I heard the click and buzz of relays and switches down the wire, and then above the low static rumble, the tinny, but clear, unmistakable southern accent of Quentin Peach. “Henry? Quent. Say, do you remember the talk we had back in January about your adventures with our friend and escape from the man in the red shirt?”
“You know I do. What’s going on?”
“I just received a copy of a telegram Zack Cobb, the customs collector here in El Paso, sent the State Department about two o’clock. I can’t say how I got it or the source of his information, but I’d bet money it’s accurate. Wanna hear it?”
“Fire away.”
Quent read, “Villa left Pacheco Point, near Madera, on Wednesday, March 1, with 300 men headed toward Columbus, New Mexico. He is reported west of Casas Grandes today. There is reason to believe that he intends to cross to the United States and hopes to proceed to Washington. Please consider this possibility and the necessity of instructions to us on the border.”
He stopped and said, “Henry, this is what you’ve been waiting for. If he gets up here close to the border, he can send a few dorados after you in addition to whatever else he’s planning.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” I studied a calendar on my desk. “Let’s see. Today is Friday, March third. Depending on how many men he has and where he started, he could be on the border in a week to ten days, so he might be in Columbus by the tenth. Hmmm. Thanks, Quent! If you hear anything else about this, will you let me know?”
“Absolutely. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I’ll wire Yellow Boy and get him down here by Monday afternoon and then decide what to do. My guess is we’ll head for Columbus and then maybe south to meet our friend head-on. You want to come?”
“Yeah, but I need to talk to Persia and Hughs Slater here at the Herald before I make any commitments. Tell you what, I’ll call Monday evening, and we can go from there.”
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll be here. Talk to you then. Adiós.”
I hung up the earpiece, sat down at my desk, and scribbled a telegram to C.R. Jefferis, the Indian agent in Mescalero, asking that he immediately ask Yellow Boy to come help me again with another project in Mexico. Finishing, I was out the door and down the street to the telegraph office, anxious for action, anxious to be rid of the ominous worry hanging like a dark cloud in the back of my mind.
Seeing Yellow Boy in his ancient, threadbare blue cavalry jacket sitting on the floor with his back to the wall reminded me of the first time I’d seen him in daylight twenty years earlier, two days after he had saved my life.
The telephone rang, and, as usual, I grimaced at the unexpected bell. Yellow Boy didn’t look too comfortable with its raucous sound either. As we expected, the caller was Quent.
“Henry? I was with reporters meeting with Commanding General Gavira in Juárez this morning, and I’m just back from confirming what he told us. He claimed Villa is still headed for the border. Gavira asked General Pershing to be on the lookout for him. Cobb says Villa will be here tonight or early tomorrow and told his contact in Columbus to let him know as soon as Villa shows up. What are you going to do? Persia says for me to do my job, just not to get shot. Hughs thinks there’s a chance for a good story and says to do what’s best. I want to go with you. It might be my last chance to see Villa alive.”
“Thanks, Quent, you’re a great help. Villa can move his cavalry fast, but he can’t move as fast as Cobb says. It doesn’t make any difference to us anyway. We’re planning to find him before he finds us. We’ll be in El Paso sometime tomorrow, depending on what Yellow Boy does, and we’ll work out the travel details of our little hunt after we get there. I’ll call when we get in. Give my best to Persia.”
“I’ll do it. See you tomorrow.”
I turned to Yellow Boy, who was lighting a cigar.
“Quent’s source believes Villa could be in Columbus tonight or tomorrow. He’s cautious and can’t move as fast as they believe. If we’re going after him from Columbus, then I figure we’ll have to be there no later than three days from now. The only way we can get there in two days without wearing out our horses is to ride the iron wagon and take them with us. I know you don’t want to ride the iron wagon, but can you change your mind in this case?”
He puffed his cigar, thought awhile, and shook his head. “No iron wagon. I leave tonight. Easy two-night ride. Meet you when train stops in Columbus on third day. You go to El Paso mañana, find Peach, make sure he’s ready for hard ride in Mexico.”
