The Missourian Part 53

"And thus they led a quiet life During their princely raine."

--_Ballad of King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid._

Some years after the events recorded here, there appeared in the Boonville Javelin (post-bellum and revived) a serial of reminiscences, which, behind an opalescent gossamer of romance, pictured the Missourians and the chivalrous role they played around that forlornly chastened and be-chased damsel, la Republica Mexicana.

Quite aside from the prodigious deeds set forth therein, the journalistic epic is of itself navely prodigious, as anyone knowing Mr.

Boone with pen in hand will at once suspect. All the little Trojan band--call them Gascons if you will, but own that if they boasted they were ever keen to substantiate the bluff--all of them, then, strove and blazed away invariably as heroes and were just as peerless as could be.

You wouldn't look for anything else from Mr. Boone. He must, however, be credited with one peculiarity, that he never hinted at himself as one of the glorious company. Daniel knew his newspaper ethics. He knew that the newspaper man is _not_ the story, however they may regard it in France, for instance, where the reporter is ever the bright particular cynosure of any interview that bears his signature.

A few strokes of the Meagre Shanks brush in the way of excerpts from his narrative, with plenty of extenuating dots in between, should make an impression, even though impressionistic, and serve perhaps as a sketch of what befell after Din Driscoll had bearded the Tiger, freed Don Rodrigo, and surrendered his own two captives. To begin:

A retreat was had [Daniel always got under way slowly, as though fore-resolved not to stampede.] Echo demands, "Retreat?--The Iron Brigade in retreat?" 'Twas true. Rallied once again, but under another flag than the Bars, the Missourians rode all that dank, wet night lest they meet and have to fight their new friends, the guerrillas under Rodrigo Galan. It was a weird predicament. Two days before, they were peaceful settlers in the land--_omne solum forti patria_--their blood-flecked swords as ploughshares fleshed in earth's warm bosom....

But tyrannical confiscation of the soil they tilled loomed foreboding.... Pestered nigh unto forceful phrases with shooing robbers of both sides out of their melon patches, and fired at last by the sentiment that it behooved them to sally forth and regulate things themselves.... They only lacked a Cincinnatus. Their old general would not lead them. Wearing his bright chaplet of renown, Joe Shelby now drove mules, a captain over long wagon trains....

Then gallant Din Driscoll appeared among them, the dry-humored, reckless Jack Driscoll of other days, attired now in the brave, das.h.i.+ng regimentals of the Republic[!] From out the wilds of distant Michoacan he came with the long gallop that never would tire, and pausing at cabin after cabin in the Colony's broad acres, summoned his old comrades to arms ... to arms against the invader.... Who, now, will argue bucolic content? Those l.u.s.ty young planters smelled the battle from afar. What now were waving ta.s.sels to the glory of deeds?--_a cuspide corona_--to a wreath of powder-burned laurel? That very day the Iron Brigade rallied again, gathered once again at the oft remembered bugle's full, resonant blare.

Fighting came sooner than the Missourians hoped. Even as they started for Michoacan, a ragged Indito, whose village had been razed by the Cossacks, met the command and asked for the Senor Coronel Gringo.

Driscoll heard what he had to tell, and was greatly concerned, though the others laughed at first and scoffed. For it seemed that the Indito did not know who sent him, except that it was a senor chaparrito, a short little senor. "Then you must be a Shorter Yet?" said Driscoll.

"Well, what do you bring?" The Indito produced from his ragged s.h.i.+rt a bit of parchment, whereon Colonel Driscoll was urged to join with his new recruits in an attack on Maximilian's escort, for Maximilian was on his way to Vera Cruz. The parchment was signed, "El Chaparrito."

"Shorty! That word means 'Shorty'," the troopers guffawed. But Driscoll showed them another handwriting at the bottom. The parchment had been countersigned in blank, thus: "Benito Juarez, Libertad y Reforma." The Missourians were respectful after that. Many thought that the mysterious guardian angel of the Republic's battles must be the Presidente himself, though the Presidente was thousands of miles away.

