The Warlords

by Matt Braun

  On Vasquez’s signal, the raiders forded the creek. All of them were armed with Winchesters, and after hitching their horses outside the corral, they set about their assigned tasks. Half the men burst into the bunkhouse, where they rousted out five Tejano cowhands at gunpoint. The other men stormed the main house.

  Earl Stovall, barefoot and still in his nightshirt, was brought outside. Behind him was his wife Mary, his eighteen-year-old son Dave and two girls, ages twelve and fourteen. The raiders roughly shoved them forward, the girls crying, clutching at their mother, shivering in their nightgowns. The family and the vaqueros were herded together where Vasquez waited by a tall oak tree in the front yard. Stovall peered at him uncertainly in the dappled moonlight.

  “Vasquez?” he said tentatively. “Aren’t you Luis Vasquez?”

  “Meester Stovall,” Vasquez said with heavy sarcasm. “You remember me, huh? Been a long time.”

  Stovall was a stern man, not above striking his vaqueros with anything handy when they were slow to respond. Three years ago, after an argument, he had whipped Vasquez with a quirt and thrown him off the ranch. He squinted querulously now, confused and angry.

  “What’s the idea of forcin’ your way into my home?”

  “Show a little respect,” Vasquez said, mocking him. “I am a capitán in the Army of Liberation. You have heard of us, eh?”

  Stovall had seen the handbills flooding the border. Until now, he’d thought the Plan of San Diego was the work of some haywire Mexican. “I won’t have my family manhandled this way, Vasquez. What d’ya want here?”

  “Oh, that is very simple, Meester Stovall. I have come here to kill you.”

  Vasquez rapped out a command. Four of his men quickly bound the hands of Stovall and his son with lengths of rawhide. Hemp ropes were tossed over a stout limb of the live oak as the rancher and the boy were prodded forward. Mary Stovall watched in horror, hugging her daughters, as nooses were slipped around the necks of her husband and son. Vasquez looked at Stovall with an evil grin.

  “Do you have any last words, amigo?”

  “No,” Stovall said in a hollow voice. “Just don’t hurt my wife and the girls.”

  “We do not harm women and children.”

  On his signal, Stovall and the boy were jerked off the ground. The ropes were snubbed around the base of the tree as they thrashed and kicked, their pale, bare legs flailing in the moonlight. Mary Stovall screamed hysterically as their faces turned purple, then dusky black, and their tongues, thick with spittle, lolled out of their mouths. Three long minutes passed while they strangled to death.

  Vasquez made an impassioned speech to Stovall’s vaqueros. His words seemed punctuated by the uncontrollable sobs of the woman and her daughters as they stared at the bodies dangling from the tree. He spoke of independence, a Texas free of gringos, and distribution of the land to the people. He urged the vaqueros to join the Army of Liberation, and while one readily volunteered, the others kept their eyes averted. He cursed them for cowards.

  All the time he spoke, his men were busy torching the house inside and out, then the bunkhouse and the equipment shed. Within minutes, the buildings were roaring with flame, the moonlit skies brightened a rosy vermilion by the inferno. The remuda of ranch horses was released from the corral, walleyed with fright, as mounted men hazed them away from the burning compound. Over it all, the keening wail of Mary Stovall was like an animal in pain.

  Vasquez turned to look at his handiwork, his teeth flashing white in the crackling flames. He reined his horse around, motioning to his men as they drove the remuda across the creek. His voice split the night in a shout of triumph.

  “Vamanos, muchachos!”

  They rode south from the carnage.

  The moon floated westward in a cloudless sky. There was a bluish haze around its rim, and it cast a spectral light across the land. A warm breeze rustled the leaves of cottonwoods along the river.

  The convoy was led by a Model-T Ford. Trailing behind was a Reo Touring sedan, followed by an open-bed Model-T pickup truck. Gordon and Maddox were in the lead car, with Captain Bob Ransom at the wheel. The twenty Rangers of Company A were loaded in the truck and the Reo sedan.

  “Not far now,” Ransom said over the wind whipping around the Model-T. “We’re getting close to Los Indios.”

