Chapter VII: Part VI: Mexican Nights (5)

Dona Luisa is a small, dumpy American woman more than eighty years of age--a benevolent New-England-grandmother sort of person. For forty-five years she has been in Mexico, and thirty or more years ago, when her husband died, she began to keep the Station Hotel. War and peace make no difference to her. The American flag flies over the door and in her house she alone is boss. When Pascual Orozco took Jimenez, his men began a drunken reign of terror in the town. Orozco himself--Orozco the invincible, the fierce, who would as soon kill a person as not--came drunk to the Station Hotel with two of his officers and several women. Dona Luisa planted herself across the doorway--alone--and shook her fist in his face. "Pascual Orozco," she cried, "take your disreputable friends and go away from here. I'm keeping a decent hotel!" And Orozco went....

*CHAPTER II*

*DUELLO A LA FRIGADA*

I wandered up the mile-long, incredibly dilapidated street that leads to the town. A streetcar came past, drawn by one galloping mule and bulging with slightly intoxicated soldiers. Open surreys full of officers with girls on their laps rolled along. Under the dusty, bare alamo trees each window held its senorita, with a blanket-wrapped _caballero_ in attendance. There were no lights. The night was dry and cold and full of a subtle exotic excitement; guitars twanged, snatches of song and laughter and low voices, and shouts from distant streets, filled the darkness. Occasionally little companies of soldiers on foot came along, or a troop of horsemen in high sombreros and serapes jingled silently out of the blackness and faded away again, bound probably for the relief of guard.

In one quiet stretch of street near the bull-ring, where there are no houses, I noticed an automobile speeding from the town. At the same time a galloping horse came from the other direction, and just in front of me the headlights of the machine illumined the horse and his rider, a young officer in a Stetson hat. The automobile jarred to a grinding stop and a voice from it cried, "_Haltoie!_"

"Who speaks?" asked the horseman, pulling his mount to its haunches.

"I, Gusman!" and the other leaped to the ground and came into the light, a coarse, fat Mexican, with a sword at his belt.

"Como le va, mi Capitan?" The officer flung himself from his horse. They embraced, patting each other on the back with both hands.

"Very well. And you? Where are you going?"

"To see Maria."

The captain laughed. "Don't do it," he said; "I'm going to see Maria myself, and if I see you there I shall certainly kill you."

"But I am going just the same. I am as quick with my pistol as you, senor."

"But you see," returned the other mildly, "we both cannot go!"

"Perfectly!"

"_Oiga!_" said the captain to his chauffeur. "Turn your car so as to throw the light evenly along the sidewalk.... And now we will walk thirty paces apart and stand with our backs turned until you count three. Then the man who first puts a bullet through the other man's hat wins...."

Both men drew immense revolvers and stood a moment in the light, spinning the chambers.

"_Listo_! Ready!" cried the horseman.

"Hurry it," said the captain. "It is a bad thing to balk love."

Back to back, they had already begun to pace the distance.

"One!" shouted the chauffeur.

"Two!"

But quick as a flash the fat man wheeled in the trembling, uncertain light, threw down his lifted arm, and a mighty roar went soaring slowly into the heavy night. The Stetson of the other man, whose back was still turned, took an odd little leap ten feet beyond him. He spun around, but the captain was already climbing into his machine.

"_Bueno!_" he said cheerfully. "I win. Until to-morrow then, _amigo_!" And the automobile gathered speed and disappeared down the street. The horseman slowly went to where his hat lay, picked it up and examined it. He stood a moment meditating, and then deliberately mounted his horse and he also went away. I had already started some time before....

In the plaza the regimental band was playing "El Pagare," the song which started Orozco's Revolution. It was a parody of the original, referring to Madero's payment of his family's $750,000 war claims as soon as he became president, that spread like wildfire over the Republic, and had to be suppressed with police and soldiers. "El Pagare" is even now taboo in most revolutionary circles, and I have heard of men being shot for singing it; but in Jimenez at this time the utmost license prevailed. Moreover, the Mexicans, unlike the French, have absolutely no feeling for symbols. Bitterly antagonistic sides use the same flag; in the plaza of almost every town still stand eulogistic statues of Porfirio Diaz; even at officers' mess in the field I have drunk from glasses stamped with the likeness of the old dictator, while Federal army uniforms are plentiful in the ranks.

But "El Pagare" is a swinging, glorious tune, and under the hundreds of little electric light globes strung on the plaza a double procession marched gaily round and round. On the outside, in groups of four, went the men, mostly soldiers. On the inside, in the opposite direction, the girls walked arm in arm. As they passed they threw handfuls of confetti at one another. They never talked to one another, never stopped; but as a girl caught a man's fancy, he slipped a lover's note into her hand as she went by, and she answered with a smile if she liked him. Thus they met, and later the girl would manage to let the _caballero_ know her address; this would lead to long talks at her window in the darkness, and then they would be lovers. It was a delicate business, this handing of notes. Every man carried a gun, and every man's girl was his jealously guarded property. It was a killing matter to hand a note to someone else's girl. The close-packed throng moved gaily on, thrilling to the music.... Beyond the plaza gaped the ruins of Marcos Russek's store, which these same men had looted less than two weeks before, and at one side the ancient pink cathedral towered among its fountains and great trees, with the iron and glass illuminated sign, "Santo Cristo de Burgos," shining above the door.

