Crossers by Philip Caputo

the battle, no, sir. It went on till first light. We held about half the pueblo, and Díaz’s soldiers held the other half, a stalemate kind of. Ben kept yelling to our men to fire at the enemy’s muzzle flashes and then move and fire again. Come dawn, his eyes were like a crazy man’s. We were all like crazy people, and little by little we got the upper hand. The shooting stopped for good, and there was dead men just about everywhere, the barracks walls was all chewed up, and in one place where about ten federals lay in a heap, blood was running down the street like it had rained blood. El Agave’s company had got hit hard—about half of them was dead or wounded. Ynez’s company lost maybe ten. The townsfolk was all hunkered down in their casitas.
The colonel climbed up to the church bell tower to get a better look at things with his field glasses, and called down that some of the federals was getting away, heading north. He come running down and told Ynez that he would hold the town with what was left of the first company and that her company was to pursue the retreating troops and cut ’em down. We hotfooted it back to the horses, mounted up, and started after ’em. By that time they were out of sight. It took us a while to pick up their trail, but once we did, they was easy to follow, on account of most was a-horseback and left a lot of sign. Ben and a few Yaqui scouts done the tracking, and Ben was as good at it as those Indians. The federal troops were making for the border. Some of ’em was already across it, most likely—Santa Cruz was just about an hour’s ride south of it. The way Ynez figured it, they knew the U.S. of A. was backing Díaz and was sending soldiers to the border, so they calculated they’d be safe once they got over the line. She said we’d chase them right into the United States if we had to. And I said, “Whoa! Hold on there! What if the American troops had got there and we run into ’em?” And Ynez said that we’d fight them, too, like a band of tatter-ass Mexican insurrectos taking on the United States Army wasn’t no big deal.
This woman, I thought to myself, is as crazy as a rat trapped in an outhouse, and you know, the crazier she got, the more in love with her I got. But I looked at Ben and said, “We can’t go shooting at American soldiers. If they catch us, they’ll hang us for sure.” Ben said back, “T.J., we have thrown in with these people. They’re our people now.” Ben was like that. He had his own personal code, and he was set to follow it even if it meant getting into a fight with the soldiers of his own country.
We caught up with the federals who were afoot one or two or three at a time. They’d thrown their rifles away, and they’d put their hands up, and the revolucionarios shot them down, no questions asked. Me and Ben took no part in that, but we didn’t do nothing to stop it neither.
We rode on. The border these days isn’t much to look at, and there was even less of it then. Most times a fella couldn’t tell what country he was in, but pretty soon Ben and me knew we were in the U.S. of A. on account of we recognized the lay of the land. We was in the foothills of the Huachuca Mountains and not too far from Fort Huachuca, where there’d been soldiers since in the days of the Apache Wars. Ben told that to Ynez, and I guess she had second thoughts about tangling with the gringo army because she passed the word that if we ran into any more of the retreating federals, there was to be no shooting guns. She told the Yaquis to finish them with their bows and arrows. Which is what they done. We come across a horse been rid to death, and the rider was running half a mile ahead, and the Yaquis made a pincushion out of him. And the next one and the one after that. They were gone to run out of arrows that way, so what they did was to pull them out by the arrowhead if the arrow went straight through, and most of the arrows shot from them long bows did just