  Maddox peered ahead. “How much farther to Bud Grant’s ranch?”

  “Couple of miles past Los Indios.”

  “Never thought to ask,” Maddox said, looking at Gordon. “You ever rode a horse before?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Gordon said. “I rode a horse to school every day when I was a kid. There weren’t any cars back then.”

  “Where was this?”

  “On a farm in Virginia.”

  “A farm?” Maddox sounded surprised. “I figured you for a city boy.”

  Gordon smiled. “Only since I got to Washington.”

  A few minutes later, the convoy sped through Los Indios. The town was dark for the hour was late, already past one in the morning. They were some twenty miles west of Brownsville, roughly following the course of the Rio Grande. Not quite ten miles west of Los Indios was Santa Maria, and between the towns was a ford in the river used by Mexican bandidos for generations. Captain Bob Ransom was convinced they would intercept the raiders at the ford.

  Around eleven o’clock the town marshal in Sebastian had telephoned Ransom. The fire from the Stovall place had drawn neighboring ranchers to the scene of the raid. One of them rode into town, just four miles away, and notified the marshal of the hanging of Earl Stovall and his son. Vaqueros at the ranch reported that the leader of the raid was Luis Vasquez, who had identified himself as a captain in the Army of Liberation. Vasquez and thirteen men had driven a herd of horses south from the ranch.

  Only minutes later, the Rangers had been notified of the execution of two deputy sheriffs in Harlingen. There were reports as well about the demolition of railroad bridges outside the towns of Raymondville and Russelltown. No one had seen the raiders in any of these incidents, and there was little chance of tracking them on horseback in the dark. Vasquez and his band were a different matter entirely, encumbered as they were by the stolen livestock. They were almost certainly driving the horses toward the border.

  Ransom had immediately called Maddox and Gordon at the hotel. The significance of the raids occurring on the Fourth of July was lost on no one, and the executions, particularly the young Stovall boy, ratcheted their anger even higher. A long-time veteran of the border, Ransom drew a direct line on a map from Sebastian to the river crossing, and predicted the raiders were headed for the ford. Within a half hour, the automobiles were commandeered from local businessmen and the Rangers were ready to move out. The final step was put in place with a telephone call to the town marshal in Los Indios. Horses would be waiting for the Rangers at the ranch of Bud Grant.

  The convoy, with twenty-three men jammed in the vehicles, was little short of a rolling arsenal. The Rangers were armed with pistols and lever-action carbines, the Winchester Model 94 in .30-.30 caliber. Maddox, who preferred a shotgun for night work, had raided the armory at Ranger headquarters. In addition to their pistols, he and Gordon carried the Winchester Model 97 12-gauge loaded with double-ought buckshot. The Model 97 was a pump-action shotgun, with six rounds in the tube and one in the chamber. Maddox joked that it would have saved Custer at Little Big Horn.

  The vehicles pulled into the headquarters of Bud Grant’s ranch shortly before two in the morning. Grant, like most ranchers, was on cordial terms with the Rangers, for they were his first line of defense against Mexican horse thieves. After being alerted by the marshal of Los Indios, he had rousted out his wrangler and several cowhands and put them to work by moonlight. There were now twenty-three horses, saddled and waiting, tied to the rails of a large corral. Ten minutes after arriving, the Rangers, formed in columns of twos, rode off upriver.

  Captain Ransom, with Gordon and Maddox at the front of the column, s
et a fast pace. They were figuring time and distance, and despite their best efforts, they knew they might be too late. The Stovall ranch, where father and son had been hanged, was some thirty miles north of the border. The raiders had a head start of four hours or more, and in bright moonlight, the stolen horses could be pushed along at a rate of seven to eight miles an hour. The timing would be tight, and it was entirely possible Vasquez and his men had already crossed the river into Mexico. The variables were simply too many to calculate.

  The ford was three miles west of the Grant ranch. A break in the trees on the north bank led down a slight incline to the Rio Grande. The rippling current of the river sparkled with moonbeams, and the shoreline was flooded with silvery light. As the Rangers approached the ford, horsemen suddenly appeared in the break between trees and drove a herd of horses, lathered with sweat, into the water. Captain Ransom, without an instant’s hesitation, whipped his arm overhead and signaled his men to spread out. The Rangers fanned off to either side, forming a line to the front, and pulled their carbines from saddle scabbards. They brought their horses to a halt.