There, at the side of the plaza, I came upon a little group of five Americans huddled upon a bench. They were ragged beyond belief, all except a slender youth in leggings and a Federal officer's uniform, who wore a crownless Mexican hat. Feet protruded from their shoes, none had more than the remnants of socks, all were unshaven. One mere boy wore his arm in a sling made out of a torn blanket. They made room for me gladly, stood up, crowded around, cried how good it was to see another American among all these damned greasers.

"What are you fellows doing here?" I asked.

"We're soldiers of fortune!" said the boy with the wounded arm.

"Aw----!" interrupted another. "Soldiers of----!"

"Ye see it's this way," began the soldierly looking youth. "We've been fighting right along in the Brigada Zaragosa--was at the battle of Ojinaga and everything. And now comes an order from Villa to discharge all the Americans in the ranks and ship 'em back to the border. Ain't that a hell of a note?"

"Last night they gave us our honorable discharges and threw us out of the cuartel," said a one-legged man with red hair.

"And we ain't had any place to sleep and nothing to eat----" broke in a little gray-eyed boy whom they called the Major.

"Don't try and panhandle the guy!" rebuked the soldier indignantly. "Ain't we each going to get fifty Mex in the morning?"

We adjourned for a short time to a nearby restaurant, and when we returned I asked them what they were going to do.

"The old U.S. for mine," breathed a good-looking black Irishman who hadn't spoken before. "I'm going back to San Fran and drive a truck again. I'm sick of greasers, bad food and bad fighting."

"I got two honorable discharges from the United States army," announced the soldierly youth proudly. "Served through the Spanish War, I did. I'm the only soldier in this bunch." The others sneered and cursed sullenly. "Guess I'll reenlist when I get over the border."

"Not for mine," said the one-legged man. "I'm wanted for two murder charges--I didn't do it, swear to God I didn't--it was a frame-up. But a poor guy hasn't got a chance in the United States. When they ain't framing up some fake charge against me, they jail me for a 'vag.' I'm all right though," he went on earnestly. "I'm a hard-working man, only I can't get no job."

The Major raised his hard little face and cruel eyes. "I got out of a reform school in Wisconsin," he said, "and I guess there's some cops waiting for me in El Paso. I always wanted to kill somebody with a gun, and I done it at Ojinaga, and I ain't got a bellyful yet. They told us we could stay if we signed Mex citizenship papers; I guess I'll sign to-morrow morning."

"The hell you will," cried the others. "That's a rotten thing to do. Suppose we get Intervention and you have to shoot against your own people. You won't catch me signing myself away to be a greaser."

"That's easy fixed," said the Major. "When I go back to the States I leave my name here. I'm going to stay down here till I get enough of a stake to go back to Georgia and start a child-labor factory."

The other boy had suddenly burst into tears. "I got my arm shot through in Ojinaga," he sobbed, "and now they're turning me loose without any money, and I can't work. When I get to El Paso the cops 'll jail me and I'll have to write my dad to come and take me home to California. I run away from there last year," he explained.

"Look here, Major," I advised, "you'd better not stay down here if Villa wants Americans out of the ranks. Being a Mexican citizen won't help you if Intervention comes."

"Perhaps you're right," agreed the Major thoughtfully. "Aw, quit your bawling, Jack! I guess I'll beat it over to Galveston and get on a South American boat. They say there's a revolution started in Peru."

The soldier was about thirty, the Irishman twenty-five, and the three others somewhere between sixteen and eighteen.

"What did you fellows come down here for?" I asked.

"Excitement!" answered the soldier and the Irishman, grinning. The three boys looked at me with eager, earnest faces, drawn with hunger and hardship.

"Loot!" they said simultaneously. I cast an eye at their dilapidated garments, at the throngs of tattered volunteers parading around the plaza, who hadn't been paid for three months, and restrained a violent impulse to shout with mirth. Soon I left them, hard, cold misfits in a passionate country, despising the cause for which they were fighting, sneering at the gaiety of the irrepressible Mexicans. And as I went away I said, "By the way; what company did you fellows belong to? What did you call yourselves?"

The red-haired youth answered, "The Foreign Legion!" he said.

I want to say right here that I saw few soldiers of fortune except one--and he was a dry-as-dust scientist studying the action of high explosives in field-guns--who would not have been tramps in their own country.

It was late night when I finally got back to the hotel. Dona Luisa went ahead to see to my room, and I stopped a moment in the bar. Two or three soldiers, evidently officers, were drinking there--one pretty far gone. He was a pock-marked man with a trace of black mustache; his eyes couldn't seem to focus. But when he saw me he began to sing a pleasant little song:

I thought it diplomatic to leave, because you can never tell what a Mexican will do when he's drunk. His temperament is much too complicated.

Dona Luisa was in my room when I got there. With a mysterious finger to her lips she shut the door and produced from beneath her skirt a last year's copy of the _Saturday Evening Post_, in an incredible state of dissolution. "I got it out of the safe for you," she said. "The damn thing's worth more than anything in the house. I've been offered fifteen dollars for it by Americans going out to the mines. You see we haven't had any American magazines in a year now."

*CHAPTER III*

*SAVED BY A WRIST-WATCH*

After that what could I do but read the precious magazine, although I had read it before. I lit the lamp, undressed, and got into bed. Just then came an unsteady step on the gallery outside and my door was flung violently open. Framed in it stood the pock-marked officer who had been drinking in the bar. In one hand he carried a big revolver. For a moment he stood blinking at me malevolently, then stepped inside and closed the door with a bang. "I am Lieutenant Antonio Montoya, at your orders," he said. "I heard there was a Gringo in this hotel and I have come to kill you."

