The Vanquished (15 page)

Chapin ignored him. Charley went in again, and again, and after four trips had a stack of planks lying behind the wagon—four planks, each almost eighteen feet long. Chapin had the same kind of stack on his side. Charley stood breathing heavily, awaiting a command, curiously regarding the pale thin youth with the underslung chin. Chapin seemed more surly than ever; he glared with open malice at the lieutenant, who was motioning to Bill Randolph and three or four other men. “You'll find shovels in the wagon,” the lieutenant said. “Dig it out.”

Bill lifted his hat and scratched his head. “That's a powerful lot of diggin', Lieutenant.”

“Do what you're told,” Allen said, and swung away to inspect the next wagon down the line. His horse's hoofs kicked up high splashes of loose white sand; it plodded away as though half swimming.

Charley went back to his horse and stood by the stirrup while Bill and his crew poked their shovels into the sand beneath the wagon. In ten minutes Bill was swearing in a steady monotone. With every shovel of sand that was taken away, half a shovelful sifted back into the hole. “Jesus,” Bill said. “This will take a week.”

Old John Edmonson, holding Charley's horse, smiled gently and murmured, “The devil's work is never done.” His talk was not loud enough to reach Bill's ears, and Charley felt thankful for that. He said, “Have you got any idea how far the dunes go?”

“About forty miles, I understand,” said Edmonson.

By midafternoon the wagons were shoveled almost clear. Lieutenant Allen came back up the line, ordering the lounging men back into their saddles. When he came by, he stopped and spoke to Charley: “You and these five men will lay rails for this wagon.” It was all he said; he reined his horse around and went forward toward the point.

The sun slapped hard against the earth, against the men. A tired stream of insects, they wound slowly forward across the sea swells and troughs of the white glittering dunes. With each ten feet the wagon traveled, a board had to be taken up behind it and carried around to the front, where a man had to avoid somehow the plodding hoofs of the mules and still get the plank laid butt against the previous plank, which would by then be disappearing under the wheel. Thus continuous rails were kept under the wheels; and the expert muleskinners did their best to keep the heavy Conestogas on the tracks. On the uphill slopes men had to dismount and put shoulders to the wagon tailboards; on the downhill slopes the muleskinners leaned forward braced against the ropes of the brake handles, and men rode behind with ropes dallied from saddlehorns to the wagon. Horses waded almost to the stirrups in the liquid sand. The westering sun stretched shadows and poured rivulets of sweat down the flesh of straining, red-eyed men.

Often a plank would tilt, slide, slip away; the wagon would sag; men would ride up, dab ropes over the wheel hub and haul the wheel up out of the dry quagmire until the plank could be righted. Once, resetting a plank in this way, Charley almost lost his hand under a wheel that came plunging away from a rope that slipped loose.

Night made its approach. In five hours the train had advanced less than half a mile. The mules were unhitched, fed and watered, and hobbled with the horse stock. Campfires blossomed in the evening and over the desert, indigo and violet twilight swept in a last retreating defense. Charley ate his meal and sank back on his blanket exhausted, his muscles trembling. Norval Douglas crouched cross-legged frowning into the fire, his eyes gleaming frostily. Jim Woods came up from the wagon and packed his tin utensils away, scrubbed clean with sand, and joined the small group around the fire. Around them the tent streets were quiet and lonely. The wheezing harmonica that they had become accustomed to was silent tonight. Charley stretched his shoulders. The air turned crisp and the fire's warmth made him immediately sleepy. A newcomer drifted up and stood a diffident six paces from the fire, looking forward inquiringly, and when Charley turned to look at him he recognized old John Edmonson. When he had taken time to study Edmonson, Norval Douglas said, “Rest a while.”

