'Thank you, Bryce.' From the runner's tone, Stuart guessed what the telegram said before he read it. When he did, he nodded to himself. The day had come later than it should have, but was at last at hand.
Major Horatio Sellers came up to Stuart. 'Is it what we've been hoping it will be, sir?' he asked eagerly.
'That's exactly what it is, Major,' Stuart answered. 'We are to enter and occupy the Mexican provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora, the movement to proceed on the outline already at hand and to commence at sunrise on Tuesday, the fourteenth of June.'
'Three days from now,' his aide-de-camp said, his voice thoughtful. A satisfied expression made his heavy features seem almost benignant. 'We'll have no trouble meeting that deadline, since we've been ready to go for most of the past month.'
'Anyone wants to know my view of the matter, we should have moved the day we had the troops in place,' Stuart said. 'We've wasted all this time trying to keep the damnyankees sweet about what we're doing, but when you come right down to it, what we do in our own territory-which this is now-and in our relations with the Empire of Mexico is our business and nobody else's.'
Sellers looked north and west, toward Las Cruces, across the international border in New Mexico Territory. 'What do you suppose Lieutenant Colonel Foulke would have to say about that?' he said, and then changed verb tenses: 'What do you suppose Lieutenant Colonel Foulkc will have to say about that?'
'Did I not make myself clear, Major?' Stuart said. 'I don't care what Foulke or any other Yankee has to say about what we do on our territory. And if the United States choose to resent our actions with weapons in hand, they are welcome to make the effort, but I doubt they will have a friendly reception here or anywhere else along our common frontier.'
'Sir, do you really think they would be stupid enough to fight a war with us over this?' Sellers asked. 'Don't they know we could lick 'em by ourselves, but odds are we won't have to?'
'We walked away from the United States the last time they put a Black Republican in the White House, and they fought to try to hold us to an allegiance we could stand no more,' Stuart answered. 'Now they have another Republican president, and there's every sign they're feeling frisky again. I hope they act sensibly; having seen one war, I don't care to see another one. But their politicians haven't seen the elephant-all they've done is talk about it. They'd be wiser if they knew more.' He shrugged. 'Be that as it may, we have our orders, and we are going to carry them out. Go issue the commands that will get the occupation forces ready to commence their movements at the required time, and also the orders for the infantry and artillery that will stay behind to defend El Paso in case the United States do decide to be foolish.'
'Yes, sir.' Sellers started to hurry away.
'Wait,' Stuart said. His aide-de-camp paused and looked back. The commander of the Military District of the Trans-Mississippi grinned at him. 'However this works out, Major, it's going to be fun.'
Sunday evening, Stuart was summoned to the bridge spanning the Rio Grande. At its midpoint, precisely at the border between the Confederate States and the Empire of Mexico, stood Colonel Enrique Gutierrez, commander of the Mexican garrison in Paso del Norte. His uniform, of the French pattern Maximilian's men favored, was far brighter and shinier than the plain butternut Stuart wore.
Gutierrez, a lean, saturnine man, spoke good English, which was fortunate, because Stuart had only a handful of words of Spanish. '1 have just received word, General, that the arrangements long under discussion are now complete,' the Mexican colonel said. 'Accordingly, on the day following tomorrow my men shall withdraw from these provinces.'
'That is when we intend to enter Chihuahua and Sonora, yes,' Stuart said. 'I am glad the news has reached you from Mexico City. We do not want to come as invaders; the Confederate States are pleased at the good relations we enjoy with the Empire of Mexico.' Given the muddle in which Maximilian's government commonly found itself, for Gutierrez to have been only thirty-six hours late in getting the word showed uncommon efficiency.
'I am glad of this,' Gutierrez said politely. He didn't show whatever he was thinking. He was, Stuart knew, a pretty fair soldier, and couldn't have been happy to serve a regime so feckless that it had to sell off pieces of the country to pay its bills. After a moment, he went on, 'I have a question: as we move back toward territory that will remain under our control, shall we also take with us the city guards who maintain order in the streets?'
'No,' Stuart said. 'My orders are to class them as police-as officers of the civilian government-not as soldiers. They will go right on doing their jobs until and unless our own government makes changes hereabouts.'
