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.
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.
The two Apaches tied their horses to nearby trees and continued to scan the hills below them. It was Geronimo who spoke.
Far beneath, made small by distance, a line of Mexican soldiers moved slowly but steadily on the cattle's trail. The two Apaches looked at them as one might regard some interesting insects.
Geronimo had never been a chief while Apaches still lived by their ancient customs. But he was one now because he had been chosen by the people who had escaped from San Carlos, to be their leader. Neither he nor Francisco, the warrior, were the least bit excited by the sight of the Mexican soldiers. Their rifles leaned against two trees.
The Sierra Madres, with their low foothills that rose to ten-thousand-foot peaks, were known only to Apaches. Two hundred miles long by a hundred miles wide, the only human dwellings in the entire vast range were wickiups.
It was here that the Apaches held their pony races, played their endless games, and hunted. When they felt in need of amusement or plunder, they left their camps in the Sierra Madres to raid Mexican towns or ranches. Returning to the mountains, they were always safe. No force of _rurales_ had ever penetrated this wild retreat.