How Few Remain (56 page)

“Pocahontas, Arkansas?” Clay Herndon asked in tones that suggested he hoped Sam was kidding but didn’t really believe it.

And Sam wasn’t. He waved the telegram to prove it. “In case you’re wondering, Pocahontas is almost halfway from the border down toward the vital metropolis of Jonesboro,” he said solemnly. “I looked it up. At first I thought it was only a flyspeck on the map, but I have to admit that further inspection proved me wrong. Hallelujah, I must say; no doubt the shock waves of the seizure are reverberating through Richmond even as I speak.”

“Pocahontas, Arkansas?” Herndon repeated. Sam nodded. “Ruffles and flourishes?” the reporter asked. Clemens handed him the wire. He read it, grimaced, and handed it back. “Ruffles and flourishes, sure enough. Good God Almighty, we shouldn’t cackle that loud if we ever do take Louisville.”

“You can’t cackle over the egg you didn’t lay,” Clemens pointed out. “We haven’t got Louisville, but Pocahontas, Arkansas, by thunder, is
ours.”
He clapped his hands together, once, twice, three times.

“Sam …” Herndon’s voice was plaintive. “Why do we have such a pack of confounded dunderheads running this country?”

“My theory used to be that we get the government we deserve,” Sam said. “Bad as we are, though, I don’t think we’re
that
bad. Right now, I’m taking a long look at the notion that God hates us.” He glanced up at his friend. “I know somebody who’s going to hate you if you don’t set your posteriors in a chair and get some work done.” To soften that, he added, “And I’d better do the same.” Returning his attention to Edgar Leary’s story, he killed seven adjectives at one blow.

    A brisk crackle of gunfire came from the northern outskirts of Tombstone, New Mexico. Major Horatio Sellers turned to Jeb Stuart and said, “You were right, sir. They are going to try and hold the place. I didn’t reckon they’d be such fools.”

“I think we rolled most of the real Yankee soldiers back toward Tucson—the ones we didn’t capture at Contention City, I mean,”
Stuart answered. “What we’ve got left in these parts is mostly Tombstone Rangers and the like, unless I miss my guess. They’ll be fighting for their homes here.”

“And they haven’t got the brains God gave a camel,” Sellers said, with which Stuart could not disagree, either. His aide-decamp rubbed his hands together in high good cheer. “They’ll pay for it.”

Boom!
A roar louder than a dozen ordinary rifle shots and a large cloud of smoke rising from the graveyard north of Tombstone declared that the U.S. defenders had found a cannon somewhere. Stuart stayed unperturbed. “I hope to heaven we know better by now than to pack ourselves together nice and tight for a field gun to mow us down.” His smile was almost found. “Those smoothbore Napoleons did a good business during the last war, but we’ve come a long way since.”

His own field artillery, posted on the hills that led up to the Dragoon Mountains north and east of town, consisted of modern rifled guns that not only outranged the Tombstone Yankees’ obsolete piece but were more accurate as well. No sooner than the Napoleon revealed its position, shells started falling around it. It fired a couple of more times, its cannonballs kicking up dust as they skipped along, then fell silent.

“So much for that,” Horatio Sellers said with a chuckle.

A couple of minutes later, though, the old-fashioned muzzle-loader came back to life. “We must have knocked out their number-one crew,” Stuart guessed, “and sent them scrambling around for replacements. They’ve got some brave men serving that gun.”

“Much good may it do them.” Sellers grunted. “They likely never did have a whole lot of men with much notion of what to do with a cannon. If you’re right, sir, and their best gun crew’s down, they won’t be able to hit a blamed thing now, not without fool luck they won’t.”

“That makes sense to me,” Jeb Stuart agreed. “We don’t want ’em to get lucky, though.” He turned to Chappo, who, along with Geronimo, was watching the fight for Tombstone alongside the Confederate commander. “Will you ask your father if he can slide some Apaches forward and pick off the Yankees who are tending to their gun?”

“Yes, I will do that.” Chappo spoke to Geronimo in their own language. Young man and old gestured as they spoke back and
forth. The Apaches used their hands as expressively as Frenchmen when they talked. Chappo returned to English. “My father says he will gladly do this. He wants to punish the white men of Tombstone, to hurt them for all the times they have hurt us. If we take this place together, he will burn it.”

