How Few Remain (89 page)

The commander of the Fifth Confederate Cavalry looked back over his shoulder. “Sir, I honest to God thought we’d run ’em the way hounds run a coon. They made fools out of me and my troopers, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Any men who can make fools out of my troopers—well, they’re men in my book.”

“They made fools of the Yankees for a lot of years,” Stuart said, doing his best to encourage Ruggles after tearing him down. “They helped us make fools of the Yankees, too, remember. Maybe they decided it was our turn now.”

Colonel Ruggles shook his head. “That’s not it, or not all of it, anyway. After they burned Cananea, they knew damn well we couldn’t let them get by with it, and so they lit out for the mountains.” His head went this way and that, too, with no sign whatever that he was enjoying the scenery. “And now we’re supposed to dig them out. Rrr.” The noise he made was very unhappy.

From behind Stuart, Major Horatio Sellers spoke up: “There is one good thing about this whole business.”

“What? About wandering through the mountains for more than a month, with damn near the only times the Apaches show themselves the times when they bushwhack some of our scouts?” Stuart exclaimed. Calhoun Ruggles also shook his head in disbelief.

But, sure enough, Sellers came up with one, saying, “If we do flush the Apaches out of their hiding places here, there’s not a chance they’ll ever come up with new ones, because there can’t be any better in the whole wide world.”

“By God, Major, you’re right about that,” Ruggles said. Stuart found himself nodding, too. In an odd sort of way, Sellers’ words offered consolation. The aide-de-camp was right: ground just didn’t come any worse than this.

Slowly, tortuously, the troopers descended into a valley where they’d camp for the night. Stuart did not have nearly so big a force with him as had set out from Cananea in pursuit of the Apaches. For one thing, supplying a large force in this cut-up land was impossible. For another, guarding the supplies that did come in required a lot of soldiers. Some of those supplies, inadequately guarded, were now in the Apaches’ hands.

Something small and bright and colorful as a jewel hovered in front of Stuart for a moment. It stared at him for a moment out of beady black eyes, then shot off impossibly fast at an equally impossibly angle.

“Hummingbird!” he said, startled. He’d seen hummingbirds back in Virginia, of course, the familiar ruby-throats; El Paso had others, occasionally glimpsed as they buzzed from flower to flower like oversized bees. But he’d never seen one with a purple crown and brilliant green throat before. He wondered what other strange creatures the mountains harbored.

He must have said that aloud, for Major Sellers grunted laughter. “Well, there’s the Apaches, for starters,” he said. He took the saddle off his horse and set it down on a round brown rock, then
started currying the animal. As with any good trooper, his horse came first.

A scout came up to Stuart. “Sir,” he said, “there’s a trail up ahead, looks like one the Apaches used once upon a time, anyway. Got Mexican plunder all along it: dresses, saddles, flour sacks, things like that. None of it’s what you’d call fresh, though. Reckon they came that way some other time when they was raidin’ through these parts. Might mean we’re gettin’ closer to ’em, though.”

“So it might.” Stuart scanned the peaks ahead. The sun still shone on some of them, though shadow filled the valley. Somewhere up there, along those ridge lines, Apaches were spying on his encampment, even if he had not the slightest hope of spotting them. Almost to a man, the Indians had sharp eyes. They also had, and knew how to use, telescopes looted from the U.S. Army. They were liable to know what he was up to better than he did himself.

That thought had hardly crossed Stuart’s mind before Horatio Sellers burst out in a storm of angry curses. Stuart spun around. “What’s the matter, Major?” he asked.

“My blasted saddle’s disappeared,” Sellers answered. “I set the stupid thing on a rock right there”—he pointed—”and now it’s gone.”

Gone it was. “You
did
put it there,” Stuart said. “I saw you do it. It isn’t there now.” That was pointing out the obvious.

“The son of a bitch goddamn well didn’t up and walk off by itself,” Sellers said. “If I find the bastard who lifted it, I’ll make him sorry he was ever born.” He glared around at the amused soldiers who were watching and listening to him. Stuart would have suspected—Stuart did suspect—them, too. The next soldier who didn’t relish a practical joke on a superior would be the first.

One of the men pointed toward a patch of waist-high scrub oak near the edge of the light the campfire cast. “Sir, ain’t that your gear?”

