Lost Lands

by P. J. Keogh

  “How many, d’you figure?” It was the Apache Lije was talking about.

  Scanlon stripped the saddle from the roan. “Twelve men in the train. Apache aren’t glory-hunters. They like to have numbers on their side. I’d make it a couple of dozen in the war-party, minimum.”

  “That’s what I’d guess.” Fisher was looking at the corpses as he spoke. “Say they got three of the mother-fuckers.”

  “That leaves twenty or so ahead of us.”

  “Yep.” The Negro had done his own arithmetic, and arrived at the same total.

  Now both men finished their resaddling. “Best get about what we’re about.” Lije climbed aboard the Fort Worth horse.

  Scanlon, already mounted, said nothing. They rode on.

  It was five miles south of where the massacre had been that they came to a spot where the trail narrowed, jumbled rocks coming near to the river’s side.

  “Here’d be a good place,” Fisher observed.

  “Or a bad one.” Scanlon had the roan’s lead-rope around his left wrist. It gave him full movement, since he knew the mare would follow where he led, without need for tight-reining. Right-handed, he eased the Spencer from its saddle-sheath. Fisher, of like mind, unlimbered his. Both knew Apache ways. The ambush, if such there was to be, would be set before the defile was reached, when the Indians believed that their attention was ahead, or after it, when caution would be supposed to have given way to confidence.

  The Apache—Mimbreno it turned out—did not disappoint. A warrior, dust-camouflaged, came up from the ground ahead of Scanlon’s bay, a carbine lifted to his shoulder.

  A greenhorn would have been done in. But Scanlon’s horns were of another color. He rode the Indian down, not wasting precious lead. Another Mimbre had risen up, yards off, and he got the major’s first bullet, its .56 calibre of punch lifting him before it set him in the dirt.

  Fisher’s Spencer was barking too, and with a shoulder-arm the sergeant was every shot the major’s equal. Another Apache fell.

  Those new to warfare would likely have swung toward the river, seeking to put its barrier between themselves and their attackers. Scanlon and Fisher—too long in the tooth to put their backs, on water-slowed horses, in line of enemy fire—urged their mounts the other way, up-slope, scattering ambushers as they rode.

  Scanlon made the higher ground first. Coming off the bay, he threw him down, treating the roan in similar fashion.

  Fisher, no more than a forehoof-length behind, had the Fort Worth mount over too. The Sanchez gray he was not sure of, but the horse did not let him down. Its comanchero-hoofwork had taught it a trick or two.

  Forted-up, with saddle-skirt as palisade, the two veterans triggered their weapons, not wasting many shots.

  A number of braves were down, before Scanlon, drawing the empty tube from the Spencer’s stock, rammed a full one in its place. It was not needed. As he had said, Apache were not seekers after glory. Had they been, a .56 calibre hole would have offered little glory anyway.

  The surviving Mimbres had shied off, putting distance between themselves and this pair of deadly rifles.

  Scanlon showed himself. Holding his Spencer one-handed, he pumped it up and down three times in the air. “!Cobren sus muertos!” he called. He spoke in Spanish, since this language was widely understood among the Apache bands.

  For moments, the living Indians did not move. Scanlon repeated the invitation. Come and get your dead!

  Cautiously at first, the Mimbrenos took the offer up. They moved forward, taking their dead and dying from the field. The short, sharp fight was over.

  The Sun was climbing now. Fisher started a fire below the skyline on the rise, one eye on the Apache, as they went off with their burdens. Scanlon grained the horses, while Lije got the coffee made. They ate their noonday ration of jerky and hard-bread.

  Then, the Indians having gone by that time, they took the horses to the river-bank for water. They let them drink, but not too much, then led them to the shelter of the overhanging rocks.

  It was time for rest. The Mimbres would not be back. Scanlon’s concession had formed a base for understanding. The truce would last at least ’til sundown.

  By then the pair of riders would be far off to the south.

  Chapter 20

  George Chapman was a red-faced man, of thirty-five years or so. A native of the English Midlands, he had learned the engineering trade at the Whitworth armament-works in Coventry, Warwickshire, and whatever there was to know about the making of artillery-pieces Chapman knew, and then some.

