They Came To Cordura

by Swarthout, Glendon

  “Try tequila,” he suggested as he left to care for Sheep.

  When they were done with the animals Thorn saw to it that they did not overcook, and that Chawk, still on guard, was relieved to eat. The meal finished the last of the bacon, but there was still a little hard bread, flour and coffee left. Not much was said. The men were sober. To the bullets which occasionally stung through the jeffery, clipping needles and ricocheting off branches with high-pitched, crazy whines, they paid no heed. They were fired, evidently, at random intervals, a shot now, another later whenever someone thought of it, without specific aim or purpose except to remind the Americans of the Villistas’ constant, solicitous presence. It was an effective way, too, to tighten the nerves of those trapped.

  Major Thorn took a brand from the fire and built his own nearby. While he made coffee and ate hard bread he worked out the guard duty in his mind. He would set what was known as a ‘running guard’, he decided, using all the men, posting them in pairs for two-hour tricks, one with a lane of fire towards the canyon mouth, the other watching the west hillside. There was no need to cover the rock wall and no one could come down the shale of the rear slope without waking the dead. He would start with the youngsters, then Chawk and Trubee, then himself and Fowler, repeating this sequence so that he and Fowler would be on again at first light. He dwelt on the mechanics of guard so that he would not have to consider the choices with which he was confronted. But the Lieutenant joined him and forced the issue. He had been thinking, he said, about the best time and way for them to pull out. The canyon mouth was, of course, their only route. They could walk the horses almost to it, mount on signal, then pour it on and ride through. As for the time, near dawn the Villistas might be least on the alert, but they would soon have light for pursuit, and he recognized the animals had little gallop left in them. So around midnight he thought the best time. Darkness would make chase difficult, and the sooner they tried, as he saw it, the greater the element of surprise.

  Thorn drank coffee. “Give me a professional opinion, Lieutenant. Looking at our situation, what are the alternatives?” Fowler seemed flattered and puzzled. “I thought I’d covered them, sir. To ride out sooner or later. I expressed my preference for the former.”

  “Isn’t there another?”

  “Sir?”

  “Not pulling out. Waiting to see what they propose to do.”

  Lieutenant Fowler stared. He said formally it had never entered his mind. They could not wait. They would soon run out of food.

  “We can eat horse.”

  And they were down to thirds of canteens of water.

  “It may rain.”

  The junior officer continued to stare.

  “Let’s be practical,” Thorn said. “Riding out of here in all directions whooping and hollering may be in the tradition, but consider our chances. We might get through the mouth, but in the dark we would be scattered all over hell’s half acre. We are in hostile country, evidently, and country none of us know. Separated, most of us would be dead or grandfathers before we ever got to base.” He meant to be easy about it, but having to word his thoughts whetted his tone. “Moreover, I have to think of my command responsibility, which is to these men. Riding off half-cocked I might lose one or two of you to wounds or worse. That I can’t have. This is a very special detail, Lieutenant, and I intend to keep it intact.”

  He glanced deliberately at the other fire. The Geary woman was cooking for herself and, ignoring her, the men were, without being told, cleaning their weapons. Trubee had relieved Chawk on guard.

  “So we will stay here tonight,” Thorn concluded. “We will see what happens tomorrow. I’m convinced they won’t attack. Our position is very defensible. When they recognize that they may pull out themselves. If they should attack, we will give them a good licking.”

  Fowler got to his feet. “Sir, I must say. . . ”

  “Will you send Renziehausen over?”

  Fowler went. When Renziehausen appeared Thorn had him sit down and removed the bandage from his head, saying he had had to be hasty in the afternoon and wanted to apply a permanent dressing. Curious, Chawk and Hetherington came along to watch.

  With the bandage off the transformation of the boy was startling. His good looks became at once ludicrous. As he searched their faces for reaction to him, Hetherington left quickly. Sergeant Chawk grinned. The boy’s fingers flew to his head. All that remained of his ear was an inch-long strip of the lobe flesh which hung loose.

