The Apaches shot slowly and carefully, for they wanted neither a fierce battle nor close-quarter fighting. Their only purpose was to delay the soldiers until the women and children had had time to reach a place of safety.
Two hours after the soldiers first opened fire, the Apaches began to slip away. Each mounted his own horse, and each took a different path to rejoin the women and children. Finally only Geronimo and a dozen others were left. They fired at the soldiers and drove them to cover in the rocks. Then all the remaining Apaches rose and ran to their horses.
On their next attack, the soldiers took the hilltop. There was not an Apache left to resist them, but there were sixty different trails that led in sixty different directions.
Forty-eight hours after they left San Carlos, the Apaches crossed the Mexican border and were safe in the Sierra Madre Mountains.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Fortress Paradise
Urged by three of Geronimo's warriors, fifty-three cattle climbed laboriously up a slope and shuffled into pine forest. Stolen from a Mexican rancheria, they had been driven most of the night at the fastest pace they could keep up. Now the cattle staggered with weariness. But they would rest soon.
Geronimo and a warrior named Francisco, who had helped steal the cattle, were with the raiding party. Watching only until the cattle had reached the mountain top, they turned to look back down the slope.
Beneath, the Sierra Madres leveled into low foothills. In the distance, the hills seemed to fold into each other, so that instead of many mountains there was just one. Finally the one was lost in a shimmering blue haze.