Night fell. It didn’t get any cooler, not so far as Pinkard could tell. He ambled over to a chow wagon. The Negro cook was serving up stale bread, tinned beef, and coffee. “Reckon I’d do just about anything for some of Emily’s fried chicken right about now,” he said mournfully, examining the unappetizing supper.
“Hey, soldier, you’ve got food,” said Sergeant Albert Cross, a veteran with the ribbon for the Purple Heart above his left breast pocket. “Believe me, time’ll come when you’re glad you’ve got anything. Ever carve a steak off a mule three days gone?”
He didn’t sound as if he was joking. He didn’t look as if he was joking, either. Sergeants seemed to have had their sense of humor surgically removed when they were children. Pinkard ate what was set before him. He unrolled his blanket and lay down on top of it. The next thing he knew, the sun was shining in his face.
The force of which he was a part resumed their march not long after sunrise. “We’ll take that high ground,” Stinky Salley declared in his best impression of the Secretary of War, “and then we’ll defend it from the damnyankees when they show up.”
From ahead, tiny in the distance, came the crackle of rifle fire. “Deploy from column into line by the left flank-move!” Captain Connolly shouted. The soldiers moved: awkwardly, because they hadn’t had enough training in such maneuvers before they got thrown into action against the Red rebels.
Out ahead, through the dust of the march, Pinkard saw men on horseback blazing away at the advancing Confederates. Yankee cavalry, he realized. As Connolly had said, the land was wide hereabouts. Cavalry had room to maneuver, as it didn’t farther east.
He didn’t see the field artillery with the horsemen, not even after it started shelling him. He heard a whistle in the air, and then a crash somewhere close by. A moment later, he heard screams. Another whistle, another crash. More screams.
“Get down!” Sergeant Cross screamed. Jeff was already on his belly, wondering how the Negroes in Georgia had fought on without guns to give as they received. At Cross’ order, he and his comrades started shooting at the U.S. cavalrymen. “Nothing to worry about-just a skirmish,” the sergeant said. Pinkard supposed he was right, and found the prospect of a big battle even less appealing than supper the night before.
XI
Paul Mantarakis looked around. Most of what he saw was mountains baking under a savage sun. The rest was waterless valley full of boulders and cactus and nothing any man in his right mind could possibly want to own, let alone want it badly enough to take it away from the poor fools unfortunate enough to be in possession of it at the moment.
When he said that out loud, Gordon McSweeney’s big, fair head went up and down in agreement. “Amen,” the Scotsman said. “The Empire of Mexico is welcome to it, for all of me.”
“You ought to take another couple of salt tablets, Gordon,” Paul said. “You look like a lobster that’s been in the pot too long.”
For once, he was thankful for his swarthiness. Even here in Baja, California, all he did was go from brown to browner. Back in the normal world of the USA he dimly remembered, the whiter you were, the more breaks you got. Here, all you got was sunburn and heatstroke.
Captain Wyatt tramped past them. He wasn’t cooked quite so badly as McSweeney, but he was suffering, too. He said, “If we take this miserable stretch of land away from the Mexicans, we’ll be able to keep an eye on the Confederate Pacific coast-if the Rebs have any Pacific coast left once the war is done.”
“That’d be fine, sir,” Mantarakis said. “But once we’ve got bases here, how do we keep them supplied? No railroads except the one we built ourself. No roads, either, not unless you call what we’re on a road.”
“This isn’t just a road, Sergeant,” Captain Wyatt said. “This is damn near the road.” He paused to swig from his canteen. The water it held, if it was anything like what Paul had, was bloodwarm and stale. Wyatt went on, “We cut across the peninsula here to Santa Rosalia, and then we can look across the Gulf of California at the Rebs in Guaymas.”
“A shame and a disgrace that the Rebs still are in Guaymas,” Gordon McSweeney observed.
“Well, you’re right about that, Lord knows,” Captain Wyatt said. “But they are, and, from everything I’ve heard, it’s not much easier fighting over in Sonora than it is here.” He made a sour face. “And, of course, we’re starved for everything here, because we’re so far west. The war on the other side of the Mississippi is the big top; we’re just the sideshow.”
Something glinted for a moment, high on the side of the conical mountain ahead. Mantarakis pointed to it, saying, “Sir, I think the Mexicans-or maybe it’s the Rebs; who knows? — have an observation post way the hell up there.”
“Up on the slope of the Volcano of the Three Virgins, you mean?” Wyatt said. Paul nodded. The captain shrugged. “I would, sure as the devil, if I were in their shoes. I didn’t see anything. Show me again where you think it’s at.” After Mantarakis pointed, the captain nodded. “A little bit above that crag there?” He shouted for a runner, gave the fellow the location Mantarakis had spotted, and told him, “Pass it on to the field artillery. Maybe a howitzer can reach him from here. If that’s no good, we’ll just have to get used to them keeping an eye on everything we’re doing.”
Mantarakis said, “Haven’t seen much in the way of real fighting since we got down here. Not that I miss it,” he added hastily, “but are these Mexicans any good?”
“They won’t be as good as the Mormons were,” Ben Carlton put in. “’Course, nobody’s going to be as good as the Mormons were, unless I miss my guess. But if they were all that bad, we’d’ve already licked ’em.”
“Something to that,” Captain Wyatt agreed. “But we’ve been fighting the terrain as much as the Empire of Mexico, and there are some Rebs, too, helping their pals. But if you ask me-”
Paul didn’t ask the company commander. He didn’t have a chance to ask the company commander. A whistle in the air made him throw himself to the ground without consciously thinking he needed to do that. A shell burst, maybe fifty yards away.
He had his entrenching tool out and was busy digging himself a foxhole before the second shell came down. “Where are they coming from?” somebody shouted. “Don’t see any flash or anything.”
“Got to be a trench mortar,” Paul yelled back. “They must have put a couple of them on these hills, figured they’d drop some bombs on us. Trouble is, we don’t have any trenches.” He felt naked trying to fight without one, too.
“I’ll lay odds you’re right, Sergeant,” Captain Wyatt said. “The Mexicans don’t have any money to speak of; they can’t afford real artillery. In a place like this, though, what they’ve got is plenty good.”
It was, in Paul Mantarakis’ opinion, better than plenty good. Shells or bombs or whatever they were kept falling on the Americans. The ground, under a few inches of sandy dust, was hard as a sergeant’s heart (that Paul thought such things proved he’d come up through the ranks). He couldn’t get the foxhole deep enough to suit him.
And then somebody shouted, “Here come the bastards!” Resentfully, he threw down the entrenching tool and set his rifle against his shoulder. The enemy wasn’t playing fair. How was he supposed to kill them without getting hurt himself if they wouldn’t let him dig in properly?
Trench mortars up on the hilltops might have been Mexicans. Like any American, he thought of Mexico as backwards and corrupt and bankrupt; if the Emperor had been able to pay his bills, he wouldn’t have had to sell Chihuahua and Sonora to the CSA. And when the United States had fought Mexico, back before the War of Secession, they’d actually won. So Paul, in spite of what Captain Wyatt had said, expected any soldiers bold enough to charge to be Confederates propping up their allies.
But he was wrong. These men wore a khaki lighter than Confederate issue, so light it was almost yellow. In this terrain, it gave better protection than green-gray. They wore widebrimmed straw hats, too, not felts or steel derbies. And their shouts yipped like coyotes’ howls; they weren’t the cougar screams the Rebs used for battle cries.