"Sit down," said I politely. I saw he was drunkenly in earnest. He took off his hat, bowed politely and drew up a chair. Then he produced another revolver from beneath his coat and laid them both on the table. They were loaded.

"Would you like a cigarette?" I offered him the package. He took one, waved it in thanks, and lit it at the lamp. Then he picked up the guns and pointed them both at me. His fingers tightened slowly on the triggers, but relaxed again. I was too far gone to do anything but just wait.

"My only difficulty," said he, lowering his weapons, "is to determine which revolver I shall use."

"Pardon me," I quavered, "but they both appear a little obsolete. That Colt forty-five is certainly an 1895 model, and as for the Smith and Wesson, between ourselves it is only a toy."

"True," he answered, looking at them a little ruefully. "If I had only thought I would have brought my new automatic. My apologies, senor." He sighed and again directed the barrels at my chest, with an expression of calm happiness. "However, since it is so, we must make the best of it." I got ready to jump, to duck, to scream. Suddenly his eye fell upon the table, where my two-dollar wrist-watch was lying.

"What is that?" he asked.

"A watch!" Eagerly I demonstrated how to fasten it on. Unconsciously the pistols slowly lowered. With parted lips and absorbed attention he watched it delightedly, as a child watches the operation of some new mechanical toy.

"Ah," he breathed. "_Que esta bonita_! How pretty!"

"It is yours," said I, unstrapping it and offering it to him. He looked at the watch, then at me, slowly brightening and glowing with surprised joy. Into his outstretched hand I placed it. Reverently, carefully, he adjusted the thing to his hairy wrist. Then he rose, beaming down upon me. The revolvers fell unnoticed to the floor. Lieutenant Antonio Montoya threw his arms around me.

"Ah, _compadre_!" he cried emotionally.

The next day I met him at Valiente Adiana's store in the town. We sat amicably in the back room drinking native _aguardiente_, while Lieutenant Montoya, my best friend in the entire Constitutionalist army, told me of the hardships and perils of the campaign. For three weeks now Maclovio Herrera's brigade had lain at Jimenez under arms, waiting the emergency call for the advance on Torreon.

"This morning," said Antonio, "the Constitutionalist spies intercepted a telegram from the Federal commander in Zacatecas City to General Velasco in Torreon. He said that upon mature judgment he had decided that Zacatecas was an easier place to attack than to defend. Therefore he reported that his plan of campaign was this. Upon the approach of the Constitutionalist forces he intended to evacuate the city and then take it again."

"Antonio," I said, "I am going a long journey across the desert to-morrow. I am going to drive to Magistral. I need a _mozo_. I will pay three dollars a week."

"_'Sta bueno!_" cried Lieutenant Montoya. "Whatever you wish, so that I can go with my _amigo_!"

"But you are on active service," said I. "How can you leave your regiment?"

"Oh, that's all right," answered Antonio. "I won't say anything about it to my colonel. They don't need me. Why, they've got five thousand other men here."

*CHAPTER IV*

*SYMBOLS OF MEXICO*

In the early dawn, when yet the low gray houses and the dusty trees were stiff with cold, we laid a bull-whip on the backs of our two mules and rattled down the uneven streets of Jimenez and out into the open country. A few soldiers, wrapped to the eyes in their serapes, dozed beside their lanterns. There was a drunken officer sleeping in the gutter.

We drove an ancient buggy, whose broken pole was mended with wire. The harness was made of bits of old iron, rawhide and rope. Antonio and I sat side by side upon the seat, and at our feet dozed a dark, serious-minded youth named Primitivo Aguilar. Primitivo had been hired to open and shut gates, to tie up the harness when it broke, and to keep watch over wagon and mules at night, because bandits were reported to infest the roads.

The country became a vast fertile plain, cut up by irrigating ditches which were overshadowed by long lines of great alamo trees, leafless and gray as ashes. Like a furnace door, the white-hot sun blazed upon us, and the far-stretched barren fields reeked a thin mist. A cloud of white dust moved with us and around us. By the church of the Hacienda San Pedro we stopped and dickered with an aged peon for a sack of corn and straw for the mules. Farther along was an exquisite low building of pink plaster, set back from the road in a grove of green willows. "That?" said Antonio. "Oh, that is nothing but a flour mill." We had lunch in the long whitewashed, dirt-floored room of a peon's house at another great hacienda, whose name I forget, but which I know had once belonged to Luis Terrazzas and was now the confiscated property of the Constitutionalist government. And that night we made camp beside an irrigation ditch miles from any house, in the middle of the bandit territory.

After a dinner of chopped-up meat and peppers, _tortillas_, beans and black coffee, Antonio and I gave Primitivo his instructions. He was to keep watch beside the fire with Antonio's revolver and, if he heard anything, was to wake us. But on no account was he to go to sleep. If he did we would kill him. Primitivo said, "_Si, senor_," very gravely, opened his eyes wide, and gripped the pistol. Antonio and I rolled up in our blankets by the fire.

I must have gone to sleep at once, because when I was wakened by Antonio's rising, my watch showed only half an hour later. From the place where Primitivo had been placed on guard came a series of hearty snores. The lieutenant walked over to him.

"Primitivo!" he said.

No answer.

"Primitivo, you fool!" Our sentinel stirred in his sleep and turned over with noises indicative of comfort.

"Primitivo!" shouted Antonio, violently kicking him.

He gave absolutely no response.

Antonio drew back and launched a kick at his back that lifted him several feet into the air. With a start Primitivo woke. He started up alertly, waving the revolver.

