“I INTEND TO take the fight to the enemy,” General Kilby began. “A defensive war is no good. It’s indecisive, drags on for too long, and is bad for morale. We can’t just hide behind our new machine guns and let them wear us down with hit-and-run guerrilla tactics. For example, long range sniping. Some of the dusky scum are armed with French Lebel military rifles. Not the latest model, I am informed, but quite effective in the right hands. If we don’t crush them quickly, they will sneak across the river in small parties and infiltrate our territory. Once across it will be hard if not impossible to dislodge them. These foul half-castes and savages will burn our crops, poison our water, destroy remote farms.”
The general rang his bell and told Uncle Jed to bring him a glass of mineral water. Then he continued. “Once these raiders have established bases in the wilder parts of our territory, they will become an ever-growing cancer in the healthy body of our community. Just now I used the word territory, but I like to think of New Columbia as a country within a country and not some sort of impermanent settlement. And we are a country with our own customs, language, and laws. We have a proud tradition that goes all the way back to the British Isles—we are white men, after all—and we must not let it down.” General Kilby paused to take a sip of water. “I see you fidgeting, Tolliver. Speak up, you burly rascal.”
Tolliver shifted his weight carefully; his chair had delicate legs. Gatling could see that he didn’t like the old man’s patronizing attitude. Maybe it was all right to call Uncle Jed a rascal, but Tolliver was white and close to fifty.
Tolliver said stiffly, “If we take the war to the enemy, as you put it, General, we must do it in force. Our people are better fighters than Suarez’s rabble—we’ll be fighting for our homes and country—but there are over two thousand of them and the most we can muster, men and boys, is a little less than five hundred. The problem, as I see it, sir, is we have to field a large force and at the same time leave enough men here to protect our women and children.”
“You have children we don’t know about?” The old man’s dumb joke got a weak smile from his son, nothing from Gatling. “Well, sir,” General Kilby went on, “no war is won without risk. We will leave fifty men here and all the machine guns.”
“But the Maxim guns....” Tolliver started to say before the general stopped him by holding up both hands palms forward.
“We will not take the machine guns, not even one. I saw them on the boat and they are too large, too awkward, for rapid movement through the jungle. And that’s what we’ll be doing—moving fast. We’re going to move like Roger’s Rangers, gentlemen. The men will train for ten days in the wild jungle thirty miles south of the Rankin plantation. It’s no different from the jungle on the other side of the river. When they’re ready, we’ll strike.”
Gatling thought it was time he spoke up; the old bastard still hadn’t said what he meant to do. “We’ll be going in through the jungle, sir? To attack Parimba City?”
General Kilby got up and walked stiffly to the large framed map of Parimba Province mounted on the wall. “To take the city of Parimba, sir, not simply to attack it. We must take Parimba because retreat would be disastrous.” He tapped the map with his cane. “This is our landing. There is no landing on the other side of the river because there is no need of it. Boats sailing to or coming from Parimba use a tributary, the Rio Ganoza. It is not an ideal waterway, but it is navigable for about half its length. No river craft proceed beyond the city of Parimba. Before this trouble with Suarez began few boats went to Parimba. None go there now.” Gatling walked over to the map so he could see it better. The general glared at him and moved his cane from the landing to the other bank of the river.
“We will land here and nowhere else.” He gave the map a bang to emphasize his point. “And now, Mr. Gatling, before you inform me that there is certain to be a small force or a party of lookouts there, let me inform you that I have taken that into consideration.” General Kilby turned away from the map for a moment. “You, Tolliver, will take twenty of your best men and cross the river ahead of the main force. You won’t cross directly, of course, but a few miles upstream. Your job will be to kill the lookouts and whoever else is there. No one must escape to give the alarm. If even one man escapes he will be halfway to Parimba before we come ashore. I exaggerate, of course, but my point is these brown monkeys can travel fast through the jungle like the monkeys they are.”
Gatling had been looking at the tributary, the Rio Ganoza, and it looked as if it emptied into the Amazon twenty or twenty-five miles upriver from the landing. A quick look at the scale showed that the city of Parimba was about the same distance from the mouth of the river.
