They Came To Cordura

by Swarthout, Glendon

  The sun, nearly noon high, flashed from the mirror in her saddle-horn. The bright bird preened itself. Major Thorn felt his own anger quicken. In manner and attitude she was the most unwomanly woman he had ever met, though that might be the way she had to be, running a ranch in the middle of a revolution; but it sharpened her sarcasm about the regiment, sarcasm typically civilian, ignorant, hasty, and made him determine to base matters between them.

  “I guess I have to be specific,” he said evenly. “You are a military prisoner. For three days you are my responsibility. I didn’t want it, but I drew it. You will be about as valuable to this detail as a sick animal. I plan to see you are as little bother as possible. When dismounted you may move freely, even out of sight when necessary. You will stay away from my men. My advice is not to try to take off. If all this is clear, I suggest we both get back in formation.”

  She started to say something. She knotted her reins until her fingers went white. Then she spurred ahead, he following, until they came in sight of the party.

  To cool his anger the Major busied himself with observation. The terrain was monotonous. Breasts before, the peaks flattened gradually into long low shapes resembling burial mounds. For vegetation there was only grey bunch grass and here and there clumps of a weed called sacahuiste. He saw no green which would mean water. They would have a dry camp tonight. The case against her was ridiculous and could never be made to stick, but that was none of his concern. He saw neither human nor animal sign, no trails, no smoke, no horse droppings, no birds. And it was true, the party, like the regiment, was ragged and flea-bitten and mangy, but day after next he would have them patch and wash and shave and they would ride into base with their tails up. Always and always the low clouds passed overhead like hands.

  At noon he rode forward, halted the detail to eat and ordered them not to cook, for they would move out in half an hour. They did not like it, but he could not help that. To compensate for time lost to altitude he would keep them in the saddle longer. The animals were let graze. While the men lounged on grass bunches munching hard bread and grumbling he went from horse to horse checking gear. There was enough forage corn for the animals. Lieutenant Fowler came up to ask if he could help. Thorn said he wanted to find out where they stood on rations; the packmaster at Ojos Azules was supposed to have issued enough for three days. Together they looked into the saddlebags. What they discovered was that the men had been given three days’ hard bread, some flour and a little parched corn, but no more than one meal of bacon and two, perhaps, of coffee.

  “I have about the same, sir,” Fowler said. “I should have checked before we left.”

  “It will do if they stretch it,” Thorn said. He caught the implication. It had been his duty, or his to delegate, and here was the oblique, gold-bar reminder. “See that they do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Thorn took his own bread and squatted a few yards from the men. The Lieutenant joined him. He was twenty-five or -six, of average build. He had fine, well-bred features. To appear older he had raised a small moustache which did little for him because there were gaps. When he pulled his auto goggles down about his neck, as he did now, his blue eyes blinked from white circles in his sunburnt face. The tip of his nose was peeling, and the backs of his hands, for his was the fair complexion which usually accompanies carroty hair. Although one sleeve of his khaki shirt was slit, he was somewhat of a dandy. He made a point of shaving daily. Under his collar he wore a handkerchief of blue silk. The spread eagles and numerals of his Academy ring glittered as he ate.

  “You think it will take us three days, Major?”

  “According to the Mexican, Ramos. We keep due north today and tomorrow, then the next morning northeast until we strike the Tex—Mex railway. We follow that northwest into base.”

  “What is the name of the base?”

  “Cordura.”

  “Will it replace Dublán, do you think?”

  “No. The railroad between them is beyond repair, as I understand it. But they can run trucks in and out of Cordura.”

  “I see.” Lieutenant Fowler nodded gravely.

