Prologue

WHEN THE SOLDIERS saw the yellow lights of the ranch house, they were seized with hunger.

Sometimes they lived for two or three days on a handful of parched corn, and the thought of well-cooked beef and hot green chiles stimulated their dormant hunger pangs. Still, they did not dare spur their tired mounts past the erect back of the colonel and continued to follow him down the hill.

The troops traveled mostly at night, wrapped in their serapes and sunk deep into their saddles, the clink of bridles and the occasional ping of a horseshoe the only sounds on the trail. By restricting their movements to darkness, the soldiers were able to evade the watchful eyes of their enemies, but the cold marches had sapped their strength. Once the sun rose and fell upon their faces, the men slipped into jittery, colorless dreams on the backs of their moving animals. The heat soon brought its own misery: the chafe of rotting clothes and the unbearable itch of unwashed bodies. They were tortured by lice, by mysterious rashes, by abscesses and pimples that covered their buttocks, their groins, their backs. Some were scarred by smallpox, others with poorly healed wounds. They had grown listless and numb, except for the buzz of anger deep in their brains. The ponies and mules suffered, too. White worms bored into their withers and their backs were covered with sores that oozed and spread each evening when the blankets were removed. The little animals did not cling to life and often died with a quick sigh, collapsing under their riders along the frigid mountain passes or in the alkali dust of the desert. While their bodies were still warm, they were butchered and their meat strapped onto the saddles.

Picking their way down the slope, the soldiers leaned back on their mounts to lessen the strain on the front legs of the ponies. Gray palomas whirred up in front of their faces and all around them were loose, treacherous rocks and the thorny pull of cactus and mesquite. With dusk came a penetrating cold, but it was early spring and a blue light still lingered in the sky. Mountains curled along the horizon, fields lay waiting for crops, and crows exploded from thickening branches of cottonwood trees, their ragged cries accentuating the stillness of the land.

Drawing near the ranch house, the soldiers could see a young woman, her soft, brown hair tucked up in a dust cap, moving back and forth in the window. They smelled animals dozing in their straw stalls, a tank of drip water, and food; something hot and bubbling on the stove—beans probably, seasoned with a few hunks of last winter’s pork, and cornbread or biscuits in the oven. Once again, hunger gripped them.

Colonel Nicolás Fernández dismounted from his horse and walked across the courtyard, passing a small adobe dwelling where the hired help lived, and headed for the main house. He was six feet tall and thin, with fine, almost delicate features and deep-set, gray eyes inherited from German ancestors who had settled in Mexico in the seventeenth century. He wore a khaki uniform, leather leggings that came up over the knees, and on the front of his battered hat was a bronze insignia the size of a silver dollar with the word Dorado inscribed in the middle. Though his clothing was dirty and his face hollow with fatigue, he was a commanding presence. He stamped the dust from his boots and knocked.

Maud Wright touched her hand to her cap and jerked open the door, staring fearlessly at the cloaked visitor. Beyond the colonel, in the courtyard, she counted a dozen soldiers, their dead eyes trained on her. More soldiers were pouring like dark water down the hill. She saw a rind of blue sky, a few faint stars, and no sign of her husband, Ed, or his young friend, Frank Hayden. The two men had left for the nearby town of Pearson earlier that afternoon to buy supplies and she expected them back momentarily. A small tingle of fear ran down her backbone, but she stepped forward and welcomed the officer.

Speaking in courteous, mellifluous tones, he introduced himself and asked her if she would be willing to sell him food.

Puedo comprar comida para mis soldados?

No tengo muchísimo. Pero se doy lo que puedo.

Maud had only enough food for herself, her husband, and the hired family, but said she would give him what she could. The colonel smiled tightly and swept past her into the warm kitchen. He glanced at her son, Johnnie, who was almost two, and already spoke a few Spanish and English words. When Fernández had satisfied himself that no one else was present, he relaxed and grew more talkative. He said that he and his troops were Carrancistas and were hunting the bandit Pancho Villa.

Maud nodded noncommittally. Their small ranch was located in the state of Chihuahua, about a hundred miles south of the New Mexico border. She and Ed had been living in Mexico off and on since 1910, when the Mexican Revolution first began, and knew that their long-term survival depended on their ability to remain neutral and friendly to all sides. In 1913 they had been driven out of the country with more than a thousand other foreigners, but had returned the following year. They had rebuilt their modest herd of cattle and horses and moved back to the ranch in February 1916, just a few weeks earlier, thinking the worst was over.

