TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (66 page)

“Then we’re no worse off than now. Give me a letter with your seal. At least you’ll be on record.”

Villa frowned. “You blew up their railroad outside of El Paso. You told me about this damned lieutenant who recognized you. If you go up there, they’ll arrest you.”

“I can sneak across the border east of Columbus. How can they prove I planted the dynamite?”

“No, Tomás. It’s too risky.”

“Chief, it’s a slim chance, but it’s just about the only one we’ve got. I don’t want Pershing to hang you. And I don’t want you lining up your sights on his belly button. If you do that, your revolution’s finished. So let me try.”

A cold wind blew at my tail, and I bellied through the brush, crawled through a ditch and found the barbed wire. The night was dark with just a sliver of moon. I snipped the strands and peeled them back so they wouldn’t score Maximilian’s flanks, then went back and fetched him, and we padded softly into New Mexico.

Around midmorning I reached Columbus.

Everything we had heard was true. The U. S. Army was on the move, stirring up more dust around the town than Noah’s flood could have settled. Horses, wagons and trucks were everywhere; officers were shouting orders; and a few thousand khaki-uniformed soldiers were either bivouacked by their pup tents or massing into different formations. The town itself looked like the plagues of Egypt had visited it, and I smelled smoke and scorched flesh.

The Commercial Hotel was gone. Peache’s, where I had lunched with Sam Ravel and Felix Sommerfeld, was nothing but some charred timber and a black hole in the ground. I could see why Mr. Wilson was upset.

I kept an eye skinned for Patton. I still hadn’t made up my mind how I was going to go about this when a hard-looking officer of about forty-five, with a thin gray mustache, detached himself from a troop of cavalry and strode over to me. I must have looked like some lost buckaroo from a cattle camp just suffered a die-up in the herd.

He smiled up at me in the saddle and said, “What’s your problem, cowboy? You here to join up? Are you a scout?”

“I’m looking for General Pershing,” I explained.

“Are you now? Well, Black Jack’s just a mite too busy to accept your enlistment personally, but he’ll be flattered you asked for him. I’m Major Tompkins, Thirteenth Cavalry. Cowboy, if you’ll just head over toward those Quads—that’s a truck, see, with wheels and an engine?— someone will take care of you.”

“Is there a Lieutenant Patton anywhere around here?”

“He’s left for Culberson’s Ranch. You want to see him?”

“No, sir, I want to see General Pershing. I have a message for him from Pancho Villa.”

Tompkins had no time to waste with chuckleheaded cowboys like me, and he just jerked a thumb in the direction of a big tent where a great many people seemed to be hurrying in and out. I strode over there, and a young officer, Lieutenant Shallenberger, took my message and my name, gave me a funny look and said he would see what he could do. I recognized him right away—he was the lieutenant who had been on the porch with Hannah that long-ago day I’d come courting. But he didn’t know me at all. I guess I had changed.

I waited for the better part of the day, except for a time when I wandered over to a loose feed bag and snagged it for Maximilian, and then helped myself to a plate of scrambled eggs that the cooks in the mess tent were handing out. I still kept an eye out for Patton, but my luck held and he didn’t show up.

About five o’clock, sitting cross-legged in the dirt, I heard a familiar granite voice. I looked around and spotted the man himself striding out of the tent. They called him Black Jack because he had once commanded the all-Negro Tenth Cavalry, and he was supposed to be so tough he had three rows of jaw teeth and holes punched for more. I’d heard a story that when he was a boy in Missouri his mother had walked out in the yard where he was roasting corn and said, “Watch out there, Johnny! You’re standing on a hot coal!”And he had looked up, without moving, and drawled, “Which foot, Mama?”

But he was the man I had come to see. His shoulders were squared; he wore summer khakis, hat and leggings; and he chewed on a cigar.

I yelled his name.

Pershing skidded to a quick halt, and his head snapped round. You didn’t yell at a brigadier general that way—not unless you were a major general.

“Sir, excuse me. I’m Tom Mix. We met a while back in General Scott’s house at the fort. Do you remember me?”

Pershing’s angry gray eyes grew a lot more interested than I thought they’d be. “Indeed I do,” he rasped. “Well, I’ll be damned! What’s your rank now? Do I have to salute you?”

“Not yet,” I said, “I’m just a colonel. I’ve come here from Ascensión, sir. I’ve got a message from Pancho Villa.”

