TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (56 page)

He threw the pistol away and charged into the hallway, bushy hair all in a tangle, clutching his bloody shoulder. The sight of the man chilled my heart. When he saw Pancho Villa his little eyes sparkled, and he flung out his arms.

“Pancho! Thank God you’re here! I was almost killed! This must be my lucky day.”

I was flabbergasted, for Villa returned the embrace. When the two men parted, the seeping blood covered Villa’s shoulder as well.
“Compadre, “
he said thickly, “you’re hurt. Is it bad?”

“I’m not dead, so it can’t be that bad.” Urbina clenched his teeth and put a hand to his breast, under the wound. “But the bullet’s still in there.” His eyes swiveled to lock on my face.

“You!” he cried. “You gringo bastard! I’ve a score to settle with you—” He shook the fist of his good arm at me. “You and that one-eyed ape disobeyed my orders! You put a knot on my head that a rat couldn’t run around. You hurt me! I was unconscious for two days! And you ran off without knowing whether I was dead or alive! Did you think I was going to steal your damned trunk? I told you, I was collecting taxes to buy ammunition and coal. We could have bargained a little, couldn’t we? But you’re a gringo, you don’t understand how we do things. You hurt me,” he snarled.

“I should have killed you,” I said. For a moment Urbina looked startled, and so did Villa. I still had told him nothing of what happened in Chihuahua City with Rosa.

“Let’s go into the kitchen,” Villa muttered. “We’ll see what we can do for your shoulder.”

On our way a woman ran out of a room and fell to her knees, flinging her arms about the chief’s legs. “Señor General! I’ve just given birth to a baby boy. Not three days ago! Will you baptize him? I’m going to call him Francisco, after you.”

“I’m not a priest, señora.”

“But you are General Villa. God smiles on you .You can do anything!.”

“Later, yes,” Villa grumbled, “if you insist.”

In the kitchen he shooed everyone out except Fierro and me. There were still hot coals in one of the charcoal pits of the range. He put a kettle of water on the fire to boil and then ripped off Urbina’s shirt to inspect the wound.

Straddling a chair, Urbina bit his lip with the pain.

“It’s bad,” Villa said. “It looks like it hit the bone. I don’t think I can get the bullet out. Is there a doctor nearby?”

“About twenty miles…”

“Let’s clean it up first. You know, I came here to shoot you.”

“Because of that damned gold?” Urbina chuckled hoarsely. “I’m keeping it safe for you, Pancho. That fucking Treviño had five thousand men and three dozen cannon not thirty miles from Chihuahua City. He would have dynamited that door faster than I did. And then, think—it would have been lost forever.”

“You ran away,” Villa said grimly. “Treviño saw only your ass.”

“Ran away?” Urbina thumped his other fist on the kitchen table. “I don’t know the meaning of the word! My men were being slaughtered! I had to regroup.”

“Here? At your hacienda?”

“I had to think what to do next.”

A bitter smile curved from Villa’s lips. “You don’t have to think,
compadre.
You have only to follow my orders. Which leads me to task: why didn’t you reinforce me at León when I sent for you?”

“I never got the wire.”

“How do you know I wired?”

“Pancho, my shoulder’s killing me. For Christ’s sake, don’t ask so many difficult questions. It makes my head ache.” Urbina glared at me again. “That’s your fault, you gringo dog. I have headaches now, to go with my rheumatism.”

Villa finally asked him, almost as an afterthought, where he had hidden the gold.

“In the stables. I have three good men guarding it.”

“You
had
three good men. Tomás, go see if it’s all there.”

Urbina growled again. “Don’t trust him, Pancho.”

I didn’t reply but went outside into the foggy morning, where a chill wind blew off the sierra.

In the stables a few of our men were playing poker with a dog-eared pack of cards. The smell of leather, grease and sweat hit my nostrils. Ignacio, whom I remembered from the battle of Torreón, sprawled on a heap of hay, drinking from a bottle of aguardiente. I ordered him and the others to stand guard outside.

The gold was there, buried deep in the hay, in the same flour sacks Fierro had requisitioned outside the Banco Minero. There were three sacks missing. It could have been worse.

Ignacio poked his nose in. “My colonel, the men are having an argument, and they ask you to settle it.”

“If I can.”

“I say your country is at war with England and Germany, over in Europe. The others say it’s not so.”

“The others are right.”

“You’re not at war?”