“I don’t doubt you’re right. Take Satanas and my gear with you. If my memory serves me right, the train gets to Columbus two or three hours after sunrise. We’ll meet you at the station. I’ll get Peach to ask his sources where they think Villa is then, and that’s where we’ll head. What do you think?”
He nodded.
After we ate, I loaded Satanas with my saddle and gear, and we walked over to the train station. A schedule showed the train from El Paso arrived in Columbus at eight o’clock every morning. Yellow Boy swung into his saddle, waved the Henry in salute, and said, “Columbus, three days. We hunt loco hombre.”
CHAPTER 37
TRAIN TO COLUMBUS
The train rolled out of El Paso in the cold, gray light of a windy dawn, Thursday, 9 March 1916. I stayed in El Paso two days longer than I planned because two major unrelated stories delayed Quent. The morning I arrived in El Paso, the El Paso police arrested and jailed over forty men, twenty of them Mexicans, involved in a brawl with soldiers over Mexican raids along the border.
The men who were arrested went through the jail’s standard, weekly delousing procedure of a vinegar and coal-oil bath and rinsing their clothes in gasoline. A fool named H.M. Cross, who didn’t hear the warning not to smoke or strike a match while the men’s clothes were still damp with gasoline in the fume-saturated air, tried to light a cigarette. The instantaneous roar of flames sweeping through the locked cells burned nearly all the prisoners to death. Quent’s fast, accurate investigative work showed the disaster an accident and almost single-handedly prevented major riots from breaking out all over El Paso.
Villa’s move north also triggered an avalanche of stories requiring additional long, speculative essays to fill the front pages of the papers in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico. Quent’s previous essays and stories on Villa also caused demand for his work on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune, NewYork Herald, New York Times, Washington Post, and other big-time papers covering Villa’s move toward the border. Calls from major papers for Villa stories and analysis demanded Quent write more every day.
I paced the floor in his office and watched, amazed, at how fast he turned out copy until Hughs Slater, the Herald’s owner, editor, and publisher, told him he had enough material for a week’s worth of papers, and for him to go on with me to Columbus. With as much national interest as Villa now generated, an interview with him might easily establish Quent as a full-time, national columnist, which would sell a lot of papers for the Herald and provide Quent with a fat income.
A few minutes before we were due to arrive in Columbus, I noticed a long, black smoke plume drifting east past the rushing train. The fuzzy black streak, spreading out across the bright blue sky and against the golden glare of the morning sun, left me with a sense of foreboding.
The train slowed to a crawl when we were over a mile from the station. Quent pushed out of his seat and said, “Something’s going on. A train doesn’t slow down this far out from the station unless the engineer thinks he might have to make a quick stop. Come on. Let’s take a look outside.”
By this time, everyone on the train was staring at the black cloud, and several armed men checked the loads in their pistols. We stepped outside into the cold, biting wind. I climbed up the ladder leading to the top of the passenger car to see how the tracks looked in front of us.
The smoke cloud looked as if it was rising from several different fires near the train station in Columbus. Off to the south, may
be in Mexico, a high-rising dust cloud suggested a herd of running horses or cattle. Quent jerked on my pants leg and yelled into the wind, “Let me look.”
I climbed down and motioned him up. In few seconds, I heard him yell, “Damn!” He climbed back down, and, shivering, we went back inside.
Men gathered around us. One asked, “Has Villa burned Columbus?”
Quent answered, “No. I saw only four or five columns of smoke. Most of the houses and stores look like they’re still standing. I didn’t see any signs of fighting. Just stay calm. We’ll be all right.” The men looked at each other and back at us, nodded, and, with a hand on their guns, sat down to wait.
Within two hundred yards of the Columbus station, the train crept along slower than a walking man. The conductor jerked open the door at the back of the car. “Take it easy, folks. We’re nearly to the station, and it looks like the raid, if that’s what it was, is over.”
