“If you wish, do what you can. That’s all I will say.”
The problem, of course, was that nobody knew where Villa was. Mick had assumed that, famous as Villa was, he wouldn’t be hard to find, but all the information he received while in El Paso convinced him otherwise. He’d decided to stay another day or so and see if he could pick more information before plunging into Mexico when Crosswinds Charlie turned up to see Xenia, carrying with him a letter from Arthur.
The letter described what had happened on the manhunt: the ascent into the mountains, the encounter with Indian village, the attack of grizzly bear, and the descent into the canyons. It told of the Colonel’s broken leg and of finding Bomba and said that they were now poised to attempt a rescue, with Crosswinds Charlie flying Arthur’s plane.
Xenia didn’t know whether to be happy or sick. On the one hand, she was grateful to know Arthur and his father were alive; on the other, she seriously doubted his ability to execute anything so difficult as an attack on Pancho Villa’s army. Yet there was something in the tone of the letter that gave her reassurance.
It took all morning, but she finally summoned up her courage and phoned Mick Martin’s room and told him of the letter. She felt uncomfortable, even guilty about it, and positively sick to hear his voice answer the telephone. How would Arthur feel, if he knew she had shown Mick his letter? In any case, she met him downstairs, and after Mick read it, he dispelled her hopes.
“Xenia,” he told her, “I don’t know exactly what he’s trying to do here, but I’d say it’s nuts. Why do this? Why not just go to Villa and see if you can pay him off? It’s a lot better than risking everybody’s lives. Frankly, I can’t believe this is Arthur talking.”
“It’s not the Arthur I know,” she said. “He’s sounding like his father.”
“Let me suggest this,” Mick said. “I will go out with this Charlie fellow in the aeroplane. Maybe I can persuade Arthur to let me have a crack at Villa before he does something rash.”
“If you do, I want you to take him a letter from me,” Xenia said. Her mouth was dry and she still couldn’t bring herself to actually look at him. But who else was there to get what she wanted to say to Arthur? She went to her room as soon as possible and washed her hands and face.
BUTCHER FIERRO HAD ALSO ARRIVED IN EL PASO. Actually he’d arrived in Juárez, just across the river, where he’d begun preparation by telegraph and riders delivering messages to re-form and organize part of Villa’s army to join him for the attack on Agua Prieta, some two hundred miles west of El Paso. Meantime, he decided to cross the border into El Paso with a specific motive in mind. He wanted to purchase a rifle.
Not just any rifle; Fierro wanted to buy one of the new American Springfield rifles the United States Army had equipped itself with. He’d heard good things about this weapon. It was a bolt-action repeater rumored to have an accurate killing range of five hundred yards or better. Fierro liked nothing more than to shoot men at a great distance and determined to get one of these rifles and see for himself. One morning, shortly after he’d arrived in Juárez, Fierro rode across the international bridge that linked the two cities and presented himself at a gun shop where he’d been told the rifle could be bought.
When someone of the stature of General Rudolfo Fierro entered the United States in a city like El Paso, it was bound to stir up interest. If few people knew Fierro by sight, most knew him by reputation, and word quickly spread that the infamous “butcher” was now in their town. Among the recipients of the news was Lieutenant George Patton, who decided to get a look at the ruthless warrior for himself.
A crowd of onlookers had gathered outside the shop where Fierro went to buy the Springfield, and Patton followed the Mexican inside. When he came through the door, Fierro ignored him despite the fact that Patton was dressed in the spit-and-polish uniform of an American officer. Even from ten feet away Fierro’s aroma was enough to knock a wolf off a gutwagon, so Patton kept his distance for the time being.
“What is your pleasure, Señor General?” asked the proprietor of the gun shop.
“My pleasure is fucking, drinking whiskey, and killing gringos,” Fierro replied, evidently for Patton’s edification, “but what I came here for was to buy a rifle.” He was feeling particularly mean that morning.
The general pointed to the Springfield, and the store owner, somewhat unnerved by Fierro’s brazen response, handed it to him across the counter.