  “Looks like a baby’s pecker,” Chawk said.

  “Shut up!” Renziehausen cried.

  “Don’t gimme any mouth,” the sergeant drawled. With one hand he made a sweeping gesture. “I might yank the rest off and make a neat job.”

  “That will be all, Sergeant,” Thorn said curtly.

  Chawk laughed and returned to the big fire. Thorn washed the dried blood from the boy’s head with water from his canteen and applied a smaller bandage of cotton and adhesive.

  Renziehausen’s eyes were tear-filled, as stricken as those of a pup whose tail has just been bobbed.

  “How could it happen when I was just riding along not doing anything? Why did I have to be the one? At Ojos they were shooting right at me and I didn’t get a scratch. I just have to see myself. Have you got a mirror, sir?”

  “No.”

  “I look awful, don’t I?”

  Thorn tried to reassure him. A sergeant of his in the Philippines, he said, had lost an ear to a Moro barong, and the surgeons, once he had returned to the States, made him one of rubber so life-like that the difference could not be told.

  “Besides, it won’t matter,” the officer told him. “People won’t even notice.”

  “Yes, they will.”

  “No. They will only notice what you wear around your neck. Have you ever seen a Medal of Honor, boy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s the most beautiful of all the decorations, as it should be. It hangs around the neck on a blue silk ribbon dotted with white stars.’’

  Renziehausen sniffed. “It does?”

  “Yes. I would trade an ear for one any day. Two, in fact.”

  Thorn put his hand on the private’s shoulder and accompanied him to the others. There he explained the guard duty for the night. He instructed them to fire at the slightest noise. As he spoke, a bullet ploughed through the jefferys from their rear, struck a branch and ricocheted down into the fire at his feet, scattering sparks like fireworks.

  “That’s another thing,” the officer said. “Two can play at that game. When you are standing guard, throw them a round now and then, maybe two or three an hour. Sight on their fires. You won’t hit anything but it will keep them awake.”

  “Ain’t we going to pull out, Major?” Chawk asked. Thorn did not reply to him. “All right, Hetherington and Renziehausen have the first trick. Lieutenant, will you and Trubee cut fuel? Come with me, Sergeant.”

  He strode back to his own fire, Chawk following. While he built up the fire and found his notebook and pencil he had the non-com sit down.

  “Major, how come we ain’t pulling out?”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask, are you feeling up to snuff again, Sergeant? Any more dizziness since yesterday?”

  “Nope.”

  “Fine.” He sat down opposite and located the notes he had taken the day of the Ojos fight. “Now, Sergeant, things happened pretty fast at Ojos when you started up those stairs to the roof. I have two eyewitness reports, but they differ a little and you can help me get the straight of it. A citation must be absolutely accurate.” He began to question the non-com, in the course of the next few minutes changing slightly some of his notes.

  “When you going to make that bitch divvy up ‘er likker an’ smokes, Major?”

  “I think that’s all I need.” Thorn closed his notebook, smiled. “You are a real engine of destruction at close quarters. By the way, what is your middle name and where do you come from?”

  No middle name, Chawk
muttered, and up in Montana, not far from a four-corners called Salmon. Thorn had to pump him about his life because the giant, his own questions going unanswered, turned sullen. He leaned back into a jeffery uncomfortably. The bright pine firelight silvered the great cocoon of bandage that was his head. His face was black with stubble except for the naked white of the bottle-scar. He had wangled or bullied leather puttees out of supply, and the lower buckle of one was missing, so that it gaped open about a thick ankle. All he remembered about Montana was living in a sod hut and the time when he and his brother, finding a nest of field mice in the roof over their bed, set fire to the nest and burned off all the ceiling grass and took a ‘whupping’ over the head by their homesteader father with a belly-band from a harness. When he was fourteen, and as big as the old man, he had repaid him with a length of angle iron and left home. He had worked southward as a ranch hand and on railroad section gang as far as ‘Albakurkey’, New Mexico, before enlisting. Of his five years in service he had been a troop sergeant for four.