“Thanks,” Edmonson said, and crouched down, turning his open palms toward the blaze. Downslope beyond the tents, guards walked slow circles around the picketed horses, now and then stopping close to one another to converse. A final ribbon of cobalt dusk faded away westward. John Edmonson stared into the fire. His cheeks were stubbled with gray and his face seemed even more deeply lined than Charley remembered it. Edmonson nodded courteously to Jim Woods and a moment later pulled out a briar pipe and packed it with care, leaning forward then to poke a twig into the fire. He put it to his pipe and puffed deeply until a red-gray spiral of smoke began to rise from the bowl, whereupon he tossed the twig on the fire and sat back, pulling contentedly on the smoke. Red-bearded Captain McDowell came up looking troubled and dipped his head to them all, and made a space for himself, saying, “This will be the last fire we'll be able to build for some time. There's no fuel on the dunes. We ought to roll in soon—we'll be on the move at sunrise. We'll be lucky to make a mile a day.” He stared across the fire. “Norval, you'll ride out at midnight. I want you to find the shortest route across the dunes.”

“Due east,” Douglas said promptly. “Thirty-eight miles. After that, Yuma Crossing and the Sonora desert. We're starting a little late in the season, I'm afraid—the desert will be damned hot by the time we reach it.”

“We'll do all right,” McDowell said in a way that at first sounded confident; afterward Charley began to feel the man was trying to reassure himself. “Those of us who are strong enough, anyway,” McDowell added. “And the others have no business coming.” His glance drifted across the face of old Edmonson; there was no visible break in his expression. He stood up and said, “Good night, gentlemen,” and went away into the night.

“Checking on the troops,” Jim Woods observed. “McDowell takes things too damned seriously, I think.”

“That's his job,” Norval Douglas murmured. Charley sat up to let his belly bake against the fire. He looked at Edmonson, who sat drawing on his pipe, apparently at peace with himself and ignoring the comment that McDowell seemed to have directed at him; Edmonson appeared to be a good deal older than he should have been for this kind of an expedition. He said now, “I gather that our friend the captain believes that things must be done in a hurry.”

“That's Crabb's belief,” Woods said. “It rubs off on the officers.”

“Many a mistake has been made because of haste,” Edmonson said, squinting through his pipe smoke.

Douglas was leaning back with one elbow on the ground, looking off across the swells of the dunes. “I expect you'll find the world's work gets done by men in a hurry, Mr. Edmonson,” he said.

“Perhaps,” Edmonson said. He did not appear to agree.

Douglas said, “I recall that we were too slow on the march in Lower California, in 'Fifty-four. That was why we were defeated.”

“You were with the William Walker party?”

“I was.”

“You must be a filibuster at heart, then,” Edmonson said.

Douglas poked a twig into the corner of his mouth and let it tilt there; it waggled when he talked. “Adventure is where you find it.”

“What happened to that expedition?”

“We were licked,” Douglas said. His tone indicated no particular regret. “We landed down there and Walker proclaimed it an independent republic—all of Baja and Sonora. But that's a bitter country and he hadn't brought enough food or water. You can't live off the land when the land supports nothing but twigs and spines and rocks. The Mexicans starved us out and we had to retreat overland to San Diego. It was a rough hike.”

“Walker's done better since then,” Jim Woods said.

“That he has,” Edmonson agreed. “I understand he's got control of the Nicaraguan government.”

Douglas's shoulder moved. “He won't last. The natives are against him.”

“They'll be against us too, more'n likely,” Woods said.

“We can handle it, if it comes to that.”

“What makes you so sure?” Edmonson said.

“Just a feeling,” Douglas told him. “I think we all need sleep. Let's turn in.”

