TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (77 page)

“The woman who shot at the Thirteenth in Parral … they say she was German. She raises horses. Didn’t Mix tell me he got that quarter horse in Parral, a gift from a lady friend? Wasn’t she German? And he admitted he’d met this Captain von Papen. Do you see the connection, Miguel? I know it’s farfetched, but that smart-ass cowboy could be working for the Germans! Godammit, this whole thing was my idea, and if something’s rotten in Denmark it’ll be
my
ass that Black Jack kicks. Maybe all the way back to Texas,” he added gloomily.

But that was in Bachinava. Now we are in Casas Grandes, and we know more. This evening, Lieutenant Patton and I and twenty men of the Thirteenth Cavalry will set out on a mission that may prove more worthwhile than the entire Punitive Expedition. We may, after all, find Pancho Villa.

It started when Patton scored his great coup of the campaign …

One day, about a month ago, while still at Bachinava, a troop of the Eleventh Cavalry rode out to hunt for Colonel Julio Cárdenas, second-in-command of Villa’s famed Dorados. Patton was detailed to accompany them because he was the only man among us who had ever seen the Villista colonel’s face—an incident that happened outside of El Paso long before we entered Chihuahua. He was certain he could recognize him again, and the troop captain had remarked, within Pershing’s hearing, “If they’ve got a mustache, all greasers look alike to me.” Cárdenas had been ranging the countryside, looting ranches, recruiting volunteers for Villa and skirmishing with Carranzista patrols. He was reported to have more than a hundred bandits under his command and was already responsible for the deaths of thirty government soldiers. He was stubborn and resourceful, even though apparently cut off from the main body of Villa’s men, which we now believed to be farther south, where Treviño’s order forbade us to hunt.

Julio Cárdenas had been on the Columbus raid. Other than Pancho Villa himself, he was one of the four men whom Pershing had been ordered to bring back dead or alive. The latest report, from the Sixteenth Infantry, had placed him near the ranch of San Miguelito, north of the pueblo of Rubio.

When Patton went with our men to San Miguelito, the scouts spotted several armed Mexicans galloping into the hills in a westward direction. The troop chased them without success, then retired to the ranch, where they camped. Patton, ever eager, took a long walk about the corrals and outbuildings to familiarize himself with the topography. He even drew a little map for his own use. The troop rode back to Bachinava.

About ten days later, headquarters staff realized we were running out of com. Pershing directed the lieutenant to take three Dodge cars, one corporal and six privates of the Sixteenth Infantry, and an interpreter and buy corn from the haciendas lying to the east of Lake Itascate.

“How about it?” Patton said to me as he loaded his Springfield. “You don’t
have
to come, but you might enjoy a luxury auto ride in the desert. Get some suntan!” He laughed shrilly. “And we can poke around for this fellow Cárdenas. I’d give my eyeteeth to catch him. We need something to cheer up the men and stop this bad press.”

The day was terribly hot, the earth gray and bare. Not a cloud in the sky offered the prospect of rain. Our corn buying went poorly. In the pueblo of Rubio, Lieutenant Patton began asking questions as to the whereabouts of Cárdenas. He didn’t expect truthful answers; he told me later that he was only trying to interpret the language of evasiveness. Each time he asked if the Villistas had returned to San Miguelito, the
campesinos
lowered their eyes before they said, as expected, “Who knows, señor?”

“Let’s go there anyway,” Patton said. “I have a hunch. Now listen, boys—” He gathered us around him. “I was at this ranch just a week ago. It’s a big place built around a courtyard. There are only two ways to get out. Through the main gate facing east, or from the windows on the western wall. The gate’s most probable, if they want to cut and run toward the mountains like they did the last time. We’ll drive right up in the three automobiles. We’ll stay in them and surround the house.”

“Stay in the cars, sir?” said the corporal.

“That’s correct. Shoot from them if we have to.”

“Sir, we’re infantry. We don’t shoot from moving cars.”

“Then we’ll try something new,” Patton said. “Call it a motorized action.”

“Never been done before,” the corporal said fatuously.

But Patton calmly issued his orders for the deployment of the vehicles.

Our scout drove the lead Dodge, carrying Patton, three soldiers and myself. As we topped the rise about a quarter mile from the hacienda, Patton ordered the driver to step on the gas. With dust boiling out behind us, we raced across the desert. Three old men and a boy were skinning a cow just inside the front gate. When the boy saw us, he bolted for the house.