  The raiders were caught in the middle of the ford. On Ransom’s command, the Rangers opened fire, the crack of their carbines rending the night air. Three of the raiders were blown out of their saddles, and the others, taken completely unawares, reacted on sheer reflex. A few turned to fight, while the larger group, following the stampeded horses, spurred their mounts for the opposite shore. Gordon and Maddox cut loose with their shotguns, a hail of buckshot blasting two raiders off their horses. The Rangers fired another volley in a staccato roar.

  Then, suddenly, the night went still. Eight raiders floated downstream, shot to ribbons, and six horses were dead or wounded. One Ranger was shot through the hand, the forestock of his carbine splintered, but the others emerged unscathed from the fight. Ransom ordered his men to collect the bodies of the dead raiders before they were lost to the river. There was no question of pursuing the raiders who had fled, for the Rio Grande was the international boundary. The Rangers were prohibited by treaty from entering Mexico.

  Gordon and Maddox watched in silence while Rangers dragged bodies from the river. “Wonder if we got lucky,” Maddox finally said. “I’d dance on his grave if we killed Luis Vasquez.”

  “How would we know?” Gordon said. “Neither one of us has ever seen him.”

  “Guess you’ve got a point.”

  Maddox noticed the strange look on Gordon’s face as the bodies were pulled from the water. His curiosity got the better of him. “You don’t mind my askin’—” he paused, rolling a cigarette. “You ever killed a man before?”

  “No,” Gordon said quietly. “That was my first one.”

  “Well, you did good. Some men tend to hesitate their first time out.”

  Maddox traced his family roots to the Texas Revolution, the war of independence with Mexico. His ancestors had served in the Texas Rangers from the time it was organized in 1835, and the number of Comanche warriors and Mexican bandidos they had killed was legion. He seldom spoke of the seven men he had killed.

  “Hoyt, it’s not a good feeling,” Gordon said, staring at the body of a dead raider. “I’d just as soon it hadn’t happened.”

  Maddox grunted. “Tonight won’t be the last time, pardner. We’re not anywhere near done with these sonsabitches. Not yet.”

  Neither of them said anything more, for they both knew it was true. The Army of Liberation had only just started its war.

  Chapter Nine

  Three days later Gordon and Maddox concluded a meeting with General James Parker. They emerged from the headquarters at Fort Brown and crossed the parade ground to the front gate. The sun went down along the western reaches of the river in a splash of molten gold.

  The swiftness of events seemed to Gordon a promising sign for the future. On July 5, he had reported by plaintext telegraph to Director Holbrook with details of the raids. The same day, Texas Governor James Ferguson appealed to President Wilson for assistance in quelling the depredations. Newspaper headlines from coast to coast bannered the crisis on the border.

  The response from Washington was immediate, and severe. Today, July 7, General Parker had been advised that an additional two thousand troops were being posted to the lower Rio Grande valley. President Wilson, in a terse statement to the press, announced that marauding bands would henceforth be treated “as belligerents entering American territory for unlawful acts.” The army was ordered to apprehend the marauders, by whatever means necessary.

  Hoyt Maddox reported that the state of Texas was no less vigilant. Governor Ferguson had detached two more Ranger units to the border, Company C under Captain John Sanders, and Company D, commanded by Captain Clell Morris. The barbarity of the July 4 raids was such that an outcry of rage spread from every corner of the Lone Star state. The governor, according to Maddox, had let it be known among the Ranger captains that summary justice was acceptable. In the future, they would take no prisoners.

  Gordon thought of it as an eye-for-an-eye mandate. He had been mulling it over as they passed through the front gate and turned onto Elizabeth Street. He cast a troubled, sideways glance at Maddox.

  “Will Ransom and the other captains take the governor at his word? Just kill their prisoners out of hand?”

  “Oh hell, yes,” Maddox said without hesitation. “We’re fixin’ to see open season on Mexicans.”