"_Quien vive?_" cried Primitivo.

The next day took us out of the lowlands. We entered the desert, winding over a series of rolling plains, sandy and covered with black mesquite and here and there an occasional cactus. Now we began to see beside the road those sinister little wooden crosses that the country people erect on the spot where some man died a violent death. Around the horizon barren purple mountains hemmed us in. To the right, across a vast dry valley, a white and green and gray hacienda stood like a city. An hour later we passed the first of those great fortified square ranchos that one comes across once a day lost in the folds of this tremendous country. Night gathered straight above in the cloudless zenith, while all the skyline still was luminous with clear light, and then the day snuffed out, and stars burst out in the dome of heaven like a rocket. Antonio and Primitivo, in that queer harsh Mexican harmony which sounds like nothing so much as a fiddle with frazzled strings, sang "_Esperanza_" as we jogged along. It grew cold. For leagues and leagues around was a blasted land, a country of death. It was hours since we had passed a house.

Antonio claimed to know of a water-hole somewhere vaguely ahead. But toward midnight, which was black and without moon, we discovered that the road upon which we were traveling suddenly petered out in a dense mesquite thicket. Somewhere we had turned off the _Camino Real_. It was late and the mules were worn out. There seemed nothing for it but a "dry camp," for so far as we knew there was no water anywhere near.

Now we had unharnessed the mules and fed them, and were lighting our fire, when somewhere in the dense thicket of chaparral stealthy footsteps sounded. They moved a space and then were still. Our little blaze of greasewood crackled fiercely, lighting up a leaping, glowing radius of about ten feet. Beyond that all was black. Primitivo made one backward leap into the shelter of the wagon; Antonio drew his revolver, and we froze beside the fire. The sound came again.

"Who lives?" said Antonio. There was a little shuffling noise out in the brush, and then a voice.

"What party are you?" it asked hesitantly.

"Maderistas," answered Antonio. "Pass!"

"It is safe for _pacificos_?" queried the invisible one.

"On my word," I cried. "Come out that we may see you."

At that very moment two vague shapes materialized on the edge of the firelight glow, almost without a sound--two peons, we saw as soon as they came close, wrapped tightly in their torn blankets. One was an old, wrinkled, bent man wearing homemade sandals, his trousers hanging in rags upon his shrunken legs; the other a very tall, barefooted youth, with a face so pure and so simple as to almost verge upon idiocy. Friendly, warm as sunlight, eagerly curious as children, they came forward, holding out their hands. We shook hands with each of them in turn, greeting them with elaborate Mexican courtesy.

"Good evening, friend. How are you?"

"Very well, _gracias_. And you?"

"Well, _gracias_. And how are all your people?"

"Well, thanks. And yours?"

"Well, thanks. What have you of new here?"

"Nada. Nothing. And you?"

"Nothing. Sit down."

"Oh, thanks, but I am well standing."

"Sit down. Sit down."

"A thousand thanks. Excuse us for a moment."

They smiled and faded away once more into the thicket. In a minute they reappeared, with great armfuls of dried mesquite branches for our fire.

"We are _rancheros_," said the elder, bowing. "We keep a few goats, and our houses are at your orders, and our corrals for your mules, and our small stock of corn. Our _ranchitos_ are very near here in the mesquite. We are very poor men, but we hope you will do us the honor of accepting our hospitality." It was an occasion for tact.

"A thousand times many thanks," said Antonio politely, "but we are, unfortunately, in great haste and must leave early. We would not like to disturb your household at that hour."

They protested that their families and their houses were entirely ours, to be used as we saw fit with the greatest delight on their part. I do not remember how we finally managed to evade the invitation without wounding them, but I do recall that it took half an hour of courteous talking. For we knew, in the first place, that we would be unable to leave for hours in the morning if we accepted, because Mexican manners are that haste to leave a house signifies dissatisfaction with the entertainment; and then, too, one could not pay for one's lodging, but would have to bestow a handsome present upon the hosts--which we could none of us afford.

At first they politely refused our invitation to dine, but after much urging we finally persuaded them to accept a few _tortillas_ and _chile_. It was ludicrous and pitiful to see how wretchedly hungry they were, and how they attempted to conceal it from us.

After dinner, when they had brought us a bucket of water out of sheer kindly thoughtfulness, they stood for a while by our fire, smoking our cigarettes and holding out their hands to the blaze. I remember how their serapes hung from their shoulders, open in front so the grateful warmth could reach their thin bodies--and how gnarled and ancient were the old man's outstretched hands, and how the ruddy light glowed upon the other's throat, and kindled fires in his big eyes. Around them stretched the desert, held off only by our fire, ready to spring in upon us when it should die. Above the great stars would not dim. Coyotes wailed somewhere out beyond the firelight like demons in pain. I suddenly conceived these two human beings as symbols of Mexico--courteous, loving, patient, poor, so long slaves, so full of dreams, so soon to be free.

"When we saw your wagon coming here," said the old man, smiling, "our hearts sank within us. We thought you were soldiers, come, perhaps, to take away our last few goats. So many soldiers have come in the last few years--so many. It is mostly the Federals--the Maderistas do not come unless they are hungry themselves. Poor Maderistas!"

"Ay," said the young man, "my brother that I loved very much died in the eleven days' fighting around Torreon. Thousands have died in Mexico, and still more thousands shall fall. Three years--it is long for war in a land. Too long!" The old man murmured, "_Valgame Dios!_" and shook his head. "But, there shall come a day----"

"It is said," remarked the old man quaveringly, "that the United States of the North covets our country--that Gringo soldiers will come and take away my goats in the end...."

