by Lou Cameron
Villa said, “Go ahead and screw her, if you like her looks. We’ll have mucho adelitas flocking in, now. But, first, see what they are saying about me on the telegrafo, eh?”
Stringer moved over to the telegraph set on a heavy desk that could have been the manager’s, before he’d been let go without notice. Stringer sat behind the desk and tapped out a C.Q. There was no reply. He told Villa, “If anyone’s home at the far end, they don’t want to talk to us. Assuming the line’s still open, the hombres who used to work here got off a last message before they lit out.”
Villa asked, “Can you signal that I wish Diaz to know I think he would fuck his mother if she was not so ugly?”
Stringer chuckled dryly and said, “I doubt they’d relay that message to him in so many words. Why tell them we’re still here? Why not let them think we hit and ran?”
Villa nodded and said, “Bueno. Tell them I am on my way to the capital to flush Diaz down his fancy toilet. Tell them that I, Villa, am marching south at the head of a mighty army!”
Stringer sent the message. If it did nothing else, it might confuse them over near the main line. That reminded Stringer of what Villa had said earlier about the company tracks. But when he asked about that, Villa looked disgusted and said, “Is no locomotive here. Maybe that is how they got away. Or maybe the company train left with some silver before we got here. Let us ask this woman they left behind.”
Stringer tried talking to her in English. The girl just went on staring down at the dead man she was kneeling over until he gently touched her shoulder. Then she sobbed, “Don’t hurt me! I’m a nurse. I wasn’t shooting at anyone and, oh, whatever shall I do for poor Mister Teasdale?”
Stringer tried, “He’s dead, miss.” But that just made her shake her head and sob, “Oh, no, he can’t be. I won’t let it be. I have to make him better.”
Stringer looked at Villa and tapped his own temple with a finger. Villa nodded and said, “Loco en la cabeza. You’re sure you want her? Not much fun to screw a lunatic, even a pretty one, and my own sainted mamacita told us lunacy was catching.”
Stringer didn’t answer. He knew most Indians were afraid to mess with the insane and Villa admitted to Chihuahua blood. He gently but firmly hauled the petite blond to her feet. The knees of her white skirt were sticky with blood.
“We want to get you cleaned up and calmed down, Miss. Where are your quarters?”
She murmured, “Down at the end of the veranda. Please don’t hurt me. I’ve never been bad to your people.”
Stringer exchanged glances with Villa, who nodded but said, “Is a little early, if you ask me. Why not wait and see what may turn up? That one could use some meat on her bones as well as some brains in her head.”
Stringer said he’d be back too soon for anyone to worry about his virtue and led the quivering little nurse out on the veranda. The open space out front had been left to the morning sun and the sprawled bodies. A veteran of the battle to the north was lounging in the shade with a heavily-armed local recruit. As Stringer led the girl past them, the soldado who knew him grinned to say, “Oh, you Yanquis! May we claim sloppy seconds?”
Stringer assumed the one who knew him was just kidding. The recent company guard sounded more ominous as he growled, “Hey, how come the gringo gets that stuck-up little bitch? We have feelings, too, and I’ve always wanted some of that.”
Stringer left them to debate the matter as he got the blonde to cover, poco tiempo. Her corner room had cross ventilation and a big brass bedstead occupied at the moment by a too-cute rag doll with flirty eyes. He locked the door behind them and did a little exploring. There was an adjoining bath, with shower, and some darker dresses hung in a big oaken wardrobe across from the bed. The girl hadn’t moved from the center of the floor since he’d led her in. He joined her there, saying, “Snap out of it. You’re safe, for now. You’d better take a quick shower, put on the darkest dress you own, and cover your hair with a mantilla or at least a kerchief. You’ll be safer if we can get you to sort of blend in, see?”
She stared at him with eyes that were beginning to focus a little better as it sank in that he was instructing her in English. She licked her pale lips and asked, “What are you doing with these greaser bandits if you’re American, like me?”
