El Paso: A Novel (64 page)

ARTHUR FOUND THE REST OF HIS PARTY
without too much trouble. Bob, Slim, and the Mexican teamsters were already there. An hour later, Bomba turned up. They had hidden in a stand of woods off the road that led to the mountain pass, discussing options.

“I expect Villa’s gonna follow along this river here,” Slim said. He had taken out his map. “He’s gotta water his horses, and if he keeps headed north, that’s the only water there is.”

“I think what we do now,” Arthur said, “is to have Mr. Flipper take Father and Johnny Ollas and the lady here,” he said, referring to Gourd Woman, “over to where they can meet the Chihuahua railroad and go on to El Paso. The rest of us will follow after Villa. With some luck there’ll be another chance.”

“I’m not going to El Paso or anyplace else until those children are safe,” the Colonel said. Both he and Johnny were sitting up in the little cart wagon on a wooden brace Ah Dong had built. Ah Dong had also made a sort of pallet for them out of some material he had stuffed with leaves and sewn up.

“Colonel, it’s out of the question. You’d slow us down,” Arthur said. This was the first time in his life he had addressed his father as “Colonel,” but Arthur felt it somehow lent authority to his own sense of command.

“My word, who’s in charge here?” the Colonel cried indignantly.

“I am,” Arthur told him.

The Colonel considered this for a moment. “Well, in that case I tell you respectfully that I would not slow you down,” he barked. “We can make time just as well as Villa can, with all his wagons and baggage and artillery and so on.”

“Both of you need medical attention,” Arthur said.

“We’ll get it at an appropriate time,” the Colonel retorted. “Johnny and I have talked it over. It’s his wife they’ve got, too. He wants to go on.”

“That so, Johnny?” Arthur asked. Johnny nodded.

“Well, Mr. Flipper, I guess it’s up to you to escort the lady here.”

“Lady’s going with you, too,” said Gourd Woman. “I come too far to quit now.”

Arthur shook his head in resignation and turned to Flipper. “I guess you’ll have to make do with your own company, then.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I suppose I’ll come along, too,” Flipper told him. “I’d kind of like to see how this thing turns out.”

XENIA WAS OVERWROUGHT
when Mick Martin broke the news. He and Crosswinds Charlie were seated in chairs in the lobby of the Toltec and Xenia was on a sofa with a handkerchief to her lips.

“He could have gotten them all killed,” she cried. She was appalled at Mick’s busted-up face, but when she asked him about it he shook his head and was silent. She more or less guessed what might have happened.

“No, ma’am, ever’body’s safe as they was before. At least that was good luck,” said Crosswinds Charlie.

“With your permission,” Mick said, “I’d like to try it myself now, if Charlie will agree to fly me out there again.”

“What’s Arthur going to do now?” Xenia wondered.

“I dunno,” Charlie offered. “There wadn’t no other plan except for that one.”

“Far as I can tell, he’s got two choices,” Mick said. “Either he’ll give up and come back here to El Paso or he’ll keep going after Villa to give it another try. Mood he seems to be in now, my guess is he’ll keep on.”

“What must he be thinking of, endangering the children this way?” Xenia said.

“Charlie, do you think you can find Pancho Villa and land me near him?” Mick asked.

“Depends on what he does,” Charlie replied. “If he’s kept going north, that’s fairly open country. There’s some mountains here and there, but I expect he’ll be following along a river. But if he goes back to hole up in them canyons, it’d be pretty dicey.”

“Would you give it a try?” Mick asked.

“I reckon,” Charlie said. “I ain’t got nothin’ better to do.”

That afternoon and evening, Mick was on the phone to Boston raising money. He’d started with ten thousand of his own, then went to the leaders of the gangs he represented and managed to raise forty thousand more. He explained that it would be good public relations and they’d probably get their names in the newspapers for performing a good deed. Next day the money was wired to a bank in El Paso and Mick tucked it all into a fat satchel in hundred-dollar bills. In Mick’s experience, most kidnappers were willing to settle for something like ten cents on the dollar, if it came to negotiation, and there was nothing like green money in the bag to help that happen. He figured it was worth a try.

SIXTY-FIVE

S
trucker had to concentrate to keep his hand from shaking as he wrote out the telegram to the first secretary of the Imperial German Foreign Service in Berlin. Villa watched over him, standing beside a desk in the dinky telegraph depot in the little town of Cabullona, about a day’s march from the Federal outpost at Agua Prieta.

The way Villa had decreed it, first the money was to be transferred, in gold, to a bank in Juárez, and as soon as Villa received a telegram saying it had arrived, he would attack the Americans somewhere along the border. Strucker had come to the conclusion that Villa had little intention of doing this, and that the money would be little more than ransom, but he didn’t see any choice in the matter.

