Next he began a letter from Captain López’s wife. Out of delicacy he read only the first page. She was evidently a romantic girl of considerable education. He decided to send her the captain’s papers—omitting the letter to the young woman in Guadalajara—and an impersonal note to tell her that he had died in action, which was untrue, and bravely, which was probably a fact. Her husband, he considered, must have been a man of exceptional character if he had been worthy to travel with 300,000 pesos; it was little wonder that he proudly carried the document about with him. Manuel again examined the governor’s order; it had been fingered, folded and unfolded till it was limp, but it was dated only three days previously. His horse, feeling the sudden contraction of its rider’s muscles, bounded forward and reached the next group before he could drop the papers into his shirt and regain control.
“Fly under his tail, Camarero?” asked the comrade whom he bumped.
“No. Under mine!”
“Sit your horse closer, or it will be you whom the generals bury.”
Manuel thought quickly. It had indeed occurred to him and to the rest that a platoon of federal troops and a mountain gun were an unusually powerful guard for a freight train, but they had taken it as a belated compliment to their activities; they had not imagined that there was anything of special value to guard. By wrecking the main line and the telegraph between Torreón and Zacatecas, Lara had forced traffic to take the longer route via Durango. He had now dislocated that line too, and it was natural enough to suppose that the government had expected and tried to forestall his attack with a demonstration of artillery and armour plate.
Manuel’s decision was instant and clean. The gold was his if he could get it. The boxes, he supposed, had been in the caboose under the eye of Captain López and were now lying, momentarily ownerless, beneath the mass of wreckage. He felt no sting of conscience on the score of dishonesty. Suddenly to respect the property which he, as an enemy of the federal government and an outlaw, had spent months in looting and destroying was absurd. Nor was his loyalty engaged. To communism he had none, for he did not believe in it. To Lara he owed obedience but no personal allegiance. Neither of them had any illusions about the other; each was playing his own hand by laws that he had invented for himself and that coincided more often than not. To hand over 300,000 pesos to Lara was criminal stupidity; the caudillero would simply enrich the pimps of New York or Paris and die in a drink shop when they had finished with him. Manuel had no dreams at all of what he himself would do with the treasure, no savage and compelling pictures of wealth, houses, women and possessions. The gold was a summons to individual adventure that must not be refused. He rode forward to the general’s side.
“Shouldn’t we ride faster, mi jefe? ”
“Why? There is no hurry. We are not worth chasing. They know already that they cannot catch us.”
“But this time they will try.”
Lara looked suspiciously at his subordinate. He considered him a little mad and as a tactician irresponsible; but El Camarero seemed to have a genius for foretelling the orders that would be issued by Mexico City. As a townsman he could understand the reactions, to Lara inexplicable, of other townsmen.
“You know nothing,” said Lara. “You cannot even ride.”
Manuel, understanding his young leader, took this as an invitation to talk.
“There will be a scandal,” he said. “We have wrecked a train of value and we have killed a whole platoon of the Tehuantepec Infantry.”
“That’s what they are for,” remarked Lara, unmoved.
“Good! But the officer was the son of the Governor of Chihuahua,” Manuel lied. “Look for yourself!”
He waved the papers excitedly under Lara’s eyes and then pocketed them again.
“The devil!”
“You see! They will send out a trainload of men and horses from Durango within an hour.”
“They cannot catch us,” Lara repeated sulkily.
“No! But when they see we have gone east, Torreón and Durango will talk together by telephone, and if Torreón sends out a division along the main line to Zacatecas, we’ll be caught between the two.”
“If they do,” said the general. “But why should they?”
“You are too modest, mi jefe. You have struck a great blow for the revolution and you do not realise it.”
“It is true,” purred Lara, “that I was very successful. You think too successful, Camarero?”
“No. I wouldn’t say that. But you’ve done enough to keep the telephones busy.”
“We should have cut the wires,” said the general, imagining it to be his own idea. “But it’s too late now.”
“Too late for all of us to return. But let me go alone with two good pack horses. I’ll hitch the wires to the team and my own horse and we’re off! If I strip a dozen poles Durango and Torreón cannot speak to each other for a day at least.”
“But they can talk and telegraph by way of Monterrey,” Lara objected.
“Good! Let them! And by way of Monterrey Mexico will talk to Chihuahua and the gringos to Mexico. Imagine the idiots in Monterrey with a whole continent asking for communication! Imagine the generals in Torreón and Durango! They will burst out of their uniforms. Even if the lines are clear to-morrow, it will be another day before they recover their tempers.”
Lara laughed. He was not entirely convinced that wrecking the wires would delay the pursuit, if pursuit there were to be. But El Camarero’s picture of furious well-fed officers cursing the telegraph and telephone as far away as Mexico City delighted him.
“You are crazy,” said the general, “but I will let you go. Take two men with you.”
“No. It’s better if I go alone. I cannot be far away when the relief train arrives and I may be caught. If I am, I can talk myself free. These others”—he jerked a thumb over his shoulder to the ragged squadron behind them—“are too foolish to lie.”
