“Here is Francisco Villa,
His chiefs and his officers,
Come to saddle the short horns
Of the Federal Army.
The rich with their money
Have already their lashing,
As the soldiers of Urbina
Can tell, and those of Herrera.”
Translating as he listened, Major Thorn eased himself. A man who sang could not kill a bird. A possibility occurred to him. The woman might have done it herself. She had been very drunk and love, it was said, was kin to hate. On an impulse he rode forward to the main body, fumbled in a saddlebag and handed over his one clean pair of socks to Hetherington. The private’s cheeks blushed his thanks.
“Ambition maims itself,
Justice is the winner,
For Villa reaches Torreon
To punish the avaricious.
Fly, fly away, palomita,
Fly over the prairies,
And say that Villa has come
To drive them out forever.”
When Major Thorn returned to the rear, Lieutenant Fowler followed.
“This is better, eh, Major?”
“Much,” Thorn said. “And we are nearly half-way there.”
Lieutenant Fowler said he had been shocked by the business of the bird. Probably they would never ascertain who was responsible; enlisted men, he had found, could be close as clams when they chose to be. Was there a chance the Geary woman might have done it herself? He would certainly not put it past her. Thorn, thinking the other would certainly not be so unchivalrous were the late Senator Geary still in office, said it was possible.
“A strange campaign,” Fowler said, as though he had been on many. “Do you think we’ll ever catch Villa?”
“I doubt it.”
“You do?”
Thorn almost grinned at the Lieutenant’s face. He explained that according to the peons, Villa had the power to transform himself; that at the battle for Torreon, for instance, when Pancho was surrounded, it was told that he lay down, cut open the belly of a dead horse, turned himself into an ant and crawled into the cavity until the Federals had left.
Fowler managed a smile and a fastidious twist at his silk neckerchief. “That may be, but we certainly gave them blue blazes at Ojos. What did you think of the fight, sir? I mean, what is your professional opinion as an observer?”
Thorn caught the implication. “I expect it will get the biggest write-up in the Journal since the Little Big Horn,” he replied. “But as a military operation conceived and carried out, it was a farce.”
Lieutenant Fowler could not hide his displeasure. “A farce!”
“Exactly. We galloped in there like a gang of Don Quixotes.”
“But we routed them!”
“Of course. You asked for my professional opinion, though. Ojos was bungled from the beginning. Take the charge, for example. The terrain was not right for squadron in line. Formation should have been line of troop columns of platoons to keep the attack mobile and offer a smaller target. The fact is the charge was over a mile before the enemy was ever engaged. And finally, no officer takes a command into battle with only hearsay knowledge of the terrain and the enemy positions, not even one still sopping behind the ears.”
Fowler caught the implication. “But isn’t it cavalry tradition to take chances, to gamble against odds?”
“That may be. However, I don’t know of any tradition which requires you to break the legs of your animals in irrigation ditches and run them through cornfields like cows.”
The junior officer pursed his lips teacherishly. “All the objectives were taken, nevertheless.”
“Yes,” Thorn agreed. “Because the Mexicans had no rapid-fire weapons and because a few men like yourself took the initiative at the right time. In fact, if you analyze Ojos, break it down into cause and effect, the results are all traceable to you four, acting independently. But then, I suppose that is true of any fight, big or small.”
Fowler considered this, his injured feelings somewhat appeased. Presently he reopened the conversation.
“I think the presence of trucks on this campaign has been very bad for morale in general. I understand they are not using cavalry in Europe. Just between us, Major, do you believe the cavalry has any future? That is, as a branch of service?”
“What kind of opinion do you want?” Thorn asked dryly. “Professional or personal?”
“Personal.”
“Then I don’t think it has any.”
Fowler was silent.
“I don’t intend to sound as though I don’t care. I do. But we have to be honest. I think the days when men fight each other on horseback are about ended. This may well be the last campaign. Trucks and aeroplanes are only the beginning. I hear the British are using in France a kind of armored vehicle on treads, which mounts its own cannon.