“Every time I leave this country I tell myself it’s for the last time,” Fierro said by way of conversation, “yet every time I leave, I return like a dog who returns to its vomit.” He began sighting the rifle to and fro and working the bolt action.
“It’s the finest infantry weapon in the world,” the proprietor told him proudly.
“It’s too short for me,” Fierro said.
“I can put a pad on it for you,” the owner offered.
“You don’t need a pad,” Patton interjected. “It’s supposed to be a little short. The reason is that when you fight in cold weather, as they’re doing in Europe, your clothing will make up the difference.”
“I don’t want it to fight in cold weather. And this is not Europe,” Fierro snapped.
“Suit yourself,” Patton told him, moving closer. “But I want to ask you a question. Your General Villa has kidnapped the children of somebody I know. What do they have to do to get them back?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Fierro replied. “What General Villa does is his own business.”
“Well, I’ve got a lady here in El Paso who’s the mother of those children, and she just wants to know where General Villa is so she can talk to him,” Patton said. “If there’s ransom involved, maybe it can be arranged.”
“Tell her to arrange it with General Villa,” said Fierro. “He’ll turn up sooner or later.”
“And you don’t know his whereabouts?”
“If I did, I certainly wouldn’t tell you,” Fierro replied. He was examining the rifle closely, looking down the barrel and checking the sights. “How much is it?” he asked the owner.
“Just a minute,” Patton said. He had bellied closer to the counter and was looking at Fierro eyeball to eyeball. “Are you expecting this man to sell you this rifle so you can use it to kill American soldiers?”
“No,” Fierro said calmly. “I want it to kill jaguars in the canyons. For killing American soldiers, I use a stick.”
“Are you always this pleasant?” Patton inquired.
“Only when I’m in a good mood,” Fierro answered.
The two remained locked in a fiery gaze until Patton finally broke out in a sardonic grin.
“Okay, General—buy the rifle. I’d be interested to learn how well you can actually shoot it.”
“If you do, it’ll be the last thing you ever find out,” Fierro told him.
CROSSWINDS CHARLIE BLAKE HAD BEEN AT WORK all night putting Arthur’s airplane together. First he hired half a dozen men to move it piece by piece from the railcar where Arthur had stored it to a hangar at the flying field on the outskirts of town. The hangar had no electric lights, so Charlie borrowed railroad lanterns to illuminate his task. By dawn he was prepared to see if the thing worked. Three spins of the propeller, and the Luft-Verkehrs sputtered, then caught. Charlie revved the throttle and the engine roared. He shut it off. Now there was nothing to do but wait. His landing needed to be timed with dusk.
Charlie had been skeptical about taking Mick Martin along, but Xenia’s voice couldn’t be ignored. The problem was that Mick’s added weight meant Charlie couldn’t take along an extra three cans of gasoline. He already had two spare cans, but had wanted the other three to be on the safe side in case he had trouble finding his landing spot. He also knew Mick would be stuck in Mexico once they landed, for better or for worse. For the return trip, there was no room in the plane for anyone but the children.
He found a shady piece of grass near the flying shack and lay down to grab a nap after being up
all night. Charlie had been crushed when the aerial circus had moved on and left him behind. And now to be given a mission of the most delicate gravity—this was something Charlie could only have dreamed about. In his mind, he was the right man, in the right place, at the right time.
At two p.m. Mick Martin showed up in cavalry-twill pants and a mohair jacket, wearing a .38 revolver strapped to his waist. At two-fifteen they were in the air, flying into a white-hot Mexican sun.
SIXTY-TWO
Arthur had selected five men to go with him on the rescue: Cowboy Bob, Death Valley Slim, two of the Mexican teamsters for their knowledge of the language, and Bomba. At noon they rode forward, and four hours later were in hiding positions in a drainage ditch at the edge of the lettuce field. Meantime, Bob had ridden back into the town for a last-minute reconnaissance. He returned vexed; Villa was no longer there.