“I’m at war, here, but America’s not, there. Not yet.”

“Then how do the gringo soldiers pass the time?”

“Practicing for war. Ignacio, don’t let your men get drunk.”

When I got back to the kitchen I found Fierro sitting on a stool, cleaning his fingernails with the point of a butcher knife. He looked vexed and out of humor. The kettle had boiled and Villa had cleaned Urbina’s wound, but he had not been able to extract the bullet. The edges of the hole were a raw pink—at least it hadn’t been one of the soft-nosed lead bullets.

Villa and Urbina were seated at the oak table, reminiscing about the days when they had been bandits here in Durango. “Luis Campos …” Villa was saying. “I remember him well. We were on the run from the
rurales,
and we stayed at his house. But they were after him too, and when they came to get him we had to shoot our way out. So he’s dead …

“Hanged by Murguia,” Urbina said mournfully. “Do you remember after that, when we worked in the Del Verde mine? We slept in those filthy limestone holes. You had gangrene in your foot—I had to sell my saddle to pay for the doctor.”

“But I kept working. I needed the lousy peso a day.”

Villa had seen me enter, and now he turned to me. “Tomás, was the gold there?”

“All but three sacks, chief.”

“How much did you steal for yourself?” Urbina asked me, his lip curling.

I didn’t answer, just glared coldly, and Villa ignored him too. He gave a windy sigh, then turned back to Urbina.

“
Compadre,
we’ll have to take you to the doctor. After that we’ll decide what to do.”

“After that,” Urbina said, “let’s go after Obregón. I want to fight again.”

“You won’t run away?”

“Why would I do a thing like that?”

“You did it once, didn’t you? We’ll have to make sure.” Villa chuckled malevolently. “Rodolfo, tie a noose around his neck before he gets on his horse. You hold the other end. I want him to have a taste of what might have happened.”

He looked disgruntled for a moment, but it was clear that for old times’ sake he had granted the pardon. Urbina grinned.

My hand tightened on the butt of my pistol, then relaxed. I had thought of killing him. But then I would have to tell them why, and betray Rosa’s secret.

Villa found a spring wagon behind the stables and loaded it with the gold. He disappeared for a few minutes to baptize the child, having discovered that the woman was one of Urbina’s daughters. Just as the sun broke through the haze to warm our bones, we forked our horses and the troop set out on the trail.

Then Villa had one last thought for Urbina. “I want you to be comfortable, my friend. You can ride in the wagon with the gold … the gold you so kindly kept safe for me.”

Urbina, amid various grunts and complaints, waddled to the wagon and settled himself on top of one of the sacks, a hangman’s noose looped snugly, but not too tightly, around his neck. Fierro had fashioned it himself, and the other end was tied to the horn of his saddle. He and Villa and I rode behind the wagon, with the troop of men out in front. The men were muttering among themselves.

Before Urbina snugged himself down he pointed to the rope and called out jovially, “Don’t forget about me. Don’t wander off the trail, Rodolfo.”

Rodolfo Fierro didn’t bother answering, and he never smiled. When we were out of Urbina’s hearing, he finally gave voice to what was on his mind.

“My general, with respect—this is wrong. The man is a traitor. You said so yourself.”

Villa’s face darkened. That reminder wasn’t what he wanted to hear. But there was no way he could escape Rodolfo’s calm words.

“And the punishment for treason has always been death.”

A sullen look, boyish in its petulance, crossed the chief’s face. “What proof do I have,” he growled, “that he meant to keep the gold?”

Fierro said, “In Chihuahua, in the Banco Minero—in front of us all, as I recall—you told us that any man who breathed a word about the gold would be shot. Now half the Division knows he stole it. And then there’s the matter of what he did at Jiménez. He ran away from Treviño. And he failed to come to León when you sent for him. He got your wires.”

The lines of anxiety deepened on Villa’s swarthy face. He had handled Urbina poorly, and he knew it. When a general loses one battle after another, he’s not at his best in other matters.

Fierro said, “If you let him live, what will our men think?”

“That he tricked me,” Villa muttered.

He realized now why they had been grumbling among themselves; they were more than puzzled that we had come all this way to shoot Urbina and now were bringing him to a doctor to save his life.

But the worst thing about this business, for me, wasn’t the gold; it was that Urbina had failed to show up at León. He had been too busy hunting for stray women and collecting the last taxes in Chihuahua City.