The Lieutenant had no comment. They rode on and when Thorn was ready to suggest he return to the main body, Fowler began to question him offhandedly about his career. Thorn let him. His father, he said, had been Academy but he had not. He had not wanted to be. After two years at a small college in up-state New York he had left to feel out the world for several more, in turn a clerk, a road engineer, a publisher’s drummer. Caught up in the 1898 hysteria, however, he had, with the aid of his father, been commissioned directly and gone to Cuba. Staying in the service when that affair was over had not been so much a conscious decision on his part, he recognized now, as a reluctance to face the more numerous decisions required by civilian life. He had been sent to Sulu, in the Philippines, to campaign against the Moros. He had been stationed at Fort D. A. Russell, Wyoming, and Fort Lewis, Washington, before making his majority and the transfer to Executive Officer of the 12th at Columbus.
“You have eighteen years, then?” Fowler asked.
“Next month.”
“Did you see much action in Cuba, sir?”
Thorn was weary of the interrogation, which was what it had become despite the junior officer’s deference of manner. The questions had been the right ones, but most of his answers, he sensed, had been wrong. He was spared the necessity of breaking it off ungracefully by something which stepped into his attention near the edge of a stand of oak at three hundred yards’ range. It was a prime buck deer standing motionless now, rack high. Thorn halted, slipped his Springfield from its boot, and raised the rifle. As he adjusted the sight the buck with one bound and white flash of rump made the cover of the oaks.
“I might have missed, anyway,” he admitted. “Will you go forward, Lieutenant, and tell them to keep their eyes peeled? With some fresh meat we could let out our belts.”
“Yes, sir.”
Riding alone again, Thorn thanked the buck. ‘Be wary with that one,’ he warned himself. ‘He is very serious and he is trying to be subtle and he has not the imagination to be subtle nor the depth to be serious. That is the way they make them at the Point.’
He stopped them for the noon meal in a pocket where the grass would give the horses plenty of roughage, yet being bone dry, would offer no danger of colic. Fires were built and coffee made, but he had Fowler caution them to go easy on their rations, for they must stretch them out over three more meals, perhaps four. He ate, worrying about water. The animals had been thirty hours without it. They had to locate water before another night camp.
The afternoon was uneventful. Lieutenant Fowler did not drop back to talk. The temper of the men, nearing base, was cheerful. Chawk sang. The character of the country changed once more. The grass browned. The sierra, massed and grand in the morning, knifed into separate peaks and the sun sharpened them and the temporary duty detail rode north in crooked defiles between the rocky scarps of the sierra. Major Thorn mused on a girl he had fancied in Seattle whose breasts perspired scentedly in the throes of the love act; on a young English newspaper correspondent named Churchill he had once got drunk with in Havana; on the proud set of his father’s jaw when he asked about obtaining a commission; on th
e first sale of textbooks he had made for the publishing house, even the place, Easton, Pennsylvania; on the day he had taken an order to General Wheeler’s division of dismounted cavalry near San Juan and watched Lieutenant-Colonel Teddy Roosevelt swearing and scratching at a blowfly bite on his neck; on how his mother had read Ulalume and Annabel Lee and Eldorado to him, how thirty years had passed over the boy he had been, and how in those years the poles between which, in a strange magnetic sense, he had been pulled, had been Poe and Pershing. Pershing and Poe. An unlikely axis for a life. But no more unlikely than that these men, riding slouched in formation before him, should, by their deeds, have made themselves unique. ‘Like Chawk,’ he thought, ‘who cannot translate what he sings, they cannot comprehend what they have performed.’ He paraphrased a poem out of his long ago: “Gayly bedight, an unshaven knight, in sunshine and in shadow, sat on his tail, led a detail, in search of Eldorado.” He was as far from it as ever. Only Chawk and Trubee remained to him. They were entirely different types, however, nail-hard, unself-conscious, and from their mouths might fall insensibly the words he had to hear. Of clay as well as metal might be made the vessel of truth. Tonight would tell.
