Chapter IV On the Cannon-Car
The first car of the repair train was a steel-encased flat-car, upon which was mounted the famous Constitutionalist cannon “El Niño,” with an open caisson full of shells behind it. Behind that was an armored car full of soldiers, then a car of steel rails, and four loaded with railroad ties. The engine came next, the engineer and fireman hung with cartridge-belts, their rifles handy. Then followed two or three box-cars full of soldiers and their women. It was a dangerous business. A large force of Federals were known to be in Mapimi, and the country swarmed with their outposts. Our army was already far ahead, except for five hundred men who guarded the trains at Conejos. If the enemy could capture or wreck the repair train the army would be cut off without water, food or ammunition. In the darkness we moved out. I sat upon the breech of “El Niño,” chatting with Captain Diaz, the commander of the gun, as he oiled the breech lock of his beloved cannon and curled his vertical mustachios. In the armored recess behind the gun, where the Captain slept, I heard a curious, subdued rustling noise.
“What’s that?”
“Eh?” cried he nervously. “Oh, nothing, nothing!”
Just then there emerged a young Indian girl with a bottle in her hand. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, very lovely. The Captain shot a glance at me, and suddenly whirled around.
“What are you doing here?” he cried furiously to her. “Why are you coming out here?”
“I thought you said you wanted a drink,” she began.
I perceived that I was one too many, and excused myself. They hardly noticed me. But as I was climbing over the back of the car I couldn’t help stopping and listening. They had gone back to the recess, and she was weeping.
“Didn’t I tell you,” stormed the Captain, “not to show yourself when there are strangers here? I will not have every man in Mexico looking at you....”
I stood on the roof of the rocking steel car as we nosed slowly along. Lying on their bellies on the extreme front platform, two men with lanterns examined each foot of the track for wires that might mean mines planted under us. Beneath my feet the soldiers and their women were having dinner around fires built on the floor. Smoke and laughter poured out of the loopholes.... There were other fires aft, brown-faced, ragged people squatting at them, on the car-tops. Overhead the sky blazed stars, without a cloud. It was cold. After an hour of riding we came to a piece of broken track. The train stopped with a jar, the engine whistled, and a score of torches and lanterns jerked past. Men came running. The flares clustered bobbing together as the foremen examined the damage. A fire sprang up in the brush, and then another. Soldiers of the train guard straggled by, dragging their rifles, and formed impenetrable walls around the fires. Iron tools clanged, and the “Wai-hoy!” of men shoving rails off the flat-car. A Chinese dragon of workmen passed with a rail on their shoulders, then others with ties. Four hundred men swarmed upon the broken spot, working with extraordinary energy and good humor, until the shouts of gangs setting rails and ties, and the rattle of sledges on spikes, made a continuous roar. It was an old destruction, probably a year old, made when these same Constitutionalists were retreating north in the face of Mercado’s Federal army, and we had it all fixed in an hour. Then on again. Sometimes it was a bridge burned out, sometimes a hundred yards of track twisted into grape vines by a chain and a backing engine. We advanced slowly. At one big bridge that it would take two hours to prepare, I built by myself a little fire in order to get warm. Calzado came past, and hailed me. “We’ve got a hand-car up ahead,” he said, “and we’re going along down and see the dead men. Want to come?”
“What dead men?”
“Why, this morning an outpost of eighty rurales was sent scouting north from Bermejillo. We heard about it over the wire and informed Benavides on the left. He sent a troop to take them in the rear, and drove them north in a running fight for fifteen miles until they smashed up against our main body and not one got out alive. They’re scattered along the whole way just where they fell.”
In a moment we were speeding south on the hand-car. At our right hand and our left rode two silent, shadowy figures on horseback—cavalry guards, with rifles ready under their arms. Soon the flares and fires of the train were left behind, and we were enveloped and smothered in the vast silence of the desert.
“Yes,” said Calzado, “the rurales are brave. They are muy hombres. Rurales are the best fighters Diaz and Huerta ever had. They never desert to the Revolution. They always remain loyal to the established government. Because they are police.”
It was bitter cold. None of us talked much.
“We go ahead of the train at night,” said the soldier at my left, “so that if there are any dynamite bombs underneath——”
“We could discover them and dig them out and put water in them, carramba!” said another sarcastically. The rest laughed. I began to think of that, and it made me shiver. The dead silence of the desert seemed an expectant hush. One couldn’t see ten feet from the track.
“Oiga!” shouted one of the horsemen. “It was just here that one lay.” The brakes ground and we tumbled off and down the steep embankment, our lanterns jerking ahead. Something lay huddled around the foot of a telegraph pole—something infinitely small and shabby, like a pile of old clothes. The rurale was upon his back, twisted sideways from his hips. He had been stripped of everything of value by the thrifty rebels—shoes, hat, underclothing. They had left him his ragged jacket with the tarnished silver braid, because there were seven bullet holes in it; and his trousers, soaked with blood. He had evidently been much bigger when alive—the dead shrink so. A wild red beard made the pallor of his face grotesque, until you noticed that under it and the dirt, and the long lines of sweat of his terrible fight and hard riding, his mouth was gently and serenely open as if he slept. His brains had been blown out.
