They Came To Cordura

by Swarthout, Glendon

  They seemed to leave the sierra. Noble peaks shrank to hills and then to foothills. Trees thinned and stunted and then the hills were bare. Brown grass seared so that once more the land was the familiar ochroid hue. It had, luckily, a gradual down-slope.

  Major Thorn gave them ten minutes at each half-hour stop to alternate a man, taking himself off the litter last and walking behind it. The Geary woman kept twenty yards between herself and the party, her stride easy though she carried both her saddlebags. He noted how laden the bearers were, the slung Springfields tending constantly to slide from off shoulders, the belts heavy with ammunition dragging at their hips, but he did not see what could safely be dispensed with. The three canteens he had tied together and fastened round his neck; the bag of feed corn he had hung from Lieutenant Fowler’s belt. He looked for Hetherington’s rifle and saddlebag and could not find them. Chawk had carried one, Trubee the other.

  Coming up with the litter he asked where they were. Neither would reply. He halted them and demanded an answer. Trubee said they had left them at the last stop because he, Hetherington, would not need them. Thorn said whatever personal he owned in the world was probably in that bag. Chawk said he might not need that, either. Telling them the cost of both items would come out of their next pay, Thorn started the litter.

  The sun was high now, the sky metallic as a gong. Sweat darkened the khaki shirts of the bearers. Pace slowed. The sick youth complained of the sun. He tried to keep his campaign hat over his face, but the motion of the litter tipped it off. His face was already reddening, his temperature up a degree or two. The senior officer went to the Geary woman and asked if she had anything of cloth. From one of her bags she gave him a good cotton shirt. This he moistened with water, emptying the least full of the canteens, and putting Hetherington’s hat on with the strap under his chin so that the brim made a support, he draped the shirt over his face like a small tent. Then they went on.

  During each break the men stretched full length. On one of them Lieutenant Fowler lay near Thorn. He had exchanged no words with his superior since the decision to give up the horses.

  “Will he pull through?”

  “I don’t know. He has some kind of typhoid.”

  “You told Chawk forty miles.”

  “Give or take a few.”

  “Have you thought he might be right?”

  “About what?”

  “About the rest not making it unless we travel light?”

  Thorn waited a moment. That Fowler was deliberately not ‘siring’ him might be as dangerous a sign as the implication of his question.

  “Don’t let me hear that again,” he said softly.

  The Lieutenant was silent.

  “Listen.” Thorn sat up. “If you reckon thirty-five miles a day mounted, we had come thirty before the ambush. If it was a two-day ride to the Tex—Mex, we were only five miles short of it. We should strike it by noon or a little later. Then if we can do two miles an hour the rest of today and tomorrow. . . ”

  “We can’t.”

  “We have to. And another thing. One of us had better be behind Chawk and Trubee every minute.”

  Lieutenant Fowler sat up. His neckerchief of blue silk, clean and jaunty when they had ridden north from Ojos, was scummed with dirt. He fixed the brown circles of his sun-goggles on Thorn.

  “Are you afraid of them?”

  “I don’t want to be jumped.”

  “I don’t want the Medal of Honor.”

  Thorn could not see through the goggles. He did not have to. He broke it off by getting the detail under way.

  They reached and passed noon. Still the detail moved with steadiness, the land continuing to fall away and fall away until the foothills flattened and there was no elevation. The sun raged. Rifle barrels and hard-leather slings seared at touch. Nostrils dried. Heads bent, the bearers plodded as sweat burst under tight hat-brims and ran to nose ends and dropped.

  They did not look up when the earth underfoot became shale. Then someone slipped and cursed and they raised their heads.