Stuart looked down at Tombstone’s wooden buildings, baking under the desert sun and no doubt tinder-dry. “If we take this place, it’s going to burn whether he burns it or not, I reckon.”

Even though he watched with a telescope, he could not spy any of the Apaches moving up toward the Napoleon the Tombstone volunteers were still firing. He wondered whether Geronimo had ordered them forward. The ground beyond the graveyard offered more cover than a billiard table, but not much. He wouldn’t have cared to send his own men up to try to knock the gunners out of action.

That’s why we’re allied with the Apaches
, the cold, calculating part of his mind said.
Let them get hurt doing the nasty little jobs like that
.

He glanced over at Geronimo. The Indian—medicine man, was the closest term Stuart could find for his position—was watching litter-bearers carrying wounded Confederate soldiers back toward the tents where the surgeons plied their grisly trade. When Geronimo felt Stuart’s eye on him, the old Indian quickly moved his head and looked in a different direction.

He didn’t do it quite quickly enough. I
will be damned
, Stuart thought. I
know just what that dried-up devil of a redskin is thinking, and nobody will ever make me believe I don’t. He’s thinking, sure as hell he’s thinking
, That’s why we’re allied with the Confederates. Let them get hurt doing the nasty big jobs like that.
To hell with me if he’s not
.

Stuart whistled “Dixie” between his teeth. Weeks of travel with Geronimo and the other Apache leaders had taught him they were more than the unsophisticated savages the dime novels made them out to be. They were, in fact, very sophisticated savages indeed. Not till that moment, though, had Stuart paused to wonder who was using whom to the greater degree.

Now Geronimo looked over toward him. The Apache seemed to realize Stuart had peered into his thoughts. He nodded to the white man, a small, tightly controlled movement of his head. Stuart nodded back. The two of them might have been the two
sides of a mirror, each reflecting the other’s concerns and each surprising the other when he realized it.

All at once, Stuart noticed the Napoleon had fallen silent again. Now Geronimo looked his way without trying to be furtive about it. The Apache raised his Tredegar to his shoulder and mimed taking aim. Stuart nodded to show he understood and doffed his hat for a moment in salute to the Apache warriors’ skill. Geronimo’s answering smile showed only a couple of teeth.

Losing their cannoneers once more dismayed Tombstone’s defenders. They fell back from the graveyard into the town. Had Stuart commanded them, he would have had them hold out among Tombstone’s tombstones as long as they could; when they retreated, the Confederates and Apaches promptly seized the high ground.

The Confederate field guns started hammering away at Tombstone itself. When shells struck bare ground, smoke and dirt leapt skyward. When a shell hit a building, it was as if a spoiled child kicked a dollhouse. Timbers flew every which way. No doubt glass did, too, though Stuart could not see that even with his telescope. But he knew what flying bits of glass could do to a man’s body, having been educated in the War of Secession.

“Do we wait for fire to do our work for us?” Major Sellers asked. A couple of thin threads of smoke were already rising into the sky.

“No, we’ll press it a bit,” Stuart replied. “Even in fire, the damnyankees can hold out for a long time down there, and it wouldn’t burn them all out. Besides, if we take the town instead of burning it, we also get to forage to our hearts’ content.”

“Yes, sir,” his aide-de-camp said enthusiastically. The Confederate army in New Mexico Territory operated on the end of an enormously long supply line. Thanks to their victories, Stuart’s troopers had plenty of food for themselves and fodder for their animals. They had enough powder and munitions for this fight, too. Looking ahead to the next one, Stuart didn’t like the picture he saw.

Down from the hills toward Tombstone came the dismounted Confederate cavalrymen, four going forward for every one who stayed behind to hold horses. Down from the hills, too, came the Apaches. Stuart was sure that was so although, again, he could see next to no sign of the Indians.

After a bit, he watched Geronimo instead of trying to spot redskinned wills-o’-the-wisp. The Indian could plainly tell where his braves were and what they were up to, even if Stuart’s eyes could not find them. The Apaches were convinced Geronimo had occult powers. Watching him watch men he could not possibly have seen halfway convinced Stuart they were right.