"That is a lie," exclaimed the other, animated. "It is the rich Americanos who want to rob us, just as the rich Mexicans want to rob us. It is the rich all over the world who want to rob the poor."

The old man shivered and drew his wasted body nearer to the fire. "I have often wondered," said he mildly, "why the rich, having so much, want so much. The poor, who have nothing, want so very little. Just a few goats...."

His _compadre_ lifted his chin like a noble, smiling gently. "I have never been out of this little country here--not even to Jimenez," he said. "But they tell me that there are many rich lands to the north and south and east. But this is my land and I love it. For the years of me, and my father and my grandfather, the rich men have gathered the corn and held it in their clenched fists before our mouths. And only blood will make them open their hands to their brothers."

The fire died down. At his post slept the alert Primitivo. Antonio stared into the embers, a faint glorified smile upon his mouth, his eyes shining like stars.

"_Adio!_" he said suddenly, as one who sees a vision. "When we get into Mexico City what a _baile_ shall be held! How drunk I shall get!..."

*PART FOUR*

*A PEOPLE IN ARMS*

*CHAPTER I*

*"ON TO TORREON!"*

At Yermo there is nothing but leagues and leagues of sandy desert, sparsely covered with scrubby mesquite and dwarf cactus, stretching away on the west to jagged, tawny mountains, and on the east to a quivering skyline of plain. A battered water-tank, with too little dirty alkali water, a demolished railway station shot to pieces by Orozco's cannon two years before, and a switch track compose the town. There is no water to speak of for forty miles. There is no grass for animals. For three months in the spring bitter, parching winds drive the yellow dust across it.

Along the single track in the middle of the desert lay ten enormous trains, pillars of fire by night and of black smoke by day, stretching back northward farther than the eye could reach. Around them, in the chaparral, camped nine thousand men without shelter, each man's horse tied to the mesquite beside him, where hung his one serape and red strips of drying meat. From fifty cars horses and mules were being unloaded. Covered with sweat and dust, a ragged trooper plunged into a cattle-car among the flying hoofs, swung himself upon a horse's back, and jabbed his spurs deep in, with a yell. Then came a terrific drumming of frightened animals, and suddenly a horse shot violently from the open door, usually backward, and the car belched flying masses of horses and mules. Picking themselves up, they fled in terror, snorting through wide nostrils at the smell of the open. Then the wide, watchful circle of troopers turned _vaqueros_ lifted the great coils of their lassoes through the choking dust, and the running animals swirled round and round upon one another in a panic. Officers, orderlies, generals with their staffs, soldiers with halters, hunting for their mounts, galloped and ran past in inextricable confusion. Bucking mules were being harnessed to the caissons. Troopers who had arrived on the last trains wandered about looking for their brigades. Way ahead some men were shooting at a rabbit. From the tops of the box-cars and the flat-cars, where they were camped by hundreds, the _soldaderas_ and their half-naked swarms of children looked down, screaming shrill advice and asking everybody in general if they had happened to see Juan Moneros, or Jesus Hernandez, or whatever the name of their man happened to be.... One man trailing a rifle wandered along shouting that he had had nothing to eat for two days and he couldn't find his woman who made his _tortillas_ for him, and he opined that she had deserted him to go with some ---- of another brigade.... The women on the roofs of the cars said, "_Valgame Dios!_" and shrugged their shoulders; then they dropped him down some three-days-old _tortillas_, and asked him, for the love he bore Our Lady of Guadelupe, to lend them a cigarette. A clamorous, dirty throng stormed the engine of our train, screaming for water. When the engineer stood them off with a revolver, telling them there was plenty of water in the water-train, they broke away and aimlessly scattered, while a fresh throng took their places. Around the twelve immense tank-cars, a fighting mass of men and animals struggled for a place at the little faucets ceaselessly pouring. Above the place a mighty cloud of dust, seven miles long and a mile wide, towered up into the still, hot air, and, with the black smoke of the engines, struck wonder and terror into the Federal outposts fifty miles away on the mountains back of Mapimi.

When Villa left Chihuahua for Torreon, he closed the telegraph wires to the north, stopped train service to Juarez, and forbade on pain of death that anyone should carry or send news of his departure to the United States. His object was to take the Federals by surprise, and it worked beautifully. No one, not even Villa's staff, knew when he would leave Chihuahua; the army had delayed there so long that we all believed it would delay another two weeks. And then Saturday morning we woke to find the telegraph and railway cut, and three huge trains, carrying the Brigada Gonzalez-Ortega, already gone. The Zaragosa left the next day, and Villa's own troops the following morning. Moving with the swiftness that always characterizes him, Villa had his entire army concentrated at Yermo the day afterward, without the Federals knowing that he had left Chihuahua.

There was a mob around the portable field telegraph that had been rigged up in the ruined station. Inside, the instrument was clicking. Soldiers and officers indiscriminately choked up the windows and the door, and every once in a while the operator would shout something in Spanish and a perfect roar of laughter would go up. It seemed that the telegraph had accidentally tapped a wire that had not been destroyed by the Federals--a wire that connected with the Federal military wire from Mapimi to Torreon.

"Listen!" cried the operator. "Colonel Argumedo in command of the _cabecillos colorados_ in Mapimi is telegraphing to General Velasco in Torreon. He says that he sees smoke and a big dust cloud to the north, and thinks that some rebel troops are moving south from Escalon!"