It was easy to think that way. After years of civil war, the Mexican countryside was bleak and empty. Fields lay fallow and small shops and stores had been looted so often that the shelves were bare. There was no food, no medicine, no clothing. Curtains, carpets, and even the green cloth that covered pool tables had been ripped up and fashioned into clothing. When that was gone, the people had covered themselves with corn sheaves and string. Thousands were dying from tifus—typhus. Starvation was claiming an even greater number of lives. “It was the custom,” remembered Martin Lyons, a mining engineer, “to pick up little children and people sleeping in doorways and shake them to see if they were dead or alive and many times they were dead.”

Bandits of all kinds roamed the countryside, robbing both foreigners and the native born. They extracted “loans” from mine owners and lumber-mill operators and kidnapped wealthy landowners and held them for ransom. Villa’s troops were invariably blamed for the depredations, yet the people in the villages and towns knew that the Constitutionalist troops commanded by Venustiano Carranza, the self-proclaimed primer jefe, or “first chief” of Mexico, were equally adept at plundering. Even before villagers could recognize approaching horsemen, they hid their few valuables, and men of fighting age took to the hills to keep from being forcibly pressed into service by one side or the other.

Maud was worried; the cattle and horses they had brought to the ranch represented years of hard work, and she found herself growing angry as she wondered whether Fernández planned to take their livestock. Just twenty-seven years old, she was tall and carried herself with an easy, unconscious strength. Her calico dress, soft and shapeless from many washings, hid her long horsewoman’s legs and the fullness that had come with the birth of her first child. To the soldiers outside, she must have seemed lovely, with gray eyes and a smile that unfolded slowly and filled her face with happiness. She spoke Spanish fluently, but with an Alabama accent that slowed the quick, tripping syllables.

Maud served the colonel the food she had prepared for her family. While he was eating, Ed and Frank Hayden rode up in the yard leading two pack mules. The two men nodded in a friendly way to the soldiers as they nonchalantly pulled the saddles off their horses and carried them into the house. As soon as they had gone, the troops tore open the packages on the pack mules, looking for food, clothing, money.

Maud introduced the two men to the colonel. Fernández nodded and continued to eat. When he was finished, he rose from the table and announced that he had to feed his horse and asked Ed to show him where the grain was kept. The two men went outside together, and a few moments later Hayden, who was twenty-five and from a wealthy New Orleans family, stood up and followed them.

After they left, soldiers poured into the house, bringing with them the ripe, fruity smell of their unwashed bodies. Johnnie began to whimper. The soldiers ordered Maud to open her storeroom, where she kept a small stock of canned vegetables, flour, beans, corn, salt, and molasses. The men longed to dip their fingers into the molasses but knew one mouthful surreptitiously taken could mean a summary execution before a firing squad or a slow, gagging death at the end of a rope.

The troops loaded up the goods and carried them outside. Maud snatched up her baby and followed them out just in time to see her husband and his friend being led away. They were sitting on one of the pack mules and their hands were tied. She ran to her husband’s side.

“They’re going to kill you,” she said.

He looked down at his young wife. “It’s cold out here,” he said. “Take the baby and go back inside.”

Ed had loved Maud from the moment they met, eight years earlier, in Oklahoma. Her parents had moved to New Mexico to keep them apart, but he was an adventurous, determined man, and followed them there. Fifteen years older than Maud and an Englishman by birth, Ed had arrived in the United States by stowing aboard a ship. One day, they decided to elope and traveled by horseback and then by stagecoach to El Paso, Texas, where they were married on January 10, 1910, before a justice of the peace. The next day they crossed the international bridge and entered the glittering promise of Mexico.

Maud returned to the house, watching in fascinated horror as the soldiers moved from the kitchen to the bedroom area, ripping the linens from her bed, stuffing hairbrushes and combs and mirrors down their shirts. She was too agitated to remain inside and when she went out again, Fernández ordered her to leave the child with the wife of the hired man, and swing up behind him. When she resisted, he told her that he would kill her. Reluctantly, she mounted one of her own horses. Then, softening his tone, Fernández explained that his troops were not Carrancistas at all.

Somos soldados de la División del Norte, he said with slow pride.