Sheep’s ears were laid back. His head was up. Thorn wondered why. The party filed along the center of a small valley. A dozen rifle-shots cracked from the right, the east, he could not see where, and bullets called in the air overhead. Thorn socked spurs into Sheep. The main body milled in surprise as he reached them and more fire burst from the left, the west, and Renziehausen cried “Ow!” and clapped a hand to the side of his head.
Thorn shouted to follow and galloped straight on up the valley. Turning in the saddle he saw the Geary woman bent low and catching up and horsemen with big hats riding out of woods from both rear flanks and coming fast and shooting. He could not tell how many because his eyes watered with wind. He did not yet know what was happening. Renziehausen had been hit. He had to get them out of the open into cover. His party pounded close behind him. Sheep’s lungs blew like bellows as the lean legs stretched and gathered and stretched and gathered. The animals were not capable of more than a mile of this.
On he took them. The valley narrowed rapidly to a draw. A slug whimpered close to his head. Suddenly the draw was a canyon. In seconds he pulled up, horse careening, nearly falling, and was almost overrun by the others.
A wall of rock sheered two hundred feet high before them. To right and left steep-sloped hills bunched them in. He had led them, or they had been herded, into a box canyon.
His eyes strained as he sought cover, and spotting a clump of jeffery pines up the left slope swung towards it with a command curve of his arm.
On lathered horses they crashed in among the pines and he yelled for rifles. A sprung branch with one swipe removed his campaign hat and glasses. He went down on a knee and blazed away at the horsemen charging them, big hat-brims blown up, mouths wide as they shouted.
He sighted on the man leading them, a Mexican with a band of red cloth around his sombrero and wearing the greaved leather leggings of Coahuila, and squeezed off the round, missing.
Springfields went off in fusillade as the troopers commenced firing. Three of the Mexicans, within a hundred yards now, were unhorsed. The others wheeled in circles. There were at least twenty. Back down the canyon a dozen more ran on foot.
Flapping his sombrero, the lead Mexican started them in retreat as the rifles stopped. Thorn retrieved hat and glasses and found Renziehausen seated sobbing. A bullet had torn off nearly all his ear. The boy’s fingers groped frantically as he sobbed. Thorn forced them away, got cotton and adhesive from his first-aid packet and applied a bandage, then returned to the others.
The troopers watched as the horsemen met those on foot. Red-Band pointed and the two groups split off, some riding double. The remainder spread out across the canyon mouth. The party in the pines waited.
Two of the Mexicans downed on the floor of the canyon had been killed outright and did not move. The third, wounded, dragged to hands and knees and began to crawl towards his countrymen, trailing one leg and presenting the broad seat of his peon pants to the troopers.
Before he could be stopped, Trubee raised his rifle and sighted at the target of opportunity. His bullet spitted the Mexican so that he screamed, leaped on all fours bear-like, flattened, twitched, and lay still. Shot and scream rocked back and forth between canyon walls.
“Thought I’d give ‘im a lead enema, Majer,” Trubee grinned, bolting another round into his chamber.
In another minute riders appeared high on the opposite hillcrest, dark against a sundown sky, and atop the cliff to the north. Scrape of iron and squeak of working leather sounded high behind them and bits of shale clattered down the slope.
Suddenly the canyon came alive with plunging rifle-fire directed into the jeffery pines from three sides. Bullets slammed into trunks and ricocheted through branches, showering needles. Though no more than thirty rifles were in operation, the canyon, an echo chamber, amplified the reports into a cannonade like that of artillery ordered to fell the small wood with grape-shot. Deafened, the Americans took to the center of the clump. Then, as though on signal, the Mexican cross-fire ceased. It had been a way of demonstrating to the detail how perfectly it was trapped.