“What about the Rio Ganoza?” he asked.
His question got a cold stare. “What about it? If you’re going to suggest going up the river instead of through the jungle, I’ll tell you why. Because it’s too obvious. Suarez may be a savage but he’s not a fool. The jungle along most of the Ganoza isn’t like it is along the Amazon. No sandy beaches, hardly a break in the jungle wall on both sides. It’s narrow for a tributary so close to the main river. They could shoot at us from both sides and we’d hardly catch a glimpse of them. Your machine guns wouldn’t be worth much in that kind of country. They could cut down hundreds of trees and create a kind of logjam. They could string heavy chains across the river—it’s narrow enough to do that. Does that answer your question, Mr. Gatling?”
“You’ve told me what they could do, General.”
“Sit down, Mr. Gatling. You are making a nuisance of yourself. Yes, I’ve told you what they could do: the logjam, the chains. They may have done all that by now. We could lose the Ruffin and every man on board. Sit down, sir. I won’t tell you again.”
Gatling sat down and the general went on outlining his plan. The old man was probably right about the dangers of the tributary—he ought to know it after twenty-four years in Parimba—but a forced march through the jungle didn’t seem a whole lot better.
“Once ashore we must move swiftly,” General Kilby said. “Our main force will cross the river as soon as it’s light so we won’t be moving through the jungle in utter darkness. Tolliver, if you and your men do your work as I expect you to, we should be able to move on Parimba without meeting any opposition along the way. Unless I am totally mistaken, and in all modesty I seldom am, our swarthy friends will not be expecting us. We will hit that filthy little pesthole like the wrath of God. You have a question, Tolliver?”
“What if there are other lookouts between the river and the city?”
The question was waved away as having no great importance. “If there are other lookouts you and your men must dispose of them. Mind you, I want you to pick the best men we have; tough men, woodsmen, men who can move through the jungle undetected. Men who like to hunt dangerous wild jungle animals. These are the men you’ll be looking for. We’ll be depending on you, old friend. All our lives will be in your hands.”
“I’ll—we’ll—do our damnedest,” Tolliver said.
Warming up to his subject, the general said, “We will take no prisoners. What would we do with them? Boys above the age of thirteen will be killed as if they were full grown men. If a boy is old enough to fire a rifle at me, then I am entitled to kill him. The boy bandit of today is the adult bandit of tomorrow. Nits breed lice, as the saying goes. Those killed in battle and those captured and killed, we will pile their bodies high and use their ashes and bones as fertilizer. But more than anything I would like to take Suarez prisoner and hang him before what’s left of the townspeople. We won’t give him a clean drop. We’ll let him strangle on a short rope. I once did that to a Yankee spy. We must teach Suarez and his scum such a lesson that no one will ever dare to attack us again. What is it, Tolliver? I’ve never known you to ask so many questions.”
The battle plan had turned into a speech and the general didn’t like to be interrupted when he was listening so intently to the sound of his own voice.
“It’s not a question, sir. I just wanted to say that not all the men and boys in Parimba are with Suarez. The nigra that deserted Suarez and ran to us for protection told me that for a fact.”
“But they are with Suarez in the sense that they have chosen to remain in the city. Why didn’t they run away? They could have run away, could have gone deep into the jungle or made their way to some other town. Yes, yes, I know. Parimba is their home. But listen to me. Suarez will arm them and force them to fight if he decides he needs more men. And after the losses he sustained on the river, I think he will do just that. My friend, a bullet fired by an unwilling conscript will kill as surely as one fired by a dedicated soldier. Now I don’t want to answer more questions today. We will meet again at eight o’clock tomorrow morning and go on from there. I caution everyone here: say nothing of our plan. The right men will be told in due time.”
Tolliver and Gatling got up to go. Gatling was to stay at Tolliver’s house for as long as he was in New Columbia. There would be a soft bed, plenty of good food and gallons of good beer.
The general said, “If you will wait outside, Tolliver, I’d like to have a few words with Mr. Gatling. Otis, you don’t look well. Go upstairs and lie down.”