Following the fiesta, Villa had sent a party of troops to boot out El Padrino’s remaining family from their hacienda, which he then took over for his headquarters. For the rescue, it was a setback but not a catastrophe, as Bob explained after scouting the hacienda. Even though much of his original plan would have to be scrapped, the way the hacienda was situated might work to their advantage. There were more and better escape routes for after Villa’s captives were rescued. If his previous experience was an indicator, Bob figured Villa would most likely open up the hacienda’s wine cellar to the soldiers, who would waste no time becoming even drunker than they’d already gotten during the fiesta, if such a thing was possible. All in all, Bob didn’t think the new circumstances were going to be any more difficult than the original plan to grab the kids from the soldiers’ camp in town, which was to say that he would have been surprised if any of them escaped with their lives. As he rode into town, he’d observed the horrid spectacle of El Padrino’s waxen body hanging upside down above the grease pot. At almost the same moment he decided not to mention it when he got back to the group. Everybody was jumpy enough as it was.
The way Arthur had worked things out, while the rescue party went about their mission the others, including his father and Johnny Ollas, would head east toward the railroad and then on to El Paso. Johnny was now conscious enough from his amputation to give them some useful information, including the fact that the kids and Donita were being kept by Tom Mix and usually remained close by Villa’s headquarters.
Arthur had to tell Johnny there was no room in the plane for Donita, and though Johnny was naturally disappointed, he understood. The Colonel promised that after the children were safe he would see what he could do to negotiate a ransom for her. He swore to Johnny she’d be rescued. Johnny took the Colonel by the hand and gripped it tightly, his eyes glistening. “Please,” he said. “Okay?”
“I promise you, son, it will all come out right,” said Colonel Shaughnessy.
THE SUN WAS GOING DOWN and was casting long shadows across the lettuce field when Arthur’s men first heard the thin drone of an airplane. Earlier they had sneaked out and pulled up six rows of lettuce to make a smoother landing strip for Crosswinds Charlie. The plane came over the field from behind them so low and sudden that they were all startled; then it swooped upward in a sharp turn, banking east, and disappeared behind some trees. When they saw it again, the plane was leveling in from the south, headed right for the landing area they had cleared. Within half a minute it was on the ground, and in a few more moments was turned around and pointing back down the cleared strip for a takeoff.
Charlie cut the throttle immediately and a hard silence fell back over the farmlands, broken occasionally by the distant lowing of a cow. Everybody was surprised to see a second passenger in Charlie’s plane.
When Arthur recognized the passenger as Mick Martin, he felt the hair on his neck stand up and his body solidified into a wooden block that would not turn. He could only glare as Mick Martin and Charlie walked toward him across the lettuce field. Cowboy Bob had risen out of the ditch and was waving his hat to motion them over, but he needn’t have bothered, since Charlie had already seen them from the air.
Arthur was standing at the rim of the ditch when Mick and Charlie came walking up. Mick stuck out his hand. Arthur hit him hard as he could in the mouth, knocking him to the ground. Mick tasted blood on his lip and reflexively reached up to wipe it off, when Arthur kicked him in the side of the head and Mick slid down into the ditch. The others were startled and frozen by this behavior. Mick pushed himself to his feet but Arthur jumped down into the ditch in front of him and hit him again, this time in the nose, but he didn’t go down. Neither did he try to fight back, but instead stood with his arms by his sides, waiting for the next blow. Arthur realized what Mick was doing and didn’t hit him anymore. He would have shot him, but the noise might have attracted unwanted attention.
Arthur scrambled out of the ditch and said to the perplexed Crosswinds Charlie, “There’s been a little change in plans but your job’s the same. It’s going to be later than I hoped when we get back here after we rescue the children and I don’t know what the visibility’s going to be like after it gets dark. If there isn’t enough for you to see, you better post torches along the strip; that ought to get you into the air.”
Bob, Slim, and the others were frowning down at Mick, who was still standing in the ditch. Whatever he’d done to provoke Arthur’s wrath must have been serious, because they all liked Arthur and knew he was an even-tempered fellow. Bomba was more mystified than anyone, since he’d known Mick as Arthur’s friend since the Christmas Day he’d brought him to the Shaughnessy home from the orphanage.