  They stood on a ledge. The ledge overhung a vast and prehistoric basin. Like a mirror the sky fell. With a crash of light it shattered upon granite, mica, limestone, porphyry, basalt, feldspar, quartz. The soldiers shut their eyes as though slapped. In a moment, squinting, across the great glitter they could make out a snake of low and blue hills on the horizon. The hills were three or thirty miles away as light refracted. In the basin below, age upon age, the earth had alternately tortured and treated itself. Knives of ancient ice had ripped arroyos deep as wounds and the sides of these had been healed by the wash of old waters. The hammers of the elements had pounded the surface to a conglomerate of sand and pebbles and given it to bear and nourish chamiso, the agrito of many thorns, mesquite, cactus, and the Spanish bayonet. The colors of the basin were two only: rust and grey.

  They stood appalled, forgetting to lower the litter. Search as they might they could see no green which would signal water. All was emptiness and glaze and loud silence across which lay their only way.

  Major Thorn gave them half an hour. Shoes were removed. Renziehausen had a badly blistered heel. Thorn found Hetherington’s fever higher but not so high as to be dangerous and he decided to save the quinine until the next crisis. Before replacing the shirt over the youth’s face he re-wet it, dripping water carefully. Every man watched him. He moved then along the ledge, stooping, and brought back six small pebbles, giving one to each man to suck, saying it would start and keep flowing the saliva. When he offered one to the Geary woman she opened her mouth to show the stone already on her tongue. Promptly on the half-hour the detail moved into the basin.

  Within two hundred yards none of them believed a passage possible. The direction of the arroyos was entirely north and south so that in order to keep northeastward each of them had to be crossed. No sooner was one traversed then another yawned. The sides were frequently steep and in the loose conglomerate the bearers slid and lurched and only by extreme effort kept the litter aloft. They were subjected to other punishments. Often the arroyo bottoms were barricaded with agrito, that cactus which grew green in Texas but grey here, every leaf of it daggered with odd-numbered spines, and as the bearers fought through it spines penetrated breeches and embedded in legs. The pebbles swelled tongues and the clamp of jaws during the strain of climb and descent grated them against teeth. Wide hat-brims protected from the sun above but so intense was the re-radiation of mica and quartz that faces began to burn and lips to crack.

  Once, when they struggled down into an arroyo, Renziehausen and Chawk, at the front of the litter, stopped in their tracks. Facing them was a cluster of yuccas, high cacti, the arms aflutter with thousands of silent, migratory bluebirds. For a moment the two soldiers gaped stupidly. Then, realizing the birds would be edible, they drew pistols and blazed away wildly, emptying the automatics, sending the birds up in a living cloud. They did not hit one.

  When it was Major Thorn’s turn off the litter he went forward. The low hills on the horizon seemed not to be nearing but to recede in the shimmer of heat. He could not trust his vision. He had left his binoculars in the box canyon. At the rear the Geary woman had taken off her jacket. Though she had got rid of one of her saddlebags the elastic was gone from her stride.

  In the course of the next hour he watched his command go rapidly to pieces, unravel as Chawk’s bandage unravelled. Into the arroyos the bearers stumbled, lunging up out of them like service horses run to dying. The blister on Renziehausen’s heel brought on a limp. Trubee mumbled tiresomely that the pebble in his mouth hurt his gums. He had long since thrown away his sweater. Chawk seemed in the best shape, towering up his corner of the litter like a moving tree, but his mouth like that of Lieutenant Fowler was cracked. Thorn remembered hearing of men in the last extremities opening veins to moisten split lips with their own blood. From the waist up every man’s shirt was black with damp. This was the dangerous thing, the sweating. For lack of anything else to do at Co
lumbus, Ben Ticknor had interested himself medically in the problem of dehydration, the effects on the body of prolonged water shortage. Patrols were sometimes lost, failed to locate water, and straggling back to post more dead than alive were met by the surgeon who examined them, questioned them closely. Thorn recalled some of his findings. Bodily moisture lost by sweating had to be compensated for by water intake; if sweat was not replaced by water ounce for ounce breathing quickened, pulse rate and rectal temperature increased, blood volume diminished and circulation slowed, producing muscular difficulty. Temperamentally, dehydrating men grew sullen, intractable, and in the last stages, emotionally unstable. For seven weeks prior to Ojos these men had been in the field, committed almost to their limit; now they managed on nerve alone, and when that was gone they would have nothing, no reserve, on which to draw. Without a find of water or the reassurance of iron rails he did not see how they could be kept going even the remainder of this day, much less the next. And for what they were having to endure, the wearing down and the defeat, he damned himself. Giving up the horses had been his decision. He had saved them only to sacrifice them to himself.

