The Vanquished (12 page)

“Yes,” Sus said. “There are some interesting dispatches from Ures and Hermosillo.”

“Go on,” Crabb said.

“There is also a very pretty young lady in the suite below,” Sus said with a grin, and Crabb resigned himself to waiting the younger man out. Sus was always a man to lead up to things in his own good time. Now, in aggravating detail, he gave a description of the
señorita
who resided downstairs, and told of her circumstances. Beneath such trivialities Sus concealed a loyal heart and a considerable store of hardy courage. As a dandy, he left one suspicious; as a warrior, he made one impatient; as a lover, Crabb suspected Sus had added a good deal to his own legend that was not deserved. Nonetheless Crabb found himself comfortable in the young man's pleasant company, and was apt to confide in him things that he might not reveal to his own officers.

In time Sus let the subject of the downstairs lady drop, and said, “The news from Ures is that Pesquiera's man Aguilar is now seated in the governor's chair. For all practical purposes the revolt is successfully complete. The dispatch from Hermo-sillo states that Manuel Gandara has retreated to Mexico City, where he isbound to get no help at all. Jesús Gandara is up in the Sierra Madres with the Indians. His guerrillas have been destroyed by Pesquiera and Gabilondo. If the reports are not moreexaggerated than usual, I think we must assume Pes quiera's coup is realized completely. He has no significant opposition any more.”

“I see,” Crabb said, and was reluctant to show his alarm. He stroked his brown beard and looked round the room with habitual vagueness in his eyes; he always gave the appearance of a man who had constant trouble keeping his mind on the subject at hand. This impression was only partly true. At the moment he was considering, with his quick politically trained mind, the varied and far-reaching implications of the news Sus had delivered. It was true he had anticipated Pesquiera's victory, but whathe had not expected was that it would occur so quickly. There was danger in this, the matter of time.

Finally he returned his attention to Sus. The lean, graceful figure was clothed in the black finery of a
don
. “I think we'll wait until tomorrow night,” Crabb said. “Then, when we're camped in the field, it will be time enough to advise the officers of this piece of news.”

“Some of them may already know of it.”

“Perhaps. But it will do no harm to wait until we are away from here. Once we're on the march, I'll have more confidence in my ability to control their feelings. There are too many distractions and temptations in a town like this one. I want no one backing out at this stage.”

“As you wish,” Sus said, and grinned. “I am to take it, then, that I am free for the evening?”

“Go on,” Crabb said gruffly, waggling a hand. “Pay your respects to the young lady.”

“My thanks for your kind understanding,” Sus said, with the flash of a smile. He turned and went out, spurs dragging the floor.

When the door closed, Crabb clasped his hands behind him and paced the floor, brooding downward. Events were not as bright as he would have them. Presently he sat down at the writing desk and composed a letter to his wife in San Francisco.

“
My dear Filomena
,” he began, and stroked his nose with the feather of the pen. Dipping it into the inkwell, he wrote in his precise small hand an account of the voyage just past, a report of the storm at sea, and a number of paragraphs of hopeful anticipation in which he assured her of his coming victory and of all that it would mean to the fortunes of her family. He mentioned Sus's good health andconveyed his regards; out of habit he signed the letter, “
Y'r ob't svt, Henry
.” For a moment he sat pen in hand while an image came to him of the sweet composed smile that would curve her lips when the servant dropped the letter onlier desk. She would walk across the parlor, a trim small figure of dark hair and eyes and a wistful smile that he had always liked. She would seat herself properly near the window and open the letter without hurry, and read with steady interest.… So Pesquiera had won already. It was a hard piece of news. But he could not turn back. He had too many commitments. He had made a contract with the men under him; he had an obligation, to them, to his family, to himself.

He sealed the letter and went downstairs to post it. In the lobby were a few knots of men, his various officers, and he stopped on his way back to the stair to have a word with Dr. Oxley. “That man who was shot,” Crabb said, “what about him?”

“A severe wound,” Oxley said. “He'll have to travel by wagon if he comes at all.”

“We'll keep him,” Crabb said. “I have made a contract with that man to deliver him to a homesite. Besides, we may have need of every pair of arms and every rifle.”

“He's not much of a specimen. I think he's a jailbird.”

“Have a bed made for him in one of the wagons,” Crabb said, and turned away. He heard Oxley's “Very well,” nodded to the others and climbed the steps. As he neared the top he found himself cursing his own shortness of breath. Years were telling in the dwindling vitality of his energies; he was, in fact, only thirty-five, but youth seemed a long way behind. He climbed the second flight and paused for breath, and went down the corridor to his room. Inside he poured a precisely measured ounce of whisky, downed it straight, and went to the window to look outward with brooding eyes. He was a man of varied moods and this evening a severe melancholia began to depress him. He wished Sus had stayed with him tonight; a few hours of the younger man's idle banter and insolent grin might have changed the sour taste on his tongue. When he looked forward into the coming weeks his feeling was bleak; he lay down on the bed, fully clothed, and took another drink while he began to pour himself earnestly back in time to a far and different past.

His thirty-five years had brought him a long way from Nashville. Now, through the open slit at the base of the window, he could hear the coarse cries of sailors on the waterfront, the rattle of wagons traveling the streets, the loud talk of a drunk. He got up to fill his glass, and found on the table a copy of Zimmerman's latest dispatch to the New York
Times
. He read it with a strange concentration.

“
It is reported that a plan exists to divide California, annex the Gadsden Purchase, and create a new Slave State. The idea is simply absurd
.”