“If you are caught they will shoot you,” Lara reminded him with a certain satisfaction.
“In that case,” Manuel answered, “you will lose your humble servant and three horses. But if you send two men with me, you will lose three men and five horses.”
“There are times when I do not know which of us is general,” Lara declared. “And when I feel that I know that you are wrong. But I do not like discussions. Where will you re-join us?”
“If I get clear I shall find you wherever you are—and that depends on the movements of the Torreón garrison. I cannot know and so, if they catch me, I cannot betray you.”
“I am not afraid of that, Camarero. You have ideas in your head and you do what you please. But you would not betray me. Let us see about the horses.”
Lara halted the column and rode back past his men, sweating in the oppressive heat of the narrow arroyo, to the small baggage train. They chose a roan and a chestnut disliked by Lara for a plodding obstinacy that was too slow for his wing-footed column, preferred by Manuel for powerful quarters that would serve equally the imaginary task of drawing telegraph wires, or the true of carrying three hundred and fifty pounds of precious metal apiece. They swiftly redistributed the loads of the two animals, leaving them equipped with the pack harness, bridles and lashings.
“What else do you want?” asked Lara.
“Water for three days and flour and charquí for seven.”
“Arms? Take your rifle back.”
“Que va! You won it on a fair bet. And I shall take no arms. They are no good to me. But give me a pair of pliers and two sticks of dynamite with quick fuses.”
Lara shrugged his shoulders and gave him what he asked. He would not himself have even mounted a horse without his arsenal. Deprived of firearms he, or any of his command, felt as undressed as a Londoner without walking stick or umbrella. Nevertheless he appreciated, while half despising, Manuel’s cunning. To be unarmed was certain proof of
innocence should he fall in with federal troops.
“Adiós, Camarero!”
“Adiós, mi jefe!”
With the halters of the two pack horses hitched to his saddle, Manuel cantered down the sandy bottom of the arroyo, exchanging farewells and jests with the column. He had made no definite plans. Ever since the eleventh wagon had crashed down the embankment, he had been led by impulses each of which grew naturally out of its predecessor with the illogical but inevitable movement of a dream. He was relieved when a curve of the valley cut him off from his former companions and from all sound but the pounding hooves of his three animals. Thenceforth every man’s hand would be against him; the thought gave him a curious and pleasant sense of freedom. To get clear away with the gold would be so difficult that it was useless to worry about it. The essential was speed—to be within reach of a frontier while the Mexican government still believed that Lara had ridden off with the gold and before Lara himself had found out that it ever existed.
In twenty minutes he was back at the deserted camping ground. The raiders had lit no fire. The trampled ground and the horse and human droppings suggested the temporary passage of a herd of animals. Manuel rode up the slope and dismounted. Below him were the seven overturned wagons, and half a mile down the line the silent wreckage of the rear half of the train with the kites already circling above it.
The steep drop to the railway was impracticable for horses; even a man needed to use hands as well as feet to descend it. Manuel cursed the delay. He reckoned that from the time the front of the train escaped until the return of a relief from Durango would not be more than four hours, even allowing for difficulties in collecting and entraining the troops. Two hours had passed; he must have an hour’s start in order to get away; that left but one hour in which to find and load the gold. He charged down the slope and galloped along the valley, careless of dynamite and lamed horses, coming out on to the plain some two miles below the scene of the disaster, where a culvert carried the railway across the wide dry track of the floods. He returned by the side of the metals, his three beasts sweating but still sound.
The inverted flatcar was supported by the breach and shield of the mountain gun which had been driven hard into the wreck of the caboose. The caboose itself had become a jungle of wood and metal some three feet high. Manuel had trusted to the dynamite to force a swift way in, but had forgotten that the wreckage was a regular ammunition dump of shells and machine-gun belts. He dared not use explosives for fear of showering gold pieces over half the state; nor had he time for a systematic attack on the smashed sides and partitions. He decided to attempt an entrance from underneath the caboose. The rear bogey was resting on a rock, and the twisted axles, their wheels shattered, still held up a portion of the floor. Manuel tied a lariat round his waist, armed himself with a broken piece of handrail and crawled between the flooring and the ground to look for a gap in the boards through which he could enter the wreck.
There were many gaps; indeed the whole floor was of gaps, but none of them was wide enough to admit his body, nor, if he should succeed in squeezing through, did there seem anywhere to go. Admitting to himself that it was foolhardy lunacy but unwilling as yet to retreat, he pried up the loose end of a floorboard with his lever. Lying on his back, he worked it loose and pushed gingerly. It leapt into the dim chaos above him as if shot from a spring, and the débris rumbled and settled. Manuel lay perfectly still, awaiting his death. For a full ten seconds the creakings and shiftings went on all about him, until at last the labour of the wreckage to find its equilibrium brought forth a girder. The butt end thudded into the ground in the angle between his neck and shoulder. Manuel crawled rapidly into the open with delicate movements of heels and elbows. Lying on the hillside with the yellow and blessedly clear spaces of the plateau spread before him, he recovered his calm. He decided that not for all the gold in Mexico would he risk being pinned by some member under the caboose without the means to kill himself. Though he did not believe that the Almighty flirted with justice, he could not avoid the thought that, as proxy for Lara, he richly deserved such an end.
