there.' He chuckled. 'I'll bet Stonewall wishes he were here instead of me. He liked Mexico when he fought there for the USA — he even learned to speak Spanish. But he's stuck in Richmond, and that's about as far from El Paso as you can be and still stay in the Confederate States.'
'Sir,' Sellers persisted, exactly as if Jeb Stuart could do something about the situation, 'supposing we do annex Sonora and Chihuahua. How the devil are we supposed to defend them from the USA? New Mexico Territory and California have a lot longer stretch of border with 'em than Texas does, and the Yankees have a railroad down there, so they can ship in troops faster than we can hope to manage it. What are we going to do?'
'Whatever it takes, and whatever we have to do,' Stuart said, though he recognized the answer as imperfectly satisfactory. 'I'll tell you this much, Major, and you can mark my words: once those provinces are in our hands, we will have a railroad through to the Pacific inside of five years. We aren't like Maximilian's pack of do- nothings down in Mexico City. When the Anglo-Saxon race sets its mind to do something, that thing gets done.'
'Of course, sir.' Major Sellers was as smugly confident of the superiority of his own people as was Stuart. After a moment, he added, 'We'll need a railroad more than the greasers would have, too. We'll use it for trade, the same as they would have done, but we'll use it against the United States, too, and they never would have bothered with that.'
Stuart nodded. 'Can't say you're wrong there. If Mexico ever got into a brawl with the USA, first thing she'd do would be to pull out of that part of the country and see whether a Yankee army was still worth anything once it got done slogging its way through the desert.'
'No, sir.' Sellers shook his head. 'The first thing Maximilian would do would be to scream for us to help. The second thing he'd do would be to pull out of Sonora and Chihuahua.'
'You're likely to be right about that, too,' Stewart said. The sound of boots clumping on the dirt made him turn his head. An orderly was coming up, a telegram clenched in his right fist. 'Well, well.' One of Stuart's thick eyebrows rose. 'What have we here?'
'Wire for you, sir,' said the orderly, a youngster named Withers. 'From Richmond.'
'I hadn't really expected them to wire me from Washington, D.C.,' Stuart answered. Major Sellers snorted. Withers looked blank; he didn't get the joke. With a small mental sigh, Stuart read the telegram. That eyebrow climbed higher and higher as he did. 'Well, well,' he said again.
'Sir?' Sellers said.
Stuart realized well, well was something less than informative. 'We are ordered by General Jackson to assemble two regiments of cavalry and two batteries of artillery at Presidio, and also to assemble five regiments of cavalry, half a dozen batteries, and three regiments of infantry here at El Paso, the said concentrations to be completed no later than May 16.' The date amused him. Most officers would surely have chosen the fifteenth. But that was a Sunday, and Jackson had always been averse to doing anything not vitally necessary on the Sabbath.
Sellers whistled softly. 'It's going to happen, then.'
'I would say that appears very likely, Major,' Stuart agreed. 'Presidio is on the road to the town of Chihuahua, the capital of Chihuahua province, which we would naturally have to occupy upon annexation. And of the larger force to be assembled here, I presume some will go to Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora province-which I suppose will become Sonora Territory-and some will defend El Paso against whatever moves the United States may make in response to our actions.'
'We'll have to post guards all along the railroad.' Now Major Sellers looked north. The Texas-New Mexico frontier and the Rio Grande pinched El Paso off at the end of a long, narrow neck of Confederate territory, through which the Texas Western Railroad necessarily ran. Small parties of raiders could do a lot of damage along that line.
'Once the annexation goes through, we won't have any trouble moving south of the Rio Grande. We'll have more depth in which to operate,' Stuart said. That was true, but it wasn't so useful as it might have been, and he knew as much. No railroad to El Paso ran through Chihuahua province; movement would have to be by horseback and wagon. He sighed, folded the telegram, and put it in the breast pocket of his butternut tunic: he was not a man to wear an old-style uniform once the new one had been authorized. 'Have to go back to my office and see what I can move, and from which places.'