After the victory won against Dupin's Contra Guerrillas [so the chronicle goes on], the Missourians found their ally to be none other than that picturesque buccaneer of the Sierras, Don Rodrigo, wild as a prairie wolf, handsome as Lucifer; and their captives to be not the Emperor and suite but two beautiful women....

When the prisoners had been exchanged--i. e., the two fair girls restored to Dupin, and Rodrigo freed--and Rodrigo had hurried away to gather his scattered vagabonds from among the foothills, the Missourians realized their predicament. That day they had fought the Empire. Then they had turned and fought the Republic in the person of the guerrilla chief, Rodrigo Galan. They had rebelled against the rebels, so were doubly rebel, doubly outlawed. Ye G.o.ds, it _was_ bizarre! And as morning dawned on them trailing along a dreary inferno gorge of the Sierra Gorda, they blinked at each other ruefully. Poor waifs, they had lost their native country. And now, one rainy morning, they found they had lost an adopted one. But each man looked into a face likewise so rueful that his own broke into a grin.

"We'll just start a _new_ country," cried Driscoll abruptly.

His voice sounded strange and very unlike him, but the inspiration was characteristic of the man, and true to the old irrepressible Storm Centre they had known. Hunted outlaws, they too were in the mood for any desperate venture. Spontaneous as wildfire, they seconded this one ere they had asked a question. They never did ask "How?"

"A new country," roared Tall Mose, "but where?"

"And when?" Old Brothers and Sisters inquired gently.

"We'll start right after breakfast," their intrepid leader replied. "And right here in Mexico. It's anybody's country yet, and we might as well slice off a little private republic for ourselves."

"And won't we fight, by Jiminy!" drawled Cal Grinders, with Ozarkian deliberation.

"And it don't matter whom we fight," Marmaduke added. "Let 'em show themselves, Slim Max or Don Benito. We'll meet all comers."

That was the mood they were in, and they were in it to the chin. Submit a wholesale fighting order, and they bid for it like neither bulls nor bears, but like wolves.

"About taxation?" asked Clay of Carroll dubiously.

But as a good general, or as another Romulus, Driscoll had figured it all out. His answer brought comfort.

"We'll not have any. We will levy on commerce, as republics have the right to do."

"Then," said Carroll of Clay, "we'll need a seaport?"

"Of course. Ain't Tampico simply waiting for us? The French aren't there now. They are concentrating in Mexico City for evacuation. There's no more of a garrison than what Old Tige left, a few hundred Cossacks. If we get there before the Liberals----" ...

... And why not? They were nearly five hundred and greater than Romulus.

They were Missourians, sir. They were from that State which gave the best fighters to both sides; which, population considered, gave more to the North than any other Northern state, more to the South than any other Southern state, and yet as a state would be a Republic unto herself. What, then, might not be possible to these her sons on a foreign sh.o.r.e? Intrepid youngsters, they were of royal State lineage, Missourians from Kentucky, Kentuckians from Virginia, which was in the beginning. Dauntless cavaliers of the Blood, if they chose to carve themselves a kingdom, why not?

But they themselves answered the questions, questions that had men's lives in them thicker than hard words in the Blue-back speller. The business was as already done, and Mose Bledsoe could go back to his chant with an easy mind. And once more Missouri's revered saga echoed among the crags:

"I come from old Missouri, Yes, all the way from Pike.

I'll tell you why I left there, And why I came to roam And leave my poor old mammy, So far away from home."

Then, the bard leading in a fas.h.i.+on vociferous, the whole command helped out:

"Says she to me, 'Joe Bowers, You are the man to win; Here's a kiss to bind the bargain,'

And she hove a dozen in...."

