PANCHO'S TRAIN
                   by Eugene Hutchinson Mallory 2



     We were driving across the desert in Mexico. We were on our
way from Mazatlan to the city of Durango. I don't know just when
perhaps 1970. We were driving the Dodge four wheel drive and
Dorothy was with me so it was at least that long ago.

     We had never been there before, but it was strangely
familiar. Many western movies were made there in those days and
we had seen that barren land on the screen. It was not so
barren, but and there were cattle there. It was more like the
old West than anything we had seen in the United States.

     It was a surprise when we came to a railway stretching
north and south across the highway. That had not been in movies,
but I knew what it was. Pancho Villas' railroad. He had gathered
the army and the people of the North and led them down these
rails on a primitive broken down train to tip the scale of
battle for the Mexican revolution.

     We were weary. Dorothy was nodding weakened by the endless
struggle with the relentless disease that was killing her.

     I pulled up. It was time to stop at this place in a great
empty land. A place where history had passed a lifetime ago.

     The sun was bright and clear and the great dome of sky was
filled with the magnificent light that had brought the
moviemakers here from distant Hollywood. Yet this bright air was
filled with the ghosts of those who had passed this place on
their way to death and glory.

     I never stop by a railroad that I don't hope for a train
preferably a steam powered one. Judging from the looks of the
track there might not have been a train here for years, but what
a train had been here carrying all the chaos and squalor of the
Mexican revolution as well as the raw power and the infinite
endurance of that nation.

     I thought I heard a whistle, not the blast of a diesel
horn, but the cry of steam. I looked out at the far horizon and
there was a little smudge of black. It came up surprisingly fast
although nothing could make speed on that desert track.

     It was a steamer all right. Two poles stuck up at the front
of the boiler. The two flags they carried had been colored once,
but now they were so tattered and blackened I could not make
them out.

     When I could get a side view of the engine, it was old,
incredibly old. It was leaking steam and water at many places.
Where did they get the water in this arid land? The exhaust in
the rusty stack was mechanized asthma.

     The first car was a stock car loaded, but I could not
identify the stock.

     The next car was an open top gondola and that gave it away.
It was loaded with people standing back to chest as close as
they could pack themselves. These seemed to be mostly boys.

     But there were men too. Men who matched the cartoon figures
of Mexican bandidos. Huge sombreros, malevolent mustaches, and
cartridge belts crossed on brawny chests, they were somehow
figures of fantasy already out of their time. The boys barely
into their teens were real enough and so were their rifles.

     They wore them slung across their narrow backs, products of
hungry childhoods. There were plenty of skinny shoulder blades
sticking out of the remnants of uniforms they wore.

     All the cars were old wooden ones sagging in the middle in
spite of the truss rods. The rods the hobos rode. These rods had
been covered with boards and rags and mostly women rode them.
There were women everywhere all it seemed with children.
Children on their backs, at their breasts, at their knees, and
in their bellies waiting to be born into hardship. A life so
hard that not half of them would live to throw a stone much less
fire a rifle.

     These children were the women's greatest future weapon, but
there were women armed for the trip also. There were revolvers
and vicious looking knives strapped to ample hips. I was sure
there were many more knives hidden in the rags they wore. Knives
that could let the blood out of a pig or man with equal ease.

     The next cars were flats with something lashed to the deck.
What I could not tell at first. People swarmed over everything
like bees, but I caught on. The cars were loaded with French
75's like the ones the R.O.T.C boys drilled with at Iowa State.
No army with these deadly little cannon is to be taken lightly.
Ask the Kaiser's ghost.

     The last two cars were boxcars with windows and doors cut
into them, command cars I supposed. There were people on the
roof as on the other cars, but only one stood tall and proud. He
had long shiny boots the only shoes I saw upon that train. He
also had a trumpet of burnished brass at his lips. He was
blasting out La Cuca Racha and once in a while the engineer
would try to get in a note with his whistle. I don't know how he
dared to waste the steam, but the apparition moved steadily
along.

     I had had goose pimples from the first sight of the smoke,
but now something hit me in the gut. How could I be such a fool.
This train was not moving south on the Pancho Villa's track, it
was moving north, toward we pampered folk across the line. It
was not the past I saw, but the future.

     Something I had heard among all the shouts and cheers from
the barefoot riders on the train became clear to me.

     "The red soil of the North is red with Mexican blood, but
it will be ours again."

     I had heard this before in the streets of the barrios of
Los Angeles. To many of these people northern Mexico should
include everything south of San Francisco.

     What had I seen? Was the third world coming? Could we
pampered ones deal with them?

     Without waking Dorothy I started the Dodge and drove
quietly away from that railway where strange things traveled the
rusty rails.

     In the years since I saw this vision of vengeance led by an
illiterate bandit, I have thought of them often. I have not
changed my mind. I do not think of these deprived and despised
people as noble romantic fighters for social justice and human
rights, to me they are just as corrupt and ignorant, just as
savage and cruel as I always thought they were, but how else
could I expect them to be.

     As a matter of history Pancho did invade the United States
although not by train. General Pershing the hero to be of World
War 1 followed Pancho into Mexico with the U.S. Calvary and
never came close.

     I say it is wise to watch out for those who would take the
wily and enduring cockroach for their mascot.