  “And a good one, from all I hear,” Thorn said.

  “I got to be. Just between us, Major, that Lootenant Wickline ain’t fit to have no troop. If I hadn’t ‘ave took out for the roof the troop’d still be waitin’ behind them dobe buildings. We’d be there yet.”

  Ordinarily the officer would have called him for the disrespect, but the opportunity was too good to lose.

  “Incidentally, Sergeant, what made you start for the roof on your own hook? Were you thinking of the troop? Did you see they were in trouble and feel you had to do something about it?”

  “Them buggers? Hell no, Major.”

  “Why, then?” Thorn asked. “What reason can you give me for such a selfless act?”

  Chawk sat forward, ran a finger into one dark ear-hole, withdraw and examined it and wiped the wax on his breeches.

  “Major, I hate greasers,” he said matter-of-factly. “Too greasy an’ connivin’, they are. I figgered to make the roof an’ kill me a couple.”

  Thorn shook his head. “But you had to cross at least eighty yards of open ground under fire, I paced it off.”

  Chawk grinned. “That don’t make a piss-difference to me when I can lay hands on a greaser.”

  Thorn sat still, blanked and repelled by the man. Over the clean scent of the pines came the reek of him, strong and animal. What had occurred on the roof of the casa grande at Ojos had not been the destruction of armed enemy so much as simple murder. It was conceivable, after all, that the act of killing might produce in a man, in some men, the same pleasurable sensations as sleep or digestion or sexual climax.

  “And you will wear the Medal of Honor for this,” he said, half to himself.

  Another slug lashed through the trees and with a solid chunk buried itself in a trunk nearby. Out on the perimeter one of the youngsters on guard replied with three rounds fired in quick succession. The cracking of the Springfield echoed and re-echoed in the canyon. It was probably Renziehausen, taking a boy’s aggrieved and foolish way of hitting back at those who had hurt him.

  “Have you thought about the Medal?” the officer asked grimly. “What it means?”

  “Sure. I can sure use the extry two horns a month. When does that start, Major?”

  Thorn wanted the interview ended. He felt like one who stumbles suddenly upon something unclean, something scrawled upon the walls of human values. He was as sickened as he had been in the morning. He saw the bird again, the beak of pure white stamped into splinters.

  He rose. “As soon as Congress approves the award,” he said. “I guess we are finished, Sergeant.”

  The non-com did not move. His eyes moved up and down the length of the officer as though estimating the strength in the stocky figure, the steel or flab in the heavy thews of shoulder and thigh.

  “Major, you ask me plenty an’ I’m supposed to talk out. I ask you a couple of thing an’ you don’t. Why is that?”

  Thorn hesitated. Rough customers were legion in the Army, but he had never encountered one to equal Chawk, whose whole character and history seemed sadistic. He had had little contact with him at Columbus; a regimental executive officer was far removed from the ten troop sergeants. The thing had to come to a head and be drawn finally, like Trubee’s boil; Chawk must be taught he could not make himself familiar with, much less daunt, an officer of field grade. But there would surely be a better time.

  He straightened. “Will you go out, Sergeant, and tell Renziehausen to stop wasting ammunition?”

  After a moment Chawk hoisted himself, grunted something unintelligible, and pushed away into the pines.

  When the senior officer came for Trubee the Geary woman was already rolled in her blanket near the big fire, her hat over her face. Lieutenant Fowler sat close to the blaze, his khaki shirt across his lap, shivering and sewing up the slit in his sleeve.

