They Came To Cordura Read Online Free PDF Page B

until the entire regiment, the 12th, had been attacked in the night and hurt badly. After the first recoil it had found itself. It knew now that it could, when well led, deploy efficiently under fire and kill efficiently. Walk to trot to walk to trot alternately, intervals between platoons and troops maintained without effort, almost carelessly, the sole flaw of the formation was the two who rode alone between Machine-Gun Troop and pack train, private and officer upon whose glasses sun glinted. The orders of the squadron on this fifteenth of April were what they had thrice been before: the enemy is reported at such and such a place, see if he is there, if he is, fight him, if he is not, wait for further orders. They had not yet found him. In the five weeks since Columbus a half-dozen rounds had been fired, and those at long range. One man, the one named Boice, had caught a stray bullet. Officers and men hoped much but expected little of this march, hoped because they had seen in Mexico the trains of trucks. White one and a half tons and Jeffrey Quads with four-wheel drive, trucks, not mules, hauling supplies; they had heard the rumors. If they did not find the enemy they could not fight, and if they could not fight they could not prove anything about cavalry. They did not speak to each other about the trucks or the rumors, but these were in their minds, and they rode sweating this afternoon in long quiet column curling hour upon hour across wasteland under a sun like a brass eye.
    They passed near two small towns, or pueblos, El Iguaje and Delicias . The hovels were identical, made of adobe, windowless, and against the walls men and women and children stood taking the sun. In Mexico the sun is called ‘The Stove of the Poor’. The people watched without moving.
    For miles the earth tilted up. They came into country treeless and seven thousand feet high. Small mountains took the shapes of breasts and loaves of bread. Their color, as the hot sun wheeled, changed from copper to rose to the grey of ash. There was no grass here, only outcrop of rock, scrub oak, thorny nopal, and the daggers called lechuguilla. To some it seemed they rode the back of the world, as close to the sky as men could stand, and so rounded was the world that, had their legs been longer, they might have touched boots under its belly. Climbing, the column slowed. No halts were called. At dusk no one knew how far they were from Cusihuiriachic .
    The dusk was quick, and as darkness followed fast, orders passed down the column to close up, and they moved on at a walk under stars like small lamps.
    Provisional Squadron reached Cusi at approximately 22.30 hours. To march thirty-two miles had required over ten hours. Troops were dismounted to make coffee while Colonel Rogers and his Executive Officer, Captain Paltz, went into town to find guides. No one knew the direction of or distance to the ranch called Ojos Azules . Fires were built. There was no order to feed grain, since it was expected the halt would be short. But it was two hours, past midnight, before Rogers returned with a lieutenant of Mexican Federal troops who had been, after much palaver, persuaded to serve as guide. In its essentials the report to Pershing was verified: two days previously close to four hundred Villistas, under Cruz Dominiguez and Javier Arreaga, had attacked; the garrison platoon of Federales had been slaughtered; three, not four, Americans of the Cusi Mining Company had been shot and all cash of the Company taken; cleaning the town of horses and young men, the Villistas had moved on south and west, it was said, to Ojos Azules , and were either there or not there now. The woman, Geary, took no sides in the Revolution, supplying food and forage to Federales and bandits alike, even quartering Villa himself on one occasion, which was how the property remained fat and unseized. The lieutenant of Federales thought the ranch was at least three leagues, or nine miles, distant. He