The General and the Jaguar (15 page)

The Moores planted rosebushes and nearly twenty acres of fruit trees around their house. But the eternity of land and sky,
which pressed in upon Susan from every window, was more than she could handle and she spent most days in the store with her
husband. She kept a glass of cold water at her side. The desert, she had discovered, created a thirst that was both physical
and psychological. On Wednesday, every customer who came into the store spoke of nothing but Villa:

These reports caused some of the people, especially the women, much anxiety. Others seemed to put no faith in the rumors.
I was one of the anxious ones. Probably the most anxious one, owing to the fact that I was not very well acquainted with the
ways along the border, having recently come from New York City; and also owing to the fact that I was daily horrified by the
detailed newspaper accounts of the unbelievable outrages which occurred at frequent intervals along the border and in Mexico.
Seeing these reports worried me. Mr. Moore made an effort to keep the papers from me and then asked me to not read these accounts.
I did not for a time.

Remote and formal in her demeanor, Susan Moore had made few friends in Columbus and came to relish the diversion of her Spanish
lessons. Just that day, in the middle of her lesson, the young instructor had asked her if she was afraid of Pancho Villa.

“Señora Moore, no tiene miedo de Villa?”

“No, y usted?”

“No, no tengo miedo pero mi madre y mi hermano tienen mucho miedo.”

Toward four o’clock, an expensively dressed man entered the store. When Susan Moore got up to wait on him, a “cold chill”
swept over her. “He was a small man, with dark eyes, black mustache, he had on one of these high class Mexican hats, and I
thought to myself: ‘He must be a lieutenant in the Mexican army.’” In her schoolbook Spanish, she asked:

Buenas tardes. En qué puedo servirle?

Quiero comprar unos pantalones.

While Mrs. Moore looked for pants in his size, she could feel his eyes following her. Later, she would say, “I did not look
at him any more until I handed him the change, and I took a good look at him again because I thought if it was ever necessary
to know him again I would recognize him, and he smiled, and took his change, and I could feel his eyes on me the whole time.”

For the next two hours she debated whether they should spend the night in the back room of the store or return home to Mooreview.
“I decided it would be better to go out there because if they did come in they would raid the stores and hotels, and I thought
he would hardly come out of his way for just one family.”

They went home between six and seven o’clock. On the way, they stopped at the house of Earl Moore, one of her husband’s cousins.

“Earl,” said Susan, “you want to look out, they say Villa is coming tonight for sure.”

He laughed, saying, “That would tickle me to death.”

W
HILE THE
M
OORES
were going home, Laura Ritchie and her family were on their way to the closing night’s festivities at the Methodist convention.
Mrs. Ritchie’s garter had come loose in the street and she stopped to fix it. Thinking she would be helpful, her daughter
Blanche turned on the flashlight and Mrs. Ritchie scolded her harshly, afraid that someone might see her. Her husband laughed,
though, and the anger she felt evaporated.

On their way to church, they had all stopped to admire the sleek Ford touring car parked in front of the hotel. The automobile
belonged to engineer Charles DeWitt Miller, who had checked in about five o’clock that afternoon. Miller was only thirty years
old, but was rapidly developing a reputation as one of the West’s water experts. He was a soft-looking man, with pale cheeks
and dark hair, whose mild demeanor hid an aggressive business sense. At that time, he was working with two separate groups
of developers on the purchase of two large parcels of land, one totaling twenty-six thousand acres and a second, irrigable
tract that encompassed approximately thirty thousand acres. He was to receive a commission of fifty cents per acre when the
deals were finalized.

Miller had been traveling for three days and was tired from the jarring, unpaved roads. On Monday, he had bundled his wife,
Ruth, and their two little girls, ages two and four, into the new car and driven to Rincon, New Mexico, sixty-five miles north
of Columbus, where they spent the night with Ruth’s sister. The following morning, Charles left his wife and children in Rincon
so they could continue their visit and motored on to Las Cruces. He had lunch with his brother, a cashier at a local bank,
then got back in his car and drove south to Deming. He spent Tuesday night in Deming and the following day he continued his
inspection of property around Columbus. When he arrived at the Commercial Hotel on Wednesday evening, Edna Ritchie was playing
the piano in the parlor. “That sounds like home,” he remarked to Laura as he signed the guest register. He took his bags to
room 3, returned to the parlor, and sang a few songs with Edna. Then he dashed off a postcard to his wife and strolled over
to the post office to mail it.

