Crossers by Philip Caputo

because she wasn’t. I don’t mean she was ugly, just not beautiful, with this dark mestizo skin and a Yaqui’s hawklike nose. The saddest face I’d ever seen, her mouth turned down so you thought she was gone to start crying and this sorrowfulness in her black eyes, but a special kind of sorrowfulness—there was a fire behind it you could see if you looked close, kind of like a candle flame burning behind a window shade. What that face did to you if you were a man was to make you want to touch it real soft like and to be afraid of touching it at the same time, like maybe she’d bite your finger off.
For old T.J. Babcock it was love at first sight.
I will tell you, it is right distracting to find yourself in love with your new commanding officer, but I won’t get into that, at least not for now.
Ynez gave us the once-over and asked if we was surprised that their capitán was a woman, and Ben answered that we were, and she said she could ride, shoot, and fight as good as any man, and Ben said we did not doubt she could, and she said she would not allow no man to be in her outfit who couldn’t ride and shoot as good as her. Francisco, who was standing nearby, vouched that we was muy hombres, and Ynez said she wanted to see for herself and told us to follow her. She went out the courtyard, and watching that gal walk, her shoulders throwed back, her skirt swishing around her boots with their spurs, and her hips swinging under the skirt, I fell deeper in love, and deeper yet after she’d saddled this little bay mare and jumped onto its back like she was spring-loaded.
Ben and me mounted up, and we rode out of the cottonwoods easy like, Ynez with a quirt between her teeth, and when we was out in the open she put quirt and spurs to that mare and took off across the desert fast as a jockey in the stretch. Ben and me had one helluva time keeping up with her. She was making straight for a clump of mesquite, with us galloping alongside her. For a second it looked like she was gone to ride right through them thorny trees, but when she was maybe a yard short, she turned that mare on a dime and spun around them and then ran for another clump a ways away and did the same thing. It was like the barrel races you see in rodeos.
She pulled up and drew her pistol and pointed at a rock on top of a low hill maybe fifty yards off and said, “I want you to hit that rock like this.” She shot, and the dust flew off that rock, which wasn’t no bigger than a basket. It is right hard to hit a target that size from that distance with a pistol when you are standing up, much less from the saddle, like Ynez done. Ben drew the Luger, and I aimed my revolver, and just as we were about to fire, what should come loping up over the hill but a coyote. Ynez yelled, “Shoot him!” I let go and hit a good yard short, and the coyote took off a-running. Ben got off the two rounds left in the Luger, and the coyote tumbled ass over teakettle and laid down dead. Ynez looked at him in this admiring way that made me jealous.
“Bueno,” she said. “Tomorrow night we will find out how well you fight. There is a detachment of Díaz’s soldiers in Santa Cruz. We are going to attack them.”
Ben said he knew Santa Cruz, had been there many times. Ynez asked him how well he knew it, and Ben said he was familiar with every street—it wasn’t much of a town.
“Good,” said Ynez. “You will be at my side and help me direct the company. Our mission will be to seize the plaza.”
I got a little bit more jealous, and as we was riding back to the hacienda, I thought I’d talk to her some, in the way of getting her interested in me. You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but when I was young, I never had no problem acquiring female companionship. I asked her where she’d learned to ride and shoot, and she told me that her husband had taught her. Well, it kind of dampened my hopes to hear that she was married, until she said that her husband was dead, killed a