Night came, with a cloudy sky and a rising wind that began to lift the dust. Along the miles and miles of trains, the fires of the _soldaderas_ flared from the tops of the freight-cars. Out into the desert so far that finally they were mere pin-points of flame stretched the innumerable camp-fires of the army, half obscured by the thick, billowing dust. The storm completely concealed us from Federal watchers. "Even God," remarked Major Leyva, "even God is on the side of Francisco Villa!" We sat at dinner in our converted box-car, with young, great-limbed, expressionless General Maximo Garcia and his brother, the even huger red-faced Benito Garcia, and little Major Manuel Acosta, with the beautiful manners of his race. Garcia had long been holding the advance at Escalon. He and his brothers--one of whom, Jose Garcia, the idol of the army, had been killed in battle--but a short four years ago were wealthy _hacendados_, owners of immense tracts of land. They had come out with Madero.... I remember that he brought us a jug of whisky, and refused to discuss the Revolution, declaring that he was fighting for better whisky! As I write this comes a report that he is dead from a bullet wound received in the battle of Sacramento....

Out in the dust storm, on a flat-car immediately ahead of ours, some soldiers lay around their fire with their heads in their women's laps, singing "The Cockroach," which tells in hundreds of satirical verses what the Constitutionalists would do when they captured Juarez and Chihuahua from Mercado and Orozco.

Above the wind one was aware of the immense sullen murmur of the host, and occasionally some sentry challenged in a falsetto howl: "_Quien vive?_" And the answer: "_Chiapas!_" "_Que gente?_" "_Chao!_" ... Through the night sounded the eerie whistle of the ten locomotives at intervals as they signaled back and forth to one another.

*CHAPTER II*

*THE ARMY AT YERMO*

At dawn next morning General Torribio Ortega came to the car for breakfast--a lean, dark Mexican, who is called "The Honorable" and "The Most Brave" by the soldiers. He is by far the most simple-hearted and disinterested soldier in Mexico. He never kills his prisoners. He has refused to take a cent from the Revolution beyond his meager salary. Villa respects and trusts him perhaps beyond all his Generals. Ortega was a poor man, a cowboy. He sat there, with his elbows on the table, forgetting his breakfast, his big eyes flashing, smiling his gentle, crooked smile, and told us why he was fighting.

"I am not an educated man," he said. "But I know that to fight is the last thing for any people. Only when things get too bad to stand, eh? And, if we are going to kill our brothers, something fine must come out of it, eh? You in the United States do not know what we have seen, we Mexicans! We have looked on at the robbing of our people, the simple, poor people, for thirty-five years, eh? We have seen the _rurales_ and the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz shoot down our brothers and our fathers, and justice denied to them. We have seen our little fields taken away from us, and all of us sold into slavery, eh? We have longed for our homes and for schools to teach us, and they have laughed at us. All we have ever wanted was to be let alone to live and to work and make our country great, and we are tired--tired and sick of being cheated...."

Outside in the dust, that whirled along under a sky of driving clouds, long lines of soldiers on horseback stood in the obscurity, while their officers passed along in front, peering closely at cartridge-belts and rifles.

"Geronimo," said a Captain to one trooper, "go back to the ammunition train and fill up the gaps in your _cartouchera_. You fool, you've been wasting your cartridges shooting coyotes!"

Across the desert westward toward the distant mountains rode strings of cavalry, the first to the front. About a thousand went, in ten different lines, diverging like wheel spokes; the jingle of their spurs ringing, their red-white-and-green flags floating straight out, crossed bandoliers gleaming dully, rifles flopping across their saddles, heavy, high sombreros and many-colored blankets. Behind each company plodded ten or twelve women on foot, carrying cooking utensils on their heads and backs, and perhaps a pack mule loaded with sacks of corn. And as they passed the cars they shouted back to their friends on the trains.

"_Poco tiempo California!_" cried one.

"Oh! there's a _colorado_ for you!" yelled another. "I'll bet you were with Salazar in Orozco's Revolution. Nobody ever said '_Poco tiempo California_' except Salazar when he was drunk!"

The other man looked sheepish. "Well, maybe I was," he admitted. "But wait till I get a shot at my old _companeros_. I'll show you whether I'm a Maderista or not!"

A little Indian in the rear cried: "I know how much of a Maderista you are, Luisito. At the first taking of Torreon, Villa gave you the choice of turning your coat or getting a _cabronasso_ or _balasso_ through the head!" And, joshing and singing, they jogged southwest, became small, and finally faded into the dust.

Villa himself stood leaning against a car, hands in his pockets. He wore an old slouch hat, a dirty shirt without a collar, and a badly frayed and shiny brown suit. All over the dusty plain in front of him men and horses had sprung up like magic. There was an immense confusion of saddling and bridling--a cracked blowing of tin bugles. The Brigada Zaragosa was getting ready to leave camp--a flanking column of two thousand men who were to ride southeast and attack Tlahualilo and Sacramento. Villa, it seemed, had just arrived at Yermo. He had stopped off Monday night at Camargo to attend the wedding of a _compadre_. His face was drawn into lines of fatigue.

"Carramba!" he was saying with a grin; "we started dancing Monday evening, danced all night, all the next day, and last night, too! What a _baile_! And what _muchachas_! The girls of Camargo and Santa Rosalia are the most beautiful in Mexico! I am worn out--_rendido_! It was harder work than twenty battles...."

