How Few Remain (46 page)

Waiting came hard, as waiting always did. When, off in the distance to the north, he heard rifle fire, his head swung that way like a hunting dog’s on taking a scent. He looked around for Chappo. The Apache had vanished, Stuart could not have said exactly when. One second he was there, the next gone. No white man was able to move like that.

Here came the Apaches, some mounted, others afoot. They retreated steadily through the canyon. Watching them, Stuart knew nothing but admiration. By the way they were carrying out their fighting retreat, they gave the U.S. forces not the slightest clue they had allies lying in wait. When they formed a line of sorts near the southern end of the canyon, it looked like nothing more than a delaying action on the part of a few to let the rest put more distance between themselves and their pursuers.

And here came the Yankees, riding in loose order, a puff of gray smoke rising every now and then as one of them or another fired at the retreating Indians. Some, a couple of troops’ worth, weren’t properly bluecoats at all, but men in civilian-style clothes: volunteers, Stuart supposed. Now that the Indians weren’t retreating but had formed a line, the U.S. soldiers began to bunch, those in front slowing while those in back came on.

It was the sort of target of which artillerymen dreamt. Stuart waited for the gunners, off on their rise, to decide they had enough damnyankees in their sights. If they waited much longer, some trigger-happy idiot was going to start shooting before they did, and warn the enemy of the trap.

Crash!
All the field guns fired as one. All the shells burst close together among the Yankees. The result, seen through smoke and kicked-up dust, was gruesome: men and horses down and thrashing on the burning desert floor, other men and horses, and pieces of men and horses, down and not moving at all.

As to sweet music, Stuart listened to the confused and dismayed cries rising from the U.S. forces. As he’d hoped, they hadn’t yet spotted his guns, and thought the Apaches had waylaid them with torpedoes. “Go wide!” someone yelled, which sent bluecoats riding toward the gentle slopes of the canyon walls—and straight into the withering rifle fire the Confederates, now waiting no longer, poured down on them.

Stuart’s Tredegar bucked against his shoulder. The Yankee at whom he’d aimed slid off his horse into the dirt. The Confederate general whooped with glee as he slipped a fresh round into the rifle’s breech, though he wasn’t absolutely sure his was the bullet that had brought down the U.S. cavalryman. Other soldiers might also have aimed at the fellow.

Now the U.S. soldiers realized they’d run headlong into a box. They still hadn’t figured out what kind of box, though. “Straight at ’em!” shouted an officer leading a squadron of volunteers. “You charge ’em, the damn redskins’ll run every time.” He swung his hat. “Come on, boys!”

He rode forward at the gallop, brave but stupid. A moment later, he was brave and stupid and dead. The bullet that caught him in the face blew off the back of his head. Another bullet took his horse in the chest. The beast went down, and in falling tripped up the horse behind it, which fell on its rider.

More shells crashed down on the U.S. troops, not in a single
neat salvo but one by one as the guns reloaded and fired. “Christ almighty, it’s the Rebs!” That cry and others like it announced that, too late, the Yankees had figured out what was going on.

They fought back as best they could. The volunteers seemed to be armed with Winchesters rather than government-issue Springfields. The hunting rifles’ magazine feed and lever action meant those volunteers could fire faster than the regulars on both sides with their single-shot breechloaders. At close range, they did a fair amount of damage.

But not many of them got to close range. The U.S. forces were at the center of three fires: the Apaches and artillery from ahead, and dismounted Confederate cavalry to either side. Had Stuart been their commander, he didn’t know what he would have done. Died gallantly, he hoped, so nobody afterwards would have the chance to blame him for sticking his head in the noose in the first place.

After dying gallantly, the next best thing the officer in charge of the U.S. force could have done was pull back and escape with as many men as he could, perhaps sacrificing a rear guard to hold back pursuit. The enemy commander didn’t try that, either. Instead, though he could not have helped knowing what he was up against, he tried to punch his way through the Confederates dug in on the sides of the canyon.

A young lieutenant close by Stuart screamed as he was wounded. Then he examined the wound and screamed again: “My God! I am unmanned!” Stuart bit his lip. He knew the horrid chances war could take, but no man ever thought of that particular injury without a shudder of dread. Then a bullet cracked past his own head, so close he thought he felt the breeze of its passage. That refocused his mind on his own survival.