  Crossing the Atlantic, in ’61, to lend his expertise to the Union’s war-effort, George had prospered for his pains. He had been on first-name terms with General Ripley when that military relic was the US Army’s ordnance chief, and had drained many a bottle with Secretary Cameron at the Washington War Department. Following that wheeler-dealer’s eclipse, George had met with Edwin Stanton more than once. In ’64, he had even been invited to the White House, where Abe Lincoln himself shook him by the hand, and thanked him for his efforts.

  Taken all around, these renegade colonials had treated him like long-lost kin.

  But all that was in the white-hot days of war. Now, in the chilly time of peace, Chapman had the feeling that his welcome had grown threadbare.

  Nowadays, as general-manager of the Scranton Metal Works, George enjoyed status in the Susquehanna Valley—a status that George feared would soon be lost to him.

  Thus, his pace was leaden, as he walked into Willard’s Hotel in Washington, where a private meeting-room was reserved.

  Chapman had not travelled to the District of Columbia from choice. He was summoned there by the man who paid his salary, though few in Scranton—or in the nation’s capital—were aware of this relationship. The call had been abruptly phrased, and the cannon-maker’s heart sank fast toward his boot-soles, as he followed the hotel’s Negro porter along the carpeted corridor to the place of rendezvous.

  The Negro tapped upon the door to the meeting-room. At the word of command from within, he pushed the door open, and stepped back. Suppressing his nervousness, Chapman squared his shoulders, and walked across the threshold.

  Oberon Fairchild, hand outstretched, crossed the room to greet him. “George! It’s good to see you. How was your journey?”

  “The train was on schedule, mustn’t complain,” Chapman said, as he took the preferred hand.

  “Fine, fine.” Fairchild’s well-fed, jowly face was wreathed in smiles, as he gestured toward the drinks tray set down on a table in a corner of the room. “You will join me?”

  “Whiskey would be nice. Bourbon for preference.” The Englishman had grown a liking for the Kentucky grog during his six years spent away from home, yet his reply was cautious. The congressman’s manner oozed camaraderie, and that put Chapman on his guard. He had been in the arms-business long enough to have met more than any one man’s share of politicians.

  Fairchild poured the drinks, and waved his hand, directing Chapman to a chair at the green-baize covered table that took up the center of the room. He set down the cannon-maker’s Bourbon and, taking his own seat, lifted his glass in salute. “Your health, George.”

  “And yours, Mr. Fairchild.” Chapman took his first sip of the Bourbon. It was the finest the Bluegrass State could offer, and, had he not feared the chop, he would have savored it more.

  A folder with papers was opened on the tabletop, and the Congressman glanced at this, as if to remind himself of what the thing contained. “I read your report on the factory, George. These last two years have not been easy ones.” Fairchild wore a look of sympathy, reminding Chapman of one such he had seen on the face of a horse-doctor, back home in Warwickshire, as a Cleveland bay with a broken leg was put out of its misery.

  The Englishman sensed a thrust coming, and spoke to parry it. His time in America had not robbed him of his native sing-song, and his unease made this more pronounced. “They have not, indeed. It has been donkey-work to keep the
place afloat. Bloody donkey-work, no less! The contract business for the locomotive people has occupied the workshop, and the steel rails for the UPR have kept the furnaces alight. But those are no more than bread and butter jobs. Ordnance is where the profits are. And the government hasn’t ordered a single cannon, from anyone, since ’65.”

  He was speaking fast, as a nervous man will when feeling pressure on him, and Fairchild allowed him to run on, amused at such a spirited defence, where no attack was mounted.

  “There are orders to be had in Europe,” Chapman continued. “That Bismark fellow’s set the Prussians on the march, and they have dealt the Danes and the Austrians a damned fine trouncing, each. The Frog-eaters are pissing their pantaloons, as you would expect, so I’ve sent Robertson to Paris to grease some palms. But what will come of it I don’t know. The Frenchies make some fair weaponry of their own, and my old firm’s in that hunt, along with Armstrong’s and God knows how many more.”