Then he listened to the report of some staff officer who dashed up on horseback, gave a concise order without hesitating, and the officer rode off. He told Senor Calzado, General Manager of the Railroad, in what order the trains should proceed south. He indicated to Senor Uro, the Quartermaster-general, what supplies should be distributed from the troop trains. To Senor Munoz, Director of the Telegraph, he gave the name of a Federal captain surrounded by Urbina's men a week before and killed with all his men in the hills near La Cadena, and ordered him to tap the Federal wire and send a message to General Velasco in Torreon purporting to be a report from this Captain from Conejos, and asking for orders.... He seemed to know and order everything.

We had lunch with General Eugenio Aguirre Benavides, the quiet, cross-eyed little commander of the Zaragosa Brigade, a member of one of the cultivated Mexican families that gathered around Madero in the first Revolution; with Raul Madero, brother of the murdered President, second in command of the Brigade, who is a graduate of an American University, and looks like a Wall Street bond salesman; with Colonel Guerra, who went through Cornell, and Major Leyva, Ortega's nephew, a historic full-back on the Notre Dame football team....

In a great circle, ready for action, the artillery was parked, with caissons open and mules corralled in the center. Colonel Servin, commander of the guns, sat perched high up on an immense bay horse, a ridiculous tiny figure, not more than five feet tall. He was waving his hand and shouting a greeting across to General Angeles, Carranza's Secretary of War--a tall, gaunt man, bareheaded, in a brown sweater, with a war map of Mexico hanging from his shoulder; who straddled a small burro. In the thick dust-clouds, sweating men labored. The five American artillery men had squatted down in the lee of a cannon, smoking. They hailed me with a shout:

"Say, bo! What in hell did we ever get into this mess for? Nothing to eat since last night--work twelve hours--say, take our pictures, will you?"

There passed by with a friendly nod the little Cockney soldier that had served with Kitchener, and then the Canadian Captain Treston, bawling for his interpreter, so that he could give his men some orders about the machine guns; and Captain Marinelli, the fat Italian soldier of fortune, pouring an interminable and unintelligible mixture of French, Spanish and Italian into the ear of a bored Mexican officer. Fierro rode by, cruelly roweling his horse with the bloody mouth--Fierro, the handsome, cruel and insolent--The Butcher they called him, because he killed defenseless prisoners with his revolver, and shot down his own men without provocation.

Late in the afternoon the Brigada Zaragosa rode away southeast over the desert, and another night came down.

The wind rose steadily in the darkness, growing colder and colder. Looking up at the sky, which had been ablaze with polished stars, I saw that all was dark with cloud. Through the roaring whirls of dust a thousand thin lines of sparks from the fires streamed southward. The coaling of the engines' fire boxes made sudden glares along the miles of trains. At first we thought we heard the sound of big guns in the distance. But all at once, unexpectedly, the sky split dazzlingly open from horizon to horizon, thunder fell like a blow, and the rain came level and thick as a flood. For a moment the human hum of the army was silenced. All the fires disappeared at once. And then came a vast shout of anger and laughter and discomfiture from the soldiers out on the plain, and the most amazing wail of misery from the women that I have ever heard. The two sounds only lasted a minute. The men wrapped themselves in their serapes and sank down in the shelter of the chaparral; and the hundreds of women and children exposed to the cold and the rain on the flat-cars and the tops of the box-cars silently and with Indian stoicism settled down to wait for dawn. In General Maclovio Herrera's car ahead was drunken laughter and singing to a guitar....

Daybreak came with a sound of all the bugles in the world blowing; and looking out of the car door I saw the desert for miles boiling with armed men saddling and mounting. A hot sun popped over the western mountains, burning in a clear sky. For a moment the ground poured up billowing steam, and then there was dust again, and a thirsty land. There might never have been rain. A hundred breakfast fires smoked from the car-tops, and the women stood turning their dresses slowly in the sun, chattering and joking. Hundreds of little naked babies danced around, while their mothers lifted up their little clothes to the heat. A thousand joyous troopers shouted to each other that the advance was beginning; away off to the left some regiment had given away to joy, and was shooting into the air. Six more long trains had come in during the night, and all the engines were whistling signals. I went forward to get on the first train out, and as I passed the car of Trinidad Rodriguez, a harsh, feminine voice cried: "Hey, kid! Come in and get some breakfast." Leaning out of the door were Beatrice and Carmen, two noted Juarez women that had been brought to the front by the Rodriguez brothers. I went in and sat down at the table with about twelve men, several of them doctors in the hospital train, one French artillery captain, and an assortment of Mexican officers and privates. It was an ordinary freight box-car like all the private cars, with windows cut in the walls, partitions built to shut out the Chinese cook in the kitchen, and bunks arranged across sides and end. Breakfast consisted of heaping platters of red meat with _chile_, bowls of _frijoles_, stacks of cold flour _tortillas_, and six bottles of Monopole Champagne. Carmen's complexion was bad, and she was a little stupid from the gastronomic combination, but Beatrice's white, colorless face and red hair cut Buster Brown fashion fairly radiated a sort of malicious glee. She was a Mexican, but talked Tenderloin English without an accent. Jumping up from the table, she danced around it, pulling the men's hair. "Hello, you damned Gringo," she laughed at me. "What are you doing here? You're going to get a bullet in you if you don't get careful!"

A morose young Mexican, already a little drunk, snapped at her furiously in Spanish: "Don't you talk to him! Do you understand? I'll tell Trinidad how you asked the Gringo in to breakfast, and he'll have you shot!"