He turned briefly to the colonel at his side, who was staring at me as if I were a cracked egg. “Hold on a minute, Dodd. Come inside, Mix. I’m willing to hear this.”

I followed him into the tent and took the offered camp chair.

While he paced up and down and worked the cigar back and forth between his teeth, I told him my story—that Villa had been nowhere near Columbus when it was raided and that I had a letter from him swearing to it.

Pershing read it and listened carefully to what I said. Every now and then he blinked, but he never asked a question. I had the uneasy feeling he was just waiting politely for me to finish, and then he was going to put his boot heel between the cheeks of my butt and kick me all the way to Mexico.

But instead, when I was done, he stood up, laid his palms flat on the rickety table between us and fixed his eyes on me with an intensity that might have withered a cactus or melted a bar of iron.

“I don’t believe a word of it, Mix. But it was a good try. Don’t argue. You’re wasting your breath.” He leaned even closer, and I smelled the dead cigar. “Now look here … I don’t know what you really want, and I don’t know anymore who you really are. Or for that matter,
what
you are. But I’m leaving in about five minutes for Culberson’s Ranch. I’ve got an officer there who wants to make a proposition to you—one that I’d personally, for your sake, and professionally, for mine, like to see you accept. I’ve got room for you in my staff car. Will you come?”

That floored me, but my mama hadn’t raised a total nincompoop. “Who is the officer, sir?”

“Lieutenant George Patton. You’ve met him.”

I started hunting for reasons to make myself scarce. But then I decided this was the wrong man to play games with.

“Sir, Lieutenant Patton and I are not on friendly terms. We’ve met, but it was never a pleasure for either of us. The reasons don’t bear discussing, although the original sin—if I can put it that way—was mine.” I cleared my throat. “Sir, I’d rather not hear his proposition, if you don’t mind.”

Pershing’s eyes grew even more piercing, and I felt lower than a snake in a hole under a rock.

“I know about the prisoners at Torreón,” he said. “And I know you blew up the El Paso & Southwestern. You’re in a hell of a lot of trouble with quite a few people, Mix, but I give you my word that if you ride with me to Culberson’s Ranch, no harm will come to you. You might even end these hostilities before they rightly begin, which would suit me just fine. I may be a general, but I don’t like to see blood, Yankee or Mexican, spilled for no damned good reason. And you’ll have the chance to make up for what you’ve done. Now, will you come?

A faint heart never filled a flush, and I said I’d go.

Miguel Bosques stared at me like a moonstruck Piute who had seen an ancestral ghost. I knew him, of course. You don’t forget the face of a man who has pleaded with you for his life and later pointed a gun at you.

Lieutenant Patton, standing next to him in puttees and riding boots, had a whole battalion of expressions fighting a pitched battle on his face; and then he began to sneeze, one blast after another, so that he had to pull out a khaki handkerchief and bend almost double, pressing it to his nose.

I kept my eyes on Miguel Bosques. He wasn’t armed, but that was the way he had started out on Stanton Street too. He wasn’t as wildeyed as that time, but the way he pressed his lips together made me think he was suffering from toothache.

I didn’t much enjoy Pershing’s remark to Patton about whether he wanted to shoot me or enlist me, but he had promised me I wouldn’t wind up feeding the grubworms, so I just smiled feeblemindedly, treating it as a rich joke. Let him think I was missing a few buttons between the ears. Under the circumstances, considering the risk I took, that wasn’t far off the mark. But I had decided that no matter what those risks, they were worth it if I stood any chance at all of keeping the cavalry out of Mexico.

When Patton had finished sneezing, Pershing said, “Lieutenant, your man Mix came here voluntarily, and I’ve granted him immunity for whatever he’s done … while he’s with us. Bear that in mind. Now, take him with you. Talk to him. Tell him what you told me. Then report back here.”

“Yes, sir,” Patton said, saluting.

He gave me a light shove. I stumbled out the door, with him and Bosques close behind.

Two minutes later we were hunkered down in the dirt near a big truck that some troopers were loading with coils of telephone wire. Patton had placed a hissing Coleman lantern between us, so that the light turned his flushed face a shadowless yellow color, like buttermilk. It was chilly out there, and the sky swarmed with stars. Patton had taken Bosques aside for a few seconds and murmured something to him; after that. Bosques only spoke when he was spoken to. He looked plumper and softer than when I had last seen him, and I guess he had taken kindly to American grub and a feather pillow. I pretty much understood now what had happened to him after he had escaped Torreón.