'Muy bien. ' Gutierrez nodded. He took a deep breath. 'Speaking for myself, General Stuart, and as a man, I will say that I would sooner see these provinces pass to the Confederate States, which paid before occupying them, than to the United States, which invaded my country and only then paid.'
Stuart thought it wiser not to mention that Stonewall Jackson and some other veterans in Confederate service had fought for the USA during the Mexican War. 'Thank you,' seemed safer. Colonel Gutierrez snapped off a salute, spun on his heel, and walked back toward the fort he would control for another day and a half.
That Tuesday morning, like most June days in El Paso, dawned bright and clear and hot. As soon as the sun rose, Jeb Stuart led his infantry and cavalry and rumbling cannons toward and then onto the bridge. He did not stop at the midpoint, but kept going till his horse's hooves thudded on the gray-brown dirt at the southern end: Chihuahua was now as much Confederate soil as was Texas.
A red, white, and green Mexican flag still flew on a pole at the southern end of the bridge. Colonel Gutierrez waited there with a last squad of soldiers in ornate uniforms. Politely, Stuart took off his hat and saluted the Mexican flag. Honor satisfied, Gutierrez barked orders in Spanish. Two of his men ran the flag down the pole for the last time and reverently folded it.
At Stuart's command, a couple of Confederate soldiers raised the Stars and Bars over Paso del Norte and, by extension, over all of Chihuahua and Sonora. Polite as a priest, Colonel Gutierrez saluted the new flag as General Stuart had saluted the old. If the Mexican colonel's eyes were unusually bright and moist, Stuart had no intention of remarking on it.
From Paso del Norte, the road ran almost due west, bending only slightly toward the south as it took advantage of the break in the mountains. That meant it stayed close to the border with the United States. Stuart didn't care for the course the geography dictated. Neither did Major Sellers. 'All I can say, sir,' he remarked, 'is that it's a good thing New Mexico Territory is just about as empty as Chihuahua here.'
'I agree, Major,' Stuart said. 'The logistics are poor for both sides in this part of the world.' As he had when first learning he would have to move troops into this newly Confederate territory, he sighed. 'If General Sibley had been able to keep his men in food and munitions during the war, New Mexico would be ours now, and our worries would be gone-or, at least, farther north.'
The country west of the mountains was even more unabashedly desert than that to the east. Saguaro cactuses stood close by the road and far away, their cigar-shaped bodies and angular, sometimes up-thrust arms putting Stuart in mind of giant green men surprised by bandits. The Fifth Cavalry Regiment seemed peculiarly at home in that harsh terrain, even if it did have to travel a bit apart from the rest. It was most often known as the Fifth Camelry, being mounted on ships of the desert rather than horses. Jefferson Davis had introduced camels to the Southwest as U.S. secretary of war before the War of Secession. The Fifth, at first stocked with beasts captured wild in the desert, had done good work against the Comanches, showing up in places its troopers could never have reached on horseback.
Here and there, wherever there was water, tiny towns punctuated the route: Janos; Agua Prieta right across the border from the equally sleepy hamlet of Douglas, New Mexico; Cananea; Imuris. At Imuris, Stuart detached one regiment of infantry and one of cavalry and ordered them south to Hermosillo. To the cavalry commander, Colonel L. Tiernan Brien, who was senior to the infantry regiment's colonel, he said, 'The occupation being peaceful thus far, I am not sending so large a force to the interior of this province as originally contemplated. I expect you to split off what part of it you deem necessary for garrisoning Guaymas on the coast and send that portion of your forces there.'
'Yes, sir,' Brien said. He had served under Stuart since the war, having led a regiment of state troops in the Pennsylvania campaign. 'If the Mexicans do choose to give us trouble, though, we probably won't be able to do much about it, especially if you're keeping all the artillery for yourself.'
'I understand that, Colonel,' Stuart answered. 'It is, I believe, a good gamble. Colonel Gutierrez may not have loved what his government did, but he accepted it like a soldier and a man. By all the signs, the same will hold true in Hermosillo and Guaymas as well. The Mexicans in these little villages haven't tried to resist us in any way; all they've done is stare.'
