Oroville Union High School - Nugget Yearbook (Oroville, CA)

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happen but that Villa greaser started up our way. The news drifted into the camp one afternoon that he and a gang of marauders were thirty miles south of us. “Now we were up in the hills and. to get out. we had to go south down to the plains and then circle back around the hills to get to the states. The night wf got this news Dawson came to me, and he sure did look sickly, and he says, ‘Dick, we’ll have to get out of here tonight. That Villa is too----------close for com- fort, and if we don’t get by him before dawn, we won’t be able to save any of our stuff.’ (He meant the truck and some valuable testing apparatus). You see, he wanted to save some of his layout and since I wasn’t the kind to choose the safe way of backing away from Villa on horseback If I could save some money for Charley by braving a little danger. I agreed with him. “We waited till about eleven that night and then jumped into the machine and started down the canyon. Just as we were going Charley laid a big steel plate from the mill, together with a bunch of rope, in the back. I didn't quite see what he wanted that for, but I knew that it was for some purpose, so I didn't have anything to say. “It’s about twenty miles down the canyon to the plains from Arroyo la Cruz, and we passed out of it about 2 a. m. Well, we could see Villa's camp fires a few miles ahead and when we turned and started away from him we felt more comfortable. 18 But everything didn’t go smooth—Villa had more than likely heard of Dawson’s truck, so about half an hour after we got out of the hills we heard some popping behind us. We had been running with dimmed lights and pretty slow over those roads, but when we heard that firing we started to speed up. The truck bounced all over the road at twenty-five miles an hour, but we couldn’t afford to go any slower. Pretty soon the popping stopped and we thought we were out of danger. Mile after mile we went on through the night. A little while after dawn a sound like a whole battle turned loose behind us and Charley looked around. You should have seen his face pale. That man looked like a ghost. About two miles behind us was an automobile coming like hell and on it was one of those machine guns making a noise like a riveting machine. A little ways farther on we stopped behind some mes-quite brush and roped that steel plate in back of the seat. Of course the popping ceased when we were hidden from the greasers’ view and perhaps they were kind of wonderin’ what kind of a dodge we would pull anyhow. But they kept coming Just the same and I should Judge that when we started off they weren’t much more’n three-quarters of a mile away. When we hit the trail again one of those Mexicanos took a squint at us through his glasses and then he waved

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I V I A THREE CORPSES It was in the back room of a saloon in the American town of Piedras Blancas, six miles back from the Mexican border in the sage brush of New Mexico, that the following scene was enacted a scarce three months ago. Picture in the foreground several chairs with raw-hide bottoms pushed back from a rough table; in the left hand far corner a tall upright stove: on the rough board floor around the latter, innumerable cigarette stubs; and hung on the right wall a large calendar from an El Paso brewery, and the setting is complete. Seated on the opposite side of the table was a large, swarthy man with black hair and a slightly grayish moustache with a fierce downward curve, a bandana around his neck, and his lower extremities clothed in leather chaps. Plainly his attire bespoke him a vacquero. or as his kind is better known, a cowboy. On his either hand sat iwo similarly attired. Before them each sat a small glass whim but a moment before had contained some of America's national drink. “Well. Dick, said the man on the right of the first de-scribed, what's been happening to you these five months, that you’ve been below the line?” Why, I was down at Arroyo la Cruz in Dawsons silver mine. You know his men there, all Mexicans, were most of them shot by Villa when Dawson abandoned his properties two years ago. But you all know Dawson—he isn’t afraid of a whole corral-full of Villas, so when things commenced to look brighter about half a year back he bought a light auto truck and he went into there again, equipped to open things up and, as a valuable part of his equipment, he took me with him. “We made the one hundred and three miles from El Paso down in great shape, but you should have seen the shape we found things in at the camp. Those --------- Villis- tas had torn the whole thing upside-down. They blew the mill up, dynamited a lot of timbering In the tunnel and stole the copper amalgam plates. But that was all in the run of things—Charley Dawson wasn’t the sort to quit. What he did was to hire a big greaser that was still there and he set him and me to excavating and retimbering the tunnel and then he hiked off to the railroad at Ysleta and ordered some new machinery. Well, we three worked away at that tunnel and got the whole thing cleared up in good shape, not mentioning the new apparatus we installed, and Charley was about ready to get a gang of men to start the thing off. when what should 17

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his sombrero in the air defiant-like and although I couldn’t hear him, he seemed to be doin’ some powerful yelling. I guess he would have been more quiet and thoughtful if he’d have known his immediate future, and when I look back on that scene with my mind work.n' a bit slower, I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor deluded devil. And every minute they were gettin’ closer. “We rattled along like this for what seemed a long time, and on account of the rough road neither the Mexicans nor I did any shooting. Charley and I didn’t say a word but I found out later from him that he was figurin’ the same thing that I w’as, that was. to reach a cactus-covered rock about an eighth of a mile ahead right by the side of the road. “If we could only get there we figured we had a slim, a mighty slim chance. “Well, those Mexicans weren’t so sleepy that they didn’t see our scheme and they commenced to kick up dust on either side of us. with, of course, an occasional bullet hitting the truck. I’ll tell you it felt mighty comfortable to hear those pills hit the plate and bounce ofT harmlessly. About this time I looked down beneath my feet and an idea, possibly the thing that saved our lives, came to me I reached down and grabbed up a sack of provisions and then buttoned my long coat around it and stuck my hat cnto the top of it. After a particularly heavy lot of firing from that machine gun. I toppled the dummy orf the seat Into some cactus. You should have seen me fool ’em! We could hear 'em hollering behind us even above the noise we were making. I ▼ I A Right after that—we were pretty near that rock by now —Dawson reached down for his rifle and then handed it to me. Then he shouted in my ear. ‘When I get around that bush ahead I’ll play dead and run the truck into that rock pile, jump clear and make for that boulder—-Don't let 'em see you!’ A second later he slowed up. zig-zagged the machine all oyer the road and then made for that pile of rocks. Just before she hit. I jumped clear and under cover of the mes-quite, made my way to the rock. Luckily those Mexicans didn't suspect a thing. As I lay on my stomach on top of that rock peering at them through a small cactus. I saw 'em jabbering away to one another and pointing to our motor vehicle. I glanced down and saw what the trouble was. Poor Charley had failed to reckon right and his faking had come to too real an end. There he lay on the other side of the machine, still as a corpse. After the sickness from that sight wore off I was nerved more'n ever and I held that gun on the driver of .he greaser's machine as steady as if it had been in a vice. 4 Then I pulled away and he keeled over—a good Mexican. The next time I sniped the operator of the machine filu. The third and last man, the one who grabbed the wheel. I Just wounded. Bui he 5iad enough—he stopped be-