The train stopped still well outside the station. Quent and I jumped off the train and walked up the tracks from the caboose. Columbus looked like an image straight from hell, with dead horses and bodies scattered in the streets. Wounded Villistas were crumpled in the sand, no one bothering to help them, most dead, but a few still alive, some twitching in death throes, others holding their hands over terrible wounds and groaning in agony, some lying with crucifixes on their chests, preparing to meet God. Women walked by, staring at their attackers with hatred. I wondered if any of the men I’d ridden with, maybe even patched up six months ago, lay among those in the street, but I saw no one I recognized.
Men and older boys collected guns and swords dropped by fleeing Villistas and from the hands of the dead or wounded. Soldiers threw buckets of water on still smoldering fires or carried stretchers with the wounded to the Hoover Hotel, its adobe construction making it nearly fireproof and bulletproof.
I saw several figures, probably army officers, on the top of the little hill across the tracks from the station. Using binoculars, they looked first toward the southeast and slowly swung west, surveying the land toward the border. Several troopers behind them knelt on one knee and leaned against their Springfield rifles. They appeared to be awaiting orders from officers pacing back and forth.
I turned to Quent, who was looking in all directions and busy making notes in his unreadable shorthand script, and said, “I’ll check in the Hoover to see where I’m most needed. I don’t see any sign of Yellow Boy. He’s probably staying out in the mesquite until things settle down. Go get your stories. I’ll see you later.”
CHAPTER 38
TWO WOMEN
A corporal and a private carried a stretcher bearing a woman into the cool gloom of the Hoover Hotel. She was clinging to the hand of a young, disheveled woman, who walked beside her. The soldiers gently set the stretcher down on the lobby tiles, and the corporal, sweat streaking his dust-covered face, sent the private to fetch a hospital corpsman from Camp Furlong.
Seeing me come forward with my doctor’s bag, the corporal asked, “You a doctor? This here lady’s been shot and needs one bad.”
I knelt beside the woman and took her free hand. Even with her eyes squeezed shut, her teeth clenched, and her long dark hair matted with dust and tangled on top of her head, her beauty still showed.
“Ma’am, I’m Doctor Henry Grace. I’ll do everything I can for you and this other lady. Where are you wounded?”
She moaned, licked her lips, and croaked, “Is there any water?”
The corporal handed me his canteen, and I held her head up to help her drink. She took a couple of long swallows before she coughed and choked, pushing it away.
I offered the canteen to the young woman holding her hand. She smelled of horse, human sweat, and desert dirt. Red from sun and wind and framed by her dust-filled, banshee-like hair, her face was smudged with dirt and grease. Lips cracked and chapped, she offered a smile of appreciation as she took the canteen and took long swallows before handing the canteen back to the soldier.
From the doorway behind the registration desk, a man, his big belly pushing out between red suspenders, and, right behind him, a tall, gray-haired woman with big, dark eyes behind wire-framed glasses, crossed the lobby to the stretcher. The man stuck out his right hand and said, “I’m Will Hoover, and this is my mother, Sara. We own the hotel.” He glanced at the stretcher and said, “My God! It’s Susan Moore!” He nodded toward my black bag and asked, “You a doctor?”
Before I could answer, he motioned toward the corporal. “Come on. Let’s carry her down the hall to a room so the doctor can examine her in private.”
Susan didn’t let go of the other woman’s hand as Will Hoover and the soldier carried her down the dark hall. Sara led the way and opened the door to a guest room. The other woman said, “She’s been shot in the right hip and leg. Ease her off the stretcher on the right side of the bed so she can lie on her left side. She’ll hold on to me, and I can help give her some support when we ease her off the stretcher.”
I turned to Sara and said, “Ma’am, I’m going to need boiled water and clean towels. Can you get those for me?”
For a woman her age, she was very agile. She two-stepped around us to zoom through the open door, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll be right back.”
We managed to get Susan onto the bed without causing her much more pain. The corporal rolled up the stretcher, leaned it in a corner, and asked in a low voice, “Is there anything else I can do before I drive the ambulance over to the camp hospital?”
I shook my head as I waved him and Will Hoover out the door. Susan moaned from deep in her chest, creases in her face reflecting a throb of pain. I found a morphine vial in my bag and give her an injection. It wasn’t long before she relaxed and passed out, finally letting go of her companion’s hand.