  Major Thorn knew something about him: three years out of the Point, he had put in two of them at Fort Riley as an aide and the third at Columbus under Colonel Rogers and himself, with A Troop his first command. He took himself and his career seriously. Column of twos into line of charge, column of fours into line of charge, he drilled his men half an hour after the other troops were dismissed; he took the train to El Paso regularly to play polo, not because he enjoyed the game or was good at it, but because, for second lieutenants on border duty, it was the game to play; it had been he who protested, with due deference, when the sabres of the regiment had been stored at Dublán, for which he had been called, to his face by his fellow officers and behind his back by his men, George Armstrong, after Custer, Fowler. A soldier by training and not by nature, Thorn believed, he was strung tight as a bow. Pluck him and he would twang.

  “I hope we won’t be at base long,” Fowler hinted. ‘‘I don’t like to be away from my troop.”

  “Oh?”

  Major Thorn swallowed the last of his hard bread. He was being pumped and he would not be. Tonight would be soon enough for them to know why they had been detached, and he wanted Fowler’s mind on the formation this afternoon. He wondered how the junior officer would take the news. He stood, signifying the conversation ended, and took some water.

  Over the end of his canteen he watched the Geary woman start towards her horse. She walked with a long stride. She had eaten her own food with her back turned on the men. Now she found something in a saddlebag and cupped her hands before her face. He saw smoke. She had cigarettes. She leaned against the mare beside the tethered bird with one hand on her hip and facing the troopers inhaled deeply. It was an act of contempt as expressive as spitting. The men sat up. It was possible the younger ones had never seen a woman smoke. But none of them had been issued tobacco after the Expedition crossed the border and until now, since the hardship was a shared one, they had accepted it. Thorn heard oaths.

  “Get them going, Lieutenant,” he ordered quickly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chawk fell while mounting. He went all the way over his saddle like the rawest recruit, striking ground on hands and knees, which broke his fall, then collapsed face downward. The men clustered round him until Thorn backed them away to give him air and with effort turned the great bulk of his body over on its back. His eyelids fluttered, opened, his eyes focused. They were black and the corneas were threaded with red.

  “Whud I do?”

  “You went over like a rookie,” Thorn said with relief. “Lie still a minute.” He found Chawk’s hat and laid it upon the mass of bandage to shade his eyes, removed his own and fanned. The giant did not protest. Stretched out, he appeared the largest man Thorn had ever seen in uniform. For a frame six feet four or five inches long the amount of flesh on him was not proportionate, though there must have been close to two hundred pounds of it. He had huge bony jaws and wrists and hands and feet. The bushy misshapen moustache was black as his eyes; a piece of hard bread protruded from the lower edge; some of the longer hairs splayed down between his lips; a white scar-line ran from his mouth to his chin as though he had been bottle-ripped in a fight and carelessly resewn. The second finger on his left hand was missing above the knuckle. He was thirty-one or -two.

  “How come I did, Major?”

  “The surgeon told me you might have dizzy spells for a day or so. They often accompany a good knock on the head.”

  “Thought somebody throwed a blanket over me,” said the sergeant of D wonderingly. “I don’t get it. I been conked before, with chairs and bottles and suchlike.”

  “Not by a rifle-butt. And I expect the altitude had something to do with it. Do you think you can stand?”

  “Sure.”

  Major Thorn helped him stand, then with an arm about his waist walked him back and forth until his head cleared. Tellin
g Lieutenant Fowler to put Trubee on the point and keep Chawk with him, he mounted up and waited as his detail passed and took position to the rear of the woman.

  The sun was hoisted high as a torch. Leather saddle pommels and anything of metal burned the fingers. The party rode north silently with hat-brims low. For a time Major Thorn kept the head of Chawk, built up with bandage until it resembled the white shell of an egg, as a reference point. He remembered Ben Ticknor’s warning about additional damage to the skull and brain cells beneath. Humpty Dumpty had had a great fall and he had been lucky enough to break it with hands and knees or all Pershing’s soldiers and all Pershing’s men might have been unable to put Humpty Dumpty together again. He did not amuse himself. The oversight of the rations still rankled him, that and leading the detail out before taps was blown. Little things, both of them, but it was handling little things, the ability to master detail, which had made him invaluable as a staff man to half a dozen commanders. He could not recall in all those years making two administrative mistakes in a single day. He had been in every respect a good garrison officer. Perhaps he had begun to unseam. The Geary woman halted and waited. He did not slacken pace and she swung in beside him. Reaching back, from a saddlebag she took a round bundle of corn-shuck cigarettes tied neatly with a shuck string.