Automatically Major Thorn took charge of his command. He had the animals tied to trees. He ordered Sergeant Chawk to find out who carried short-handled axes, break them out and have a large number of branches trimmed. “All right, heroes,” Chawk roared at the rest as they stood about indecisively, “snap ass and cut wood!” Renziehausen, who still sat sobbing, hugging his knees in grief, the sergeant brought to with a smart slap across the face and set to helping. The men chopped away with a will, glad to have something to do. Thorn next had the branches dragged to points at intervals around the perimeter of the wood, piled as cover, and disposed the men behind them, Chawk and Renziehausen on one flank, towards the canyon mouth, Trubee and Hetherington in the center facing west and north, twenty yards apart, and Lieutenant Fowler at the rear, to the east. He ordered them not to waste ammunition, to fire only when absolutely certain of targets. He went to various points at the edge of the clump, and from concealment observed what he could of the Mexican positions. This was not his only purpose. He had to be by himself, to think. The ambush, the fact that they were pinned down by armed enemy in this unpeopled country, seemed completely unreal to him. They should be making night camp at this hour, near water, prepared to reach Cordura the next day. There was no shooting now. Light ghosted rapidly out of the canyon. Peering, he could make out movement on the three heights and down at the mouth, four hundred yards distant, but figures and rock formations and bushes fused in dusk and haze of powder smoke. Men could neither scale nor descend the great slab to the north nor could horses manage the steep slopes to east and west. There was no way out of the canyon except by its mouth, and that, he was sure, had been well sealed off by the Mexicans. He had led his party into this place. It was not his fault. He did not know the country. He had not panicked. He had got them to cover with only one casualty, and that not serious. He might have hesitated when they were first fired upon, been more cautious about an escape route rather than taking them in head-long flight, but the boy had been hit, and he had obeyed his impulse to get them out of danger, anywhere. Still, anger at circumstance flickered in him and on a hunch he went into the pines. Adelaide Geary sat against a trunk calmly smoking a shuck cigarette.
“Who are they?” he demanded. “Where did they come from? I think you know.”
“I do now. I didn’t at first, or I wouldn’t be here.”
“Well?”
“The one with the red band and the Coahuila leggings is Arreaga.”
“That’s impossible!” Arreaga and Cruz Dominiguez had commanded the force they had defeated at Ojos. Dominiguez they had identified among the dead.
“Have a little logic, Major,” she said, “even if you can’t afford it. When you threw them off the ranch,
why should they all go south? You would only be after them again. So some of them doubled back north, where they would have clear country, and banded up. I imagine they’ve been watching us all day and waiting to trip the snare.”
It was so dark Thorn could not see her face. “Don’t sweat,” she went on. “I’m sure Arreaga didn’t know what brave men and bird-killers you have, or he’d never have picked on you. He won’t attack. When you run out of rations and surrender he’ll kill you with ceremony befitting your honors.”
The tone of her voice was such that if she had been a man he would have beaten the insolence out of her then and there.
“And what will he do to you?” he asked.
“Nothing. He was my guest, remember?” He left her. On the heights and in the canyon mouth, at the four points of the compass, fires flared. The Mexicans were settling down for the night. Saying one guard would be enough, he had Lieutenant Fowler bring in Trubee, Hetherington and Renziehausen from the perimeter to cut fuel and build a fire. He saw to the horses and found them securely tied, but so dry they were already chewing on their halter ropes. They had to have water. Just as he went back to the men they lit the fire, and as the light pushed out and up, a volley from the Mexican rifles zinged through the branches and they took shelter behind trunks until it ended. Facing them across the fire, Major Thorn told them the Mexicans were stragglers from the Ojos fight under Arreaga. He said he did not know how long they would be bottled up, but he was certain the Villistas had little stomach for Springfields. It was unlikely they would attack at night. He would let them know in due time what he had decided to do, but they must make the best of the situation meanwhile. He made every effort to speak calmly and to appear unconcerned. He had them check ammunition; they averaged sixty rounds apiece for the rifles and four pistol clips. He ordered them to unsaddle and give the animals half a feed of corn and a quarter hatful of water from the canteens. While this was being done he warned the Geary woman quietly to stay close to the fire at all times so that she could be kept in sight. When he asked her about provisions, she replied she had grain for her mare but no water.
They Came To Cordura Page 11
