by B. TRAVEN
14
It was in a semitropical pine wood that the rebels had set up their new camp. The site had already been selected several days before the battle in which the Federals suffered such an unexpected defeat. Women, children, wounded, and sick were moved to this camp as soon as General received news of the approach of the force to which had been allotted the task of disposing of the rebels once and for all. It was General’s intention to create a sort of settlement at this spot, instead of the usual field camp. His plan was to make sorties from here, to attack fincas and divide their lands among the peons, to do battle with Federal troops and police wherever they were encountered, and if they were not, to lure them by adroit maneuvers and surprise attacks to small villages and fincas where he could successfully overpower them and thus steadily reduce their numbers. In a more permanent camp it would be easier for him to train raw recruits, to create an army with which he could advance against the capital of the state in order to occupy the government buildings and thus bring the whole state under the rule of the revolutionaries.
The country in which the camp lay consisted partly of forest, partly of plains, and partly of several acres of bush and scrub that could with little trouble be converted into arable land where corn, beans, and chilies could be grown. In five or six weeks the first harvest could be gathered.
The land belonged to one of the great fincas that two weeks previously had been occupied and divided up among the peons.
The camp area offered all that an army of Indians needed in order to live there for years, even for generations. A broad stream of pure water that never failed, even in the dry season, ran the length of the rebel’s new encampment.
The place was excellently protected against attack. On three sides it was surrounded by rocky mountain spurs traversed by only four narrow, stony paths that were easy to guard and that twenty men could defend against the advance of half a brigade. The fourth side was bordered by level, swampy ground that at this time of year was totally impassable and during the dry season could be crossed only at a few places where the surface, being somewhat above the general level, dried out when there had been no rain for a long time. But these crossings were so few and so exposed that, like the mountain tracks, they could be so well guarded by a few men that a surprise attack was virtually impossible. However, should such an attack succeed, the whole army could hide effectively in the surrounding clefts, crannies, crevices, and hollows, all thickly overgrown with thorny, tropical bush, and it would have been extremely difficult to force them out, the more so since the rebels knew the terrain, and from their hideouts behind bushes and rocks could keep the attackers under as heavy a fire as if they were sitting in a strong fortress.
It was, of course, only natural that the muchachos, assured of a long stay here, should start to build light huts and shelters like those in the monterías.
Only six, at most ten, days would pass before this camp looked just like any other Indian village. Although there was no thought of it at present, it was nevertheless possible that the rebels might settle here permanently. If the revolution were successful in overthrowing the dictator, it might easily follow that a democratic regime following the dictatorship would give the rebels the property on which the settlement was built. A democratic government would be all the more willing to recognize such rights won during the revolution, because thereby the former rebels could best be prevented from turning into common bandits, as they might do if driven by force of necessity. The possibility of such or similar outcome to their rebellion had in fact occurred to Professor, General, Andreu, Colonel, Celso, and many others of the more intelligent muchachos, and to the women with the army; they had all thought about it for weeks and at times discussed it.
This new camp was about fifteen miles distant from the old one, the site of the battle.
The muchachos who were marching back to camp with the captured Federal general did not hasten on their way. The general was too fat and too clumsy to be able to run away from them. Every ten minutes he groaned and moaned and had to sit down to rest. Perhaps he exaggerated his clumsiness and weariness in the hope that a relief battalion might possibly have been sent after him and be close enough to turn defeat into victory and incidentally liberate the general. However, the general knew very well that such a hope was totally unfounded, for he himself had ordered his colonel to initiate no troop movements unless on express instructions from himself.
Another hope was that perhaps a few of his soldiers who had escaped might be wandering around here and, seeing their general in the hands of three muchachos taking him to their camp, would try to rescue him. This hope, too, evaporated the farther they progressed from the battlefield and the nearer they got to the new camp. In fact, his soldiers, themselves hunted and wildly seeking safety in headlong flight, could never have succeeded in rescuing him. For along the whole way—a wretched, swampy path newly hacked out of the bush—he saw groups of rebels either returning to the great main camp or going back to the battlefield, probably to stand guard there or to glean the area for any further weapons and ammunition.
The boundless rage the general had at first felt at being led away prisoner by these filthy Indians had gradually evaporated in the course of this laborious journey. He knew well enough, too, that it would do him no good to vent his anger on the muchachos. Had he refused to walk, they would certainly have beaten him. The very fact that they showed not a spark of respect toward him, a person of authority before whom these fellows would have fallen on their knees a few months before if they had met him, proved to the general more plainly even than the lost battle that the country was on the verge of an upheaval unparalleled since it had shaken off the tyranny of the Spanish crown.
At intervals he attempted to exchange a few words with the muchachos. He did this with the faint hope—the very faintest hope—that he might be able to bribe the fellows and offer them a substantial reward to take him by a roundabout way to his headquarters. But the very first attempt misfired. Either the muchachos did really understand no Spanish or else they understood it well enough and only pretended not to have understood what he was suggesting to them.