Beatrice threw back her head and roared. "Did you hear what he said? He thinks he owns me, because he once stayed with me in Juarez! ... My God!" she went on. "How funny it seems to travel on the railroad and not have to buy a ticket!"

"Look here, Beatrice," I asked her; "we may not have such an easy time of it down there. What will you do if we get licked?"

"Who, me?" she cried. "Why, I guess it won't take me long to get friends in the Federal army. I'm a good mixer!"

"What is she saying? What do you say?" asked the others in Spanish.

With the most perfect insolence Beatrice translated for them. And in the midst of the uproar that followed I left....

*CHAPTER III*

*FIRST BLOOD*

The water train pulled out first. I rode on the cow-catcher of the engine, which was already occupied by the permanent home of two women and five children. They had built a little fire of mesquite twigs on the narrow iron platform, and were baking _tortillas_ there; over their heads, against the windy roar of the boiler, fluttered a little line of wash....

It was a brilliant day, hot sunshine alternating with big white clouds. In two thick columns, one on each side of the train, the army was already moving south. As far as the eye could reach, a mighty double cloud of dust floated over them; and little straggling groups of mounted men jogged along, with every now and then a big Mexican flag. Between slowly moved the trains; the pillars of black smoke from their engines, at regular intervals, growing smaller, until over the northern horizon only a dirty mist appeared.

I went down into the caboose to get a drink of water, and there I found the conductor of the train lying in his bunk reading the Bible. He was so interested and amused that he didn't notice me for a minute. When he did he cried delightedly: "_Oiga_, I have found a great story about a chap called Samson who was _muy hombre_--a good deal of a man---and his woman. She was a Spaniard, I guess, from the mean trick she played on him. He started out being a good Revolutionist, a Maderista, and she made him a _pelon_!"

_Pelon_ means literally "cropped head," and is the slang term for a Federal soldier, because the Federal army is largely recruited from the prisons.

Our advance guard, with a telegraph field operator, had gone on to Conejos the night before, and they met the train in great excitement. The first blood of the campaign had been spilt; a few _colorados_ scouting northward from Bermejillo had been surprised and killed just behind the shoulder of the big mountain which lies to the east. The telegrapher also had news. He had again tapped the Federal wire, and sent to the Federal commander in Torreon, signing the dead Captain's name and asking for orders, since a large force of rebels seemed to be approaching from the north. General Velasco replied that the Captain should hold Conejos and throw out outposts to the north, to try and discover how large the force was. At the same time the telegrapher had heard a message from Argumedo, in command at Mapimi, saying that the entire north of Mexico was coming down on Torreon, together with the Gringo army!

Conejos was just like Yermo, except that there was no water tank. A thousand men, with white-bearded old General Rosalio Hernandez riding ahead, went out almost at once, and the repair train followed them a few miles to a place where the Federals had burned two railroad bridges a few months before. Out beyond the last little bivouac of the immense army spread around us, the desert slept silently in the heat waves. There was no wind. The men gathered with their women on the flat-cars, guitars came out, and all night hundreds of singing voices came from the trains.

The next morning I went to see Villa in his car. This was a red caboose with chintz curtains on the windows, the famous little caboose which Villa has used in all his journeys since the fall of Juarez. It was divided by partitions into two rooms--the kitchen and the General's bedroom. This tiny room, ten by twenty feet, was the heart of the Constitutionalist army. There were held all the councils of war, and there was scarcely room enough for the fifteen Generals who met there. In these councils the vital immediate questions of the campaign were discussed, the Generals decided what was to be done,--and then Villa gave his orders to suit himself. It was painted a dirty gray. On the walls were tacked photographs of showy ladies in theatrical poses, a large picture of Carranza, one of Fierro, and a picture of Villa himself. Two double-width wooden bunks folded up against the wall, in one of which Villa and General Angeles slept, and in the other Jose Rodriguez and Doctor Raschbaum, Villa's personal physician. That was all....

"_Que desea, amigo_? What do you want?" said Villa, sitting on the end of the bunk in blue underclothes. The troopers who lounged around the place lazily made way for me.

"I want a horse, _mi General_."

"_Ca-r-r-r-ai-i_, our friend here wants a horse!" grinned Villa sarcastically amid a burst of laughter from the others. "Why, you correspondents will be wanting an automobile next! _Oiga_, senor reporter, do you know that about a thousand men in my army have no horses? Here's the train. What do you want a horse for?"

"So I can ride with the advance."

"No," he smiled. "There are too many _ballasos_--too many bullets flying in the advance...."

He was hurrying into his clothes as he talked, and gulping coffee from the side of a dirty tin coffee-pot. Somebody handed him his gold-handled sword.

"No!" he said contemptuously. "This is to be a fight, not a parade. Give me my rifle!"

He stood at the door of his caboose for a moment, thoughtfully looking at the long lines of mounted men, picturesque in their crossed cartridge-belts and varied equipment. Then he gave a few quick orders and mounted his big stallion.

"_Vamonos!_" cried Villa. The bugles brayed and a subdued silver clicking ringing sounded as the companies wheeled and trotted southward in the dust....

And so the army disappeared. During the day we thought we heard cannonading from the southwest, where Urbina was reported to be coming down from the mountains to attack Mapimi. And late in the afternoon news came of the capture of Bermejillo, and a courier from Benavides said that he had taken Tlahualilo.

We were in a fever of impatience to be off. About sundown Senor Calzado remarked that the repair train would leave in an hour, so I grabbed a blanket and walked a mile up the line of trains to it.

*CHAPTER IV*

*ON THE CANNON-CAR*