He had never seen a battle that came so close to running itself. That was as well, for, with the Yankees in the trap, his messengers had to travel a long, roundabout route to reach the Confederates on the other side of the canyon. But the other half of the army knew perfectly well what it had to do: hold its place and keep shooting at the damnyankees either till none was left or till the ones who were left had enough and ran away.

The same applied to the men on the west side of the canyon with him. The U.S. soldiers, regulars and volunteers alike, pushed their attacks with the greatest courage. Many of them advanced on foot, to present smaller targets to their foes. Some got in
among the Confederates. The fighting then was with clubbed rifles and bayonets and knives as well as with bullets. But, though the Yankees got in among the C.S. troopers, they did not get through. Those few who survived soon ran back toward the center of the canyon, bullets kicking up dirt near their heels and stretching them lifeless under the sun.

Stuart looked up to the sky. Buzzards were already doing lazy spirals. How did they know?

“Forward!” Stuart called. “If they’re going to stand there and take it, let’s make sure they have a lot to take.”

Cheering, his men advanced. Neither butternut nor gray perfectly matched this country, but both came closer than the dark blue the U.S. soldiers wore—and both were covered with a good coat of dust and dirt, too. The damnyankees found few good targets among their oncoming foes.

The officer in charge of the U.S. forces—whether he was the original commander, Stuart had no way of knowing—finally decided, far too late, to pull out with whatever he would save. By then, rifle fire from both sides of the canyon was far closer than it had been. The Confederate field guns kept sending shells wherever the Yankees were thickest. Only a battered remnant of the force that had pursued the Apaches south from Tucson rode back toward it.

“Splendid, General, splendid!” Major Horatio Sellers shouted.

“Thank you, Major,” Stuart told his aide-de-camp, and then went on, in a musing voice, “Do you know you have a bullet hole in your hat?”

Sellers doffed the headgear and examined it. “I know now, yes, sir,” he said, and then, with studied nonchalance, set the hat back on his head. “How vigorous a pursuit were you planning to order?”

“Not very,” Stuart answered. “President Longstreet has made it all too plain that our mission is to protect Chihuahua and Sonora, not to try to annex any of New Mexico Territory. A pity, but there you are. After this licking, I don’t think the Yankees will be panting to invade our new provinces any time soon.”

“I think you’re right about that,” Sellers said. “And I also have to say that you were right about the Apaches. They served us very handsomely here.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “And I hope a lot of them bit the dust, too. What they helped us do to the Yankees, they could do to us one fine day.”

“They could,” Stuart agreed. “We have to persuade them that it’s not in their interest. As I’ve said, being neither Yankees nor Mexicans, we have a leg up on that game.” He pointed toward the mouth of the canyon, where the artillery, lengthening its range, was paying the retreating U.S. soldiers a final farewell. “And we have a leg up on this game, too.”

On what had been the main battlefield, gunfire ebbed toward silence. More and more Confederates broke cover to round up prisoners, do what they could for the U.S. wounded, and plunder the dead. The Apaches emerged from their places of concealment, too. Some of those seemed incapable of concealing a man until an Indian, or sometimes two or three, came forth from them.

A fair number of the Confederates—especially members of the Fifth Cavalry, who had done a lot of Comanche fighting—took U.S. scalps as souvenirs of victory. To Stuart’s surprise, the Apaches didn’t.

“No, that is not our way,” Chappo said when the general asked him about it. He frowned in thought, then qualified that: “Some of the wildest of us will sometimes take one scalp”—he held up his forefinger—”only one, for a special …” He and Stuart hunted for a word. “… a special ceremony, yes. The one who does this spends four days making clean. Not like—” He pointed to the cavalry troopers, who were busy with their knives.

Stuart suffered a timely coughing fit. He was used to whites’ being disgusted at Indians’ brutality. Here he had an Indian unhappy with the brutality of his own men. When worn on the other foot, the shoe pinched.

To keep himself from dwelling on that, he walked over to have a look at the prisoners. He found that the U.S. Regular Army troopers his men had captured wanted nothing to do with the volunteers who had ridden into battle with them. “You better keep us separate from those sons of bitches,” said one blue-coated cavalryman, a dirty bandage wrapped around a bloody crease to his scalp. “God damn the Tombstone Rangers to hell, and then stoke the fire afterwards. ‘Got to get them Injuns,’ they said. ‘Them Injuns is runnin’ on account of they’s a pack of cowards,’ they said. And God damn Colonel Hains for listening to ’em, the stupid fool.”

