what?”

  “You’ve got plenty of time,” Sus said. “Don’t let what you’ve seen turn you into a rock. The only thing you have is the future. The past is dead for all of us. It was something like this that made Norval Douglas what he was—but it didn’t do him any good to lose his faith.”

  Faith in what? was the answer that hung on Charley’s tongue, but he did not voice it. Sus’ talk droned on, insistent:

  “Loneliness is the worst thing of all.”

  Like ghosts they made visions before Charley: Edmonson, Chapin, Bill Randolph, Parker, Woods, Crabb, McKinney, McCoun, Holliday, McDowell, Douglas. Which was important: That each of them had lived, or that they had died? Who was at fault, Crabb for trusting too much, or Douglas and McDowell for refusing to give up? And why was Charley alive tonight? There ought to be a reason for it, beyond the random fact that he had been the youngest. Perhaps when he was released he might go and have a look for that reason. He doubted he would ever find it, but it would be as good a way to pass the time as any.

  Across the cell, Sus spoke: “You awake?”

  Charley almost answered, but he could think of nothing to say to Sus. He turned his face toward the black wall. It was beginning to rain.

  EPILOGUE

  After his release from Mexico in September 1857, six months after the execution at Caborca, Charley Evans disappeared into the Southwestern desert. No one is recorded to have seen him for forty years. During that interval a Civil War was fought; the Indian tribes were subdued; railroads and telegraph threaded all quarters of the West; the day of the cattleman came, thrived briefly, and went, superseded by the day of the homestead farmer; the legendary plainsmen and gunfighters lived and died, leaving their myths; automobiles and telephones appeared. In 1897, weathered and gray, Charley Evans walked into Yuma leading a burro. He had been prospecting, but what he had been searching for in the desert for forty years was not clear, and he did not choose to reveal it. When he left Yuma to walk back into the desert it was almost the turn of the century. He was never seen again. The world had forgotten the executions at Caborca.

  After Charley left Mexico, Sus Ainsa was brought before a Mexican tribunal in a long, involved mockery of a trial, and was finally released in the absence of a verdict. He spent years trying to clear his name, and subsequently joined his brother, Augustin, in developing a prosperous coal business in Sonora. During those decades Ignacio Pesquiera, although widely disliked, continued to rule the state of Sonora. There was no particular difference between his brand of despotism and Gandara’s.

  After Crabb’s death, according to one source, letters from William Walker were found among his papers, proving that the two filibuster chiefs had entertained the idea of conquering the whole of Mexico: Crabb to work south from the Arizona border, Walker to work north from Central America. On May 1, 1857, or only about three weeks after the Crabb expedition met disaster, William Walker, the last surviving filibuster, surrendered to U. S. Navy Commander Charles H. Davis, in order to avoid death at the hands of Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans who had risen against Walker’s piratical regime. Thus ended Walker’s scheme, but not his covetousness: again in i860 he invaded Honduras with a filibuster force, but was captured and executed on September 12 of that year.

  Immediately following the execution of the Crabb expedition, General Gabilondo sent Lieutenant Corella north from Caborca with three hundred troops to engage the party of twenty-six gringos who were coming down from Tucson to reinforce Crabb. This relief column included in its roster some respected Indian fighters and even Granville H. Oury, who was to become a powerful figure in Southwestern politics. Despite its fighting ability, however, the column was outnumbered twelve to one. Corella attacked, and the column was driven back, across the border in confusion and hardship. It was a grim retreat; two or three men died.

  Crabb’s was the last armed filibustering expedition to attempt the conquest of Mexico. In the absence of evidence that might have proved that there had been agreements between Pesquiera and Crabb, the United States government had no recourse but to let the issue drop after formally protesting the incident. (In fact copies of the agreement documents existed, but were only discovered much later.) John Forsyth, the American Envoy and Minister Plenipotentiary to Mexico, lodged a strong protest of the execution with Pesquiera and with the government at Mexico City. In Washington, on February 12, 1858, President James Buchanan transmitted to the House of Representatives the Secretary of State’s report on the Crabb expedition: Executive Document 64, 35th Congress, 1st Session.

  The issue was dropped; the incident soon became one of the minor, forgotten wars of our history. Today there remain the tall palms of Caborca, a few yellowed documents, and the dusty bronze plaque on the face of the battle-scarred church.

  All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1964 by Brian Garfield

  cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media

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