How Few Remain (84 page)

“Oh, Lord.” Stuart did not look at his aide-de-camp. Horatio Sellers had been sure nothing good would come of cooperating with the Apaches, and maybe he’d turned out to be right after all. “I left a troop of cavalry behind there to make sure the Mexicans and the Indians didn’t go at each other.”

“Yes, sir,” the trooper said. “Wasn’t enough, sir. You remember that Yahnozha who ran away with the Mexican gal, and she says he drug her off and he says she was beggin’ for more?”

“Oh, yes. I remember,” Stuart said, a sinking feeling in his midsection. “What about him? Did he steal another woman?”

“No, sir,” the soldier answered. “The gal’s father and her brother, they was layin’ for him, and one of ’em put about three bullets in his belly, and the other one, he put two, three more in his head. Then they cut off his privates, sir, and left ’em sittin’ by the carcass for the Indians to find. That started the fightin’, and it’s been a regular war ever since—you’d best believe it has.”

“Christ,” Stuart said, an exclamation that had nothing to do with the approach of the holiday season. “What the devil have you men been doing to put the lid back on the place?”

The look the trooper sent his way reminded him how insubordinate so many Confederate soldiers had been during the War of Secession. They were men accustomed to speaking their minds regardless of the niceties of rank. This cavalryman was stamped from the same mold. He said, “What we’ve been doing, sir, is trying to keep from gettin’ ourselves killed. Hell of a lot more Apaches down by Cananea than we-uns, an’ every one of ’em totes a Tredegar just like the ones we’ve got. Hell of a lot more Mexicans than we-uns, too. They got every damn kind of rifle you ever did see. We try and get between the greasers and the redskins, only means we get shot at from both sides at once.”

“Who’s winning?” Major Sellers asked. His voice was exuberant, almost gleeful. “Whoever gets killed off, long as it isn’t
our own soldiers, we’re well shut of ’em.” Stuart glared at him. He stared right back, not so noisily insubordinate as the man who’d ridden in from Cananea, but not backing away from his opinion by even an inch, either.

“Well, sir, that’s right hard to say,” the Confederate trooper answered. “The Mexicans, they don’t get to go out of their houses a whole lot, but they’ve got plenty of vittles, and any Injun sticks his head up inside of rifle range, he’s liable to end up with his brains rearranged, you know what I mean? Every now and again, some of the greasers, the ones with the best guns and the most balls, they’ll sneak out of a night and shoot at the Apaches’ camp.”

“We can’t have that,” Stuart said. “We can’t have any of that sort of nonsense. If we let it go on there, it’ll go on all over these two provinces.” He heaved a deep, regretful sigh. “So much for Christmas on the edge of civilization. Bugler!”

“Yes, sir!” The trooper produced his polished brass horn.

“Blow Halt,” Stuart said. He sighed again. “Then blow About-face. We’re going to have to go back there and stamp out that foolishness.”

“The whole army, sir?” Major Sellers sounded appalled. He’d been looking forward to Christmas in Texas, too, perhaps even to taking leave and traveling back to Virginia for Christmas with his family.

But Stuart answered, “Yes, the whole army. The Apaches and the Cananeans are going to think they were strolling along the railroad tracks when a train ran over them. If we smash both sides now, it will save the Confederate States a lot of trouble for years and years to come.”

“All right, sir; we’ll do that, then.” Sellers’ laugh held a gravelly rumble of doom. “I’ve been saying all along that we ought to clean out those Indians. The faster and harder we do it, the better off these provinces will be.”

“I knew you’d say, ‘I told you so,’ Major,” Stuart said, and his aide-de-camp grinned, altogether unabashed. The commander of the Department of the Trans-Mississippi stroked his beard, working through the orders he would have to give to make the army reverse its course. “First thing we need to do is send a wire to El Paso, letting people know what’s happened. Next thing—” He glowered his discontent at the desert all around. “We’re
already the other side of Janos, better than two days away from Cananea no matter how hard we push.” He shook his head, annoyed at his wits for working slower than they should have. “No, most of us are better than two days away from Cananea. Colonel Ruggles!”

“Sir!” At that shout, the commanding officer of the Fifth Confederate Cavalry rode up on his camel. Stuart’s horse snorted at the other beast’s stink and tried to rear. He didn’t let it. Calhoun Ruggles went on, “What can I—what can we—do for you, sir?”