When he sat down on the way, to rest and light a cigarette, the muchachos also sat down at some distance from him and talked and laughed together without apparently paying any attention to him. As soon as he made a motion to go on, they, too, rose and marched along behind him.
Anyone meeting this little group would have thought that the general was on a walking tour and that the muchachos were retainers sent to accompany him so that he wouldn’t lose his way.
In spite of the general’s efforts to prolong the march for as long as possible, always in the fading hope that something might happen to extricate him from his plight, he eventually arrived at the new camp.
His escort, without having been ordered to, had cleverly led him by such devious ways and taken him zigzag across country to the camp that, even if he should happen to escape, he would scarcely have been able to find the camp again. The Indians, always mistrustful of those not of their own community, had acted like this out of pure instinct. They had behaved exactly as they would when bringing anyone else—a trader, for example—to one of their settlements, whether in the bush, in the jungle, or in the sierra, which for good reasons they wished to keep secret from the outer world, particularly from officials and other authorities.
When the general arrived, the whole camp was exclusively engaged in cooking supper. Supper that day had to make up for all the other meals the men had missed during the previous thirty-six hours, since the preparations for the battle had left no time for either men or women to think of eating, far less of cooking. Here and there, and at odd moments, one of them had swallowed a few mouthfuls of cold tortilla or pushed a handful of moldy frijoles into his mouth.
The camp was concentrating on cooking, washing, and similar matters associated with peaceful domestic existence, and they did it with such intentness and concentration that it seemed almost a
passion.
There was nothing to suggest that these very men, in the morning of the same day, had fought a bitter battle in which they had suffered thirty dead and about fifty wounded, even though the battle had ended for them in a decisive victory.
Since no one in the camp was occupied with anything that could be regarded as preparations for a new fight, the general knew that no troops were on the way to rescue him. He had learned in the meantime one of the causes of his defeat. The spies of the rebels were ten times better and a hundred times more accurate and reliable than the intelligence service of his own division. He was no longer in any doubt that every peon on a finca, every wandering, apparently harmless and ignorant Indian, probably even every Federal soldier of Indian origin was active in the rebel spy service.
No one in the camp was curious enough to look closely at the general when he was brought in. No one bothered about the presence of this man whose curses had made a division of Federal troops tremble. Here in the rebel camp everyone would have laughed at him had this highly placed, deeply respected officer demanded that the lousy Indians show him proper respect and receive him with due humility.
He was led across to a campfire burning in the center, which was the general staff fire.
As he approached, he saw to his great astonishment Lieutenant Bailleres squatting there, eating tortillas and frijoles and drinking coffee with these verminous muchachos.
During the morning’s battle, Lieutenant Bailleres had found himself in the hands of a muchacho who was about to cut his throat when Andreu came by and recognized the lieutenant.
“Wait, boy!” he had called to the fellow. “Better stay with him. Tie him up tightly, and later bring him to the camp. General might make use of him again as his messenger. His weapons are yours, of course.”
So, after the battleground had been cleared up, the lieutenant had been brought here as a prisoner. Lieutenant Bailleres and the Federal general were the only soldiers to survive the fight.
In his astonishment, the general did not know what to make of the lieutenant, seeing him squatting so calmly, so apparently calmly, at the fire and eating with the muchachos as though he belonged to them.
His first thought was that the lieutenant might have been responsible for the theft of their weapons on the preceding night and even for this morning’s shameful defeat. It was possible that he was in league with the rebels and had intentionally given incorrect information about their strength, equipment, and whereabouts.
This suspicion, however, lasted only a few seconds. In face of the bloody bandages the lieutenant wore over his ears, and the blood-encrusted stump of his nose, such thoughts could not be entertained for a moment.
Looking again at the lieutenant, the general grew once more uncertain. It was possible that the lieutenant had not been abused in this way by the muchchos, but by some enraged ranchero or finquero whose daughter he had seduced. It was by no means rare for cuckolded husbands or fathers whose daughters had been basely dishonored to revenge themselves in such ways.
While the three heads, which the lieutenant had brought the general as a present, might really have been chopped off by the rebels, it was possible that the lieutenant had also blamed his own mutilations on the rebels in order not to have to confess that he owed them to an adventure with a woman and that he had not been in the rebel camp at all, but in the hands of a ranchero who had felt it his duty to avenge his honor.
“Welcome, General,” said General, as the prisoner was led unceremoniously to the fire. “Sit down on one of the conference chairs you see lying around and make yourself quite at home.”
“Gracias,” said the general mechanically and from habit. But he immediately added harshly, “You’ll pay for this bitterly, muchacho. I can tell you that now. You’ll be quartered and then nailed up and drenched with paraffin.”
“It’s a pleasure, General, to know that—to know that today. Of course, those who are going to enjoy themselves with me in this way must first catch me. And that, General, will take quite a while, I think. In the meantime, we ourselves can enjoy that pleasure—and indeed with you, General. Your idea is by no means so bad as it seemed at first sight. What do you say, Lieutenant Bailleres?”