All day vast pillars of smoke had boiled up toward them out of the desert from the arriving troop trains of Villa’s main army. Fierro had managed to get them all assembled and moved out of Coahuila, and now they came, rugged, bearded, gaunt, and filthy, crammed on the tops of the boxcars inside of which were the horses, wagons, rations, artillery, and other equipment necessary for the battle. The men were all singing “La Cucaracha.”

Reed and Bierce were astonished at the excitement building up in everyone. Villa had put on his worn American-made businessman’s suit and his eyes were red from poring over battle maps. Fierro was rushing around barking orders and slapping people on the back. Almost all the men had a cornhusk cigarette dangling from their mouths. It took the entire day to organize everybody into an army again. The artillery pieces were unloaded and hitched to teams, rations and ammunition were issued, first-aid facilities were set up, roll calls taken, and the shouting never ceased.

Villa had been developing and refining his plans for attack during the long days on the trail. It was a plan of amazing simplicity, just the way he used to do it in the old days. His intelligence network had informed him that there were twelve hundred Federal troops manning the garrison at Agua Prieta. To overrun them, Villa had assembled four thousand men of his own. It would be a night attack and, he hoped, a complete surprise. Artillery would open up first. Then the soldiers would march forward, breaching the Federal lines. Next the cavalry would dash in and exploit the gaps and the rest of the army would simply steamroll over the garrison.

The “pesky horsefly” strategy had been born of necessity because of his losses at Chihuahua City and elsewhere, but now Villa saw renewed hope. When word got out that Agua Prieta had fallen, Carranza would naturally rush an army there to attack Villa. But by then he intended to be gone, after resupplying himself from the Federals’ own garrison. And whatever garrison the Federal army had come from, that was where he would go, popping up like a jack-in-the-box in front of the understrength ranks before they could be reinforced.

AT SUPPER THAT NIGHT
, Bierce was entertaining everyone with a discourse on ghouls, which was one of his favorite topics.

“In 1640, a Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it away with the sign of the cross. He said it had many heads and he saw it in more than one place at a time,” Bierce informed them. “On another occasion, a ghoul was caught by some peasants in a churchyard near Sudbury and ducked into a horse pond. The water at once turned to blood.”

“May I suggest, Señor Robinson,” Strucker said, “that El Padrino was a ghoul?”

“That I don’t know, Herr Strucker,” Bierce told him, “but there’s one more account that might shed some light on the subject. At the beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was cornered in a crypt of the Amiens Cathedral and the whole population surrounded the place. Twenty armed men, with a priest at their head, captured the ghoul, which, thinking to escape by a trick, had transformed itself into the figure of a well-known citizen of the town. It was nevertheless hanged, drawn, and quartered.”

“Sounds like it served him right,” Strucker remarked.

“Yes, I suppose,” Bierce continued. “But the citizen whose shape the ghoul had assumed was said to be so affected by the experience he never again showed his face in Amiens and his fate remains a mystery.”

Everyone laughed except Villa, who decided the gibe had been aimed at him. Here he was, general of an army that was to attack the enemy any day now, and getting needled by a cynical old gringo.

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON NEXT DAY,
Villa’s army was entrenched behind a low rise in the desert overlooking Agua Prieta when a startling sight appeared in the sky. First they heard a high-pitched mosquitolike hum, and when they looked up they saw an airplane. It circled once, then began to spiral down until it came in for a landing not two hundred yards from where Villa’s whole force was hidden. Villa was concerned that it might spoil his surprise attack.

Agua Prieta was a huddle of gaunt adobe buildings in the windswept desert just yards from the American border town of Douglas. From the look of it, Agua Prieta was aptly named: a filthy little river ran through the town. Villa had positioned his artillery east and west to keep from throwing shells across the border and starting an incident. A little earlier, he had crawled atop the rise and studied the garrison through field glasses. He was surprised to find that the Federals had strung barbed wire in many rows in front of the garrison. That would make things more difficult because his artillery now had to open up sooner than he wanted, so as to cut the wire. Bierce advised him against attacking at all, but Villa was in no mood to listen to that kind of talk.

“Señor Robinson, we have been up against barbed wire before and succeeded,” he said patiently, as if talking to a child.

“You didn’t succeed at Chihuahua City,” Bierce reminded him. “I was there, remember?”

“I wish you hadn’t been,” Villa said. “All you have done in the past weeks is make unwelcome remarks to me.”

“I’m sorry if you see it that way, General Villa,” Bierce replied. “I thought you’d requested my advice, and so I gave it.”

“Well, stop giving it,” Villa told him. “It’s causing me a headache.”