Crabb smiled briefly. Not so long ago, the plan had not been so absurd. But like all careful politicians he had canvassed his friends in Sacramento. He remembered one colleague's words exactly: “If you want to make a new Slave State, Henry, don't try to make it out of existing territories. You haven't got the support.” He allowed himself to relax with one shoulder against the window frame, looking upon the street. Above a distant building flapped a banner of the Know-Nothing party. For a time it had been Crabb's party. He had never particularly believed in the tenets of that organization—hatred in blanket form of all immigrants, notably the Irish, the German, the Catholics. It was difficult to maintain such an attitude in view of his wife's allegiance to the Church; it was even more difficult because the Know-Nothing platform straddled the slavery issue. But in California the power of the party had been strong and in it he had seen a chance to achieve a Senate seat in Washington. Unfortunately, in California senators were elected from the state congress—and he had a good many enemies there. His bid had been defeated. It had cut him loose, set him adrift. He regretted none of it, but from his presently detached position he was free to recognizethe good fortune that had made his wife purposefully ignorant of politics. She had never shown any interest in his allegiances; her mind, shrewd in its way, recognized that he had merely seized an expedient means. She had never reproached him. Because of that, he felt both relief and a portion of guilt. He was happy to have it all behind him.

His glass was empty. He put it away and lay down. His eye tracked the course of a jagged crack in the ceiling. Tomorrow the journey would begin. He felt troubled by the news from Mexico; he knew Pesquiera, and thus he knew that Pesquiera was as much a political man as he himself was. His eyelids drew slowly together; he yawned.

A listless breath of air held a weary carpet of yellow dust hovering just above the ground. The early morning was cool. Men stood around shuffling their feet. Behind them a mile distant was the silhouette of the town, the wharves, the boats; and the green swell of the ocean. Above the meadow grew gnarled cypresses. Charley stood alone in the midst of the disorganized crowd of men, drawn off in small knots of quiet conversation. He considered a group of little white cloud balls that rolled softly across the sky, and remembered standing on the gangplank watching the buggy go away at a rapid clip with Zimmerman and the deep-eyed girl, neither of them looking back. People came into your life and went out of it.

Down at the foot of the meadow, Crabb and McDowell and the other officers were holding a heads-together conference, the low-east sun shooting their shadows long and thin along the earth, and eighty or ninety men waited around in the cool dusty morning. Charley turned and drifted away from the murmuring crowd, going up into the hillside of flat-topped cypress ghosts, wind-blown into eerie shapes, and found presently that the forest was a cathedral, drilled through by dark, long-sounding corridors. Here he stood with his head thrown back, trembling a little against the dry cold. Underfoot the ground was a strange mixture of ocean-white sand and brush growth. He noticed the weight of the revolver, the dig of the rifle across his shoulder, the heaviness of the carpetbag and the hang of the coat; there was the jingle of coins in his pocket when his fingers touched them. From his belt hung the pouch full of round leaden bullets and a bag of black gunpowder with a little tin of percussion caps. He put down the carpetbag and took a tentative aim across the rifle's sights at a red cardinal that squatted at the base of a treenot far away. The cardinal blinked at him, pecked at the ground once or twice and, when Charley's foot moved, flapped away. Charley balanced the long-barreled rifle across his hand and wished it weighed less.

He put it over his shoulder and picked up the carpetbag, and pulled the hat low over his eyes as he had seen Norval Douglas do it. The hat was an unfamiliar tightness about his scalp, but Douglas had told him it would be needed on the desert. It was a wagon-hat, flat of crown and wide of brim, dun-colored like the dust that hovered below the woods.

When he looked back through the trees, down the way he had come, he could see far at the foot of the meadow the conference breaking up, the officers walking forward and General Crabb going toward a mound of earth. Regretfully, Charley turned with his equipment and went back into the open to join his company.

Men milled and gossiped. He saw Chuck Parker sitting in a camp chair, his injured leg bandaged, and Samuel Kimmel, who had shot him, watching over him like a hovering nurse. Parker was ignoring Kimmel; he was deep in heated conversation with Bill Randolph. Charley mingled into the crowd.

He saw David McDowell, who was the captain of his company, come up across the dry grass and signal to Norval Douglas and Will Allen. The two went away from the crowd and for a while there was a quiet conversation among these three men. Will Allen came from Coyote Flat, and was the company's lieutenant, a slight but muscular man with a drooping brown mustache that gave his whole expression a dour cast. Captain McDowell had a vivid red beard that chopped up and down when he talked. Norval Douglas did a good deal of listening, very little talking. Charley wondered what they were discussing.

A hand gripped his shoulder from behind, startling him. He frowned because he never liked to be touched. What he saw when he turned was Bill Randolph's sweat-caked stubbled face, and it made him go still inside and guard his expression with a tough screen. The big bartender grinned an unclean sort of grin, as if they were old friends among strangers, and said, “What you suppose they're jawing about, Charley?”

“How would I know?”

“I thought you were pretty friendly with Norval Douglas.”

“What if I am? He doesn't tell me everything.”

“Just thought I'd ask,” Bill said mildly. He seemed in an amiable mood; he let Charley's hard tones ride off him. Chuck Parker's voice lifted to a bellow, hailing him, and he drifted off. Idlers milled around. Charley had a glimpse of Jim Woods and of Carl Chapin, the indrawn youth he had met at the ship's rail. Chapin was standing by himself, his Adam's apple like a second chin, looking waspish and bad-tempered. Charley felt the uneasiness of waiting begin to build. Men moved around aimlessly, restlessly, striking up conversations and letting them drop incomplete, looking half-apprehensively at Captain McDowell and his little council, and presently almost in a mass shifting their attention to the solitary jut-bearded figure of General Crabb, who had climbed the little mound of earth and now stood with his hands behind him and his head down. Someone spoke nearby and Charley let himself eavesdrop out of idleness. “I reckon Crabb wants to take over Sonora and get himself appointed the first senator from Sonora.”