“Two more battles and we shall be warriors,” whispered Shoz-Dijiji.
Far behind the mounted troopers, dogged, determined, trailed the twenty—grim and terrible.
CHAPTER VIII
VACQUEROS AND WARRIORS
DOWN into Sonora the trail of the raiders led them, but the Mexicans, versed in the ways of the Apaches, loitered not upon the trail. Pushing their stolen stock to the utmost of the endurance of man and beast they kept ahead of their pursuers. Yet to accomplish it they were compelled to average from sixty to seventy miles a day through rough mountains and across fiery, dust-choked flats, thirst-tortured, wearied, quirting on their jaded mounts in sullen effort to outdistance the avenging red demons that they never saw, but who experience, torture-won, told them followed relentlessly just below the northern horizon. Brave men, these, whose courage on countless savage, unsung fields deserves a fairer recognition than it has received at the hands of the chroniclers north of the Line.
Exhausted, half-starved, the troopers rode at last into a cattle ranch near Nacozari, where, after turning the stock over to a dozen cowboys, they were asleep almost before they could satisfy the pangs of hunger.
Twenty miles behind them, their deep chests rising and falling unhurriedly, trotted the twenty upon their trail. There were old men among them and youths yet unmatured, but nowhere was there sign of fatigue, though for three days and nights they had hung doggedly to the trail of mounted men, gaining in the last day almost all the distance they had lost while the horses of the Mexicans were fresh.
Just before dark they halted within sight of the ranch and from vantage points of concealment saw their herd grazing under the watchful eyes of the dozen vaqueros. Quenching their thirst in the nauseous, sun-heated contents of their septic water bottles, allaying their hunger with bits of dried meat, tough as leather and stinking to heaven, they waited. They were not resting, they were merely waiting.
Mighty men were these, as nearly immune to fatigue as human flesh may ever be, or ever has been. Some there were among them, however, who, feeling perhaps a hint of rebellion upon the part of overdriven muscles, cut switches from ready mesquite and lashed recalcitrant legs until they bled, scarifying them to renewed life and vitality.
Shoz-Dijiji was not of these. He had not tired. Prone behind a little bush, chewing upon a bit of strength-giving carrion, his sober, unchanging eyes bored through the dusk down to the unsuspecting vaqueros and the herd. They held mostly upon a browsing pinto, Nejeunee, friend, as his name implied, pal, comrade, prized possession of this son of Geronimo. Shoz-Dijiji owned two other ponies. They, too, were there; but they were not to him as was Nejeunee.
The youth chafed to move forward to the battle. He glanced behind him in the direction of Geronimo who would give the signal for advance and attack. He saw that the old chief and the other warriors had removed their shirts and cotton drawers. They were stripped now to moccasins, G-strings, head handkerchiefs, and they were greasing their bodies and painting their faces. Shoz-Dijiji thrilled. The war paint! Ah! how it had always filled his brain with fire and his breast with savage emotions that he could not fathom, that he could only feel as they raised him to an exaltation, to a fanaticism of the spirit such as the old crusaders must have felt as they donned their armor to set their lances against the infidels. Deep within him smouldered the savage fires of his Caledonian ancestry that made him one with the grim crusaders of the past and with the naked descendants of the Athapascans preparing for battle.