The Grapple Read Free Page A

enough to let Moss hear their cries of fear and dismay and agony. Some of them tried to charge the machine-gun position. That was brave, but it didn’t work. The gun itself might have held them at bay. In case it didn’t, other blacks with rifles were there to help protect it.
    Realizing they’d run into a trap helped break the Mexicans. When they took heavy casualties without taking the machine gun, they fled east, back toward Plains. Some of them threw away their weapons to run faster. The guerrillas galled them with gunfire till they got out of range.
    After the Negroes emerged from cover, they methodically finished off the wounded Mexicans. Some of the guerrillas carried shotguns or small-caliber hunting rifles. They replaced them with bolt-action Tredegars taken from Francisco José’s men. A handful of the Mexicans carried submachine guns. Those also went into the blacks’ arsenal. None of the dead men had the automatic rifles that gave Confederate soldiers so much firepower. Moss wasn’t much surprised; the Confederates didn’t have enough of those potent weapons for all their own front-line troops.
    Nick Cantarella went up to Spartacus, who was pulling clips of ammunition from the equipment pouches on a dead man’s belt. “We better haul ass outa here, and I mean now,” the U.S. officer said. “Those greasers’ll be back, either by themselves or with the local Freedom Party stalwarts. Ain’t gonna make the same trick work twice, not here.”
    “You don’t reckon so?” The guerrilla leader didn’t sound convinced. “Them Mexicans ain’t smart, an’ the ofays who yell, ‘Freedom!’ all the goddamn time, they’s dumber.”
    “Quickest way to end up dead is to think the guy you’re fighting is a damn fool,” Cantarella said. “Second quickest way is to get greedy. You try both at once, you’re askin’ for it, you hear what I’m sayin’?”
    Spartacus looked at him. Jonathan Moss thought another quick way to end up dead was by pushing the Negro too far. Spartacus didn’t take kindly to listening to whites. But Cantarella had the certainty that went with knowing what he was doing. He wasn’t trying to show Spartacus up, just to give good advice. And he wasn’t much inclined to back down himself.
    Muttering to himself, Spartacus looked along the road toward Plains. “Reckon mebbe you’s right,” he said unwillingly. “We done stuck ’em pretty good, an’ that’ll have to do.” He raised his voice to a shout: “Let’s git! Time to move out!”
    The Negroes and their white advisers streamed away from the ambush. Moss didn’t see how Spartacus could have wanted much more. He wondered if the Mexicans would push hard after the guerrillas again, or if one introduction like this would show them that wasn’t a good idea.
    When he asked Nick Cantarella, the infantry officer only shrugged. “Have to find out,” he said. “Pretty plain they never saw combat before. Whether they can’t stand up to it or whether they figure they’ve got something to prove now—well, we’ll see before long, I figure.”
    “Guerrillas did well,” Moss remarked.
    “Yeah.” Cantarella looked around, then spoke in a low voice: “Wouldn’t’ve thought the spooks had it in ’em. But if your ass is on the line, I guess you do what you gotta do, no matter who you are.”
    “We just did,” Moss said. Nick Cantarella blinked, then nodded.
             
    S cipio was almost too far gone to notice when the train stopped. The Negro and his wife and daughter were scooped up in Augusta, Georgia, a week earlier—he thought it was a week, but he could have been off by a day or two either way.
    Along with so many others from the Terry—Augusta’s colored district—they were herded into a boxcar and the door locked from the outside. It was too crowded in there to sit down, let alone to lie down. Scipio wasn’t off his feet for a minute in all that time, however long it was. He couldn’t make it to the