Gatling sat down again and waited. General Kilby rang for Uncle Jed and told him to fetch a julep and a glass of beer. “You like our beer?” the general asked.
“It’s very good.” He knew the old man hadn’t called him back to talk about beer.
“We brew it right here in New Columbia,” the general said. “A German in Para, a man who trades in many commodities, buys as much as we can send him. Beer is just one source of income. We ship coffee, rubber, hardwood, cotton, beef, pork, bananas and coconuts. We have two doctors. We have gunsmiths, carpenters, iron workers and blacksmiths. We have our own hospital. We have schools and churches. We have everything we need.”
“Very impressive, sir.” Gatling sipped his beer.
“And with no modesty at all, sir, I take credit for all of it. I brought my people here in 1865 at the end of the War. After Lee’s craven surrender, I learned that the emperor had a plan to encourage white immigration. Most of the people I took with me were from Columbia, South Carolina, or from small towns and farms adjacent to it. Good people. Plain, hardworking people. I took no gentry with me, sir, nor did I attempt to recruit them. All of us, myself included, had suffered greatly from the War. I offered them a fresh start in life far from the federal army of occupation, the carpetbaggers, the upstart nigras. I told them I could give them no guarantee of success. Nonetheless, they were willing to take the risk. I sold what little I had left. I established what I called our Freedom Fund, and no contribution was too small. One way or another, I raised the money. And so, twenty-four years later, here we are.”
Gatling knew he was expected to make some comment. “I’ve never seen anything like it, not in a place like this.”
“And I rule it, Mr. Gatling. That’s what I want to talk to you about. Today you argued with me and I didn’t like it. I was explaining the plan I had formulated and you interrupted me to argue for another.”
“I wasn’t arguing, General. I was making a suggestion.”
“Whatever you were doing, it seemed to make Tolliver restless, inclined to argue too. Burton has never done that before. By the way, I don’t know why he hates that name. It’s a perfectly good name.”
Gatling didn’t explain why Tolliver hated his given name. He wondered if Otis Kilby was listening at the top of the stairs, and decided he probably was.
“This is not a democracy,” the general stated. So far he hadn’t yelled at Gatling; if he had, Gatling would have walked and looked for a way to get to the coast. “Set this place down, say in a remote part of British Columbia, and democracy might flourish, though I must say I have no love for that political system. That’s beside the point. It wouldn’t work here because of the violent and unstable nature of the country. Oh, I don’t rule like a tyrant, but I do rule. Mine is the final word in all matters. We do have a community council and they do meet and vote on minor issues. I refrain from attending these meetings so that the council members may talk freely. In fact, I know everything that is said for and against me.”
“You mean you have a spy on the council?”
General Kilby laughed. “You are an insolent young man, but, I think, an honest one. You remind me of my dead son Clay, poor boy. I don’t mind much what you say to me in private. Just don’t say it in front of my people. Besides, you won’t be here for very long. As for spies on the council, I don’t have one. I have two so that I may compare their reports. Neither is aware of the other’s activities.”
“You don’t want any more suggestions from me, is that it, General?” The old man reminded Gatling of Colonel Pritchett. Both men were vain and opinionated, had the same disdain for democracy, and would rule the world by force if they could. The difference was the colonel was out in the real world and knew what he could and couldn’t do, while General Kilby was buried in a world of his own making where his word was law.
“I want you to follow my orders without question, Mr. Gatling. You are here to collect the money for the Maxim Company weapons. We hope to benefit by your wide experience—Colonel Pritchett speaks highly of you—but you must not take too much upon yourself. My impression of you is that of a solitary, a man who believes he gets the best results when he does everything himself, makes his own decisions and is responsible to no one. But a fighting force is made up of many men, a team pulling together. Can you accept that concept, sir?”
Gatling nodded. “Yes, General. I did serve in the U.S. Army for some years.”
“Good. Colonel Pritchett says you wish to fight alongside my men? To test certain new weapons under combat conditions?”
