They Came To Cordura by Glendon Swarthout

fall, then collapsed face downward. The men clustered round him until Thorn backed them away to give him air and with effort turned the great bulk of his body over on its back. His eyelids fluttered, opened, his eyes focused. They were black and the corneas were threaded with red.
    “Whud I do?”
    “You went over like a rookie,” Thorn said with relief. “Lie still a minute.” He found Chawk’s hat and laid it upon the mass of bandage to shade his eyes, removed his own and fanned. The giant did not protest. Stretched out, he appeared the largest man Thorn had ever seen in uniform. For a frame six feet four or five inches long the amount of flesh on him was not proportionate, though there must have been close to two hundred pounds of it. He had huge bony jaws and wrists and hands and feet. The bushy misshapen moustache was black as his eyes; a piece of hard bread protruded from the lower edge; some of the longer hairs splayed down between his lips; a white scar-line ran from his mouth to his chin as though he had been bottle-ripped in a fight and carelessly resewn. The second finger on his left hand was missing above the knuckle. He was thirty-one or -two.
    “How come I did, Major?”
    “The surgeon told me you might have dizzy spells for a day or so. They often accompany a good knock on the head.”
    “Thought somebody throwed a blanket over me,” said the sergeant of D wonderingly. “I don’t get it. I been conked before, with chairs and bottles and suchlike.”
    “Not by a rifle-butt. And I expect the altitude had something to do with it. Do you think you can stand?”
    “Sure.”
    Major Thorn helped him stand, then with an arm about his waist walked him back and forth until his head cleared. Telling Lieutenant Fowler to put Trubee on the point and keep Chawk with him, he mounted up and waited as his detail passed and took position to the rear of the woman.
    The sun was hoisted high as a torch. Leather saddle pommels and anything of metal burned the fingers. The party rode north silently with hat-brims low. For a time Major Thorn kept the head of Chawk, built up with bandage until it resembled the white shell of an egg, as a reference point. He remembered Ben Ticknor’s warning about additional damage to the skull and brain cells beneath. Humpty Dumpty had had a great fall and he had been lucky enough to break it with hands and knees or all Pershing’s soldiers and all Pershing’s men might have been unable to put Humpty Dumpty together again. He did not amuse himself. The oversight of the rations still rankled him, that and leading the detail out before taps was blown. Little things, both of them, but it was handling little things, the ability to master detail, which had made him invaluable as a staff man to half a dozen commanders. He could not recall in all those years making two administrative mistakes in a single day. He had been in every respect a good garrison officer. Perhaps he had begun to unseam. The Geary woman halted and waited. He did not slacken pace and she swung in beside him. Reaching back, from a saddlebag she took a round bundle of corn-shuck cigarettes tied neatly with a shuck string.
    “Will you have a cigarette, Major?”
    “No,” he said, without thanks. “I don’t smoke. Most of the men do. They have not had tobacco for weeks.”
    She ignored the suggestion. “An old woman of my ranch makes them for me. She may be a hundred years old, no one knows, and making cigarettes has been her life work. She picks the shucks with great care and cures them for two years. Her cigarettes are as good as any in Mexico.”
    Thorn allowed himself only a glance. Made of macuche, the native blackleaf tobacco, the cigarettes were perfectly round, the shucks smooth, twisted to a point at one end and doubled inside at the other. He wanted one very much.
    She put them back in the bag. “The old woman is typical of the gente, my people,” she said. “I have families who have lived at Ojos for six