Colonel Hains was not in evidence among either the dead or the captured. The commander of the Tombstone Rangers, however, had had his horse shot under him; the beast had pinned him
when it crashed to earth. When Stuart came up to him, he was cursing a blue streak as a Confederate medical steward put splints on his ankle. “If I knew who the shitepoke was that killed my horse, I’d cut the balls off the asshole,” he greeted Stuart. “I’m going to hobble around on a stick the rest of my born days, goddamn it.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Stuart said, a polite fiction. “Your men fought courageously, Colonel …?” They’d charged into a trap—by what the Regular had said, they’d ignored the possibility that it might be a trap, too—so they hadn’t fought very cleverly, but they had indeed been brave.

“Earp,” the colonel of Volunteers said. Stuart thought it was a nauseated noise, perhaps from the pain of his injury, till he amplified it: “Virgil Earp.” He was about thirty, with a dark mustache and a complexion, at the moment, on the grayish side. “You damn Rebs went and slickered us.”

“There’s nothing in the rules that says we can’t,” Stuart answered.

“Wish my brother’d come out West with me,” the captured Colonel Earp said. “He’s the best poker player I ever knew. You wouldn’t have fooled him.
Careful
there, you son of a whore!” That last was directed at the man tending to his ankle. He gave his attention back to Stuart. “We wanted to wipe out the dirty redskins, but it didn’t quite come off.”

“No, it didn’t.” Stuart knew he sounded smug. He didn’t care. He’d earned the right.

Virgil Earp surprised him by starting to laugh. “That’s all right, Reb. You go ahead and gloat. Those bastards are your trouble now.”

Abruptly, Stuart turned away. The Volunteer might not have been much of a soldier, but he’d put his finger right on the Confederate commander’s biggest worry. If the need to worry was so obvious even an arrogant fool could see it at a glance … Stuart didn’t care for anything that implied.

    Across the Ohio, the guns had fallen silent. Frederick Douglass peered suspiciously over the river toward the wreckage of what had been Louisville. The Confederates had asked for an eight-hour truce so they could send a representative to General Willcox’s headquarters, and Willcox, after consulting by telegraph with President Blaine, had granted the cease-fire.

Here came the Confederate now: a major carrying a square of white cloth on a stick as his
laissez-passer
. Seeing Douglass standing close to Willcox’s tent, he snapped, “You, boy! What business do you have hanging around here? Speak up, and be quick about it.”

He might have been speaking to a slave on a plantation. To Douglass’ hidden fury, a couple of the U.S. soldiers escorting the messenger chuckled. With ice in his own voice, Douglass replied, “What business have I? The business of a citizen of the United States, sir.” He spoke with as much pride as St. Paul had when declaring himself a Roman citizen.

“Any country that’d make citizens out of niggers—” The Confederate emissary shook his head and walked into General Willcox’s tent.

Douglass was shaking all over, shaking with rage. He turned to one of the U.S. soldiers who had not joined in the amusement at his expense and asked, “Why is that—that individual here, do you know?”

“I’m not supposed to say anything,” the bluecoat answered. Douglass stood as quietly as he could and waited. In his years as a newspaper reporter, he’d seen how proud most people were of knowing things their friends and neighbors didn’t, and how important that made them feel. He’d also seen how bad most of them were at keeping their secrets. And, sure enough, after half a minute or so, the soldier resumed: “What I hear, though, is that there Reb is going to put terms to us for ending the war.”

“Terms?” Douglass’ ears stood to attention. “What kind of terms?”

“Don’t know,” the soldier said. His obvious disappointment convinced Douglass he was telling the truth. “Tell you this much, Uncle: after what I’ve been through over on the other side of the river, any terms at all’d look pretty damn good to me, and you can take that to the bank.”

His companions nodded, every one of them. Douglass made as if to write something in his notebook, to keep the white men from seeing how they had wounded him. Where he’d envisioned a crusade—literally a holy war—to sweep the curse of slavery from the face of the earth forever, they, having fought a bit and seen that the enemy would not fall over at the first blow, were ready to give up and go home.