  Fairchild saw that it was time to interrupt the cannon-maker’s flow. “You’ve done well, George,” he reassured the man, “in difficult times. Now I have news for you, strictly confidential, mind. There is reason to believe that a final resolution of the Indian problem will come soon. You recall that small howitzer we have the patent on, the horse-artillery piece? The one General Wilson had the Cavalry Bureau evaluate back in ’64?”

  “I do.” Chapman nodded vigorously. “Secretary Stanton would have placed an initial order for five hundred, if the Rebs hadn’t surrendered when they did.”

  The Congressman smiled. “I have a feeling, George, that we are going to get that order after all.”

  Chapter 21

  They were a mile high on the Mexican Plateau and a hundred miles into the tropics. The city of San Luis Potosi was off east of them, a place they had skirted by intent. Armandez would be there, Sanchez had said, and Scanlon wished no truck with that one until he had Juarez’s mandate to hand the treacherous bastard everything he had coming.

  A road came down from the Sierras Occidentales. Little more than a track, it joined the trail that they were on. At the junction of the two a small cantina stood.

  The riders drew up. The time was coming on to noon. It was the hour for man and horse to rest, and whatever this run-down flytrap had to offer would help conserve their dwindling saddle-rations. A trough with water in it was by the cantina’s entrance-door. They grained their mounts, then allowed them a sparing drink. Having tethered the horses in the shade of a ramada tacked onto the building’s side, they entered the cantina.

  It was an adobe building, and its interior was cool. The light was gloomy. By that light, they could see that, themselves apart, the business had no patrons. The room they were in was dirt-floored, sparsely furnished. The bar was two redundant barrels supporting a plank-top.

  A man leaned against this—the tabanero, Scanlon would have guessed, except that this man was not Mexican. He was big and flaxen-haired. His face was heavy-set, not bearded but unshaven. His eyes were small, beneath a low, flat forehead. He wore a white shirt grown grubby with unwashed wear. His trousers were tattered remnants of what Scanlon recognised as the ducks worn by the French-led troops he had fought against in the war with Maximilian. The man’s belt was French issue too. From it hung a Lebel pistol, likely stolen from an officer’s corpse. He had to be a deserter from the polyglot ranks sent out from Europe, to re-establish Old World power in the New.

  “Buenas dias,” Scanlon said.

  “Buenas dias.” The clumsy way in which the man returned the greeting said clearly that, wherever he hailed from, he was no Spanish-speaker.

  “Queremos alimentos, por favor,” Scanlon requested of the man, and was not surprised to get a blank look in response. Having two more languages at his command, and this column-dodger looking unlikely to have fluency in Erse, the major tried the one remaining. “We want some food.”

  The fair-haired man’s expression cleared at that, became one of comprehension. “Food? Well, you’re in the right place for that.”

  He was an Anglo then, but with an accent Scanlon had not heard, and could not place. The deserter shouted. “Woman!”

  A door at the rear of the room opened, and a Mejicana came into the room. She was small, with the weathered skin of a country-dweller, and the dark-coloring of her race. Indio blood showed in her cheekbones and in the slant of her eyes. Those eyes showed fear too, as did the subdued shuffle of her gait.

  “Customers.” The deserter waved a hand toward Scanlon and Fisher.

  “Queremos alimentos, por favor.” Scanlon repeated his request, with gentleness this time, so as to let the woman know she need have no apprehension of him or of Fisher either.

  “?Chilli con carne?” she asked, “?y tamales?”

  “Si. Muy bueno,” Scanlon confirmed the order. “Para dos, y dos cervezas, por favor.”

  “Cervezas,” the man at the bar grinned at this. “That’s one bleedin’ word I do know.” Turning to the barrel that stood on blocks to his rear, he pulled draughts of liquid into ollas of red terra cotta.

  “Don’t ’ave no glasses, Gents. Gotta make do and mend, in the back o’ beyond out ’ere.” He placed the vessels on the plank-top. His eyes, small and furtive, shifted between Scanlon and the Negro. He seemed a man to whom it would ill-advised to offer a back view.

  * * * *

  Fisher had been watching him, and listening too. The remnants of uniform told Lije nothing. However, the buffalo-soldier had seen enough deserters, in his time with volunteers and the cavalry, to place this one for what he was. He had placed the accent too, having come across merchant-tars from Britain during time spent on the Texas coast.

