TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border

by Clifford Irving

Ignacio related what he had heard from two separate groups of Yaquis: that the raid on Columbus had taken place before dawn, that Villa had led it himself, and that a regiment of U. S. Cavalry was riding into Chihuahua to bring him back dead or alive.

  “And how long ago did I do this thing?” Villa asked, astonished.

  Ignacio counted on his fingers with the same maddening seriousness. “Two nights ago, señor. Maybe three.”

  Villa gazed northward at the heat rippling the horizon. “We’d better find out more about this,” he said gravely.

  He ordered Julio to take five men, ride hard for Casas Grandes and see what they could learn there. We slowed our pace and moved cautiously toward Ascensión, reaching it only at dark. We camped by the lake. The night had a foul smell, as if the waters of the lake had been poisoned.

  Around midnight, as Villa was pacing the turf by a little fire, Julio and his men galloped out of the darkness. One of the horses crumpled to his knees, black blood oozing from the nostrils. Like hen hawks on a setting quail, we swooped down on Julio.

  He squatted on his haunches, took a deep breath and said, “It’s true, chief. Almost everything that Ignacio heard, except that everyone tells a different story about how many were killed. Columbus was burned to the ground, that’s certainly a fact. Worse, Pershing is really coming after us. But not with a regiment of cavalry. With twelve thousand men! Cavalry, trucks—even airplanes! Can you imagine? I’ve never seen an airplane.”

  Villa’s face in the firelight looked blood red. “Who told you this?”

  “Some Mormons were there. They just got back from El Paso. One of them had a brother in Columbus.”

  “Why do the Americans think we were the ones who did it?”

  “Pablo Lopez was recognized. Martín too. And the colonel of the garrison swears you led the raid. He recognized you. It was supposed to be for revenge, and to steal rifles.”

  From our cut-off and lonely part of the world it seemed a ridiculous story, but we understood the implications. The gold would have to wait.

  We rode south through a cloudy night to Casas Grandes, and at dawn we finally found the telegraph operator. Villa composed a denial to Pershing at Fort Bliss, and then a second message addressed to President Wilson himself.

  “How will the wires get through?” I said. “They have to be routed by way of Juárez.”

  “I didn’t think of that. But we’ll send them anyway. This is a crazy business. What do you think really happened?”

  “Well, someone attacked Columbus. Maybe it was really the Lopez brothers. You said you’d shoot them for what they did at Santa Ysabel. Maybe they went over to Carranza.”

  “Carranza…”

  “It was dark. Anyone can yell ‘Viva Villa!’ Anyone can ride a black horse and put a pillow under his shirt to look like you.”

  He shot me a look of reproof. “I’ve lost weight, Tomás.”

  “Colonel Slocum doesn’t know that.”

  “I still don’t understand it. Why would Carranza bother to do such a thing to me? I have only four hundred men.”

  “But a hundred thousand will rise at the bugle call. That’s what you said to Von Papen. If Carranza believes it too, this is a fine way of getting rid of you. The U.S. Cavalry will do the job for him.”

  He laughed. “Even twelve thousand men can’t find four hundred, not if the four hundred know where to hide. And not if they’re led by me.” He sank down on his heels in the dust. “I don’t believe Carranza is behind this. He’d piss blood at the thought of gringos invading Mexico, even if their aim is to catch me. You remember how he yelled when they landed at Veracruz?”

  “Then who did it, chief? If it wasn’t us, and if it wasn’t Carranza … then who?”

  Pulling at his mustache, Villa squinted into the glare outside the telegraph office. I could see that all his senses were alive. He had been beaten on half a dozen battlefields by Obregón, humiliated and reduced to a poor wandering bandit; but now he was challenged by something larger than the problem of where to water the horses or how to find enough stray chickens and tortillas to feed four hundred tapeworms—and it suited him. It made the blood move in his veins. It was as if he had been waiting for the worst to happen, and this was it; and now he could be himself again, because the worst was over.

  For a moment he shut his eyes. I knew what he was doing. He wasn’t thinking. He was letting the breeze talk to him, letting it tell him how to hit the empty cartridge in the wall, and in which column the gold was hidden. I waited a reasonable length of time … perhaps two minutes.

  “What do you smell, chief?”

  “The German. The one you stopped me from shooting in Sonora. Do you think Lopez did this on his own? He has no reason. To solve a crime, you have first to see who it benefits. The German is the answer. This is what he hoped for.”

  It was farfetched, but so was everything to do with Von Papen and his idea that Mexico recover her lost territories. He wouldn’t even have to promise that to Lopez. Von Papen was a man who kept his branding iron smooth. He would only have to pay enough cash and make some sort of oily-tongued guarantee that Lopez would be sheltered from Villa’s wrath.

  “We’ll never know,” I said.

  He brooded for a while, kicking his feet in the dust, picking at the raw skin of his thumbs. “All right,” he decided, “let the gringos come. Their soldiers will die in Chihuahua. They shoot well, but not if they don’t have targets. We’ll do what Zapata does—hit them from all sides, then withdraw. They’ll have to build a cemetery in Mexico as large as Fort Bliss.”

  A feeling of alarm spread through my chest, almost as if I had swallowed a hot pepper. I knew that Villa meant what he said. He had nothing against the United States or the American army—it was only the government in Washington that he hated now—but if he was attacked he would fight back like a hound dog against a grizzly, slashing until he dropped.

  And I realized that if he did that, I couldn’t fight with him anymore. I couldn’t put a bullet in the stomach of an American soldier who was only doing his job for fifteen dollars a month. These weren’t Redflaggers who skinned Yaqui feet or Obregonistas who shot children in Mexico City over a sip of water. These were my own kind.

  They said in the old days in Texas: “Another man’s life don’t make a soft pillow at night.” I had known that at Hot Wells, after we blew up the railroad and I wouldn’t fire at Patton. I had known it even before that, after Torreón. I would have to quit Pancho Villa and the revolution, and I didn’t want to do that yet.

  These last months, watching Carranza make a mess of things in Mexico City, hearing campesinos‘ tales of Obregón’s further cruelty, I had come to the belief that Villa had made one other mistake that none of us had understood. Despite his denials, he was the right man to rule Mexico. No one else had the simplicity of motive, the backing of the people, the ruthlessness to deal with the politicians who wanted to hack and carve up the country just as Diaz and Huerta had done before them. He had to have his chance, and I had to convince him to seize it. It might take a lifetime, but a lifetime in Mexico was short, and I had no better way to spend it. Neither did he.

  It wasn’t a reckless spirit that moved me—it was stubbornness and knowing where I belonged on this earth, at least for now. The thought startled me, as true thoughts always did.

  But before any of that happened, there were a few minor obstacles in the way. One of them seemed to be the United States Army.

  “That wire will never get through,” I said, “but you’ve got to get word to Pershing that you didn’t raid Columbus. I met him at Scott’s house, and I don’t believe he’s the kind of man who forgets people. I’ll go up to Columbus. I’ll find out what really happened there. I’ll tell him you didn’t do it.”

  “He won’t believe you,” Villa said glumly.

  “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 rai
lroad 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?”