“Pancho Villa doesn’t consider himself a bandit, and I don’t think you’d better call him a greaser to his face. I was just about to ask you what you were doing on the other side. If I had my druthers, neither one of us would be down here. It’s not our fight.”
She said, “I didn’t come down here to fight anyone. I was sent by the company as an angel of mercy, only they refuse to send the supplies I ordered, and I fear most of the emergencies I’ve had to cope with would be beyond the skills of most graduates of the Harvard Medical School. It makes you feel so dumb and helpless when all you can do for an injured miner is hold his hand until he passes away. They hate me here. They think I don’t care when they get hurt or sick.”
He nodded and said, “I’ll pass the word it was company policy. What nursing school in the States might you be a graduate of?”
She looked away. He smiled thinly and said, “Right. Why hire a real R.N. when you can just go through the motions and save a heap of dinero? For real, miss, who and what are you?”
Her eyes got misty again as she almost whispered, “My name is Roberta Davis. My friends call me Bobbie. I’m the widow of a mining engineer who died in a cave-in two years ago. The company was kind enough to find me this position on their payroll, so…”
“So they saved themselves the widow’s pension and even a ticket back to the states.” He cut in, too polite to add that she seemed pretty dumb even when she wasn’t hysterical. Hoping she’d calmed down enough to pay attention, he told her, “I have to get back on the job, Bobbie. I want you to lock the door after me and stay put. Remember what I said about changing out of that uniform and getting your blond hair under cover. I’ll get back to you when Villa makes up his mind about moving on, or, failing that, I’ll be back at siesta time with some food and drink. Can you last that long just on tap water?”
She said she had too many butterflies in her stomache to drink even water, and begged him not to leave her alone, lest some rude greaser subject her to a fate worse than death. He told her, “I can’t think of a fate worse than death. Nobody will mess with you once I spread the word that you’re my adelita, with the full approval of Pancho Villa.”
She blushed like a rose and turned her back to him as she flustered, “I guess I have no other choice, but you will try to be gentle, won’t you? It’s been some times since I’ve… You know, and this has all been so sudden!”
He chuckled and assured her, “I meant in name only. You have to understand that Hispanic women are treated with the respect due the man who claims the right to defend their honor. Without at least a tough brother to stick up for her, the Virgin Mary would be up for grabs. My name’s MacKail, Stuart MacKail. Remember that and feel free to invoke it should anybody try to mess with you. Don’t struggle. It’s not considered womanly. Just bat your lashes and say you’d just love to kiss such a handsome gent but that your hombre, that’s me, might be jealous.”
She told him she wasn’t sure she could be that subtle, given her limited grasp of Spanish. He told her to start learning the lingo and meanwhile do the best she knew how.
Then he ducked out before she could ask more dumb questions.
He knew he had enough on his own plate and that this was no time to play Sir Galahad. But he knew he couldn’t just leave her to be passed around as a play pretty, as she would, if he just left her behind when he got his own chance to make a break for it. Villa himself was okay. But it was no secret that most of his mestizo followers hated Americans, sometimes with good reason. If Bobbie spoke no Spanish and hadn’t really been much of a nurse, they no doubt had her down as just another stuck-up member of the ruling class. He’d interviewed old-timers of the G. A. R. and knew that while it hadn
’t gotten into the history books, Sherman’s march through Georgia had been tough on many a southern belle once the liberated field hands had waved adios to the boys in blue. Folk who kept others in slavery never seemed to learn, until too late, that a grinning and fawning bond servant could store up one hell of a lot of resentment as even an easygoing master got to laze about sipping juleps. And, as always in times of sudden change, it seemed to be the more innocent members of the ruling class that suffered most. The really mean bastards got to the lifeboats first. Diaz would probably retire in a few years as he said. A lot of other grandees had Swiss bank accounts and carried steamer tickets in their wallets. It was the smaller landlords and officers of lower rank that figured to wind up against the wall in the end.
