How Few Remain (67 page)

“My infantry Regulars aren’t, no, sir,” Welton replied, which made Custer like it even less. Then the infantry officer went on, “But the First Montana Volunteer Cavalry are skirmishing with the limeys—that’s the Unauthorized Regiment, you know.”

“Volunteer cavalry?” Custer said scornfully—he didn’t know, and had no way of knowing.
“Unauthorized
volunteer cavalry?”

“They’re good men, sir—as good as a lot of the troopers you have,” Welton said. Custer didn’t believe that last for a minute, but, if the commander of the Seventh Infantry thought it was true, they might prove better than their name suggested. Welton next addressed that very point: “They started calling themselves the Unauthorized Regiment because they had a devil of a time getting into U.S. service after their colonel recruited them. They still wear the name with pride—a finger in the eye of the War Department, you might say.”

“All right, Colonel—for the time being, I have to take your word about such things, not having seen them myself.” Custer’s tone remained dismissive.

Henry Welton held up a warning hand. “Sir, they truly are a fine-looking unit. And their colonel, the fellow who recruited them and organized them, is a lad to watch out for. One way or another, you mark my words, he
will
make the world notice him.”

“Their colonel—a lad?” Custer wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “Theodore Roosevelt is twenty-two … though he will be twenty-three soon.” Welton spoke with a certain somber relish. “By Godfrey!” Custer exploded.

“That’s right, one of those.” Welton nodded. “He will run rings around any three ordinary men you could name. He’s run rings around me more than once, I’ll tell you that. Do you know what he puts me in mind of? He puts me in mind of you, sir, the day you got yourself onto General McClellan’s staff. Do you remember?”

“I’m not likely to forget,” Custer said with a smile.

Welton went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “There we were, on the banks of the Chickahominy, and Little Mac wondered how deep it was. And what did you do? You spurred your horse into the river, got to the other side—God knows how, because it wasn’t shallow—and then came back across and said,
‘That’s
how deep it is, General.’ Roosevelt would have done the same thing there. I can’t think of anyone else I’ve ever seen who would.”

“Hmm.” Custer wasn’t sure he liked that; he preferred to think of his headlong bravado as unique. “Well, we shall see. A man who goes hard at the foe will find a place for himself, sure enough.”

“Yes, sir.” Welton looked around. “Your regiment is shaping with remarkable speed. Won’t be long before you’re ready to move out, will it?”

“We’re
not Volunteers, unauthorized or otherwise,” Custer said with more than a hint of smugness. “By God, it will be good to get out in the clean air on a horse’s back, instead of sitting cooped up in a rolling box breathing the fumes of other men’s tobacco until it was as if I were doing the smoking myself.”

Welton chuckled. “Well, then, sir, I shan’t offer you a cigar, as I was about to.” He got one out, lighted it, and puffed up a happy cloud of smoke.

“Never took the habit,” Custer said, “though I really am thinking of starting now, having made such a good beginning at it.”

“Here’s a habit I know you have.” Henry Welton took a flask off his belt. It gurgled suggestively.

But Custer shook his head again. “I was a man who’d raise Hades, sure enough. But I haven’t touched spirits and I haven’t cursed—much—since I married Libbie right after the War of Secession.”

“Well, well,” Welton said. “Should I congratulate you or commiserate with you?”

“One of those should do it,” Custer answered. “But I’ll tell you this, Henry—if we don’t lick the British, we may as well get drunk, because the whole country will be up the smokestack.” Henry Welton solemnly nodded.

    Jeb Stuart took off his hat and fanned himself with it. “El Paso was hot,” he said to Major Horatio Sellers. “Cananea’s hotter. Don’t know whether I’d have believed that if someone told it to me last spring, but it’s so.”

His aide-de-camp nodded rueful agreement. With his chunky build, the heat told harder on him. When he spoke, he spoke of a different sort of warmth: “Latest wagon train from El Paso is overdue, too. If the Yankees hit us now, they could make things hot. We still haven’t caught up with all the munitions we used against them in New Mexico Territory.”

“I sent a wire off yesterday, asking where the wagons were,” Stuart said. “Haven’t had an answer yet. Maybe the line’s down again; heaven knows how it stays up, strung from cactus to fence post the way it is. Maybe a cow tripped over a wire. And maybe the Yankees are up to something farther east. If I don’t hear anything from El Paso by this time tomorrow, I’m going to send out a troop of cavalry and see what’s up.”