The Division of the North was the army of peasants, small farmers, cowboys, and unemployed miners who had flocked to Pancho Villa’s side during the revolution. The army had swelled to more than fifty thousand men at its zenith. But Villa had suffered a string of military defeats the previous year and had also fallen out of favor with the United States. Surrounded suddenly by the unmistakable odor of failure, lacking the money to feed and clothe his army or to buy ammunition or arms, he had watched in mounting fury as his soldiers deserted him. Now the celebrated División del Norte had dwindled to a few hundred soldiers and a fiercely loyal cadre of bodyguards known as the Dorados, or “Golden Ones.” These were Villa’s handpicked men, soldiers who were bronzed and hardened by war and were willing to lay down their lives for their commander. Among this loyal group of men, the U.S. Army would later write, Nicolás Fernández was one of the most devoted.

Before the revolution, Fernández had been the administrator of several sprawling haciendas belonging to Luis Terrazas, Chihuahua’s wealthiest citizen and the owner of upwards of fifteen million acres of land. His grandfather’s brother had governed Chihuahua in the 1880s. By virtue of his family ties and occupation, he was a solid member of the upper class, wrote one historian, adding, “It’s not easy to understand why he took part in the revolution, and even less easy to explain why he joined Villa’s forces.” Whatever his motives, Fernández’s loyalty to General Villa was so strong that U.S. Army officials would note that he “preferred death to separation from his chief.” Like Villa, he was a harsh disciplinarian and shunned both tobacco and alcohol.

Fernández picked up his reins and looked back at Maud. Seeing her distress, he reassured her that he only wanted the two American men to help guide the troops out of the heavily patrolled Carrancista territory. Then they would be freed.

It was the evening of March 1, 1916.

IN THE BLUE-BLACK darkness, the steaming breath of the men and the dust from the horses’ hooves swirled together, blotting out the nearby landmarks and the distant stars. Maud groped for a rolled, dirty serape she had found on the back of her saddle. Though the serape was worn and offered scant protection from the cold night air, she untied it and drew it down around her shoulders. She breathed in the scent of her horse and watched the jostling troops, hoping to see the pack mule carrying her husband and Frank Hayden. They would be easy to distinguish from the soldiers, many of whom were small and slender as young boys and sat the choppy trot of their mounts with a supple ease.

At daybreak, they reached Cave Valley, a mile-long canyon some thirty miles north of the ranch with steep, heavily forested walls and a stream that meandered along its shadowy bottom. There, they rendezvoused with two to three thousand other Villistas who were camped on either side of the stream, their ponies staked randomly around smoky campfires. The animals stood in motionless dejection, too exhausted even to nibble at the weeds.

Through the smoke, Maud suddenly saw her husband and Frank Hayden. They were still bound and sitting astride one of the mules. She edged her horse closer so they could talk.

Her husband told her that they had been taken to Pancho Villa. “He says he’s not going to kill us,” Ed said.

“I’m not so sure,” she responded, looking bleakly around her.

In the brief moment they were together, they tried to come up with an escape plan but their wits failed them. All they could agree upon was that whoever was freed first would return to the ranch for their little boy.

A guard named Castillo was assigned to Maud and together they rode parallel to and east of the main body of soldiers. From her position she could see the entire column. Her husband and Frank Hayden were in the rear. She waved to them and then turned to ask Castillo a question. When she glanced back again, she saw the two Americans being escorted around a hill by several soldiers. They were visible one moment and the next they were gone. The same soldiers soon rejoined the column without the two captives and Maud felt certain her husband and her friend had been killed. A huge grief began to rise up within her but she pushed it back down. What she needed to survive was not the softness of grief but the hardness that comes from rage.

The column marched in crazy, drunken loops, traveling east, then west, but always north, toward the border. The soldiers wore faded serapes and floppy sombreros plucked from the heads of their deceased compañeros on the battlefield. They were armed with German-made Mausers, Winchester rifles, and old shotguns and pistols, and carried their ammunition in tremendous bandoliers that crisscrossed their chests or in feed bags attached to their saddles. Several pack mules stumbled along at the rear of the column, their backs weighed down with badly rusted machine guns, sacks of corn, jerked beef, and grain for the horses.