... Bivouacked under the black-lipped howitzers of Tampico's sullen heights.... Dismal fens ... where fever exhaled its dread gray breath thick over swamp and lagoon ... above, the vast aegis of the firmament, wrought in a diamond dust of stars ... a sickly, jaundiced, moon tilted drunkenly.... Through ooze and fetid slime the Americans crept stealthily out of the reeds; and on, over cypress roots, silently in the silent night; on, up the hill under the low walls of Fort Iturbide.

Gently and fleeting as a dark beauty's sigh in old Castile, they were come in canister range.

"Steady, men," their leader whispered.

"Unto death," came the low-breathed response.

[No such words were uttered, as Daniel knew perfectly well, but he knew that they should be--in the telling.].... A sharp cry ... fearful alarums from the crest of the hill ... next a belching fury of grape....

But Tall Mose was happier for it. The seal was off his lips at last, and out thundered his stentorian war-song:

"O Sally! dearest Sally!

O Sally! for your sake...."

... still upward, until the cannon fumes broke as a dun-colored wave over pennant and plume ... and grimy troops fell as spring blossoms in a balmy south breeze.... Dying as they loved to die, game to the last ...

they stumbled back to the river, which swept over the gallant stranger slain....

"... It's enough to make me swear!-- That Sally had a baby, And the baby had red hair...."

... Then piercing and wildly plaintive, the clarions rang out, clamoring for victory and _vae victis_ ... and Din Driscoll's hoa.r.s.e voice....

"We are the last of the race, let us be the best as well."... "Back at 'em, fellows!" Bledsoe bellows.... And the parson murmurs, "He prays best who fights best, both great and small" ... his soft voice tremulous enough for Glory, his superb trigger finger disturbing enough for Chaos.... At last, the supreme command "like volley'd lightning"--"Give 'em the revolver. _Charge!_"...

Not until the story is told shall ... for over the battered masonry, in through the splintered doors, felling shadowy foes on every hand....

When well within-side ... the prowess of each unto himself ... tempest of pistol cracking ... bleeding deathfully ... ah, the killing is fast and desperate ... and not a candle over the pitiless fray.... Huddled together for a brief last stand, the Cossacks ... panic, flight....

_The fort is taken!_

When the incarnadine embers of sunrise glowed in the east, the Missourians stood on the battlements and surveyed their domain. "You are the man to win, Joe Bowers," Mose hummed with an I-told-you-so air, but softly, for many of his comrades were wounded, though he was not, as usual, for all his seven feet of perpendicular target. But "the Doc," of Benton, was, of course. Getting wounded was the greatest trouble with Doc. If he attacked a hornet's nest, he would contrive some way to get a leg shot off. But with him such things had become to be a matter of course, so now he crated himself together enough to move around and attend to the others. Driscoll was most innumerably barked, with a perforated humerus as climax. [The modest Boone might have catalogued similarly his own casualties.] Old Brothers and Sisters, that cool Christian, had lost a lens out of his spectacles, and was now replacing it from a supply he always carried. What, though, were fractured arms and busted specs to becoming a republic over night?

But eternal vigilance is ever ... and menace was not long in coming.

Three French gunboats, like sluggish water beetles, crossed the bar and steamed up the river.... Promptly the howitzers on the ramparts were trained.... But there was no need ... a white flag ... a naval lieutenant at the fortress gate.... The gunboats had not come to fight.

Bazaine had sent them to carry off the endangered garrison, it being expected that a Liberal army under a General Pavon would shortly besiege the place. The Frenchman was astounded to find that the Liberals, as he imagined the Missourians, had already arrived. Driscoll allowed him to embark the dislodged garrison, as well as the defenders of the other fort, Casa Mata; that is, all except those who might want to change sides. And nearly every Mexican among the Cossacks did change. It was a sign of the panic that had spread throughout the Empire. Driscoll also insisted on the burial of certain guerrilla corpses which Dupin had left hanging to the town's lamp posts. After which the gunboats took themselves out of republican waters.