Stringer went back to where he’d left Villa, but nobody was in the office now. They’d even hauled the dead Anglo out. When Stringer glanced out the window, he saw the bodies out front had been cleared away as well. A quartet of Mex women were turning an ox, or perhaps a burro, over the fire pit they’d just put in business. Stringer went out to join them, in hopes they had some idea what was going on. The girl turning the spit was sort of pretty, despite the wood ash on her brown face. She told him the meat was still raw, inside. He said he could wait for La Fiesta to start officially and asked where the four of them might have come from. An older and fatter woman explained, “We are with the army of liberation, now. This morning we were only the mujeres of peon mine workers. Now we march as adelitas with Pancho Villa. You can ask him if you do not believe us!”
Stringer said he felt sure they had Villa’s blessings and added, “We live in times of change. I would like it known that La Señora Davis, who used to be the company nurse, will be marching as my adelita, now.”
The pretty one scowled and demanded, “For why? Just because she has frog-belly skin and yellow hair? Hey, I got some hair to show you, Americano. That gringa has no fire between her legs. You will see.”
Stringer laughed and told her she was wrong. It wasn’t gallant to talk that way about a gal, even when you’d really had her. But this was not a gallant situation and he wanted them to gossip dirty about him and Bobbie. So, knowing they surely would, he moved on.
There was a water tower near the railroad trestle Villa and his boys had charged across earlier, as the water under it went down. This far up from the dam, the stream bed was now a sea of chocolate mud, already starting to crust and crack under the Chihuahua sun. Down closer to the dam there was, no doubt, quite a swimming hole left. The open floodgate could have only let so much water out.
Stringer started climbing the ladder of the water tower with his captured army rifle slung across his back. It was all very well for the guerrillas to take such a casual attitude toward the basic rules of organised warfare, but he wanted some idea just what the hell was going on.
When he got to the platform the big redwood tank rested on, Stringer learned Pancho Villa was not as half-assed as he’d feared. One of the recruits from the village was posted up there with a pair of field glasses. He helped Stringer up the last few rungs and asked if he’d been relieved at last.
“I’m afraid you’re still pulling look-out,” Stringer replied, “Call this an inspection. Have you seen anything worth reporting, yet?”
The kid shrugged and said, “Sunshine and buzzards. Is too hot now to make out movement on the horizon.”
Stringer followed his gaze to the east, across the shimmering desert. It wasn’t that one couldn’t see movement out there. The whole scene was moving as if reflected in a disturbed millpond. He followed the twin ribbons of sun-baked steel extending from near the base of the tower to an uncertain vanishing point. The railroad line seemed to be twisting like a skinny steel snake as it slithered off to the east through the chaparral. A dirt service road and a string of dancing telegraph poles shimmered out of step with the single track rail line. He told the kid, “A train coming our way would be moving under a smudge of coal smoke long before you could make out movement on the ground.” The boy replied that Villa had already told him to watch for smoke.
Stringer moved around the platform for a bird’s-eye view of the mining complex itself. From a defensive standpoint, he didn’t like what he saw. The main building with its wraparound veranda stood close to the smelter up the tracks, where they ended. There was a stamping mill and piles of silver ore and coal. That part seemed compact enough to fortify with earthworks strung from strong point to strong point, but after that, things commenced to sprawl. The adobe and brush one-roomers of the mine workers lay mostly to the south, scattered helter skelter as the people had just thrown them up in their spare time wherever they’d felt like it. Villa didn’t have the forces to dig in that far out, and the damned shacks still provided lots of cover for skirmishers moving in. Any federale officer with the brains of a gnat and a survey chart of the area would stop his troop train well out on the desert and have his men move in to pay house calls as they leapfrogged in.