In this moment of uneasy contemplation he looked at the dead bodies whose bedfellow he had so nearly become. Poor miserable devils of the Tehuantepec Infantry ordered up from the south in their light cotton uniforms—they must often have dreamed of death as comfortable when the night frosts of the plateau cut into their thin blood! Nobody in this country could be trusted. The northern regiments could not be trusted to garrison their own towns. The government could not be trusted to clothe their loyal troops in proper uniforms. The unhappy wretches from Tehuantepec could certainly not have been trusted with 300,000 pesos had it not been for the outstanding character of Captain López.
Manuel was suddenly amused at himself. After all, he knew nothing whatever of Captain López and had quite arbitrarily chosen to invest him with heroic qualities. It was most unlikely that the captain could be trusted—300,000 pesos were enough to tempt any man to retire to New York, or, if ambitious, to set himself up as an independent general.
He jumped to his feet, mounted and cantered his horses up the line along the foot of the slope. It had just occurred to him that Captain López and his command would never have been trusted by any Mexican official to travel in the same wagon as the gold they were to guard. Honesty would not be so strained if the money were under seal in another car, whence it could not be extracted without wholesale bribery of the train crew or deliberate armed assault. The obvious place for 300,000 pesos was that efficient-looking boxcar of the New York Central which, once locked and sealed, could not easily be tampered with. True, none of the caudilla had seen any boxes of gold, but they had not looked. There had appeared to be little loot of value to outlaws—toys, tweeds and a bidet were not encouraging—and Lara had hurried on to the greater temptations of a mountain gun and a wealth of weapons.
The boxcar lay on its side with its roof stove in and most of its merchandise scattered. Finding nothing on the hillside, Manuel rapidly searched the wreck; it was partly buried under a shower of coal and timber from the trucks dragged down with it, but easy to enter and explore. Working a path into this débris, he came on more burst crates of plumbing fixtures, some squashed valises, a consignment of hats, but no boxes of gold. He attempted to sling a battered leather kit bag out of his way, but could not lift it. Considering it for the first time as more than an obstacle, he saw that the locks had been sealed by the customs in Ciudad Juárez and that the initials on the bag were C. C. M. He had the gold and the initials told him its origin.
Claudio Cavira Martínez had been a treasury official under the Obregón government. Trusting to the confusion of the change-over from Obregón to Calles to cover the theft until he was across the frontier, he had bolted with 400,000 gold pesos that had been earmarked for transfer to the United States in payment for arms. It was a scandal at which all Mexico had laughed, and the subsequent capture and execution of Cavira Martínez at Ciudad Juárez had inspired a popular song. Cavira could not have had time to spend a hundred thousand in his dash for the frontier, so it was probable that someone had rewarded himself for his own honesty in capturing the absconding official and that after a long delay 300,000 pesos were being returned to the treasury.
Manuel searched for the rest of the late Claudio Cavira’s baggage, and found the tell-tale customs seals on two unsuspected trunks—battered but powerful containers of leather and metal that might have belonged to some conservative domestic servant. He stabbed the tough cowhide with his knife and ripped the baggage open.
The gold of the trunks was in bars. It bore witness to the vanished prosperity of imperial Europe and to the foreign trade of Mexico under Porfirio Díaz. The German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires lived still in the indestructible metal that proudly bore the stamps of their state banks. The kit bag contained a quantity of United States gold coin in ten-dollar eagles. This loot of great weight but small bulk had been
packed under and between layers of old linen—shirts, singlets, cotton pants and socks. Cavira might at least have had them washed, Manuel thought. A demoralised soul. He had indeed been an indelicate cashier.
Manuel Vargas tethered his horses alongside the smashed boxcar and began to transfer the gold to their pack saddles. About 175 kilos apiece was an awkward and heavy load though it did not fill the packs to a fifth of their capacity. For his own horse he improvised panniers, slinging across him a thick pad, formed of Señor Cavira’s shirt stuffed with his socks, and lashing a small crate on each flank. His riding saddle and his spurs he discarded, grinning to himself at the thought of Lara’s horror had Lara known.
There was no time to cross the open expanse of desert where the head and shoulders of a man and the backs of his horses could be seen for miles as they threaded their way through the low grey scrub. He dared not march up or down the railway. Thus the only route open to him was up the dry arroyo in Lara’s tracks; and this was dangerous. His horses could not climb the slope, and he must walk the two miles down the line to the culvert and then back up the valley. If the troops arrived within an hour—and it was now more likely to be within half an hour—and if it occurred to any of them to climb straight up the ridge that overlooked both the railway and the arroyo, he was done.
The Third Hour Page 5