  “Will you have a cigarette, Major?”

  “No,” he said, without thanks. “I don’t smoke. Most of the men do. They have not had tobacco for weeks.”

  She ignored the suggestion. “An old woman of my ranch makes them for me. She may be a hundred years old, no one knows, and making cigarettes has been her life work. She picks the shucks with great care and cures them for two years. Her cigarettes are as good as any in Mexico.”

  Thorn allowed himself only a glance. Made of macuche, the native blackleaf tobacco, the cigarettes were perfectly round, the shucks smooth, twisted to a point at one end and doubled inside at the other. He wanted one very much.

  She put them back in the bag. “The old woman is typical of the gente, my people,” she said. “I have families who have lived at Ojos for six generations. They are gentle, loyal, innocent people. If I’d tried to fight either the Villistas or Federales my young men would have been taken off and the women attacked and the old people tortured and the stock slaughtered and the buildings burned. Only the walls of Ojos would stand today. Owls would live in the cottonwoods. I might as well have sown my fields with salt. Besides, there’s a tradition of hospitality in Mexico that Americans cannot understand. Do you know what the peons say? ‘A stranger might be God.’”

  Major Thorn set his jaw. It was a very good speech and a very good act. He respected anyone, man or woman, who could alter his tactics to the situation, but after the gesture of smoking before the men he would not respond if she got down on her knees.

  She waited for his reaction, then frowned. “What will happen to me, Major—I mean, after we get to base?”

  “I turn you over to the Provost Marshal. Probably you will be sent by train to Fort Bliss at El Paso. After that I don’t know.”

  “El Paso, the States,” she said. “I haven’t crossed the border in eight years. I’ll be frank with you. I had a lot of bad publicity before I came down here, my family also, most of it deserved. Even though the case against me falls of its own weight, the newspapers will hang me. Mothers will scare their daughters into virtue with my name. You may not believe this, but it’s true.”

  He said nothing.

  “Who is in command of the Army down here?”

  “General John Pershing.”

  “I never heard of him. I used to have connections in Washington, but not anymore.”

  He felt her desperation. She was trying everything she knew.

  “Major, do you have any sympathy for me at all?”

  “Not particularly.”

  He started when up ahead, in the full bellow and the bad Spanish, Chawk commenced another song. It was a welcome sound. The sergeant of D was all right.

  “You will see at the time of our parting,

  I will not allow you to love another;

  For if it should be, I would ruin your face,

  And many blows we would give one another.”

  The Geary woman had her head down. When she raised it the officer glanced at her. She was grim.

  “I don’t know what a major’s pay amounts to, but I doubt if it’s enough. Would you be interested in a thousand dollars in gold?”

  “That wasn’t a very good idea,” he said. Lieutenant Fowler had not put a stop to Chawk’s song. He probably did not dare.

  “So I am going to become an American;

  Go with God, Innocencia,

  Say farewell to my friends;

  O may the Americans allow me to pass,

  And open a saloon

  On the other side of the river.”

  She rode silently beside him for so long that Thorn looked at her again. She had loosed her reins and taken the bright bird up into her hands. The muscle under the skin beside her mouth twitched. It was evidently a nervous tic uncontrollable at times when she was under strain.

  “Major, are you married?”

  It was the last question he might have expected. He could not imagine what was coming.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then it must have been quite a while since you’ve had a woman, certainly since this campaign started,” she went on hurriedly. Her voice, customarily low in timbre, became so thick it was difficult to understand her words. It reminded him of his own, the night he had read Hetherington’s citation to him.

