'Who's winning?' Major Sellers asked. His voice was exuberant, almost gleeful. 'Whoever gets killed off, long as it isn't our own soldiers, we're well shut of 'em.' Stuart glared at him. He stared right back, not so noisily insubordinate as the man who'd ridden in from Cananea, but not backing away from his opinion by even an inch, either.
'Well, sir, that's right hard to say,' the Confederate trooper answered. 'The Mexicans, they don't get to go out of their houses a whole lot, but they've got plenty of vittles, and any Injun sticks his head up inside of rifle range, he's liable to end up with his brains rearranged, you know what I mean? Every now and again, some of the greasers, the ones with the best guns and the most balls, they'll sneak out of a night and shoot at the Apaches' camp.'
'We can't have that,' Stuart said. 'We can't have any of that sort of nonsense. If we let it go on there, it'll go on all over these two provinces.' He heaved a deep, regretful sigh. 'So much for Christmas on the edge of civilization. Bugler!'
'Yes, sir!' The trooper produced his polished brass horn.
'Blow Halt,' Stuart said. He sighed again. 'Then blow About-face. We're going to have to go back there and stamp out that foolishness.'
'The whole army, sir?' Major Sellers sounded appalled. He'd been looking forward to Christmas in Texas, too, perhaps even to taking leave and traveling back to Virginia for Christmas with his family.
But Stuart answered, 'Yes, the whole army. The Apaches and the Cananeans arc going to think they were strolling along the railroad tracks when a train ran over them. If we smash both sides now, it will save the Confederate States a lot of trouble for years and years to come.'
'All right, sir; we'll do that, then.' Sellers' laugh held a gravelly rumble of doom. 'I've been saying all along that we ought to clean out those Indians. The faster and harder we do it, the better off these provinces will be.'
'I knew you'd say, 'I told you so,' Major,' Stuart said, and his aide-de-camp grinned, altogether unabashed. The commander of the Department of the Trans-Mississippi stroked his beard, working through the orders he would have to give to make the army reverse its course. 'First thing we need to do is send a wire to El Paso, letting people know what's happened. Next thing-' He glowered his discontent at the desert all around. 'We're already the other side of Janos, better than two days away from Cananea no matter how hard we push.' He shook his head, annoyed at his wits for working slower than they should have. 'No, most of us arc better than two days away from Cananea. Colonel Ruggles!'
'Sir!' At that shout, the commanding officer of the Fifth Confederate Cavalry rode up on his camel. Stuart's horse snorted at the other beast's stink and tried to rear. He didn't let it. Calhoun Ruggles went on, 'What can I- what can we-do for you, sir?'
Briefly, Stuart explained what had gone wrong in Cananea. He finished, 'I want the Fifth Camelry to ride out ahead of the rest of the army and hit the Indians and the Mexicans before either side expects you. If you can, smash 'em up by yourselves. If you can't manage that, do everything you can. You know we won't be far behind you.'
'All right, sir, we'll handle it,' Colonel Ruggles said. 'And if the redskins light out for the mountains, I reckon we'll chase 'em down before they can get there. They say they can go faster on foot than troopers can on horseback. I'd like to see 'em try and outrun my critters.' He leaned forward in his peculiar saddle and set an affectionate hand on the side of his mount's neck. The camel twisted and tried to bite. Ruggles laughed as if he'd expected nothing else.
As Stuart had seen for himself, the Camelry was not in the habit of wasting time. Aboard their moaning, snorting, hideously homely mounts, Ruggles' troopers soon headed west. Stuart would have sworn his horse let out a sigh of relief when the camels trotted away.
Major Horatio Sellers gave Stuart a sly look. 'I notice you're not riding with the Fifth this time, sir,' he said.
'That's right, I'm not, and I'll give you two good reasons why,' Stuart answered. 'The first one is that anybody who gets on a camel more than once proves to the world he's a damned fool.' He waited for his aide-de-camp to grunt laughter, then went on, 'And the second one is that Colonel Ruggles and his regiment are perfectly able to handle the size of the trouble they've got in Cananea without me, and I don't want them thinking that I think they can't.'