  He wondered how much longer he could control. By instinct they were still soldiering, but hunger and thirst, particularly the latter if Ben Ticknor’s observations proved out, would put an end to that. For whatever they might do he could not blame them. In their condition they were not responsible. He wondered if Fowler would come to his aid. He wondered where Renziehausen would stand in a showdown. Since the loss of his ear the boy had not been himself.

  They might disobey an order to take up the litter.

  Or they might refuse to go on without water.

  Or they might jump him.

  He halted them every twenty minutes now. The rock was too hot to lie on and they sat where they were, heads down, picking the barbs of the agrito from their legs and feeling the raw of their faces in a stupor of exhaustion. After each break it was more difficult to get them on their feet.

  As they went down into an arroyo a loud voice rang out. “‘For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pome granates; a land of olive oil, and honey, a land where-in thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in it. When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which He hath given thee.’”

  They got Hetherington down to the pebbly bottom and removing the shirt Major Thorn found him in another coma of fever, his skin burning, eyes closed, head turning from side to side. Raising him he put two quinine tablets in his mouth and enough water to enable him to swallow. The Geary woman brought the bottle and bending over the stricken youth to shield him from the sun the officer began rubbing his face and neck and hands with the liquor. He told the others they would not move until the crisis had passed. The seizure was more severe than that of the preceding night; for almost an hour Thorn worked without ceasing while the soldier babbled the Old Testament, now from the Book of Psalms, now extended genealogies, now snatches of the Hebrew law. When at last his limbs stiffened and sweat poured from him and he lay back as though lifeless, the officer could scarcely stand with the cramp of his exertions. Lieutenant Fowler and Renziehausen were hunched nearby. The Geary woman was out of sight. So were Chawk and Trubee. It took a moment for his mind to alarm his body. Then with a shout at the others he set out on the run down the arroyo. It doubled sharply and he put out his hands to keep from crashing into a large granite outcrop. Over his own panting he heard a sound. Reaching down his right leg to unholster his automatic he stepped warily around the granite.

  They had her breeches off and her shirt pulled up and tied round her head, the tails wadded into her mouth so that she could not scream.

  At her head Chawk pinioned her arms wide in sand, his knees on her shoulders.

  Trubee, his breeches down, tried to butt between her legs, cursing with pain as her knees smashed up at his bare buttocks, at the bandage where the boil had been drawn.

  Intent on the act they did not see Thorn as he stepped to them and shoved the snubnose of the .45 into the base of Trubee’s neck.

  “Get up,” he said harshly. “Let her up.” Trubee scrambled like an animal, hitching at his breeches.

  Chawk lumbered up, his hat falling off. Thorn had never seen such menace on a man’s face.

  Lieutenant Fowler and Renziehausen reached them. “If you try this again,” Thorn breathed, “I will prefer charges the day we get to base.” He kept the muzzle full on them.

  “An’ what the hell day may that be?” Chawk snarled. “You dunno where that railroad is any more ‘n yer ass. . . ”

  “Puffer charges, hah?” Trubee cinched his belt tight and sidled next to the sergeant. “I’ll do tha pufferin’! We ain’t takin’ no more orders from a officer whose guts is yella!”

  “That’s enough!” Thorn cried.

  Trubee pulled the pebble from his mouth and hurled it to the ground.

