The White Mountains succeeded in killing one raider, during the fight. He was Hal-zay, Nah-che’s half-brother. They cut off his head, for a trophy. But the ten others completed their bold circuit, and in spite of soldiers, settlers, telegraph, heliostat and railroad escaped back into Mexico.
“I never would have believed it!” declared Chief Packer Tom Moore, to Jimmie at Bowie. “It beats the Dutch! The general’s got every waterhole covered, and every pass watched. Anyhow, now there’s a fresh trail, for back-tracking on, where they came up by the shortest way. Crawford and Cap’n Davis are going right down after the bacon, to stay till they get Geronimo or his scalp. I’ve picked you for assistant chief packer with one of ’em. Which do you say? Chances are even. You’re the boss.”
“Guess I’ll throw in with Crawford, Tom, if you put it up to me,” promptly said Jimmie. Assistant chief packer! Wow!
Captain Crawford and Captain Wirt Davis were both good men, but as Tom Horn, acting chief of scouts, had remarked: “Crawford’s my style of fighter: the go-get-’em kind with a wolf jaw!”
“You’d better be makin’ up your best trains, then,” counseled Tom, to Jimmie. “Three, I reckon. Crawford won’t wait on sore backs or sore feet; and he’d rather bust every man and every mule and go on by himself, than let Davis outdo him.”
When Captain Crawford arrived with his column at Bowie, from Fort Apache, on November 15, Jimmie the assistant chief packer was ready for him. The Captain Wirt Davis column was to be composed of cavalry and scouts both; but Captain Crawford was taking only scouts.
These were one hundred Chiricahuas, White Mountains and Warm Springs, from the Fort Apache reservation; but mainly Chiricahuas, with Chato as their chief, and Ka-e-ten-na the traveler included. Micky Free was going with the San Carlos scouts and Captain Davis. Captain Crawford had selected so many Chiricahuas because his goal was the Sierra Madre Range again, and the Chiricahuas knew all that country well.
The scouts formed two companies, under command of First Lieutenant Marion P. Maus, of the First Infantry, and a gallant young “shave tail,” Second Lieutenant William Ewen Shipp, of the Tenth Cavalry, only two years out of West Point.
Another “shave tail,” Second Lieutenant Sam Faison, of the First Infantry, who had graduated in the same class with Lieutenant Shipp, was the adjutant, quarter-master and commissary, all three. Dr. T. B. Davis was the surgeon, Concepcion was the interpreter. Al Sieber, the old war-horse, was retained to look after the reservations, but Tom Horn was to be chief of scouts and had proved first-class.