“Corrai!” said one guard. “There was a shot for the dirty goat! Right through the head!”
The others laughed. “Why, you don’t think they shot him there in the fight, do you, pendeco?” cried his companion. “No, they always go around and make sure afterward——”
“Hurry up! I’ve found the other,” shouted a voice off in the darkness.
We could reconstruct this man’s last struggle. He had dropped off his horse, wounded—for there was blood on the ground—into a little dry arroyo. We could even see where his horse had stood while he pumped shells into his Mauser with feverish hands, and blazed away, first to the rear, where the pursuers came running with Indian yells, and then at the hundreds and hundreds of bloodthirsty horsemen pouring down from the north, with the Demon Pancho Villa at their head. He must have fought a long time, perhaps until they ringed him round with living flame—for we found hundreds of empty cartridges. And then, when the last shot was spent, he made a dash eastward, hit at every step; hid for a moment under the little railroad bridge, and ran out upon the open desert, where he fell. There were twenty bullet holes in him. They had stripped him of all save his underclothes. He lay sprawled in an attitude of desperate action, muscles tense, one fist clenched and spread across the dust as if he were dealing a blow; the fiercest exultant grin on his face. Strong, savage, until one looked closer and saw the subtle touch of weakness that death stamps on life—the delicate expression of idiocy over it all. They had shot him through the head three times—how exasperated they must have been!
Crawling south through the cold night once more.... A few miles and then a bridge dynamited, or a strip of track wrecked. The stop, the dancing torches, the great bonfires leaping up from the desert, and the four hundred wild men pouring furiously out and falling upon their work.... Villa had given orders to hurry....
About two o’clock in the morning I came upon two soldaderas squatting around a fire, and asked them if they could give me tortillas and coffee. One was an old, gray-haired Indian woman with a perpetual grin, the other a slight girl not more than twenty years old, who was nursing a four-months baby at her breast. They were perched at the extreme tip of a flat-car, their fire built upon a pile of sand, as the train jolted and swayed along. Around them, backed against them, feet sticking out between them, was a great, inconglomerate mass of sleeping, snoring humans. The rest of the train was by this time dark; this was the only patch of light and warmth in the night. As I munched my tortilla and the old woman lifted a burning coal in her fingers to light her corn-husk cigarette, wondering where her Pablo’s brigade was this night; and the girl nursed her child, crooning to it, her blue-enameled ear-rings twinkling,—we talked.
“Ah! it is a life for us viejas,” said the girl. “Adio, but we follow our men out in the campaign, and then do not know from hour to hour whether they live or die. I remember well when Filadelfo called to me one morning in the little morning before it was light—we lived in Pachuca—and said: ‘Come! we are going out to fight because the good Pancho Madero has been murdered this day!’ We had only been loving each other eight months, too, and the first baby was not born.... We had all believed that peace was in Mexico for good. Filadelfo saddled the burro, and we rode out through the streets just as light was coming, and into the fields where the farmers were not yet at work. And I said: ‘Why must I come?’ And he answered: ‘Shall I starve, then? Who shall make my tortillas for me but my woman?’ It took us three months to get north, and I was sick and the baby was born in a desert just like this place, and died there because we could not get water. That was when Villa was going north after he had taken Torreon.”
The old woman broke in: “Yes, and all that is true. When we go so far and suffer so much for our men, we are cruelly treated by the stupid animals of Generals. I am from San Luis Potosi, and my man was in the artillery of the Federacion when Mercado came north. All the way to Chihuahua we traveled, the old fool of a Mercado grumbling about transporting the viejas. And then he ordered his army to go north and attack Villa in Juarez, and he forbade the women to go. Is that the way you are going to do, desgraciado? I said to myself. And when he evacuated Chihuahua and ran away with my man to Ojinaga, I just stayed right in Chihuahua and got a man in the Maderista army when it came in. A nice handsome young fellow, too,—much better than Juan. I’m not a woman to stand being put upon.”
“How much are the tortillas and coffee?” I asked.
They looked at each other, startled. Evidently they had thought me one of the penniless soldiers crowded on the train.
“What you would like,” said the young woman faintly. I gave them a peso.
The old woman exploded in a torrent of prayer. “God, his sainted Mother, the Blessed Niño and Our Lady of Guadelupe have sent this stranger to us tonight! Here we had not a centavo to buy coffee and flour with....”
I suddenly noticed that the light of our fire had paled, and looked up in amazement to find it was dawn. Just then a man came running along the train from up front, shouting something unintelligible, while laughter and shouts burst out in his wake. The sleepers raised their curious heads and wanted to know what was the matter. In a moment our inanimate car was alive. The man passed, still yelling something about “padre,” his face exultant with some tremendous joke.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Oh!” cried the old woman. “His woman on the car ahead has just had a baby!”
Just in front of us lay Bermejillo, its pink and blue and white plastered adobe houses as delicate and ethereal as a village of porcelain. To the east, across a still, dustless desert, a little file of sharp-cut horsemen, with a red-white-and-green flag over them, were riding into town....