'Ah.' Sellers nodded. 'Yes, sir; that makes good sense.'
The men grumbled as they headed back toward Cananea. Some of them had wives in El Paso. Some had sweethearts. All of them, by now, had had a bellyful of Chihuahua and Sonora. But, aside from that grumbling, without which they would hardly have been soldiers, they went where they were ordered.
When they came into Janos just before sundown, they found the town in an uproar. The camels of the Fifth Cavalry had gone through and past the town two or three hours earlier. A couple of companies of Confederate soldiers occupied the adobe fortress that was Janos' principal reason for being, and from which Mexican troops had withdrawn when Maximilian sold his northern provinces to the CSA. They were as indignant and almost as upset as everyone else in town; the Camelry had passed by so swiftly, the men of the garrison had hardly had the chance to learn why they were on the move.
'Something in Cananea, ain't it?' one of the Confederates asked as the force Stuart led got ready to camp for the night.
Bugles roused the soldiers well before dawn. Stuart drank cup after cup of strong black coffee, and was still yawning when he swung aboard his horse. His bones ached. He wondered if he was getting too old for much more campaigning. If he was, he wouldn't admit it, not even to himself-perhaps especially not to himself.
He and his troopers kept to a moderate pace on the road between Janos and Cananea, the road they were getting to know altogether too well. Not much water lay between the two towns, and pushing too hard would have killed horses even at this season of the year. Major Sellers remarked, 'The Apaches aren't worth a single good cavalry horse, you ask me, and the same goes for the Mexicans.'
'We wouldn't have had nearly so much fun up in New Mexico Territory if it hadn't been for the Apaches,' Stuart remarked. Since Sellers could hardly disagree with that, he grunted and did his best to pretend he hadn't heard it.
Stuart waited to see if he would get more reports from Confederate troopers forced out of Cananea, but none came back to him. 'Either they aren't coming,' he said to Major Sellers, 'or Colonel Ruggles is keeping them for himself. If I had to bet, I'd go the second way.'
His aide-de-camp nodded. 'I think so, too. He's ahead of us, so he needs to know worse than we do.'
'Which doesn't mean we don't have to know at all,' Stuart said fretfully.
A couple of hours later, a camel rider did come back to Stuart's force with news that fighting in and around Cananea still was going on, or still had been going on when the troopers who brought word to Colonel Rugglcs left the town. 'By what everybody says, sir,' the messenger reported, 'they're going at it hammer and tongs.' He paused to spit a stream of dark brown tobacco juice into the light brown dirt. 'Reckon they purely don't like each other.'
Stuart got another short night and woke too soon to the blare of the horns. Walk, canter, trot-instead of the ambling pace they'd set on the way east, when they saw no need to hurry, his troopers used the alternating gaits that kept their horses freshest while eating up the ground. As morning passed into afternoon, he heard one of the men say to another, 'I hope the damn camel boys kill all the lousy sons of bitches on both sides, so when we get there tomorrow we've got nothin' to do but spit on their graves.'
Toward evening, a thick column of smoke rose in the west, silhouetted against the light sky there. The troopers cheered. 'I expect that's the Camelry, cleaning up the fight,' Horatio Sellers said.
'Hope you're right,' Stuart said, and rolled himself in a blanket on his folding cot as soon as he had seen to his horse.
Sometime in the middle of the night, a sentry shook him awake. 'Sorry to bother you, sir,' the man said, 'but Colonel Ruggles just rode in.'
That was plenty to make Stuart open his eyes. He pulled on his boots and ducked out of the tent. Calhoun Ruggles stood by the embers of a campfire perhaps twenty feet away. 'I saw the smoke, Colonel,' Stuart said around a yawn. 'Was that us, putting down Apaches and Mexicans alike?'
He expected Ruggles to nod, but the commander of the Fifth Confederate Cavalry shook his head. 'No, sir.
