The Grapple Read Free

unfamiliar shape came into the area. “Mexicans!” Nick Cantarella said in disgust. “Goddamn bean-eating greasers! Wonder how the hell Featherston pried ’em outa Francisco José.”
    “Screw that.” Spartacus didn’t let the Mexican soldiers faze him. “What I wonder is, can them fuckers fight?”
    “When the U.S. Army broke through in Pennsylvania last fall, it broke through against the Mexicans,” Cantarella said.
    “Uh-huh, but y’all got barrels an’ airplanes an’ all that good shit.” Spartacus was nobody’s fool. “All we got is us, an’ we ain’t got so many of us.” He frowned in concentration. “Make them come at us, mebbe, an’ see how good they is.”
    “Always better to meet them where you want to, not where they want to,” Moss said.
    “Make sense,” Spartacus agreed. “Now we got to cipher out how them greasers can reckon they is doin’ what they wants when they is really doin’ jus’ what we aims to have ’em do.”
    Arranging to have a letter intercepted in Plains turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. Moss’ only worry was that the Mexicans would decide it was too obviously a fraud. It told a fictitious comrade in the town where Spartacus’ band would be and what they planned to do for the next four days. One of the blacks sneaked into Plains at night and dropped the envelope that held the letter not far from the little hotel where Francisco José’s soldiers were garrisoned. Another black, one who lived in town, brought word the envelope had been found.
    As Spartacus hoped, the Mexicans moved down the road from Plains toward Preston, the next town farther west. They marched in good order, with scouts well forward and with men out to either side to make sure they didn’t get hit from the flank. But the scouts saw nothing the guerrillas didn’t want them to, and the flank guards weren’t out far enough.
    Spartacus approached field fortifications with the eye of a man who’d seen plenty of trench warfare. He had eight or ten riflemen dug in at the top of a tiny swell of ground. Jonathan Moss was one of them. He clutched his Tredegar with sweaty palms and hoped none of the blacks in the trench with him noticed how nervous he was.
    The one thing he felt he could tell them was “Don’t open up too soon. We want to make the Mexicans bunch up in front of us, remember.” The Negroes nodded. Some of them still automatically acted deferential toward whites when they weren’t trying to kill them. That was a funny business.
    Moss had only a few minutes to wonder about it before the Mexicans’ scouts came into sight. Their pale khaki might make good camouflage in northern Mexico, but it didn’t do so well against the green woods and red dirt of Georgia. The guerrillas waited till the scouts got close, then shot all three of them down. Moss thought he hit one of them, and also thought they went down before they were sure where the killing fire came from.
    Those gunshots brought the rest of the Mexicans at a trot. They came in loose order, so nobody in front of them could pick off too many men at once. They would soon have overwhelmed the Negroes in that trench—if those were the only men Spartacus had. But their commanding officer did what the guerrilla leader hoped he would: in concentrating on what lay ahead, he forgot all about what might might be waiting off to the flank.
    And he paid for it. What waited off to the flank was an artfully concealed machine gun. The Negroes didn’t take it with them everywhere they went; it was heavy and clumsy to move. But when they could set it up ahead of time…
    When they could set it up ahead of time, it was the concentrated essence of infantry. The Mexicans hurried forward to deal with the roadblock in front of them. The machine-gun crew couldn’t have had a better target for enfilading fire if they’d set up the enemy themselves.
    When the machine gun started stuttering, the Mexicans toppled like tenpins. They were close