Charlie finally spoke: “It was your wife that told me to bring him along, Arthur. I didn’t know y’all wasn’t friends.”
“Arthur, I need to talk to you,” Mick said, climbing out of the ditch and dusting himself off.
“No, you don’t. I don’t have time for you now. Best thing you can do is start walking east and away from here.”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Mick said. “I came to try to talk you out of it. Let me try something. This is my specialty.” Arthur gave him a steely glare. The silence between them was vast and stony. Then Arthur spoke:
“You’re not talking anyone out of anything,” he said furiously. “We have a plan and we’re going to stick to it, so shut up and get going. There’s a railroad about twenty or thirty miles east from here.”
“Look, I don’t know what Xenia has told you. But it wasn’t what you think . . .” Mick took out the letter Xenia had given him and tried to hand it to Arthur.
Arthur hit him again.
AT THE HACIENDA OF EL PADRINO, a celebration was in progress. Villa had opened the wine cellar to his soldiers and they were sprawled all over the ground or reeling among one another with wine bottles in their hands. Inside the main house, Villa had ordered a great feast to be prepared: roasted chickens and ducks with tomatoes, peppers, and cheese; lamb chops and mint jelly; broiled calves’ liver with rice and fresh spinach; baked ham with cabbage and sautéed onions; and, of course, fine wines. This nearly cleaned out the pantries and larders of the hacienda, but Villa wasn’t concerned because he had plans for the house, too. Having ordered all this, Villa retired with the headache that had nagged him since the incident at the fiesta that morning. Finally he got his lemonade.
The meal was served bacchanal-style over the course of many hours. In the dining room, Bierce, Reed, Fierro, Strucker, and a host of others, including Donita Ollas and the children, sat at an enormous table made from ponderosa pine. The food was a delicious change from the beans and beef of the trail. Pluto, the Mexican hairless, sat under the table gobbling chunks of meat that Timmy fed him. In a corner, the mariachi band from the fiesta played gay tunes, including, at Fierro’s insistence, “La Cucaracha,” and there was noisy singing amid a blue pall of cigar smoke from El Padrino’s private stock.
During a break in the courses, Katherine excused herself and walked outside for some air. Tom Mix saw her and motioned for her to come with him onto a
secluded lawn away from the drunken soldiers.
“Those men have been out in the wild for a long time,” he told her, “and when they get a bellyful of drinking, sometimes unpleasant things can happen.”
“Do you know what day this is?” Katherine asked him. They sat down on a stone bench in a corner of the lawn that was framed with flowering bushes.
Mix was somewhat baffled. In fact he didn’t know what day it was, though for some reason he thought it might be Tuesday. But out here, Tuesdays were pretty much the same as Mondays, or Wednesdays or Thursdays, or even Sundays, for that matter.
“Tuesday?” he offered.
“No, silly, not what day of the week. But what day,” she said.
Earlier Katherine had luxuriated in her first real bath since her capture. Upstairs in the hacienda was a huge commode room with mosaic tiled floors and a white marble tub; the servants had been told to bring buckets of hot water. She scrubbed herself with perfumed soaps and washed her hair for nearly half an hour. It had actually become matted in places. Since Mix told them to take or use anything they wished at the hacienda, Katherine managed to find a nice lace dress in somebody’s room. It had been a grown-up’s room, and she was a little surprised when the dress actually fit her. When she looked in the mirror, she sensed that she had grown, not just taller, but in other places, too. Katherine looked at herself for a long time and was pleased she was still pretty.
“Well, they were having a fiesta,” Mix said. “Are you asking if it is some saint’s day?”
“No, not that,” she said coyly.
“What, then? I don’t know,” Mix replied.
“It’s my birthday,” she told him.
“Is it really?” Mix said, genuinely surprised.
“I’m thirteen.”
“That’s nice and grown-up,” he said. “I remember the day when I was thirteen.”