The volunteers in Tombstone kept on putting up a brave fight. As they had been in the valley south of Tucson, the U.S. forces were caught in a box with opponents coming at them from three sides at once. Here, though, they had good cover. They also had no good line of retreat from Tombstone, which made them likelier to stand where they were. Whenever Confederates or Indians pushed them, they drove off their foes with an impressive volume of fire from their Winchesters.

But then more and more of the saloons and gambling halls and sporting houses—which seemed to make up a large portion of Tombstone’s buildings—on the northern edge of town caught fire. The flames forced the defenders out of those buildings and farther back into Tombstone. The smoke from them also kept the Tombstone Rangers from shooting as accurately as they had been doing. Confederates and Apaches began dashing between flaming false fronts and into Tombstone. As Stuart rode closer to the mining town, the cheers of his men and the Indians’ war cries drowned the shouts of dismay from the U.S. Volunteers.

Major Horatio Sellers rode alongside him. “Sir, will you send in a man under flag of truce to give the Yankees a chance to surrender?”

Geronimo and Chappo were also riding forward with the Confederate commander. Before Stuart could answer, Chappo spoke urgently to his father in the Apache language. Geronimo answered with similar urgency and greater excitement. Chappo returned to English: “Do not give them a chance to give up. They have done us too many harms to have a chance to give up.”

Sure as the devil, the Apaches were using the Confederates to pay back their own enemies. But then Major Sellers said, “It’s not as if they were Regular Army men, sir, true enough. Probably better than half of them are gamblers or road agents or riffraff of some kind or another.”

The spectacle of his aide-de-camp agreeing with Geronimo instead of trying to find a persuasive excuse to massacre him bemused Stuart. It also helped him make up his mind. “If the
Tombstone Rangers want to surrender, they can send a man to us. I won’t make it easy for them.”

Chappo translated that for Geronimo. His father grunted, spoke, gestured, spoke again. Chappo didn’t turn his response back into English. From the old Indian’s tone and expression, though, Jeb Stuart thought he could make a good guess about what it meant: something to the effect of,
Oh, all right. I’d sooner every one of them bit the dust, but if they give up, what can you do?

A dirty-faced Confederate came running back to Stuart. “Sir, the damnyankees put a couple of sharpshooters up in that church steeple”—he pointed back through drifted smoke toward what was plainly the tallest structure in Tombstone—”and they’ve done hit a bunch of our boys.”

“I can’t knock ’em out by myself, Corporal,” Stuart answered. He looked back to sec where the field guns were. A couple of them had already taken up positions in the graveyard, not far from where the Napoleon had stood. “Go tell them. They’ll take care of it.”

The range was short; the gunners were barely out of effective Winchester range from the outskirts of Tombstone, and might have come under severe fire from U.S. Army Springfields. Stuart watched shells fall around the church. Then one gun crew made a pretty good shot and exploded their shell against the topmost part of the steeple. No further reports of Yankee sharpshooters there came to Stuart’s ears.

That church, he found when he rode into town, was at the corner of Third and Safford. The Tombstone Rangers made a final stand a block south of it, at the adobe Wells Fargo office at Third and Fremont and the corral across the street from it, whose fences they’d reinforced with planks and stones and bricks and whatever else they could find. The OK Corral was a target artillerists dreamt of. After a couple of salvos turned the place into a slaughterhouse, the defenders raised a white flag and threw down their guns, and the fighting stopped.

Geronimo, seeing the men who had so tormented the Apaches now in his allies’ hands, wanted to change his mind and dispose of them on the spot. “No,” Stuart told him through Chappo. “We don’t massacre men in cold blood.”

“What will you do with them?” the medicine man asked.

“Send them down to Hermosillo, along with the rest of the U.S. soldiers we’ve captured,” Stuart answered. Geronimo sighed. “It is not enough.”

“It will have to do,” Stuart told him. “We haven’t done too badly here, when you think about it. We’ve cleared U.S. forces from a big stretch of southwestern New Mexico Territory, and we did it without getting badly hurt at all.”

“Much of what you did, you did because we helped you,” Geronimo replied through Chappo. “We should have some reward.”

He could not force the issue; he had not the men for that. Stuart said, “You do have a reward. Here is all this land with no Yankee soldiers on it. Here are your braves with the fine rifles they have from us. How can you complain?”

“It is not enough,” Geronimo repeated. He said nothing more after that. Stuart resolved to keep a close eye on him and his followers.