The performances of the Ritchie girls went beautifully. The family stayed for refreshments and walked back to the hotel. Blanche
took off her pink frock and her black patent-leather shoes and laid them on a chair. Edna covered the little canary. Mr. Ritchie
retired to bed while Laura puttered about the hotel, putting away the punch bowl that she had provided for the Methodist reception,
picking up the newspapers in the parlor, blowing out the lamps.

In their room overlooking the street, the honeymooners, Rachel and John Walker, were packing their suitcases. They were checking
out the following morning and were eager to return home; they had heard the ugly rumor that two of their friends, Arthur McKinney
and William Corbett, had been killed by Pancho Villa’s men and the news had deeply shaken the Walkers.

“Can they get their bodies brought across the border for burial?” Rachel had asked the man who brought them the news.

“Too risky,” he responded.

“Well,” said her husband, “when Villa gets me, I hope he finishes me north of the border.”

Rachel hushed him. The idea was too horrifying to contemplate.

The other hotel guests—Harry Hart, the veterinarian; José Pereyra, the well-mannered young man from the Mexican consulate;
and the wily old cattleman, Uncle Birchfield—were in their rooms. Sam Ravel’s room was dark; he had gone to the dentist in
El Paso and had not yet returned. Captain Leoncio Figueroa, his enemy, was also out for the evening. The hotel seemed unnaturally
silent without Figueroa’s booming laughter.

H
ERBERT
S
LOCUM
stayed late at his headquarters on Wednesday night, still poring over the telegrams and reported sightings of Pancho Villa.
Another employee of the Palomas ranch, J. L. Fonville, forty, had independently come across the tracks of Villa’s soldiers.
He followed the tracks and spotted the Villistas on the Boca Grande River. He immediately wired the information to the ranch’s
agent in Columbus.

Around 5:00 p.m., Sam Ravel’s brother Louis, twenty-seven, had crossed the border to Palomas to pick up some telegrams and
discovered the entire town in pandemonium. The telegraph lines were out of commission and officials in Palomas were anxious
to get messages to the Mexican consul in El Paso and Carranza’s military men. Villa was very close, they wrote in the telegrams,
begging for instructions on what to do. As Ravel was returning to Columbus, he glanced back across the flat plain that dipped
down into Mexico and saw a huge amount of dust “as might be caused by a large body of men.” He continued on to the local telegraph
office, where he proceeded to send the telegrams. While there, he bumped into Captain George Williams, Slocum’s adjutant.
Louis shared the contents of the telegrams with the captain and also told him of the large cloud of dust he had seen. “Captain
Williams said that men would be sent out to investigate and ascertain with regards to these facts.”

It was already dark by the time Antonio Múñez returned to Gibson’s Line Ranch from his “spying” mission south of the border.
Major Elmer Lindsley drove him in a Ford car fourteen miles back to Columbus so he could give Colonel Slocum his report. Slocum
spoke Spanish poorly and Antonio’s English was equally lacking so Major Lindsley acted as interpreter. Also present was Captain
Williams. Later, Antonio would tell Marcus Marshall, the son of the owner of the sprawling Palomas Land and Cattle Company,
“I reported that night, Wednesday, that Villa with about 500 or 700 men was on the Boca Grande River and was headed this way.”
But Slocum would inform investigators for the U.S. Army that he had been given exactly the opposite information: Antonio,
he said, told him that Villa and his main body had turned off to the southeast and were moving away from Columbus. A smaller
group of a hundred soldiers had split off from the main body and were heading for Palomas but these soldiers, too, had turned
south away from the border, he added.

There are several possible explanations for the differences. Antonio’s information may have been garbled in translation. Another
possibility is that Villa, who was extremely canny, deliberately turned south away from the border with the express purpose
of deceiving any observers and then doubled back under cover of darkness. Or, someone was lying. But who? Major Lindsley would
later confirm Slocum’s account in his own sworn statement of what transpired, but he also said that Antonio was questioned
very carefully and was “too scared to be lying.”