A minute later, just as we reached the gate, three armed horsemen dashed out. Patton yelled, “Halt!” He drew his pistol, but the horsemen charged by toward the north face of the hacienda, where they almost collided with the second Dodge full of our soldiers. The horsemen wheeled and began firing at us. One bullet ricocheted off the hood. Patton leveled his pistol and shot three times. He told me later that it was the first human being he had ever shot at.

“Out of the cars!” he shrieked. “We’ve got ‘em!”

I sprinted with him around the house. I had no intention of killing anyone, but I was caught in the surge. Other Mexicans were breaking free now, and our men fired at will, dropping two. Patton shot first at the horses to prevent escape, then coolly took aim at the fallen rider as he scrambled to his feet. All this time, the three old men continued to skin the cow.

One of the riders, a wiry fellow who had lost his sombrero, ran quickly toward the desert. When he was about twenty yards from us, Patton cried out in a quivering voice: “Stop or I’ll fire!” The man’s stride broke. He wheeled round, trying to raise his rifle.

Spreadlegged, face mottled with excitement, Patton leveled his pistol and fired twice. The man stumbled forward, then fell to his knees as if he were praying. As we approached him he lifted a hand in apparent token of surrender. The dark eyes in his poxed face looked stunned and confused. He tried to raise his pistol, but before he could fire he pitched forward in the dust.

When the fight was over we had killed three men; perhaps ten others had escaped. Patton showed the bodies of the three dead Mexicans to the old men who had been skinning the cow.

“This one is Julio Cárdenas. Isn’t that so?”

He pointed with the tip of his saber to the body of the pockmarked man he had shot. He had been struck twice in the chest with .45-caliber bullets and was muddied with blood. The men finally nodded.

“By God, I knew it!”

We lashed the three dead men to the hoods of the cars and drove back to camp. In one room of the house Lieutenant Patton had found a silver saddle, which the old men, voluble enough now that they realized they were in no danger, claimed to be the property of Cárdenas. The lieutenant reported the action to General Pershing and asked permission to keep the saddle as a souvenir. Pershing agreed, although his lips curled with distaste when he saw the bodies slung across the hoods of the cars, like bagged deer.

A
New York Times
reporter named Elser interviewed the lieutenant late that afternoon, but it was not until two weeks later that we read the newspapers. Elser called the incident “one of the prettiest fights of the campaign” and labeled the action a new type of combat for the American army. Patton and his men had fought from automobiles, leaping directly from them to open fire. It was ironic, Elser pointed out, that a dedicated cavalryman should be the first to employ a moving motor vehicle in an attack—he may have struck a blow to make the horse obsolete in modern warfare. When he read this, Patton frowned.

“I hate to admit it,” he said, “but the man’s not entirely wrong. Depends on the terrain. Mobility is everything. I’ve got a lot of new ideas. If only they’d listen to me.”

Now he is a hero, and for him at least the campaign has been a success. He was promoted to first lieutenant.

Then came our worst defeat, at Carrizal, when Captain Boyd and the Negro troops of the Tenth Cavalry made a foolhardy attack against four hundred entrenched Carranzista troops armed with machine guns. We suffered twelve dead, including Boyd, and twenty-three men were taken prisoner. I remembered Boyd well—he was the officer who had greeted me when I crossed the border after escaping from Torreón. It was never quite clear why he had attacked the government troops, although there must have been some grave provocation, but the War Department was furious. General Funston, Pershing’s superior, accused him of “a terrible blunder.” That action effectively ended the campaign. From then on, after being forbidden by Treviño to venture in any direction but north, we sat in Casas Grandes and prayed for rain, and the newspapers began referring to our ten-thousand-man army as “Pershing’s Punitive Patrol.”

But one hot morning, as Lieutenant Patton was writing a letter to his wife and I was busy hanging his shirts out to dry on a line we had rigged between the tent and a mesquite tree, Tom Mix arrived in the camp at Casas Grandes.

“Good to see you, Mix,” the lieutenant said cheerily. “Where have you been? I’ve got a letter for you.”

The letter had arrived some weeks ago in the mailbag from Texas. It was in a feminine handwriting, and while our young spy sat on a cot and read it, I studied him. He had grown older since I first met him in the stockyards of Torreón. That mask of innocence had faded from his windburned face, but his eyes were clear and he seemed more at ease, more sure of himself—more of a man now than a youth. If I had had no reason to hate him, if he had not loaded the pistols that had killed my brother, I might have found him an appealing man. He had a certain wry and pleasing expression; yet underneath it one sensed a lack of frivolity, a tempered metal that no longer bent so easily.

