They Came To Cordura (2 page)

“No sir,” he said, “I haven’t. Boice was killed yesterday. I was going to find him and tell him today.”

The touring sedan swayed as a gust hit it broadside. It was quiet in the tonneau except for the whine of the wind and the pelleting of sand against the side-curtains.

“That’s hard news,” the General said. “I’m sorry.”

“Superb.” Emmet Harris had finished reading the citation. The
New York Tribune
man was short and plump with small, almost fragile hands and wrists. He wore a city overcoat and a new ten-gallon hat he had bought in Texas. He spoke in bursts. “A masterpiece of brevity. This might serve as a model for military prose, Major. I’ll certainly do a story on this, what’s-his-name, Boice. Of course the sequel has the impact.”

“Share it with the others,” Pershing said.

“General, that’s why I came to see you,” Thorn said. “I have another one, a private named Hetherington, out of L Troop of this regiment. What he did this morning is worth the Medal, I know, and I intend to write him up.”

“What was it?”

Briefly the officer described the deed.

“Jesu,” Emmett Harris said. “I’ll do a piece on him, too. Though I do think an award is always more picturesque when it’s posthumous.”

“Wait until it’s approved,” Pershing advised. “Where is he, Thorn?”

“Out there, sir, holding the horses.”

The General opened the door, got out and strode to a figure holding the reins of two horses. The wind held the door open. Squinting, the men in the car could see that the commander put a hand on the shoulder of the private and shook his hand. After a minute he returned.

“I had to say something to him,” Pershing said. “Another young one, a fine lad.”

“A latter-day Leonidas,” said the correspondent.

“General, I would like to prevent what’s happened to Boice happening to Hetherington,” Major Thorn said abruptly. “I would like to keep him out of action and alive until the Medal is approved. That is the least we can do. May I have permission to send him back to base until we know, and any others I find?”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“Would you put it in writing, sir?”

‘‘If you want.”

The General took a pad and pencil from his breast pocket and wrote, reading aloud. “This will authorize all commanders to detail those men selected by the bearer, Major Thorn, Awards Officer, Punitive Expedition, to him for temporary base duty. Pershing.” He re-read the order, tore off the sheet and gave it to Thorn. “Will that do?”

“Thank you, sir.” Thorn folded the order. “Shall I take Hetherington to
Dublán
?”

“No, it’s too far. I’m setting up an advance base at
Cordura
. The trucks will be that far soon. It’s on the Tex-Mex Railroad—ask DeRose to show you on the map.”

“All right, sir. By the way, before I take him there, is anything coming up I should see?” the Major asked. “Anything in the next three or four days you know of?”

Pershing told him about
Cusihuiriachic
and the Villistas at the
Ojos Azules
ranch. “Rogers is nearest there, at
Gral
.
Trias
, with seven troops of your outfit and the Apache scouts. When the wind dies I will send the areoplane to him with orders to start for
Cusi
. He needs a fight.”

“He does?” asked Emmett Harris.

“Selah Rogers will be sixty-four this summer,” Pershing said, “retirement age. Something like this morning might make the Senate happy enough to give him a star before then.”

“We’ll start for
Cusi
right away.” Thorn opened the door. “Thank you, General. If I find any others I’ll take them to
Cordura
.”

“All right.” The General leaned forward. “Thorn, I think you are right about this. It is the least we can do for them. Have DeRose locate
Trias
for you.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Major stepped out, slamming the door against the wind. Pershing sat back against the leather. He seemed relieved the officer had gone. Emmett Harris was re-reading the Boice citation.

“It may be something in the genes,” he said.

“What?”

“Which makes it possible, or necessary, for a man to stay at a gun until he faints from loss of blood. Or do what this other one, Hetherington, did.”

“I don’t know.”

“How fascinating for a man to make the discovery about himself, what his conduct would be under similar circumstances. Or how terrifying.”

“I wish this wind would die.”

It was draughty in the tonneau of the Dodge. The newspaperman buttoned the top button of his city overcoat.