The longer he studied the map, the less happy he got. To carry out General Jackson's orders, he would have to pull troops from as far away as Arkansas, and that would result in weakening a different frontier with the USA. He would also have to call down the Fifth Cavalry and to denude the rest of the garrisons protecting west Texas from the Comanche raiders who took refuge in New Mexico Territory. If the Yankees turned the Comanches loose, there was liable to be hell to pay among the ranchers and farmers in that part of the country.
But there would certainly be hell to pay if he did not obey Jackson 's order in every particular. Old Stonewall had sacked one of his officers during the war for failing to deliver an ordered attack even though the fellow had learned he was outnumbered much worse than Jackson thought he was. Jackson did not, would not, take no for an answer.
By the time Stuart was done drafting telegrams, he had shifted troops all over the landscape. He took the text of the wires over to the telegraph office, listened to the first couple of them clicking their way east, and then went off to watch the cavalry regiment regularly stationed at El Paso go through its morning exercises.
Troops began arriving a couple of days later. So did cars filled with hardtack, cornmeal, beans, and salt pork for the men, and with oats and hay for the horses and other animals. Every time he looked across the river into Chihuahua province, he wondered how he could keep his soldiers supplied there. He also sent out orders accumulating wagons at El Paso. If he didn't bring food and munitions with him, he suspected he'd have none.
No troop movements on this scale had been seen in the Trans-Mississippi since the end of the war, not even during the great Coman-che outbreak of 1874. Some officers had been rusticating in their fortresses since Lincoln abandoned the struggle to keep the Confederacy from gaining its independence. All things considered, they did a good job of shaking off the cobwebs and going from garrison soldiering to something approaching field service.
By the tenth of May, Stuart was convinced he would have all his troops in place before the deadline General Jackson had sent him. On that day, a messenger came galloping into El Paso. 'Sir,' he said when he came before Stuart, 'Sir, Lieutenant Colonel Foulke has crossed the border from Las Cruces under flag of truce and wants to speak with you.'
'Has he?' Stuart thought fast. There were any number of places where the Yankees could have sneaked an observer over the border to keep an eye on the one railroad into El Paso; spotting troop trains would have given them a good notion of the force he had at his disposal. But what the United States knew and what they officially knew were different things. 'I want his party stopped four or five miles outside of town. I'll ride out and confer with him there. Hop to it, Sergeant. I don't want him in El Paso.'
'Yes, sir.' The noncommissioned officer who'd brought him the news hurried away to head off the U.S. officer.
Stuart followed at a pace only a little more leisurely. Accompanied by Major Sellers and enough troopers to give the idea that he was someone of consequence, he rode up the dirt track that led northwest toward New Mexico.
He met Lieutenant Colonel Foulke's party nearer three miles outside El Paso than five. One of Foulke's aides was peering toward the Confederate garrison town with a telescope he folded up and put away when Stuart and his retinue came into sight. He could have done it sooner without Stuart's seeing it. That he'd waited meant he wanted Stuart to know the Yankees had him under observation.
'Wait here,' Stuart told the troopers when they drew close to the U.S. soldiers. 'They didn't come here to start a fight, not under flag of truce.' He and his aide-de-camp rode on toward the men in blue.
Lieutenant Colonel Foulke and the officer who'd been using the telescope imitated his practice, so that the four leaders met between their small commands. 'A very good morning to you, General,' Foulke said politely; seeing his baby-smooth skin and coal-black mustache reminded Stuart he himself would be fifty soon.
He didn't let himself dwell on that. 'The same to you, Lieutenant Colonel,' he answered. 'I hope you will not mind my asking the purpose of your visit to the Confederacy here.'
'By no means, sir.' Hearing the polite phrase in Foulke's Yankee accent- New York, Stuart thought-was strange. The U.S. officer went on, 'I have been instructed by the secretary of war, Mr. Harrison, and by the general- in-chief of the United States Army to inform you personally that the United States will view with great concern any