“Railroad line might be broken east of El Paso, too,” Sellers said. “It’s not as if we haven’t worried about that.”

“No, it’s not.” Stuart kicked up dust as he paced along Cananea’s main street, which would scarcely have made an alley in a proper town, a town that had some life to it. “El Paso’s on the end of a long supply line from the rest of the CSA, and we’re on the end of a long supply line from El Paso. I suppose I ought to get down on my knees and thank God our ammunition has come in as well as it has.”

“Embarrassing to try and fight a battle without it,” agreed Major Sellers, who had a sardonic cast of mind. “We almost found that out, to our cost, at Tombstone. If the Yankees had had a couple of companies of Regulars there along with the Tombstone Rangers, we might have found ourselves biting down hard on a cherry pit.”

“That’s so.” Of itself, Stuart’s tongue ran over a broken tooth on the left side of his lower jaw. He hadn’t done it on a cherry pit,
but on a bit of chicken bone. The comparison struck a nerve even so. He went on, “We’ve taught the Yankees a lesson, though. Since we licked them in that last fight, they haven’t even tried moving soldiers into the stretch of their own country we overran, let alone down into Sonora.”

But counting on the United States to stay quiet was a mistake, as Stuart learned that afternoon when a half-dead Confederate cavalry trooper rode a foundering horse into Cananea. A bucket of water poured over his head, another poured down him, and a tumbler of
mescal
poured after it did wonders to revive the soldier. “Drench me again,” he said, whether seeking more water on him or more
mescal
in him Stuart did not know.

“What news?” the commander of the Trans-Mississippi demanded.

“Sir, the damnyankees bushwhacked our wagon train, maybe twenty miles west of this Janos place,” the trooper answered. “Wasn’t like they came ridin’ down on us, neither. They was waitin’ there, right in the road, like they got there a while ago and they was a-fixin’ to stay.”

“Oh, they were, were they?” Stuart’s eyes lit up. “That’s what they think. How many men have they?”

“Looked like a couple troops of cavalry, mebbe some infantry with ’em,” the soldier answered. “I was ridin’ rear guard, but I reckoned you needed to know what they was up to worse’n the folks back in El Paso, so I went wide around the ambuscade and managed to get on by them bastards without ’em spottin’ me. They was too busy foragin’ ’mongst the wagons to pay much heed to one rider off on his lonesome. You reckon my horse’ll live, sir? That’s powerful dry country I rode him over, and I didn’t do much in the way of stoppin’, you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Stuart said. “I don’t know about your horse.” He did know about foraging in a captured wagon train; he’d done plenty of that during the War of Secession. He also knew the trooper was right about how dry the land between Cananea and Janos was. If he galloped out at the head of a column of horsemen, he’d get to the Yankees a day and a half later with all the mounts at death’s door, as this trooper’s was now. The U.S. cavalrymen would ride rings around him.

If he galloped out at the head of a column of horsemen …

He hunted up Colonel Calhoun Ruggles, commander of the Fifth Cavalry, and outlined his difficulty. “Oh, yes, sir, we can do
that,” Colonel Ruggles said confidently. “Those Yankee sons of bitches won’t reckon we can drop on ’em anywhere near so quick as we’ll do it.”

“That’s what I hoped I’d hear you say,” Stuart answered. “Get your regiment in order, Colonel; we leave as soon as may be.”

Colonel Ruggles erected one of his bushy eyebrows like a signal flag. “‘We,’ sir?” he asked. “Are you certain?”

“Good heavens, yes,” Stuart answered. “Did you think I’d miss the chance to ride with the Fifth Camelry if it ever came up? Or do you deny that a threat to our supply line is business important enough to demand the attention of the army commander in person?”

“No, sir, and no, sir, again. It’s only that—” Ruggles’ eyes took on a wicked gleam. “It’s only that, if you ride a camel the way you dance a quadrille,
sir
, you’ll be yanking cactus spines out of your backside with pliers before we’ve made a mile. Meaning no disrespect, of course.”

“Oh, of course. Heaven forbid you should mean disrespect,” Stuart said. Both officers laughed. Stuart went on, “I have been aboard the mangy critters your regiment fancies, Colonel, but I’ve never seen them in this kind of action, striking across the desert from a distance horses can’t hope to match.”