  Taking the veteran back with him, Thorn got through the routine questions quickly. Trubee’s given and middle names were Milo and Sharp. The notes on his single-handed assault on the log corral position early in the Ojos fight checked out in each detail. But despite his years in the service Trubee was irritatingly not at ease in the presence of an officer, removing his hat and scratching with long finger-nails at his bald spot or picking at ravelings from his sweater or at one of the eruptions on his neck. Now and then he felt beneath himself where his saddle boil had been attended to. Thorn’s distaste for him increased in direct ratio to his sense of urgency. He knew Trubee’s type well. Of sub-average intelligence, by disposition a griper, a plotter, a latrine lawyer, he would lick an officer’s boots and profane him when his back was turned. In an emergency he would be unreliable. In combat he could not be trusted. But in the person of such a man, because he had performed in a certain astounding way for less than five minutes of his life, was represented what seemed to Thorn to be his last chance to see clearly the other side of the human coin.

  He closed the notebook. As he prepared to phrase the next, the crucial question, Trubee began a long recital of his ills. He was in very bad health even though the surgeons joshed him or gave him pink pills. He was short of wind, each morning one leg was stiff and took half the day to limber up, ‘roomatism’, probably, and he had two twingy teeth which needed a dentist.

  “I bin in tha calvary goin’ on twenny-three years, Majer, sir,” he whined. “I’d ree-tire, but half a private’s pay ain’t enough for a man to take his ease on, you know that. I could git by on full, but that’s anuther seven year an’ I tell you, Majer, sir, I ain’t likely to make it, tha shape I’m in. I’m forty-four an’ that’s too old for tha field, now ain’t it?”

  “What is it you want?” Thorn asked impatiently, confirmed in his estimate.

  Trubee came to his feet and removed his hat. His small round eyes blinked rapidly as though to button the lids to the pouches beneath.

  “Well, Majer, sir, when we git to base I’d take it mighty kindly of you to see about me getting a transfer to tha quartermaster or mebbe drivin’ one o’ them trucks. When a man’s put in twenny years’ faithful dooty he rates consideration, seems to me. He oughta be taken outa combat. Let the young jays do tha fightin’, I say, an’ save tha old boys what’s already put in their share for tha country!”

  Thorn almost choked on the irony. “Take you out of combat?” he demanded. “Why man, you’re being recommended for the Medal of Honor, the highest award that can be won in action! How in God’s name can you tell me you’re too old and feeble to fight when you fight as you did at Ojos? Tell me that!”

  Trubee swivelled his head, put on his hat, took it off again.

  “Listen to me,” Thorn said, swallowing his contempt. “I will think it over. But you have to tell me what made you charge that corral at Ojos. I want to know how you felt, what you thought just before you left the troop and started out alone.”

  “I dunno, Majer, sir.” He was the more raddled because only then did he recall his original scheme, to lie low in an irrigation ditch, shoot h
is horse in the shoulder, and so skulk the action altogether.

  Thorn rose. He had to try another tack. The man had to be led. “Try to remember, Trubee. A and C Troops were bunched up at the wire fence, caught in the fire from the corral. Men were being hit.”

  “Yessir.”

  The officer pointed a finger. “Someone had to reach the corral and do enough damage so those troops could cut and pass the wire.”

  “Yessir, I seen tha Mixicans there.”

  “So you lit out on your own to save the men of those troops, isn’t that right?” Thorn’s voice lifted with excitement. “You knew you might not make it, but you had to try? It was a conscious act of self-sacrifice, isn’t that right?”

  “Majer, sir,” Trubee said, nodding vigorously, “you put that in writin’ an’ I’ll swear to it!”

  Thorn stopped. “You’ll swear to it?”

  “Why I will!” Trubee’s Adam’s apple corked up and down. “That I will, Majer!”

  The officer seemed to sag. He had stooped once more to bribery, sold himself for the pottage of agreement, and suddenly the whole of the day, from the killing of the bird to the ambush, to Renziehausen’s sorrow, to the circumstances which had forced him to bring his party to this place, burst in him. With two strides he had Trubee by the shirt-front, raising him off his feet.