Pulling up Susan’s long dress and petticoats, I saw bloodstains streaked down her fancy silk pantaloons and where she’d ripped off enough underskirt to make a bandage around a bullet wound grazing the muscle a few inches above her knee. Well up on her hip, another round black circle oozing dark, coagulating blood showed where she’d been hit a second time.
There wasn’t any extraordinary swelling and discoloration, indicating the bullet had missed her thighbone. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a companion exit wound, which meant she had to go to a hospital where the bullet could be removed without killing her.
Sara Hoover knocked on the door and rushed in with white towels and a shiny, zinc-plated, five-gallon bucket full of steaming water. Without strain, she lowered the thirty-pound bucket to the floor. Seeing Susan’s bloodstained pantaloons, she shook her head. “She gonna live?”
“I believe so if I can get these wounds clean and stop the bleeding.”
“Is there anything else you need?”
I shook my head as I pulled a bottle of carbolic acid out of my bag and took a towel to wash my hands in the nightstand bowl.
Sara turned to the young woman, who had flopped in a chair, and said, “I don’t believe I know you, ma’am. You’re not from around here, are you? Is there anything I can do for you?”
The woman said in a soft, southern accent, “I’m Maud Wright. I’ve been a Villista prisoner for nine days. My husband and I have a ranch about a hundred miles south, but they murdered my husband and our friend, and they took our twoyear-old son, Johnnie, and gave him to the hired Mexican family livin’ with us.”
Sara put her arm around Maud’s shoulders. “Dear God in heaven, I’m so sorry.”
“I can only pray that by the grace of God they’ve been able to keep Johnnie safe and fed. I’ve only had parched corn to eat for the past few days, been rubbed raw riding all over northern Chihuahua on a pack mule, and my feet are torn up and swollen from walkin’ through goat head stickers and cactus after Villa let me go. I’ve barely had enough water to drink, much less bathe, and I’m stinkin’ nasty. Anything, Mrs. Hoover, just anything you can help me with, I’d be grateful.” Maud sounded on the verge of tears, but none fe
ll.
Sara said, “Of course, we’ll do anything we can for you. I’m so sorry to see and hear how badly you’ve been abused. You—”
There was a firm knock on the door. Sara went to crack it open, and I heard someone say, “Begging your pardon ma’am, but one of the ambulance drivers told me Mrs. Moore and the lady with her was here. Mrs. Slocum, the colonel’s wife, wants them ladies at her house. Says to tell them she has all the conveniences a lady needs, including a tub and plenty of hot water.”
Sara looked over her shoulder at me, her eyebrows raised. Looking at Maud, I nodded and said, “Mrs. Wright, you go ahead with the soldier to Mrs. Slocum’s house, and tell her I’ll make arrangements to get Mrs. Moore to a hospital in El Paso as soon as possible. Then I’ll come and check on you.”
Maud clasped her hands together and bowed her head. I heard her murmur, “Thank you, dear God.” She looked up at me and asked, “Doctor Grace, will you help me get my son back?”
“Yes, ma’am, I sure will. Get on up to Mrs. Slocum’s and have a bath. You’ll feel better. Don’t worry. We’ll all help get Johnnie back. You’re safe now, that’s the most important thing for both of you.”
Outside the sun blinded me. As my eyes adjusted to the hard, brittle light, I saw organized turmoil. Soldiers up the street were using teams of mules to drag smoldering and blackened embers from the Commercial Hotel and four or five burned stores into a grid of woodpiles on the southwest edge of town. The army ambulance hauled bodies of Villistas over to the piles of burned wood. A few hundred yards north of the woodpiles, dust filled the air as army gravediggers worked preparing places for the caskets of fallen American soldiers not being sent back home because the army was their home.
The bank behind the hotel served as a morgue. A soldier stood guard at the door to keep curious onlookers out and to give the army hospital corpsman time to ensure the bodies of the ten civilians and seven soldiers were properly identified for someone to claim or to fill a casket for one of the graves being dug.
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