  He took his beer, and sat down at a table in the room’s farthest corner from the bar. Scanlon seated himself across the table, and Fisher asked him, low-voiced, “What do you make o’ this?”

  Scanlon shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. I’d guess he’s moved in, uninvited, and the woman’s had no choice but to go along.”

  “But what the Hell is a Britisher doin’ here in the wilds o’ Mexico?” Fisher wished to know.

  “He’s British, you reckon?”

  Fisher nodded. “Bet on it. I came across a number of ’em when I hauled freight to Brownsville, right after the war.”

  “He’d have been with the Foreign Legion then,” Scanlon said. “French outfit, sent here to fight for Maximilian. Tough crew. Officers are French, enlisted men come from jails all over Europe. Get treated like horse-shit mostly.”

  Fisher chuckled. “Sounds some like my old bunch. And this one’s an absconder, huh?”

  “Yep. That’s for sure.”

  Lije chuckled again. “Then he’s in damn good company.”

  Scanlon saw the truth in this, and the acid humour. He smiled an acknowledgement of both.

  The woman brought the food out from the kitchen. Up close, even in the gloom, the men could see the bruises showing on her face and on her arms, where the skin of these was exposed. Scanlon, who had known many campesinas in his life, guessed her age at no more than twenty years, despite her beaten down appearance. In another place or circumstance, she would have been pretty.

  “Muchas gracias,” Scanlon said, as she lay the chillis down.

  “Por nada, Senor.” She showed appreciation of his politeness.

  “?Este hombre?” he asked. “?Es su marido?”

  Disgust showed in the Mejicana’s eyes as she replied, “!Eso! No!”

  As Scanlon had surmised, the couple were not married, then. The form of response the woman had chosen to express this fact told the major of the depth of her contempt for the deserter and for all his kind.

  “?Su Marido? Donde esta?” The major had guessed the answer to this question before he put it to her. Yet he had to have the facts.

  “Es muerto.” Genuine sadness showed in her expression. “La Guerra.”

  “?Juarista?”

  “Si.”

  “Quiere usted para se quedar este
hombre?”

  “!Eso! No!” The negative reply dripped with vehemence.

  The deserter had grown suspicious at the exchange, and he called to the girl, “Whatcha sayin’? What’s all this whisperin’?”

  She looked at him, bewildered, guessing at the sense of his demand, but not knowing how to answer it.

  This matter was none of Scanlon’s business, but he could not just let it lie. The tabanera had made clear she wanted rid of this interloper, and she was widow to an unknown comrade, after all. He turned his head toward the Britisher. “I asked the lady if she wants you here. She said, no.”

  “Oh, did she now?” The deserter’s tone was dismissive. Perhaps he had been a man with whom to reckon on his hometown streets, bull of whichever jails in which he had done time, and carried the memory of those prestigious days still in his mind. Or maybe, in the ill-lit room, he had not seen Scanlon clearly enough to judge him right. “And what do you plan to do about it?”

  The major stood up. “I guess I’ll have to kill you.” This was no more than plain truth. Scanlon had made up his mind that he could not simply ride off, and leave the war-widow to this damned degenerate and his mercies. To run the man out of there would do no good, since he would just come back later to take out his anger on the girl.

  So that left no alternative.

  The man’s small eyes widened. Scanlon’s flat-out reply had taken him back a pace. “There are two of you.” The deserter licked his lips as he spoke.

  “Don’t worry. We can kill you one at a time,” Fisher cut in. He was of a mind with Scanlon, where this woman-beating bastard was concerned.

  “‘Ey, now. Listen, Gents. There ain’t no need for fallin’ out, on account o’ this.” The Legion runaway played for time, put on a man-to-man tone. “We’re all men o’ the world ’ere, ain’t we?”

  This was a ploy, and Scanlon saw clear through it. As the deserter’s Lebel came up, the major’s Colt’s was out, its hammer back. The hammer fell. The bullet hit the man to the left of his breastbone, knocking him back against the cerveza cask. His body, dying as it dropped, depressed the tap. The beer gushed out, filling the dead man’s mouth that lay open, beneath the tap, where the body had hit the ground. The liquid overflowed, running across and down the deserter’s lifeless face.