“That’s right. I’ve done it in other parts of the world. It’s the best way to see if weapons work right. Testing weapons in the farmlands of New Jersey—that’s where our proving grounds are—doesn’t tell you all you need to know about their performance.”
“I can see the sense of that. Very well, Mr. Gatling. Welcome to the Grand Army of New Columbia.” That was the general’s little joke. “However, and I can’t stress this too strongly, you will not be acting as a free agent. If you prove to be insubordinate or impertinent as you were today, I will put you on a Peruvian boat and send you to the coast.”
The old bastard really wants me gone, Gatling thought, but what he said was, “I’d like to stay, General. Your men need training with the Maxim guns and the Hotchkiss Cannons. I didn’t use the cannons on the river because they’re heavy and hadn’t been assembled yet. Instead, I used hastily prepared gun crews to fire the Maxims. Tolliver was quick to learn and did better than the others. The others did well enough, but as you know, General, there’s more to a machine gun or any new weapon than just firing it. Men have to be trained and trained hard. Colonel Pritchett kept at me till I was ready to drop.” This was a lie.
General Kilby rang for another julep.
Gatling pushed on, saying, “Machine guns are just that—machines—and like all machines they must be maintained, repaired if they break down. I brought along enough spare parts to last you for many years, but your gunsmiths and men in the field can’t fix them if they don’t know how. I do.”
General Kilby yawned; too many juleps in one afternoon. “You’ve made your point, Mr. Gatling, and we do need you for the time being. Yes, for the time being. My gunsmiths are the best and won’t need so very much instruction. You are not indispensable. And now I must attend to other matters. Good day to you.”
Tolliver was waiting and he grinned when Gatling came out and they started the mile walk to his house on the edge of town. He told Gatling he had made good money blacksmithing, and with the money he got for the farm he and his wife used to live on, he didn’t feel the need to work so much anymore. His wife had been hell-bent on saving—“Lord but she was thrifty!”—so he was pretty well fixed.
“You hungry?” Tolliver asked.
“As hell,” Gatling said. “I’m looking forward to a glass of beer I can drink without getting a lecture.”
Bright green fields were on both sides of the road. The general’s house and land might have been in the lowlands of South Carolina instead of hundreds of miles up the Amazon. It was hot, but no hotter than South Carolina would have been at that time of year.
“Well he’s an old man,” Tolliver said. “You have to make allowances for age. Not that he’s all that old—he’s sixty-seven—but he sees himself as the patriarch and he plays the part to the hilt. You don’t like his plan for taking Parimba?”
“I don’t know. What’s the jungle like on the far side of the river?”
“Pretty bad, a good deal of it is. Some of it is swamp. The general hasn’t been to Parimba that often in twenty-four years, and when he did go there he went by boat. You might say there’s a difference. Been some years since I’ve been through that patch of wilderness. That was when Governor Suarez—the twin brother Jorge murdered—was talking of building a road to the river. The general didn’t like that; told me to go through there and see if it could be done.”
“Could it?”
“Not a chance. That stretch of swamp is miles wide and has no bottom. Anything can be done, I guess, but it would take years and I don’t know how much money to put a road through there. And to no real purpose.”
The white buildings of the town showed in the hazy distance. “What do you think of the general’s plan?” Gatling said.
“Getting more than four hundred men through there will be a son of a bitch. Doing that would be hard even if there was no danger of getting ambushed. That’s something the general has turned a blind eye to. On the other hand, if we do get through without getting spotted, I would say there’s a good chance of taking the town.”
“Won’t do much good to take the town if Suarez isn’t there,” Gatling said. “Probably he is, but we don’t know for sure. I would have expected General Kilby to tell us he knew for sure.”
“I thought of that,” Tolliver said, “but didn’t want to bring it up after the general got mad at you. We just don’t have good information, no spies, no nothing. A good reason for that: none of our men could pass for a native. They wouldn’t last five minutes in Parimba. The general won’t allow any natives in the settlement and we’re paying for it now. No good information.”
Tolliver told Gatling they could take a shortcut to his house or they could go through the town. “You might want to take a look at it.” Gatling said he would.
