The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [243]
Going back to when he joined the First Kansas Colored Volunteers in ’63, age fifteen. Wounded at Honey Springs the same year. Guarded Rebel prisoners at Rock Island, took part in the occupation of Galveston. Then after the war got sent out here to join the all-Negro Tenth Cavalry on frontier station, Arizona Territory, and deal with hostile Apaches. In ’87 went to Mexico with Lieutenant Brendan Early out of Fort Huachuca—Bren and a contract guide named Dana Moon, now the agent at the White Tanks reservation—brought back a one-eyed Mimbreño named Loco, brought back a white woman the renegade Apache had run off with—and Dana Moon later married—and they all got their pictures in some newspapers. Mustered out that same year,’87… Drove a wagon for Capt. Early Hunting Expeditions Incorporated before going to work for Dana at White Tanks. He’d be sitting on Dana’s porch this evening with a glass of mescal and Dana would say, “Well, now you’ve seen the elephant I don’t imagine you’ll want to stay around here.” He’d tell Dana he saw the elephant a long time ago and wasn’t too impressed. Just then another voice, not Dana’s, said out loud to him:
“So you was in the war, huh?”
It was one of the cowboys. He sat his mount, a little claybank quarter horse, close to the porch rail, sat leaning on the pommel to show he was at ease, his hat low on his eyes, staring directly at Catlett in his rocking chair. The other one sat his mount, a bay, more out in the street, maybe holding back. This boy was not at ease but fidgety. Catlett remembered them in the Gold Dollar.
Now the one close said, “What was it you did over there in Cuba?”
Meaning a colored man. What did a colored man do. Like most people the boy not knowing anything about Negro soldiers in the war. This one squinting at him had size and maybe got his way enough he believed he could say whatever he pleased, or use a tone of voice that would irritate the person addressed. As he did just now.
“What did I do over there?” Catlett said. “What everybody did, I was in the war.”
“You wrangle stock for the Rough Riders?”
“Where’d you get that idea?”
“I asked you a question. Is that what you did, tend their stock?”
Once Catlett decided to remain civil and maybe this boy would go away, he said, “There wasn’t no stock. The Rough Riders, even the Rough Riders, were afoot. The only people had horses were artillery, pulling caissons with their Hotchkiss guns and the coffee grinders, what they called the Gatling guns. Lemme see,” Catlett said, “they had some mules, too, but I didn’t tend anybody’s stock.”
“His brother was a Rough Rider,” Macon said, raising one hand to hook his thumb at Wayman. “Served with Colonel Teddy Roosevelt and got killed in an ambush—the only way greasers know how to fight. I like to hear what you people were doing while his brother Wyatt was getting killed.”
You people. Look at him trying to start a fight.
“You believe it was my fault he got killed?”
“I asked you what you were doing.”
It wasn’t even this kid’s business. Catlett thinking, Well, see if you can educate him, and said, “Las Guásimas. You ever hear of it?”
The kid stared with his eyes half shut. Suspicious, or letting you know he’s serious, Catlett thought. Keen eyed and mean; you’re not gonna put anything past him.
“What’s it, a place over there?”
“That’s right, Las Guásimas, the place where it happened. On the way to Santiago de Coo-ba. Sixteen men killed that day, mostly by rifle fire, and something