Mix read the letter twice, smiled wistfully, then tucked it in the back pocket of his Levi’s.

“Well, Lieutenant, thanks. Now, what did you ask me?”

“Where have you been?”

Parral, said Mix, recuperating in the home of a
campesino.
In the retreat he had fallen off his horse, injuring his shoulder again.

“Where’s Pancho Villa gone to?”

“West of here, in the high sierra. You can get there through a pass called the Púlpito. He’s gone to Sonora to meet General Cervantes.”

“How do you know?”

“I bumped into some Villista officers on my way up here. There’s one named Colonel Cárdenas—he was up at Hot Wells, driving the wagon. I met up with him in Buenaventura. He’s headed west now with a hundred men to join up with Villa.”

The lieutenant looked only momentarily startled; then he recovered himself. “You met Julio Cárdenas?”

“That’s right.”

“How long ago?”

“Maybe four or five days.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

“I know him well.”

For a minute Patton looked away, into the glare of the blue sky, obviously trying to control his emotions. He clacked the knuckles of both hands.

“I see. Look here, Mix, if I can persuade Pershing to send a regiment of cavalry through this pass into Sonora, will you go along with us? We’ll need a good scout. And you’re the only man who can show us where Villa might be.”

“I can join up with you on the other side of the Pulpito. But I can’t start out with you. I’ve got to ride up to Ascensión … on something personal.”

“Let me talk to General Pershing,” the lieutenant said coolly. “Let’s see what he thinks. You stick around my tent until I get back. Come along, Bosques.”

Mix agreed to do that, and I strode off with Lieutenant Patton toward the general’s headquarters in his big tent on the edge of town. Patton looked grim. I wondered why he hadn’t arrested Mix on the spot. He said nothing, and neither did I; the situation was all too clear.

Pershing was with two other officers, but Patton asked to speak to him alone. The general put on his campaign hat to shield his head from the sun, and we stepped outside the tent. Patton began to sneeze, and it was only after a series of hard blasts and half a minute of honking into his handkerchief that he was able to get a grip on himself and speak coherently. His face was flushed, and his voice was as high-pitched as ever I had heard it.

“Sir, that fellow Mix is in the camp. I’ve just talked to him. He’s not a spy for us at all. He’s still working for Pancho Villa. I take full responsibility.”

Pershing frowned out of his lean face. “What the hell are you telling me, George?”

The lieutenant repeated most of our conversation with Mix, including his claim to have spoken to the dead Julio Cárdenas five days ago. “Bosques heard every word. Mix has been leading us up the garden path. He’s a goddam traitor! To his flag and his country! Despicable sonofabitch!” Patton’s eyes glittered. “Villa was never in Parral. Or if he was, Mix tried to decoy Major Tompkins out of there. And then he rode back to warn Villa. The whole while our men were hunting at La Bufa and El Sauz, he was laughing at us.”

“That’s a nice mess,” said Pershing. He was angry, but he controlled it well. “Where is this fellow now?”

“Back at my tent.”

“You didn’t place him under guard?’’

“He still thinks we trust him. And I have a plan, sir. I think I can locate Pancho Villa.”

“Your plans with this damned cowboy haven’t panned out too well so far. How the hell do you propose to find Villa?”

“Mix will lead us to him.”

Pershing looked exasperated. “You just said he’s still working for the man.”

“I don’t mean voluntarily. I think they’re in touch. Mix said he was headed up to Ascensión, which may be true or false. But if I can follow him, sir, I may get lucky.”

Pershing considered for a while, then shook his head. “He’s bound to spot you. You can’t hide a troop of cavalry, much less three automobiles. Go back and arrest him.”

Patton straightened his shoulders. “I didn’t mean a whole troop of cavalry. Just a few men under my command. Once we know where Villa is, I can send a scout back for the troop. I’ll tell Mix that you’re going to take a regiment west through this pass into Sonora, and he can meet us later—that was his idea. He’ll believe me. Then when he leaves camp, I’ll follow him. There’s hardly anything at risk.” Patton thrust out his jaw. “Sir, I have to do something to make up for my stupidity. Give me that chance.”