  “I’d like to offer myself. I’m supposed to be good in bed, at least I was told so years ago, that was ten years ago, though, and I’ve forgotten about things like that. Use me all you want, just let me go before we get to base. I told myself I wouldn’t beg, but I am, just use me and let me go.”

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  His anger returned. He wanted to insult her and shut her up once for all so that he could be alone and think about how he would tell them tonight.

  “For one thing, it would be like going to bed with a man.’’

  He heard the hiss of her breath.

  “Then I don’t know what to do. Yes, I do. I’m going to ride. You can’t catch me, you know it. I’m going to ride out of here!”

  Thorn turned in his saddle. She had the bird close to her, its beak white at her throat, her hands caressing it as though it were a child she would kill with love. The muscle in her face beat like a wing.

  “Don’t try it,” he warned.

  “You wouldn’t dare shoot a woman!”

  “I wouldn’t try. But I can bring your horse down at three hundred yards with a rifle.”

  Her face twisted.

  “You stupid military son-of-a-bitch!”

  She spurred the mare savagely away from him. He kept one hand on the Springfield in its boot behind him until she slowed and took her place between him and the main body. His palms were slippery with sweat. Somehow, he could not understand it: what she had called him was the most female utterance she had made.

  By mid-afternoon the altitude caught up with the detail. Lieutenant Fowler halted the main body and when Major Thorn rode up to inquire why, the Lieutenant and Hetherington were both dismounted and attempting to stanch nose-bleeds. He called a break and had the pair hold their heads back and press their nostrils. Telling Renziehausen to keep an eye on the prisoner, he tore a sheet of paper from his notebook, rolled it into two balls, and put them under the upper lips of those bleeding. While they waited for the flow to cease he had a look at their animals and that of Sergeant Chawk. Two, though saddled properly, had sore backs where the forward end of the blankets had rubbed the hide raw, and he did what he could to correct this, taking his own maneja from Sheep’s neck and cutting it into straps with his pocket-knife. Chawk, watching the operation, nodded towards the Geary woman. She sat her horse with a lit cigarette slanting fr
om her mouth.

  “Major, you know how long we ain’t had smokes.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, you tell ‘er we don’t like it. She tants us much more and somebody might stick a few of them shucks up ‘er ass and set fire to ‘em.”

  The threat surprised Thorn. Glowering, the sergeant of D stood head and shoulders over him. To meet it he fixed his eyes not on Chawk’s, but, disconcertingly, on his nose, which was nearly as large and hooked as the beak of the bird. The giant’s nostrils were black with hair.

  “You carry a tune very well, Sergeant,” he said easily. “Do you know Spanish?”

  The question confused Chawk. Before he could reply the officer continued. “Incidentally, make sure the men switch their rifle boots to the opposite side when they saddle up tomorrow morning, then back again the next day. We may avoid some sore withers that way.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Within another hour the sun sloped. At once the air chilled. Thorn decided to keep them going until dark; it would make up some of the time lost to altitude and there was a bare chance they would reach water. He might have to take the cigarettes from the Geary woman if she persisted, as Chawk put it, in ‘tanting’ the men with them, and ration them equally among those who smoked. They deserved them more than she. ‘And you have to plan tonight,’ he reminded himself. ‘For a thing like this there must be a plan. Four soldiers have so distinguished themselves in battle that they are worthy of their country’s highest award to the brave; four human beings are suddenly heroes; what must be unprecedented is that all four have been brought together in one place and do not yet know what they have done or what they are. It may be that this time is the only time anyone will ever have so perfect a chance to put his hand on the bare heart of heroism and hear answers to one of the great questions man has asked about himself. But if you tell a human being what he has done, will he then, withdrawing into himself, turning himself into what he conceives he should be if he is what he has been told, be able to explain why? Should you not ask his secret of the child before you make a man of him? And if you do, can you keep him apart from the others until they, too, still innocent, can be asked? I don’t know, I don’t know. Still I am the one to do it. The choice of me is either the most lunatic or the wisest choice which could be made. I wish tonight would come fast and I wish it would never come. It is getting cold.’