TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border Read Free Page B

them, a former mule driver named Pascual Orozco, sold out to the northern cattle barons, defecting with six thousand former rurales. Madero’s chief general, Victoriano Huerta, a bullet-headed, brandy-drinking Indian who boasted that his closest friends were named Martell and Courvoisier, ordered the little president confined in the national palace for his own safety.
    A few nights later Madero was taken out and shot. Huerta assumed the presidency. Orozco became his commanding general.
    As for Pancho Villa, when the revolution had first begun back in 1910, he decided to fight for it rather than against it—banditry, I suppose, already being a kind of natural opposition to property and the status quo. Villa was different from most of the mountain gunmen in that he came to be a true believer in the cause and a devoted follower of the one they loved to call, with weepy affection, “the little Señor Madero.” Pancho collected his share of scalps and medals, rose to the rank of colonel and won a big battle right here in Juárez, which made him famous. After Madero was elected president he retired, but then he got into trouble with General Huerta for stealing a horse from some rich hacienda owner.
    At the last minute a telegram from President Madero called off his execution, and Pancho was thrown into prison in Mexico City. Disguised as his own lawyer, he escaped and made his way through the mountains to exile in El Paso. He had been there ever since, until Madero was assassinated two months ago.
    If there was any revolution still drawing breath, I had heard it was led by a new star named Venustiano Carranza, an older gentleman with a distinguished white beard parted in the middle and blue-tinted spectacles that hid his eyes. He was east of here in the state of Coahuila, and there was another independent revolutionist general to the west named Alvaro Obregón.
    Confusing? Sure. No American could follow the ins and outs of Mexican politics. The chiles killed each other off so fast you didn’t know from one day to the next who was on top and who was six feet under.
    “Does Villa have an army?” I asked Julio, in that smoky Juárez bar. “Is he going to join up with Carranza?”
    “Venustiano Carranza!” Julio snorted with disdain. “We call him ‘Don Venus.’ He smells of scent and he drinks chocolate with his pinky in the air. He makes proclamations, but he does nothing. And he has no cojones. “
    That was about the worst thing you could say of a man in Mexico, that he had no balls.
    “Well,” I said, “they tell me that Pancho Villa has plenty of cojones. Can’t he lend one or two to Don Venus, so they can lick Huerta and Orozco together?”
    Julio’s vexed expression softened a bit, and the huge man behind him smiled at me with broken white teeth out of a bearded face the color of burnt toast. He murmured something that I didn’t catch. A random shaft of sunlight touched his face. Something glittered. I realized he had only one good eye and the other one was glass. He had the kind of brutal mien that you would describe to little kids if you wanted to scare them into eating their porridge. Finally he laid a thick hand on Julio’s shoulder and rumbled, “We have to go. That other one’s not going to show up.”
    Julio said, “Tomás, it was pleasant to see you again. What you did in the street for that woman was a good thing. Consider that the revolution owes you a favor.”
    “Hang on a minute.” A thought finally wandered into my skull that accounted for their standing in that bar drinking soda pop and the way they kept glancing over my shoulder into the street. “Are you a Villista?” I asked Julio bluntly. “Are you going to meet Pancho Villa?”
    Julio started to grin—then murmured, with obvious prudence, “Possibly.”
    Looking back now, I can see more than a few times in those years when I made decisions that determined the course of my life. I almost said “… changed my life,” but from