That evening they made their first prolonged stop at a small ranch whose owners long ago had fled the turbulent countryside. Maud’s body ached with pain and her brain was clogged with fear. Her thoughts had slowed and drifted through her head with no urgency at all. A new guard named Juan Ramón Ruiz, who spoke perfect English, was assigned to look after her. With a chivalry that seemed out of place, he threatened to report any man who swore in her presence. Maud dismounted stiffly, kneading the tight muscles at the small of her back as she looked around. The mountains wavered in the blue air, weightless as dropped silk, and light slanted through the chamisa and sage. She listened to the watery sounds of nesting quail and experienced an acute sense of dislocation. Her husband had been murdered. She had been kidnapped. She worried that she would never again see her son. So how could the outer world still be so tranquil and beautiful?

Her reverie was broken by the sound of cattle being driven into camp. As the herd boiled toward them, the soldiers leaped to their feet and formed a human corral around the animals. When the last cow was driven into their midst, the corral was closed and an officer barked a sharp command. Dozens of lassos sizzled through the air and the cows suddenly found themselves entangled by five or six different ropes. As they struggled to break free of the snares, a small man holding a long-bladed knife appeared at the far end of the corral. He skipped through the churning dust, pausing in front of each animal long enough to run his blade beneath its throat. Some of the cows squealed in surprise and dropped to their knees immediately; others seemed not to know that they had been fatally wounded and continued to pitch and buck, flinging gouts of wet crimson from their gaping throats, until finally they, too, subsided in dreamy bewilderment. Into the squirming knot of bleeding bodies waded soldiers with their own dull knives. Many of the cows not yet dead kicked out desperately at their assailants. Soon enough, though, they lay unmoving on the ground and the men deftly skinned the carcasses and scooped their hands into the warm bellies to fish out the organs. They rammed the chunks onto sharpened sticks and held them out briefly over the campfires. Too hungry to wait for the meat to cook properly, they gobbled it down while it was still raw. After they finished, they returned to the carcasses once more, fingering out the flesh from the cavernous heads and the heavy thighbones and roasting it over the fires.

Maud was stunned by the hunger. She had been slipping into a kind of stupor, but the ferocity of the killing, the squeals of the terrified animals, and the iron smell of blood brought her back to the present. A soldier tossed her a black flour tortilla and a piece of meat. The meat was burned on the outside, raw and bloody on the inside. Maud held it in her hands, feeling the fire’s warmth, but could not put it in her mouth. She ate the tortilla and tied the meat onto the back of her saddle.

On the second or third day of the march, she saw Pancho Villa for the first time. He was wearing a small round hat and riding a mule. When he passed Maud, he bowed in her direction, smiled tightly, and rode on. He was much larger than the other soldiers, with heavy slabs of muscle padding his shoulders and a thick, retracted neck that absorbed the gait of the mule and left his massive head motionless, pointed into the wind like a ship’s prow. Although Villa chose the mule, he could have ridden any one of his own horses, which carried no food, weapons, or men and pranced alongside the plodding column with coltish happiness. Each night, his horses were fed, curried, and brushed and their hooves inspected for small stones. These animals had one function only: to carry Villa into battle.

Those battles consisted of little more than skirmishes now. Villa had once been hailed in the United States as the “Man of the Hour,” but by the time Maud saw him, much of his grandeur and prestige had vanished. Everything had been lost. His amigo, Rodolfo Fierro, a man of “sinister beauty” who killed men just to watch death well up in their eyes, was dead himself, drowned in quicksand, and his most trusted general, Felipe Ángeles, melancholy, incorruptible, and brilliant, had left for Texas, where he was trying to eke out a living on a small ranch. Other high-ranking officers from Villa’s army had also fled to the United States or gone over to Carranza’s side. Villa had let some of them go with his blessing, but others he had killed himself. He could tolerate almost anything but betrayal.

Maud had lived in Mexico long enough to have heard the many stories recounting Villa’s military victories, his courage, his appeal to women. The peasants who thronged to his side had many names for him: gorra gacha—slouch hat; el centauro del norte—the centaur of the north; el jaguar indomado—the untamed jaguar; la fiera—the wild beast. Maud sensed immediately the crouching, unpredictable energy from which the latter names were drawn. She had four brothers and could swing an ax, handle a crosscut saw, and drive a team of mules as well as any man. But she found herself afraid of this man, this Pancho Villa. The desultory banter among the troops ceased as he rode by and she realized that his men feared him, too.

Maud worked the leather reins between her fingers, squeezing and releasing the pressure until she felt the animal drop its head and come onto the bit. The horse, at least, was under her control. The column rode on.