Sellers’ gaze followed the trooper’s outthrust finger. “It is, by Jesus!” he rumbled. “How in the damnation did it get way the hell over there?” He rounded on the nearby cavalrymen. “All right, ‘fess up. Which one of you blackguards went and shifted it?”

Instead of confessing, the soldiers denied everything, each more vehemently than the last. Stuart had heard a great many soldiers tell a great many lies in his day. As with anything else, some
were good, some bad, some indifferent. Either these men were all inspired liars, or—”Major, I think they may perhaps be telling you the truth.”

“Yes, sir!” Major Sellers came to attention stiff as rigor mortis: respect exaggerated to the point of parody. He performed a precise about-face and stomped over to the saddle. When he picked it up, he let out an oath that was startled rather than furious: “Son of a bitch! Did you see that?”

Several people, Stuart included, said, “No.” Most of them added “What was it?” or words to that effect.

“An armadillo.” Sellers stood there holding the saddle, an extraordinarily foolish expression on his face. “I must have put this thing”—he hefted it—”on top of a big goddamn armadillo instead of a rock. It just ran off into the bushes.”

With a certain amount of relish, Stuart said, “The saddle didn’t up and walk off by itself, eh? This time, it damn well did.”

Sellers carried it back over by his horse and set it down, with ostentatious care, on a piece of flat, level ground. That care didn’t keep him from getting ragged unmercifully by the Confederate troopers the rest of the night. Stuart did his share of the ragging, or maybe a little more. If the lurking Apaches, wherever they were, had been able to figure out what the fuss and feathers were all about, they were probably laughing, too.

When morning came, though, the time for laughter was gone. Stuart’s army swung into motion once more, advancing along the trail the scouts had found the evening before. It was broad and easy at first, but soon narrowed and climbed steeply. A pack mule went over the side and rolled to the bottom of a gully. It scrambled up onto its feet, none the worse for wear except for a patch of hide scraped off its flank. A few minutes later, another mule missed a step. Its bray of terror cut off abruptly halfway down the rocky slope. It did not get up when it stopped rolling, and would not get up again. Its head twisted at an unnatural angle.

A little past noon, a scout came back to Stuart with a prize: a Tredegar cartridge an Apache must have dropped. “Has to be one of the redskins we’re after, sir,” the fellow said. “Means we’re on the right trail.”

“Yes.” Stuart’s head came up. “Can’t mean anything else.” Tredegars were mighty thin on the ground south of the border—back when this had been south of the border. “Maybe we’ll catch
up with them yet.” He frowned. “And maybe they left it there for you to find so they could draw us into a trap.” He ordered more scouts forward, and sent men to scrambling along the ridge line to smell out any ambush on either flank.

In the next valley they came to, they found the remains of a Mexican army camp. The camp looked to have been abandoned in great haste a couple of years before, and then plundered by the Indians. “They did try to put them down,” Colonel Calhoun Ruggles said.

“Yes, and look what it got them.” Major Sellers spoke like a man passing judgment.

“We’ll do better,” Stuart said. “The Empire of Mexico hasn’t been what anyone would call vigorous about fighting the Indians. We
will
do it, because they haven’t got any place to run to from here.”

“They could go up into the USA, sir,” Sellers said.

Stuart shook his head. “Not after they made common cause with us against the Yankees. The USA would sooner kill ’em than look at ’em after that, you mark my words. We’d be the same. If a Comanche band comes out of New Mexico and wants to take our side against the damnyankees, do we let ’em?”

Ruggles was best qualified to speak to that, and did: “No, sir. It happened once or twice, not long after the War of Secession: some of the Comanches reckoned they could play us and the United States off against each other.” His smile was thoroughly grim. “Buzzards ate well for a few days afterwards.”

Two valleys deeper into the mountains, the Confederates came upon an abandoned Apache encampment, and not an old one, either: some of the ashes in the fire pits were still warm, while flies buzzed around the bones of butchered beeves. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Stuart said with more satisfaction than he’d shown since the army plunged into the divinely beautiful, hellishly rugged terrain of the Sierra Madre. “If we can get them on the run, they’ll start making mistakes, and they can’t afford that.”