  “You can’t do nothin’ to nobody! Tell tha boys, Majer—tell ‘em where they found them goddam oak leaves at Columbus! In a ditch, boys! That’s where he was while we was fightin’ for flag an’ country! Tha dirty yella-guts hid out in a ditch! An’ would Seeley Rogers put ’im before a board—no! Tha hull goddam gang a officers hushed it up—hadda been a ordin’ry soljer like you an’ me we’da been to Levinworth, that’s what!” Trubee fairly screamed. “So that high mucky-muck tellin’ us we’re heroes, boys, an’ tryin’ to kill tha lot of us, an’ I say blow ‘im fulla holes an’ put tha pud to tha whoor an’ find our own way home—he dassn’t shoot, boys, he’s a yella-guts, a yella-guts!”

  Westering sun glared on Thorn’s glasses and he could scarcely see them. Adelaide Geary had disappeared behind the outcrop. He realized Fowler and Renziehausen were behind him. He had to act before what Trubee said sank in.

  “Lieutenant, take their guns.”

  The scene was hellish, the men facing him like red men standing at bay in a blaze of red from rock on fire. Behind him nothing moved.

  “Mister, take their guns!”

  Fowler passed him and removed the pistols from their holsters.

  Thorn swung around and motioned with the gun at Renziehausen. “His, too.”

  Fowler obeyed.

  ‘Throw them as far as you can.’’

  The Lieutenant heaved them out of the arroyo where they fell and clattered.

  “Now move. I will shoot if I have to. I will wing you in the shoulder or arm or leg and you will get to base if you have to crawl. Now move.”

  Thorn marched them back towards Hetherington.

  “It won’t do, Majer,” Trubee said without turning. “Pullin’ a gun like you had tha craw to use it. You take us in like pris’ners an’ pin them dekkerations on us an’ tha boys an’ me will wag jaw till they rip them goddam leaves offa you.”

  “Shut yer yap,” Chawk advised. “He’ll never take us in—we ain’t inclined to go.”

  “March,” Thorn said.

  After they reached the equipment he had Fowler collect all five Springfields and Hetherington’s pistol and hide them in the cactus. He told Renziehausen he was sorry to do this, he trusted him, but he thought it best only officers carry weapons henceforth. The boy stared at him, not listening, remembering Trubee’s words and trying to picture his commander in a ditch. Putting Fowler on guard, Thorn went back for the woman. She sat behind the outcrop trying to be sick on an empty stomach. When he spoke to her she rose and followed him.

  He had the three enlisted men strip off ammunition belts as he and Lieutenant Fowler took the rifle cartridges from their own. Then, after re-wetting the shirt over Hetherington’s face, he ordered the litter hoisted, putting himself and the junior officer at the rear end with holsters unbuttoned and telling Trubee to stay out in front.

  Not until they mounted the side of the arroyo did what had h
appened hit him. It was out, foul, with no mercy, but out. It was as though he had been leeched suddenly of a thing which for weeks had poisoned his being, but now, freed of it, he was also bereft of that which had given him power, no matter if misused, and bearing, no matter if compassless. In an arroyo somewhere, God knew where, in the state of Chihuahua in Mexico, a rape had been attempted upon the body of a woman and performed upon the soul of a man. Nothing for that man would ever be the same. He closed his eyes and let the pull of the litter lead him.

  As the sun drove down the sierra at their backs the shadow of the litter, like that of a sail, grew long before them, vanishing into arroyos and scudding up from them as the bearers stumbled towards the low hills, rubied now, which slithered away in space. Trubee stumped in front, his head swiveling over his shoulders to spy on the two officers. The Geary woman shuffled after. Chawk had left his hat at the place where they had attacked her. At each stop, timed according to exhaustion, the senior officer checked Hetherington’s forehead. Fever still burnt in him like a candle low of wick. Once, when they took him up, he was tipped to the ground and lay with eyes closed. Yet when lifted again and moved a few steps his voice sounded above, reciting, and Trubee swore at him, saying to the others, see, that was what he was, a “snot-nose, holy-rollin’ preacher”. Even with day dying, the air over the basin did not cool for the rock held the heat. They were men in the last stages of consciousness.

  In the oven that was his skull Thomas Thorn talked to himself.