“That’s what they’re for, sir,” Ruggles said. “We’ve hit the Comanches a few licks over the years that they never expected to get, after they raided west Texas from out of New Mexico. And now we can hit the Yankees who paid ’em to do it. This’ll be purely a pleasure, sir. We’ll be ready to ride in an hour at the outside.”

He proved as good as his word. Stuart spent most of that hour convincing Major Horatio Sellers that he wasn’t just indulging himself by riding off with the Fifth Camelry. He was indulging himself, and he knew it. But a U.S. force athwart his supply line was serious business, too. “This is what we were talking about before the trooper rode in, if you’ll recollect,” he said. After he’d said it several times, Major Sellers, both outranked and out-argued, threw his hands in the air and gave up.

Despite what Stuart had said to Colonel Ruggles, he hadn’t ridden a camel in several years. He quickly discovered several things he’d forgotten: the rank smell of the beast, the strange feel of the saddle under him and the even stranger grip his legs had on
the animal, and how high up he was when it reluctantly rose after reluctantly kneeling to let him mount.

Its gait was strange, too, when it set out east across the desert with the rest of the Fifth Confederate Cavalry. It had much more side-to-side sway than a good, honest horse did. Stuart began to suspect they called camels ships of the desert not only because they could travel long distances on little water but also because a man might easily get seasick atop one.

Despite that sway, in another way the camel’s trot was smoother than a horse’s. Along with the hard hooves on the ends of its toes, it also struck the ground with padded feet. No jolts flowed up its legs to him. Its strides were slow, but they were so much longer than a horse’s that Stuart found himself astonished when he realized how quickly the barren countryside was flowing past to his left and right.

And, while the countryside might have seemed barren to him, the camels reckoned it flowing with milk and honey—or at least with cacti and thorn bushes, which they found an adequate substitute. Whenever Colonel Ruggles halted the regiment to let men and animals rest, the camels would forage. Thorns seemed to bother them not in the least. Some of the cacti they bit into dripped with juice, so they were getting something in the way of water to go along with their food.

The sun dropped toward the horizon behind the Fifth Camelry. Colonel Ruggles called out to Stuart: “I presume we go on through the night, sir?”

“I should say so.” Stuart pointed ahead, where a fat, nearly full moon hung low in the southeast. “That’ll light our way. We won’t go so fast as we would in daylight, but we’ll get some good work done—and we’ve done amazingly good work so far, if anyone wants to know. We should come down on the Yankees before noon tomorrow, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’d best believe it, sir,” Ruggles answered. “When you want to get somewhere a long way away in a hurry, camels are the best thing this side of a railroad.”

They were also the noisiest things this side of a railroad. They moaned and complained when they started up, they moaned and complained when they stopped, and they moaned and complained in between times to keep from getting bored. Stuart began to see why it took a special sort of trooper to want to have anything to
do with them: they were easier to hate than to love. But how their long strides ate up the ground!

On through the night the Fifth Camelry rode. Maybe some of the troopers, long used to their beasts, were able to sleep in the saddle. By the time the sun turned the eastern horizon gray and the moon sank behind Stuart in the west, he was yawning, but he and the rest of the men kept on. As dawn stretched the distance a man could see, Colonel Ruggles sent scouts out ahead of the main body of the regiment to search out the Yankee position.

They found the U.S. force a little past nine o’clock, better than an hour earlier than Stuart would have expected. “Did the damnyankees spy you?” he asked.

“Don’t reckon so, sir,” one of the scouts answered, and the rest nodded.

Stuart glanced over to Ruggles. “We outnumber ’em. If we spread out and hit ’em from three sides at once, the way the whole army did with the Yanks at Tombstone, they shouldn’t be able to stand against us.”

“Expect you’re right, sir,” Ruggles said. “I wouldn’t say this if we were riding horses, but I think we ought to go in mounted. The stink of camels panics horses that aren’t used to them—you’ll have seen that—and the sight of them ought to panic Yankees who never set eyes on the like before.”

“Good,” Stuart said. “We’ll do it.”

He swung north with three troops from the regiment. Firing had already broken out from the west when his men came into sight of the Yankee position. It was a roadblock with an encampment beyond it, fine for ambushing a supply column but not intended to hold against a serious assault