Patton wanted first to know what the general had told me.

“He said you had a proposition for me. I came here to tell him that Pancho Villa didn’t raid Columbus. I was with him over in Sonora when it happened. Villa thinks the Germans paid the Lopez brothers to do it.”

I told him that we had met up previously with Captain von Papen in the desert and he had put the same proposition to us, but Villa had turned it down cold.

Patton smiled. “And did General Pershing believe you?”

“No, but that don’t make it a lie.”

He fiddled in the dust with his fingers, as if he wanted to smooth it out to draw a map. But he didn’t; he was just nervous.

^Look here,” he said. “Villa and Columbus are one issue, and you’re another. You heard the general. For the time being, you’re off the sharp end of the hook. But I want to ask you something before we get down to business.” Patton had filled a pipe from a leather pouch, and when he got a fire going he tipped his blue eyes up over the bowl and looked at me keenly. “After you blew up the El Paso & Southwestern, we chased you into the Potrillos. We shot to kill. You didn’t return the fire. Why not?”

“I fought for Villa against Orozco and Huerta,” I said. “And then against Obregón and Carranza. I’m a revolutionist, but I’m an American too. Pennsylvania-born, Texas-bred. I pledged allegiance to the flag every day in El Paso High. There’s no way I could ever shoot an American soldier.”

Patton wagged his head up and down. He had the air of a circling buzzard who had spotted a crippled calf. I built a cigarette and waited. He puffed on his pipe, sending up clouds of nut-flavored smoke.

“Mix, you’re a smart fellow,” he said. “You’re not blind. We’re going after Villa, and nothing’s going to stop us. Maybe he didn’t raid Columbus personally, but he’s responsible.” He waved a hand around him at the line of trucks whose engines sputtered in the darkness. “We’ve got ten thousand men, here and in Columbus, ready to move.”

“Lieutenant, Villa’s innocent, and you’re making a terrible mistake. But if you don’t believe me, all I intend to do is ride back down there and tell that to him. And then I’m going to retire from the field, so to speak … if Villa and the U. S. Army have no objections.”

“We just might let you do that,” he said, “if you cooperate.”

I bit shallow on that. Pershing had given me immunity, but it wasn’t an open ticket to paradise. I still couldn’t go back to Texas unless I wanted to break rocks for twenty years in Yuma. But I didn’t see exactly what kind of cooperation Patton had in mind. He surely didn’t need one more rifle added to those ten thousand, and even if he did I was less disposed to fire on Candelario and Julio than on the Thirteenth Cavalry. I got to wondering if he was going to ask me to scout for them, but I had already spotted a dozen Apaches in the camp as well as a couple of Mormons who had lived in Mexico most of their lives and knew northern Chihuahua even better than I did. So that wouldn’t make much sense.

I was about to blurt out my feelings on the matter when a little voice tickled the vacant space between my ears and told me to shut up and let him ride the point on this sally. I was pretty pleased with myself. It wasn’t often that I had that kind of sense.

He got tired of waiting for me to say something. Squatting around that Coleman lamp, the game had become interesting.

“Mix,” he said, “let me tell you the deal I’ve got in mind. A damned good deal, especially for you. You interested?”

“Depends,” I said.

“I wouldn’t ask you to fire at the men you rode with. I’m a soldier. I respect your feelings on that score.”

I hesitated and then gave a light shrug, as if the matter was of no great importance. He brightened up even more.

“Like you said, you don’t want to see Americans get killed. Whatever you’ve done, you love your country. Isn’t that so?”

“I’m an American, if that’s what you mean.”

“You hear a marching band play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ it thrills you, right? You salute. Or put your hat over your heart?”

“Every time.”

“Well, look here. Villa was finished even before this happened, but now ten thousand of the finest soldiers in the world are riding into Chihuahua to get him, and believe me, they will succeed. My point is this: sooner is a damn sight better than later. The quicker it’s over, the less blood will be spilled. Once we get to him and take him to trial, why, that’s the end of it. All we want is him and a few others. We have no reason or authority to fight his men after that, and the expedition will be over. You say Villa is innocent, that he didn’t attack Columbus or authorize the raid. All right, fine. If he didn’t do it, that will come out in court. It will be an American court, and you know he’ll be innocent until proved guilty. That’s the American way. If he’s guilty, he’ll pay the penalty under law.”