He snapped orders. Three trails led out of the valley. Mounted scouts trotted rapidly down all of them. Within half a minute of one another, three explosions shattered the quiet. All told, they cost four men killed and half a dozen wounded. One of those wounded, one of the luckier ones, told Stuart, “It was a charge buried in the ground, sir, with a trip line for a horse or a man to set it off.” Blood was soaking through the rag wrapped around his
forearm. “I didn’t think those Apache bastards knew about little tricks like that.”

Stuart and Major Horatio Sellers looked at each other. Both spoke the same name at the same time: “Batsinas.” Stuart went on, “What’s the name of that Yankee who comes up with a new invention every day before breakfast? Tom Edison, that’s who I mean. The Apaches have got themselves a regular Tom Edison in that fellow.”

“If they’re going to start planting torpedoes in the road, we won’t be able to rush after them,” Sellers said.

“We can’t rush after them in this country, anyway,” Stuart answered. “So long as we get them, that’s what counts.”

Unhappily, Sellers said, “Damned redskins didn’t even give us a clue about which way they went. If they’d put a torpedo on one trail and left the other two alone, we’d have a pretty fair notion which one to follow.”

“Not necessarily,” Stuart said. “A torpedo on one trail could as easily lure us into an ambush or a false path as to show the way the Indians did go. They’re more than clever enough to do something like that. We’ve seen as much.”

Major Sellers looked unhappier still before at last nodding. “I said before, we should have slaughtered them,” he muttered.

“We got good use out of them up in New Mexico Territory,” Stuart said. “If they hadn’t quarreled with the Mexicans, we’d still be on good terms with them.” He craned his neck to look around. Which of the crags ahead held Apaches with Tredegars? Behind which bushes were they crouching? He couldn’t begin to guess, and that worried him. He did some muttering of his own: “Now we have to make sure they don’t slaughter us.”

With some misgivings, he pushed his force down the trail the scouts reported to be most used. The column had not got far when boulders thundered down the mountainside above them. The avalanche scraped several men and horses and camels and mules off the paths into a ravine below. For a moment, Stuart spied men up above him, looking at what their handiwork had done. When Confederate troopers opened fire on them, they disappeared. He hoped his men had hit some of them, but he wouldn’t have bet on it.

“Come on,” he called to the soldiers. “We just keep after ’em, that’s all.”

Perhaps half a mile farther down the trail, another landslide
took its toll. Doggedly, the Confederates pressed on. “This is the difference between us and the Empire of Mexico,” Major Sellers said. “If the Apaches gave the Mexicans a little licking, they’d leave. The redskins must reckon we’ll do the same.” He shook his head. “Won’t happen.”

“No, indeed,” Stuart said. “We shall teach them a new reckoning.”

Maybe his army’s persistence started giving the Indians that new reckoning. Or maybe he had chosen the right trail after all, and was nearing whatever encampment Geronimo’s men had set up after abandoning the shelters his troopers had already found. Whatever the reason, the Apaches started shooting at the Confederates from the slopes above them and from in back of rocks and bushes ahead.

Soldiers who were hit screamed. Soldiers who were not, though, went into action with a fierce joy. If the Apaches would stand and fight, they could fight back. At Stuart’s shouted orders, they went forward dismounted, so they could advance over ground their mounts could not cross. Gray and butternut uniforms were hard to see against rock and dirt as they moved ahead.

Stuart shouted other orders, too, to a runner. The man dashed back along the trail, breasting the tide of troopers going forward. He did his job better—which meant faster—than Stuart had dared hope. Only a few minutes passed before first one and then another of the army’s field guns began landing shells on the positions from which the Apaches were fighting. Getting those guns over what passed for trails in the Sierra Madre had been back-breaking labor—luckily, not man-killing labor—but it paid dividends now.

The Apaches did not care for coming under shellfire—or perhaps it unnerved them where bullets whipping past did not because it was less familiar. It made some of them break cover, a mistake often fatal. Yelling and whooping, the Confederates on foot went forward.

U.S. soldiers in a position like the one the Apaches held would have slugged it out with their Confederate opponents and made them pay a high price for every foot they gained. Had Stuart been defending that position against the Yankees, he would have done the same. The Apaches, though, did not fight to spend men. He’d seen that before. When they were under pressure, they saw nothing shameful about escaping from danger.