Planks broke or overturned. Wagon wheels slipped off and sank hub-deep in sand. In the depths of the dunes, each such occurrence meant the wagon must be unloaded, for there was no shoveling this loose liquid sand. The wheels had to be reset on the plank rails and the wagon reloaded. Days passed with a dreadful monotony. Toward the end of January the weather turned cool and cloudy, but there was no rain. Nighttime temperatures plunged down into the thirties; men shivered by night and sweated by day. McDowell's estimate had been correct; there were days when they did not make a full mile. By the tenth day of February, with the Colorado still twenty miles distant, water for the animals was reduced to one ration every forty-eight hours. Mules began to drag in their traces and had to be shot. The column moved day and night now; one shift of men would sleep, then catch up and relieve the other half of the party. The shifting, treacherous sandhills made of it a trek through hell. Food spoilage made scurvy a danger. On the seventeenth, they found that too many planks had splintered; they could not move all the wagons at the same time. With ten miles yet to go, the pace slowed again; each wagon in turn had to wait on its rails while the spare planks were carried to other wagons. Norval Douglas led a party ahead to the military post above Jeager's Ferry, but there was little food to be spared at that outpost. It was all Douglas and his detail could do to return with four water barrels filled at the river, two sacks of flour and a side of bacon. Men ate sourdough biscuits and gnawed on strips of leather-hard beef jerky. On the twenty-seventh of February they rolled out of the desert and turned upstream to Jeager's Ferry. At the Army post they recruited a few mules. Crabb sent a dispatch to San Francisco, and directed Charles Tozer and Robert Wood to ride with all possible speed to Tucson, where they were to recruit additional men to reinforce the column when it reached Mexico. George Alonzo Johnson's clumsy steamboat was moored above the ferry, which had a bloody history of its own; Captain Johnson grinned and waved a hand as the column marched upriver. The river was rising with the first of spring's melted snow from the mountains up the Colorado and Gila and Salt. Arizona lay ahead of them, sunlit and brassy.

So many mules had been shot and eaten during the clumsy crossing of the dunes that several horses had to be hitched into the teams, setting a squad of men afoot. Nonetheless, a construction mechanic at Fort Yuma who asked the men what they intended to feed their horses along the desert
Jornada
got the cheerful reply that they would ride them into the shops and feed them calico. There was a reckless spirit of abandon alive in the party, stirred up perhaps by the cool crossing of the river and the path they now traveled up the Gila River, easy going after what lay behind them. The word “filibuster” came out in the open and men laughed with it; those who made rational justification for the march were pushed away and the spirit of impending conquest fixed its grip on them, so that soon with few exceptions, and for the first time, the many individuals bonded together with a single purpose. Captain McDowell's face lost its look of troubled uncertainty and he joined himself to the other officers with positive enthusiasm; the anticipation of manifest victory was all about.

In a wagon bed rode Chuck Parker, his fever risen and broken, his leg healing slowly. One-eyed Sam Kimmel, who had shot him, walked alongside and periodically inquired after Parker's needs.

Several men came down with various ailments. It was to be expected. Sus Ainsa found himself put in charge of this group, and watched over it with good cheer.

Forty-five miles east of Yuma they made a halt to rest and organize for the desert crossing ahead. The party now numbered eighty-nine; a few men had left at Yuma and two or three recruits had joined the expedition. Here, in a shaded oasis of cottonwoods and grass, tents were pitched and horses and mules grazed while men cut their names in cottonwood bark and christened the spot Filibuster Camp. Charley walked about the camp, bathed in the river, washed out his clothes and borrowed a pair of scissors from old John Edmonson to trim his lengthening hair. In his reflection on the river surface he could see that his shoulders had toughened up, his arms had thickened, his face had burned brown and his hair was sun-bleached; he looked a decade older than his years.

For a time he was full of the camp's spreading optimism. They had conquered the clutching sands of the dune country; they were like invincible men. But there were signs to make him wary. Bill Randolph, always willing to fight, lunged around camp in an impatient temper. The strange youth, Carl Chapin, was now and then to be seen threading the trees by himself, eyes vacant; at meals he was silent, moody, sulky—he seemed irritated whenever anyone invaded his privacy enough to ask him a simple question. Old John Edmonson had developed a wheeze and a cough that kept him bent over a good deal of the time. His eyes seemed too bright. Captain McDowell came around often, inspecting equipment; he rationed out food and supplies with a hoarder's miserliness. Even Norval Douglas, who usually seemed willing enough to let the world go its own way as long as it let him go his, seemed strangely anxious at times, and once jumped irritably at an innocent question Charley asked of him. And Crabb—Crabb plowed through the camp with his hands behind him and his head down, like a man restlessly pacing a floor, trying to fight out the solution to some weighty problem. There were many of them, however, who showed no indications of that same strain—Jim Woods for one; Sus Ainsa and the easygoing Captain Bob Holliday, Lieutenant Will Allen, Dr. Oxley.