Fierro hammered away. “Four men were killed defending the gold for him. And yet Urbina lives.”

“If he doesn’t fight for us,” Villa muttered, changing course as he felt the weight of Fierro’s argument, “he’ll wind up fighting for Carranza, like the others. I can smell it.”

Urbina heard none of this. He sprawled on the sacks of gold, one arm clasping his wounded shoulder. He looked as if he were falling asleep, despite the jolting of the wagon on the trail. The sun had vanished and the sky was soggy with impending rain.

A little desperate, Villa turned in his saddle toward me.

“What do you think, Tomás?”

He knew that if any man would counsel mercy, it should be me. But he was wrong. And yet something stopped me from pronouncing the sentence. If I were to do that for a false reason, it would be a trickery I couldn’t live with. If Urbina were to die, it had to be for treason.

“Don’t make me condemn him to death,” I said. “That’s your job.”

Villa nodded glumly. “All right. He’s a traitor. Traitors die.” He drew his pistol.

He raised it in the direction of Urbina, who had begun to snore in the wagon. The middle finger curled reluctantly around the trigger. He was going to shoot him in his sleep; he didn’t want to see his eyes. But after a moment, his finger quivered, then slowly uncurled, like a worm from a hook.

He let the pistol drop, shoving it back into his holster. “I can’t do it,” he murmured. “I must have a sentimental streak somewhere. Rodolfo,. use the rope.”

The rope stretched slack about fifteen feet from the horn of Fierro’s saddle to Urbina’s neck in the spring wagon. Fierro checked his stirrups, patted his sorrel’s neck, then dug his right knee hard into the flank.

The sorrel wheeled, almost knocking me askew in the saddle, and then Fierro spurred him round the other side of the wagon. It was cleverly done … he must already have been thinking about it before he received the order. If he had just galloped back along the trail he would have dragged Urbina after him, tearing him to pieces on the stones.

But Fierro had his code. Despite what he had done to Benton, he believed in a quick death.

As I stared, Urbina’s body flung itself across the sacks of gold, slamming hard into the planks of the rattling wagon. His hands flew to his neck to get rid of the rope, and he snatched the hangman’s knot just as it began to bury itself deeper in his throat. The team of horses pulling the wagon trotted gently along, the driver half asleep on the box.

Fierro spurred as far as he could until the rope was taut and Urbina, eyes popping, was wedged in a ball against the wooden slats. Then he slowed the sorrel and hung there, trotting in pace with the team.

Dancing a strangulation jig, Urbina kicked his legs fiercely, fighting for life. The wound in his shoulder flowed red with fresh blood. His tongue bulged. He wasn’t able to speak, to remind Villa how they had fled from the
rurales
or worked together in the Del Verde mine. But his grip on the knot was too powerful; he was refusing to die. The sorrel strained against the rope, mud spurting up from his hoofs.

Urbina kicked and jumped, and his pop eyes glared with fury.

“Stop!” Villa cried to Rodolfo. “You’ve bungled it, you fool!”

The rope began to relax. I kicked my horse and bolted forward, drawing my pistol. The purple tongue had already begun to edge back between the slitted lips; the limbs gave a last kick of relief, and Urbina’s onyx eyes blazed in demonic triumph. He thought now he would live.

“No, you bastard,” I whispered, and thrust the barrel of the pistol between his eyes. I pulled the trigger—the pistol roared, smoke curling. Urbina slumped suddenly, tiredly, with what seemed a third black eye above his nose and his bloody brains spewing out against the boards of the wagon.

Warm sweat rolled down my face. I turned to Pancho Villa. A vein in the center of his forehead stood out like a piece of thick blue twine.

“It’s done,” I said.

With one sleeve Villa wiped his eyes, then shoved his horse forward to the main body of men. Fierro trotted back to the wagon.

He untied his rope from Urbina’s mangled neck and dumped the body in the road for the buzzards.

A traitor had been shot. Rosa was avenged. But when we reached Torreón in the fog the next morning, I forgot about that.

While we were gone, hunting gold and Urbina, Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo had fallen to the Carranzistas under González. Our new commander in Chihuahua City, Calixto Contreras, sent word that Treviño had begun to bombard him, and he doubted that his single brigade could hold out. Five hundred more of our soldiers had deserted from Torreón. Our scouts reported that Obregón was pushing north with thirty thousand men and was only fifty miles away.