“General, isn’t it a little unusual to place all this stress on awards? I mean, appointing an officer of field grade Awards Officer, allowing him to take men out of action? Is this Army custom?”

“There are good reasons.”

“Would you care to mention them?”

Pershing looked at him. “Since we can’t move, I will. I would guess this country is going to need an army soon, a big one, plus material and spirit to go with it. As always, the country will take too long. But in the meantime it will have some heroes to think about.”

“I see. You believe we will enter the war, then?”

“If you know how we can stay out, tell me.”

“That’s the only reason?”

“The principal. This also is the last cavalry campaign any of us will see. What General Sheridan started, General Motors is going to finish.”

Time dragged. The wind fisted the touring car. Once the General’s aide came, a handkerchief muffling his face, and a door on the lee side of the car was opened upon a premature night in which the entire regiment, men and animals, was swallowed up by airstreams of sand.

“General,” Emmett Harris said, “this ranch where you’re sending Rogers—did I understand it’s owned by a woman named Geary?”

“I suppose it’s the ranch Senator Geary owned.”

“Senator? Adolf Geary?”

“I know he owned one.”

“Jesu.” Harris sat up. “Then that’s his daughter; that’s where she’s hidden. Don’t you remember, Geary died in ‘o8 and she disappeared the same year? She has been there out of sight for eight years. What opulent irony. Instead of Villa, the U.S. Cavalry catches up with Adelaide Geary. I didn’t connect the names.” Harris coughed violently.

“I may have heard of her,” Pershing said. “I was in the Philippines then.”

“You would have even there.” The newspaperman filled him in. A member of the Indian Affairs Committee, a man of great wealth and long tenure in the Senate, Adolf Geary of Missouri had been convicted of fraud in connection with the sale of reservation lands in 1908, dying that year in prison. It had required considerable time and moral ingenuity (the term Harris applied), for his daughter to equal his disrepute, but this she had managed to do. “The delicious part being,” he concluded, “that it was all true about her. A woman more sinning than sinned against.”

“If she’s the one,” the General said.

Using a small silver nail-cutter the
Tribune
man began to trim his nails, dropping each cutting carefully to the car floor. “Adelaide Geary,” he said. “What a stroke of luck.” He examined the trimmed nails, fingers extended. “Incidentally, isn’t there something stuffy in the Constitution about a citizen giving aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States? Something to that effect?”

“It would be a fine point to establish. We are not at war with Mexico.’’

“Unfortunate. I must look into it, though. What a lark it would be to haul her kicking and screaming back across the border. Exclusive interviews from the
El Paso
pokey, that sort of thing.”

The afternoon wore itself out. The wind did not abate. The stiffened isinglass of the side-curtains crackled.

“Gibbons asked if you thought you would capture Villa, General, and you turned him off with a joke. Perhaps it’s a stupid question, but do you think you can?”

Pershing sat in the corner of the seat, erect, his eyes closed. Except for his posture, he might have been asleep.

“Harris,” he said after a time, “understand something. When I talk to you this way, it is one person to another, nothing more. If you put what I say in your dispatches, I will cut it out. Now your question: do I think I can catch Villa? No, I don’t. He knows
Chihuahua
better than I do and he can live off it. I have a front seventy miles wide and practically no communications. Even so, I feel sorry for him. He has lost a lot lately, as I have.”

It was dark in the tonneau. The correspondent could scarcely see the spare, sharp-boned face of the commander. The mouth was a straight line. Over it a moustache had begun to grey. Hooking down to the corner of the mouth a furrow cut deep in each cheek. The allusion to loss puzzled the correspondent until he recalled the tragedy of the year before: by telephone the General had been informed that his wife and three young daughters had lost their lives at San Francisco in a fire which had destroyed their quarters; only the infant son had survived.

Emmett Harris changed the subject. “By the way, how exactly does an Awards Officer function? I see him galloping about the country looking for battles and bravery, then writing it all down in deathless prose.”

“His duty is to find men who deserve recognition. He writes a citation, signs it and swears to it as an officer. Then I and the Chief of Staff of the Army and the Secretary of War must endorse it. Congress will generally approve what we endorse.”