  “Whatever name you put to it, it’s still murder. Lawmen are supposed to uphold the law.”

  “Well, Frank, you have to understand how things are. Most folks figure it’s a waste of time to give a Mexican a trial and then wait around to hang him. Especially when he kills people in cold blood.”

  “That doesn’t excuse it,” Gordon countered. “The Rangers might as well be vigilantes.”

  Maddox shrugged. “I’m not trying to excuse it or defend it. I’m just tellin’ you the way things are.”

  “Tit for tat isn’t justice. Garza will use that to incite even more Mexicans to rebellion.”

  “Yeah, I reckon he will, and it’ll likely work, too. There’s not a helluva lot of justice on either side of the river.”

  The point was difficult to argue. In the past five years, thousands of people had fled the bloodletting of the Mexican Revolution and crossed the Rio Grande. On the north side of the river, they found an age-old prejudice by Anglos that made them ready recruits for Augustin Garza’s Army of Liberation. Tejanos, their kinsmen by heritage, had long since learned a harsh lesson for those who sought freedom. Injustice was a way of life along the border.

  Gordon and Maddox planned to take their supper in the dining room at the hotel. As they approached the entrance, they saw Manuel Vargas cross the intersection of Elizabeth and Twelfth. He strolled past them at a leisurely pace and rolled his eyes with an almost imperceptible nod toward the southwest corner of town. A moment later, he disappeared around the corner of the hotel.

  “Something’s up,” Maddox said as they entered the hotel. “Wonder what’s happened now.”

  “Any news is bad news,” Gordon replied. “Looks like we’ll have a late night.”

  By eight o’clock, darkness had fallen over Brownsville. Gordon and Maddox, after a hasty supper, made their way through the narrow streets of the Mexican district. Guadalupe answered their knock and held the door as they moved inside the house. She smiled warmly at Gordon.

  “Buenas noches.”

  “Good evening,” Gordon said, struck again by her radiant beauty. “We came as soon as we could.”

  Martinez and Vargas were seated at the small dining table. The wick on the lamp was turned low, and as they rose to exchange greetings, the look on Martinez’s face was unusually sober. Everyone took chairs, and Guadalupe again seated herself beside Gordon. Maddox arched an eyebrow in question.

  “We’re all ears,” he said. “What’s the latest from Matamoras?”

  “Garza is a happy man,” Martinez said with a tight smile. “The raids have brou
ght him much fame.”

  Gordon looked at him with a measured stare. “Does he say anything about his plans?”

  “Si, but only in general terms. He brags that the war of liberation will deliver Texas into the hands of the people.”

  “Nothing more specific?”

  Martinez spread his hands. “More men have volunteered since the raids. I even recruited a few myself in the last couple days. Otherwise Garza would grow suspicious.”

  “You still have his trust, then?”

  “So far.”

  “How many men have volunteered?”

  “That’s a strange thing,” Martinez said. “Luis Vasquez tells me maybe thirty or forty. But Garza keeps talking about invading Texas in force. How can you invade with so few men?”

  Maddox chortled sharply. “They didn’t do all that bad the Fourth of July. Scared the blue-billy-hell out of everybody in two counties.”

  “Si, but that was not an invasion, eh?”

  “You’re getting at something else, aren’t you?” Gordon cut in. “That’s why you called us here tonight.”

  “A very odd thing happened this afternoon.”

  “Odd in what way?”

  Martinez nodded to Vargas. “Tell them, Manuel.”

  “I stay close to Garza,” Vargas said. “A street vendedor can go anywhere and nobody pays attention. I followed him to the train station.”

  “The train station?” Gordon repeated. “Was he meeting someone?”

  “No, he was carrying a valise. He boarded the overnight train to the interior.”

  “Where does this train go?”

  “West to Reynosa, then south to many places along the railway line. It stops in Monterrey and returns the next day to Matamoras.”

  “That’s odd all right,” Gordon said in a musing tone. “Why would he leave if he’s planning this big invasion?”

  “Maybe it’s a recruiting trip,” Maddox suggested. “Reynosa’s a good-size town, and it’s smack-dab on the border.”