“It’s nothing to do with me,” said the latter, chewing away.
The general turned to his lieutenant. “Buenas noches, Lieutenant Bailleres.”
The lieutenant made a brief movement instead of standing up, nodded his head, and replied, “Muy buenas noches, mi general, gracias!” Then he quickly bent his head and devoted himself again to his interrupted supper.
The general was plainly uneasy, seated on the low, wide seat the muchachos had proffered him. He shifted back and forth on his fat hams. Whenever he made a movement, it produced a sound as if his whole body were clad in dry, creaking leather. Whether this sound was caused by the new boots he was wearing or the very wide belt and the somewhat narrower shoulder straps, or whether he wore beneath his tunic a laced leather corset that disguised the mighty fullness of his stomach could not be precisely decided at first glance. At any rate, the impression the muchachos received was that the whole man, body, limbs, head, brain, heart, and intestines, was constructed of raw leather, freshly come from the saddler and as yet unseasoned.
On the long, hard march to the camp, he had become sufficiently hungry not to refuse the food that the muchachos now offered him and that was the same as they themselves were eating. He accepted the hot tortillas, the frijoles spiced with green chilies, the dried meat roasted on hot coals, and the boiling coffee, although it all came from the hands of filthy, stinking pigs whom, even in his wildest dreams, he never thought he would have to be so near to. He devoured his food with enjoyment, although he knew that this might very well be his last meal on earth. Nevertheless, he took care to behave so that to outward appearances one might think he was doing the muchachos a great honor by sitting at the same fire with them, exchanging chipped and cracked dishes with them, and now and again asking, half-subduedly, half-condescendingly, “May I have some salt, muchachos? Perhaps you could spare me another two or three tortillas? Muchas gracias! Gracias!”
The muchachos who were squatting around the great fire behaved as if there were no one present but themselves. They paid no attention to either the general or the lieutenant. They talked, laughed, smiled, told stories and jokes that were full of spirit; and they went so far that, without any regard for their guests, they discussed how at their next encounter with the Federals and Rurales, they would thrash them even more soundly than today, how they would hang all the finqueros and pass their wives and daughters from hand to hand, and finally how fiercely they yearned to get to Balun Canan and other big garrison towns in order to attack and occupy them for no other purpose than to straddle the wives, daughters, and concubines of the officers there.
It was quite possible that neither the general nor the lieutenant understood much of what was being said, for the muchachos spoke not in elegant Spanish but in such a smattering of the language as they had learned and were accustomed to using, and that was a corrupt form of Spanish without any grammatical rules, intermingled with words and phrases of three different Indian dialects. In any case, the two officers gave not the slightest indication that they were even listening to what was being said.
Suddenly the general said, half-turning to the lieutenant, “I’m pleased, Lieutenant Bailleres, to find you among the survivors.” The faintly ironical tone in which the general spoke did not fail to make its intended impression on the lieutenant. He bowed slightly and said, “The pleasure is entirely mine, General.”
“You don’t by any chance think, Lieutenant, that, at this moment of my life which I may still call mine, I could have sold myself to these filthy, colored, stinking swine?”
The lieutenant smiled in a way intended to convey to the general that the smile had only been pasted on the surface, concealing mockery behind. The general understood it well enough. He did not wait for an answer, but added, “I
could far more easily expect that of you, Lieutenant, since I find you sitting here at the fire so well looked after by these creatures, and I notice you are even smoking a cigar.”
The lieutenant nodded, smiled again, drew deeply on the fat cigar, and blew out the smoke. “This cigar is the last I shall smoke in my life, General. This cigar, although it is uncommonly long and thick, having been rolled by one of the muchachos here, has a different purpose from the cigarette you offered me just now. The last puff from the butt of this cigar signifies for me the trumpet signal for my departure from this world. You will certainly smoke more cigarettes in your life than I cigars.”
“What do you mean by that, Lieutenant, the trumpet signal?”
At this moment, General, who had been away for a while, returned to the fire.
“The commander-in-chief who thrashed us will very soon explain the trumpet signal and thus save me the need of giving you an explanation, General,” said the lieutenant.
General, although he must have heard these words, said nothing. But Colonel, who came up to the fire at the same time, looked at the lieutenant’s cigar and said, “You are a good smoker, Lieutenant. And it occurs to me at this moment that our chief strongly advised you, the last time you visited us, never to allow yourself to be seen in our neighborhood again.”
The general swung his head so sharply, first toward Colonel and then toward where the lieutenant was squatting, that it seemed as if he had suddenly been startled out of sleep. It was plain to read from his face that he had received a severe surprise. His fat mouth dropped and hung open for a while, as he stared again, first at Colonel, then at the lieutenant.
The lieutenant took another puff at his cigar, looked at it pensively as though trying to estimate how long it would last, stroked off the ash with his little finger, and then said, “Yes, I remember, muchacho. I was told not to repeat my visit to you. That’s right.”