Briefly, Stuart explained what had gone wrong in Cananea. He finished, “I want the Fifth Camelry to ride out ahead of the rest of the army and hit the Indians and the Mexicans before either side expects you. If you can, smash ’em up by yourselves. If you can’t manage that, do everything you can. You know we won’t be far behind you.”

“All right, sir, we’ll handle it,” Colonel Ruggles said. “And if the redskins light out for the mountains, I reckon we’ll chase ’em down before they can get there. They say they can go faster on foot than troopers can on horseback. I’d like to see ’em try and outrun my critters.” He leaned forward in his peculiar saddle and set an affectionate hand on the side of his mount’s neck. The camel twisted and tried to bite. Ruggles laughed as if he’d expected nothing else.

As Stuart had seen for himself, the Camelry was not in the habit of wasting time. Aboard their moaning, snorting, hideously homely mounts, Ruggles’ troopers soon headed west. Stuart would have sworn his horse let out a sigh of relief when the camels trotted away.

Major Horatio Sellers gave Stuart a sly look. “I notice you’re not riding with the Fifth this time, sir,” he said.

“That’s right, I’m not, and I’ll give you two good reasons why,” Stuart answered. “The first one is that anybody who gets on a camel more than once proves to the world he’s a damned fool.” He waited for his aide-de-camp to grunt laughter, then went on, “And the second one is that Colonel Ruggles and his regiment are perfectly able to handle the size of the trouble they’ve got in Cananea without me, and I don’t want them thinking that I think they can’t.”

“Ah.” Sellers nodded. “Yes, sir; that makes good sense.”

The men grumbled as they headed back toward Cananea.
Some of them had wives in El Paso. Some had sweethearts. All of them, by now, had had a bellyful of Chihuahua and Sonora. But, aside from that grumbling, without which they would hardly have been soldiers, they went where they were ordered.

When they came into Janos just before sundown, they found the town in an uproar. The camels of the Fifth Cavalry had gone through and past the town two or three hours earlier. A couple of companies of Confederate soldiers occupied the adobe fortress that was Janos’ principal reason for being, and from which Mexican troops had withdrawn when Maximilian sold his northern provinces to the CSA. They were as indignant and almost as upset as everyone else in town; the Camelry had passed by so swiftly, the men of the garrison had hardly had the chance to learn why they were on the move.

“Something in Cananea, ain’t it?” one of the Confederates asked as the force Stuart led got ready to camp for the night.

Bugles roused the soldiers well before dawn. Stuart drank cup after cup of strong black coffee, and was still yawning when he swung aboard his horse. His bones ached. He wondered if he was getting too old for much more campaigning. If he was, he wouldn’t admit it, not even to himself—perhaps especially not to himself.

He and his troopers kept to a moderate pace on the road between Janos and Cananea, the road they were getting to know altogether too well. Not much water lay between the two towns, and pushing too hard would have killed horses even at this season of the year. Major Sellers remarked, “The Apaches aren’t worth a single good cavalry horse, you ask me, and the same goes for the Mexicans.”

“We wouldn’t have had nearly so much fun up in New Mexico Territory if it hadn’t been for the Apaches,” Stuart remarked. Since Sellers could hardly disagree with that, he grunted and did his best to pretend he hadn’t heard it.

Stuart waited to see if he would get more reports from Confederate troopers forced out, of Cananea, but none came back to him. “Either they aren’t coming,” he said to Major Sellers, “or Colonel Ruggles is keeping them for himself. If I had to bet, I’d go the second way.”

His aide-de-camp nodded. “I think so, too. He’s ahead of us, so he needs to know worse than we do.”

“Which doesn’t mean we don’t have to know at all,” Stuart said fretfully.

A couple of hours later, a camel rider did come back to Stuart’s force with news that fighting in and around Cananea still was going on, or still had been going on when the troopers who brought word to Colonel Ruggles left the town. “By what everybody says, sir,” the messenger reported, “they’re going at it hammer and tongs.” He paused to spit a stream of dark brown tobacco juice into the light brown dirt. “Reckon they purely don’t like each other.”

Stuart got another short night and woke too soon to the blare of the horns. Walk, canter, trot—instead of the ambling pace they’d set on the way east, when they saw no need to hurry, his troopers used the alternating gaits that kept their horses freshest while eating up the ground. As morning passed into afternoon, he heard one of the men say to another, “I hope the damn camel boys kill all the lousy sons of bitches on both sides, so when we get there tomorrow we’ve got nothin’ to do but spit on their graves.”