“Remarkable,” Emmett Harris said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll do the first story on him.”

“I do mind,” John Pershing said.

“You do?”

“I do.”

“But he’s a hero-maker, General, a Homer on horseback. Or a Virgil—arms and the man he sings!” The correspondent flung up a plump hand in mock salute.

“Harris, I said no.”

The
New York Tribune
man was caught in mid-salute. The General’s words, direct as though delivered to a child, were less a statement than an order. Awkwardly Emmett Harris lowered the hand, leaned back. He was stunned. In some way he had given offence or stepped upon forbidden ground, and for it he had been rebuked. He could not allow this situation to firm. Opening the door of the Dodge he closed his eyes and went through the storm to the rear of the car to search blindly in the luggage strapped beside the spare wheel as the sand scoured the skin of his face and the wind blew his new hat from his head and brought him to his hands and knees so that he tipped over a water-can. Hating the wind and the country and what he was about to do, he thought: ‘You are a city man and live in a flat and you are afraid of this general; if you had been in the soldier Hetherington’s place you would have run for your life because you are probably a coward.’ Then coughing, spitting, hatless, he returned with a large pre-baked ham he had intended to save for himself.

“Here we are, General, with my compliments,” he forced himself to say. “We will starve before morning.”

“Well, look here.” John Pershing opened a pocketknife. “I will have a little, thank you, Harris. We must take back most of it to the others, though.”

They ate.

WITH
the fall of night the wind fell, suddenly. Sand, for the first time in hours, ceased to blow. Officer and enlisted man stopped amid a great hush. The absence of sound seemed in itself a terrifying fact. The stars were shrouded. Their throats sore from breathing through their mouths, the two men blew filthy strings of mucous dust from their nostrils and then, each wrapped in a blanket, they rode on while sand grains, held high by the storm, filtered endlessly down through darkness, touching like the tips of unseen fingers their bared faces. They talked. There had been no opportunity since the morning’s fight at
Guerrero
for Major Thorn to find out anything about the enlisted man, Hetherington. Neither had he told him why he was detached from L Troop for temporary duty; he would have to choose the right time for that. Now, as they rode, he learned that the private’s name was Andrew, he was twenty-three, his home was a town in Kansas called Dancey. He had no brothers or sisters. Two years ago he had enlisted without telling his parents, being assigned to the 6th Cavalry stationed then at Fort
Huachuca
, Arizona.

The youth responded freely to questions, answering in a drawly Kansas voice over the edge of his blanket. He seemed grateful that an officer of such high rank should take an interest in him. When asked about his parents, however, he spoke hesitantly, of his father with hatred, of his mother with longing.

His father was an itinerant preacher, a minister in ‘The Sole Church of Christ Resurrected’, an evangelist who travelled most of each year from country church to country church over Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado, stopping from three days to a week to put on revivals, percenting the collections with the local parson. He played the trombone, his wife the piano. They sang duets. This had been Hetherington’s boyhood and adolescence: constant movement, infrequent schooling, as he grew older regular resistance to, then surrender before, the emotionalism of the revival. He had himself taken part in the show. Almost from infancy he had been taught the Bible by his father, it being his weekly task to memorize one chapter, verse by verse. Before he could read he had learned by heart the Pentateuch. By age eight he appeared nightly, introduced as a prodigy by his father, who challenged the congregation to stump him by calling out book, chapter and verse. At each call he recited. By age eighteen he had committed all thirty-nine books of the Old Testament to memory. The Good Book, he said, had been beaten into him.

Their way, during the long afternoon of storm and later, in absolute darkness, lay for the most part eastward over grass plateaus. There was no proof of trail except the soft footfall of the weary horses in dust and now and then the grate of pebble against shoe. The officer estimated they had come twenty miles from
Guerrero
; he intended to push on another five if the animals held up. He was glad to have the youth talk. His voice made company for them both. The night grew piercing cold. Differences of fifty degrees in temperature between noon and midnight were not unusual for this time of year.