"_Corrai!_" said one guard. "There was a shot for the dirty goat! Right through the head!"
The others laughed. "Why, you don’t think they shot him there in the fight, do you, _pendeco_?" cried his companion. "No, they _always_ go around and make sure afterward——"
"Hurry up! I’ve found the other," shouted a voice off in the darkness.
We could reconstruct this man’s last struggle. He had dropped off his horse, wounded—for there was blood on the ground—into a little dry arroyo. We could even see where his horse had stood while he pumped shells into his Mauser with feverish hands, and blazed away, first to the rear, where the pursuers came running with Indian yells, and then at the hundreds and hundreds of bloodthirsty horsemen pouring down from the north, with the Demon Pancho Villa at their head. He must have fought a long time, perhaps until they ringed him round with living flame—for we found hundreds of empty cartridges. And then, when the last shot was spent, he made a dash eastward, hit at every step; hid for a moment under the little railroad bridge, and ran out upon the open desert, where he fell. There were twenty bullet holes in him. They had stripped him of all save his underclothes. He lay sprawled in an attitude of desperate action, muscles tense, one fist clenched and spread across the dust as if he were dealing a blow; the fiercest exultant grin on his face. Strong, savage, until one looked closer and saw the subtle touch of weakness that death stamps on life—the delicate expression of idiocy over it all. They had shot him through the head three times—how exasperated they must have been!
Crawling south through the cold night once more.... A few miles and then a bridge dynamited, or a strip of track wrecked. The stop, the dancing torches, the great bonfires leaping up from the desert, and the four hundred wild men pouring furiously out and falling upon their work.... Villa had given orders to hurry....
About two o’clock in the morning I came upon two _soldaderas_ squatting around a fire, and asked them if they could give me _tortillas_ and coffee. One was an old, gray-haired Indian woman with a perpetual grin, the other a slight girl not more than twenty years old, who was nursing a four-months baby at her breast. They were perched at the extreme tip of a flat-car, their fire built upon a pile of sand, as the train jolted and swayed along. Around them, backed against them, feet sticking out between them, was a great, inconglomerate mass of sleeping, snoring humans. The rest of the train was by this time dark; this was the only patch of light and warmth in the night. As I munched my _tortilla_ and the old woman lifted a burning coal in her fingers to light her corn-husk cigarette, wondering where her Pablo’s brigade was this night; and the girl nursed her child, crooning to it, her blue-enameled ear-rings twinkling,—we talked.