Toward evening, a thick column of smoke rose in the west, silhouetted against the light sky there. The troopers cheered. “I expect that’s the Camelry, cleaning up the fight,” Horatio Sellers said.

“Hope you’re right,” Stuart said, and rolled himself in a blanket on his folding cot as soon as he had seen to his horse.

Some time in the middle of the night, a sentry shook him awake. “Sorry to bother you, sir,” the man said, “but Colonel Ruggles just rode in.”

That was plenty to make Stuart open his eyes. He pulled on his boots and ducked out of the tent. Calhoun Ruggles stood by the embers of a campfire perhaps twenty feet away. “I saw the smoke, Colonel,” Stuart said around a yawn. “Was that us, putting down Apaches and Mexicans alike?”

He expected Ruggles to nod, but the commander of the Fifth Confederate Cavalry shook his head. “No, sir. That was the damned Apaches, burning damn near all of Cananea to hell and gone just before we got there. Not much of the place left standing, and a hell of a lot of Mexicans dead.”

“Jesus,” Stuart said, yawning again. Ruggles joined him. He went on, “How in blazes did that happen?”

“In blazes is right,” Colonel Ruggles answered. “A couple of
the Mexicans who lived—Salazar the
alcalde
is one of ’em—says the Indians got hold of some kerosene some kind of way, and that clever one called Batsinas poured it in front of doors and such. Then they shot fire arrows into it, and the wind did the rest of the job for ’em.”

“Jesus,” Stuart said again. “I bet it was Batsinas’ scheme, too.” The Apache had been so eager to learn from the white man, and had figured out a way to use some of the white man’s products to deadly effect, too. Stuart went on, “I hope you licked the redskins once you got to Cananea, anyway.”

Glumly, Calhoun Ruggles shook his head again. “No, sir. Time we got there, they’d all hightailed it toward the mountains.” Even more glumly, he pointed southwards. “I put men to chasing ’em, but they had a better than decent start on us—and they can move, too. I tell you, sir, they can really move, a hell of a lot faster than I ever thought they could. I reckon they’re holed up in the Sierra Madre somewheres, and I’ll be damned if I look forward to digging ’em out.”

    Rain pattered down on San Francisco. Having grown up and lived for much of his life in a place where rain was liable to fall any old time, Sam Clemens took it in stride. His wife, a native San Franciscan, did not approve. “It has no business doing this,” she said. “It’s nothing but a nuisance, especially on a day when you have to go to work.”

“Not that big a nuisance,” Clemens answered. “If there’s one thing about your brother we can count on, it’s that he has more than one umbrella. He may even be willing to let me borrow one, provided I post a bond not to stab anyone with it or use it as a swimming hole for seagulls.”

Sure enough, from an ugly ceramic vase in the front hall sprouted the handles of four or five umbrellas. And, sure enough, Vernon Perkins did not complain about Sam’s borrowing one—nor did he ask for the bond Sam had predicted. He was so glad to see his brother-in-law leave his house, he would help in any way he could.

Clemens strode carefully along wet sidewalks and picked his way through puddles in the streets. No matter how careful he was, his feet were wet by the time he got to the
Morning Call
offices. If he’d been a reporter, he wouldn’t have been too proud
to take off his shoes and put his stockinged feet close by the fire till they dried out. As an editor, he felt that beneath his dignity. That left him with dignity unimpaired and wet feet.

“Thank God for good coffee,” he said, pulling the pot off the stove and filling a cup. “I never knew this horrible muddy slop
was
good coffee till my sister-in-law broadened my horizons. Bath water with cream is what she makes.” He sipped and nodded. “This, now, this’ll grow hair on a man’s chest—maybe even on my brother-in-law’s. If it weren’t that Vern’s daughters look like him, poor things, I’d say he was the likeliest man in this town to make his next position harem guard for the Turkish sultan.” His voice rose to a screechy falsetto.

“For some reason or other, Sam, I get the feeling you don’t
like
your brother-in-law,” Clay Herndon drawled. “Why on earth is that?”

“Why on earth is which?” Clemens asked. “Why do you get that feeling, or why don’t I like the whey-faced, self-righteous, prissy, tight-fisted little horse’s ass? I swear to Jesus, Clay, if brains were steam pressure, he couldn’t blow his own nose.”

“I’ll bet he loves you, too,” Herndon said, laughing.