Stringer moved around to the west side as the kid drifted along, trying to be helpful. It was easier to judge the distance to the barren hills to the west from up here. They were, in fact, further away than they looked from ground level. Way the hell out of rifle range. So that might account for Hernan’s failure to follow that part of the plan, though it didn’t account for where the devil Hernan and his sharp shooters might be at this late date. Stringer had a clear view of the mine entrance and the narrow-gauge tram line leading from the mine to the refining layout. He knew the miners had been expected to push the heavy ore trams the hard way, barefoot. He asked the kid with him just how many of the locals had joined up. The kid shrugged and said, “Most of the guards, maybe half the miners, and all their women, of course. I make it fifty or sixty men and about a hundred adelitas, now. A nice big army, no?”
Stringer didn’t answer. Felicidad had told him why peon women were ever anxious to exchange a life of cruel drudgery for a life on the owlhoot trail. They expected only to screw a lot more and grind corn meal a lot less. Men didn’t like to join armies unless they could carry a gun. So Villa would have to do something about his ordnance problem before he could recruit more men to tag along. Stringer asked what they’d done about the mine workers who’d refused to join. The kid shrugged and said, “Nothing. They have nothing. Why waste ammunition on cowards? Perhaps they hope to someday work here again. Even bad jobs are hard to come by in this country. Pancho says not to hurt anyone who does not get in our way. Some of them seem put out by the loss of their women. But, what is a man who has no gun and no will to fight the government to do? We are twice as tough as the government, you know.”
Stringer had certain reservations about that. Both the regular army and Los Rurales, who combined the duties of the Texas Rangers and U.S. marshals, had been fighting rebels, and winning, long before most of Villa’s current band had been born. But it wasn’t his problem.
They moved around to the north side. All too aware of how far over the shimmering horizon the border was, Stringer saw what the kid had meant about buzzards. Those three bodies out by the stalled army truck had sure attracted a flock of them. From the way they still circled, it seemed at least one of the meals he’d left out there for them was still breathing. Stringer gulped down the green taste in his mouth as he thought about how long it had been. He was sure young Tomas had been dead for hours. If one of the other three was still waving off buzzards, it was just tough titty. It had been their notion to fire first, and he knew they’d have left him in the same fix if they’d won.
Due north, he saw he’d been right about the dam. The water had only dropped five or six feet. Some tiny tawny figures seemed to be skinny-dipping in the shallow lake it created. He told the kid he’d been wondering where everyone had gone. The kid sighed wistfully and replied, “I wish it was me down there. I don’t know what gets into women, once they decide to march in the manner of adelitas. I’ll bet you last night a lot of them were lighting candles to the saints lest their husbands bea
t them for suffering yet another headache after a long hot day at their looms or earthen stoves. Now they are behaving as naked pagan girls, and enjoying every momento as they frolic with their new lovers. I wonder if it’s true we’re going to shoot all the priests but just the ugly nuns when we get our country back?”
Stringer cautiously replied that he hadn’t heard Villa was at war with the Mexican church.
The kid shrugged and said “Pancho says it is wrong to loot churches. But Los Colorados and some of the other rebel bands are not as superstitious. They say the priests work hand in glove with the grandees, getting fat and rich as they tell ignorant people they will burn in Hell if they fail to obey their masters. They got lots of gold, whole altars of gold, in lots of churches. Pancho says after he becomes El Presidente, he can make all the money the people need with just a printing press. But I don’t know. The man who runs the cantina in my village says paper money is no good unless you got some gold to back it up, and the priests got lots of gold.”
Stringer tried to change the subject. He’d never been able to talk much sense to folk who could read Marx and Engels’ drivel. He knew the most bloodthirsty Marxists were the ones who’d only memorized a few slogans and didn’t know that Karl Marx had lived pretty high on the hog with a staff of house servants. He pointed out a distant smudge of rising dust, far to the northwest, between the river and the hills, saying, “That looks like one rider or maybe a handful of men on foot. Maybe Yaqui?”
The kid stared soberly for a time before he decided, “Yaqui don’t move out that far from the hills in daylight. Whatever it is, it’s moving too slow for a rider. We better tell Pancho, I think.”