It looked as if Tolliver was the most popular man in New Columbia. Gatling thought it looked like any small Southern town drowsing in the heat of midsummer, except that there the heat lasted all year. There was just one main street with buildings, mostly stores, on both sides of it. It was very clean and there were no dogs scratching in the shade. People came out of the stores to greet Tolliver and to shake his hand. Gatling was introduced to some of them and got some curious looks. Everybody seemed to know who he was, but he was the first stranger they had seen for a long time.
They went into the brick courthouse, where the guns were being stored, and it was cool after the sun glare of the street. The spectators’ benches had been moved to make room for the crated weapons. Tolliver had posted riflemen inside and out; the boxes of dynamite had been heavily sandbagged in case of fire. A man named Longley had been put in charge of the guns, and he sat in the judge’s chair reading the settlement’s weekly newspaper, a thin sheet called the New Columbia Times.
Tolliver roared at him. “Get your backside out of that chair, Judge. You’ll be a sorry man the general catches you in it. Then maybe you’ll get your name in the paper the first time in your goddamned life. Pick up your rifle and watch those fucking guns!”
They went out and Tolliver said, “Good man, that Longley. He could shoot fine from behind the bench, but nobody sits in that big chair but the general.”
“You have a sheriff and a jail?”
“Got a lockup in the basement of the courthouse and I’m kind of the sheriff. But no title, badge or wages. Anybody breaks the law I haul them in and the general decides what to do with them. For small offenses it’s just a fine and sixty days hard labor on his plantation. A serious crime—we don’t have much of that—like rape, inflicting grievous bodily harm, housebreaking, murder—will get you hung. No jury and no appealing the sentence. The criminals are hung in public and I have to do it, a nasty job to be sure, but somebody has to do it. Hasn’t been a hanging in more than a year.”
Half a mile on the other side of town Tolliver’s small house stood behind a white fence that enclosed about an acre of ground. A widow with a bit of money had lived there until she joined her husband in the graveyard.
“Simms ran a store in town so he didn’t need much land,” Tolliver said. “I bought the place from a married daughter after the widow died. It’s not the King ranch, but it’s big enough for me.”
Gatling sat in a bamboo easy chair and drank beer while Tolliver put on two huge steaks. Because of the heat the kitchen was in a small building in back of the house. Duckboards connected the house and the kitchen, and there was a roof to keep things dry in the rainy season.
They ate the steaks when they were ready; no side dishes or biscuits or gravy, just the steaks. Tolliver set out a big pitcher of beer, saying he had enough beer in the house to take a bath in. Gatling thought how good it was to sit there with his coat off, with a breeze blowing through the house, eating a good steak, drinking a good beer.
“How long have you lived here?” he asked.
“About a year,” Tolliver said. “That’s what makes me mad. I was just getting to enjoy the place when this trouble with Suarez started. Would be just my luck to catch a bullet when we cross the river. But, by Jesus, if I survive I’m going to do something nice for Senhor Suarez. Like hang him slow the way the general said. Would be a pleasure to watch him strangle.”
Gatling was thinking about the stretch of jungle where the general planned to put the men through some kind of training. He asked Tolliver what he thought of the idea.
“Not a bad idea on the face of it,” Tolliver said. “Though I don’t know that they need it. Except for a handful of storekeepers who won’t be going anyhow, all the men have been hardened by years of back-breaking work. They’ve all been in the jungle, know what it’s like, know what to look out for. But let the general have his training exercises. What I don’t like is taking the entire force so far from the settlement. The Rankin plantation is ten miles from here and the real wild jungle is thirty miles south of that. The men will be forty miles away if Suarez launches an attack. No way on earth they could get back in time to do any good.”
Gatling smiled at the big blacksmith. “You want to try changing the general’s mind? Like say persuading him to send in half the men while the other half stays here. The rest could go in when the others are through with their so-called training.”
Tolliver made a sour face. “Why don’t you try it? Sure he yelled at you, but I know he likes you deep down. You got till eight in the morning to figure out how to do it.”
“Not me,” Gatling said. “It can’t be done.”