After Antonio left, Slocum went to the Border Gate and tried to elicit information from the Carrancista soldiers on the other
side. “I found everyone on the Mexican side more or less terrified and not willing to go very far to the south and find out
what could be learned of Villa. They told me that one of their men had the day before, or night before, I have forgotten,
been out in the hills, heard some voices, this frightened him and he had returned to the gate.”

Slocum again went over the disposition of his troops: a total of 270 soldiers and officers were stationed at various points
along the border, leaving 341 men and 12 officers in Camp Furlong. Of these, 79 were noncombatants, which meant that there
was a fighting force of 274 men in Columbus. Sending more soldiers to the border would mean fewer men in the camp and Slocum
decided to leave the troops where they were.

Three sentinels and a watchman were assigned to guard Camp Furlong. One sentinel was posted at the guard tent, where the regiment’s
machine guns and ammunition were locked up; a second was posted near the stables; and a third was stationed in the vicinity
of the headquarters building near the northwest corner of the camp. The watchman patrolled an area that included the stables,
band barracks, hospital, and haystacks. In addition to this regular guard, one noncommissioned officer and three soldiers
made an inspection of the town and camp every evening.

Slocum did not increase the number of sentinels assigned to the camp, nor did he dispatch additional guards to look after
the town. The troops remaining in camp were also not ordered on alert. The reason for this was simple: despite the telegrams,
the three eyewitness accounts of the Palomas ranch hands, and the excited report of Louis Ravel, Slocum still didn’t believe
that Pancho Villa would attack an armed military encampment. And he had said as much to George Carothers, the State Department
agent. Carothers had planned to come out to Columbus on the midday train but hadn’t been able to reach Slocum until that evening.
He had obtained new information, apparently, and no longer thought that Villa was moving away from the border. “I told him
that I knew Villa was very close to Columbus; that I didn’t know what he was doing there, but my information was very positive.
. . .”

Slocum’s response?

“He ridiculed the idea,” Carothers would later say. “He said that his information was that Villa was 65 or 70 miles away,
and I told him I knew different.”

As darkness fell, Slocum put on his canvas jacket and his battered cavalry hat. Exiting the headquarters building, he nodded
to Fred Griffin, a nineteen-year-old sentry from Cottondale, Alabama, who had caused his parents much grief two years earlier
when he had enlisted in the army without their knowledge.

The wind had finally died down and the land had the brushed look of stiff corduroy. Here and there, among the clumps of sage,
were the small modest houses belonging to the officers and the townspeople. Looking to the northeast, Slocum could just make
out the lights of his own home. Relief washed over him.

A
T HIS SMALL HOME
on the Mexican side of the border, Juan Favela, the other Mexican cowboy who had escaped capture on the Boca Grande River,
sat under the stars with his young wife, Petra. He was discouraged by the brush-off that he had received from Colonel Slocum.
As he told his wife what had transpired, she became convinced that Villa would attack their place on his way to Columbus.
They also had family who lived in Columbus and needed to be protected. “It does not matter if the Colonel does not believe
you, my Juan. We have loved ones there. Your mother, who is alone. We must go now.”

She pulled him to his feet and they got into their Star sedan and drove through the sand hills back to Columbus. Eight months
pregnant, Petra held a lantern out the window so they could see where they were going. The mesquite and creosote bushes exuded
a tangy scent, but in the blackness beyond the swinging lantern light, Juan sensed something malevolent. “The air was bad,”
he would later say.

At the Border Gate, Juan told the officer in charge that Villa was coming. He was brushed off once more, but vowed to try
to talk to Slocum again in the morning. Their sedan lurched over the railroad tracks, past the train station, and rolled into
town.

At ten o’clock, Susan Moore opened her kitchen door and stepped out into the yard. The night was awash in starlight, and the
uneasy restlessness that had plagued her all day evaporated. The Moores slept on a sleeping porch facing the small town. Before
she went to sleep, Susan placed her navy blue coat on a chair. On a second chair, she placed her clothes in the order in which
she would put them on. “Mr. Moore, being very tired, went to sleep in a short time. I studied about the rumored raid about
an hour. Finally I decided the night was too clear for it and went to sleep.”