Alternately walking and trotting their mounts, they rode steadily toward
Mexico. That day they stopped only long enough to let the thirsty
Apache horses drink from a water hole. A herd of range horses was
already drinking there, and they took those horses with them when they
went on.
Into the night they traveled, and stopped again for two hours at another
water hole. The horses drank and grazed. Some of the weariest people
slept. Geronimo, who often had been afield a full week with only such
sleep as he could get in the saddle, climbed a hill to look for danger
on the back trail.
The next day, riding as advance scout, Geronimo saw soldiers coming a
moment before they saw him. There were two companies, about sixty men,
of the Fourth Cavalry, and they were directly in the path the Apaches
must follow. Geronimo waved his rifle as a signal that enemies were
sighted, and the warriors whooped to join him.
This was Apache country, a land in which they were familiar with every
rock and crevice, and to the west was a bypass around the soldiers.
Driving the loose horses at full run, the women and children raced
toward that bypass. Yelling, but not shooting, because they had no
bullets to waste, the warriors swooped down on the soldiers. It looked
as though they intended to have a hand-to-hand fight with them.
Again Geronimo could not help admiring American soldiers, who never ran
as Mexicans so often did but always stood their ground. However, the
Apache charge was a trick.
Suddenly the racing Indians swerved east, toward some rocky hills. They
rode up a narrow cleft, the only one around which horses could climb.
The soldiers shot, but the range was so long that they hit no one.
Reaching the summit of the cleft, the Apaches took their horses behind
some rocks where they would be safe from bullets. Then they scrambled
back to take up positions in the rocks themselves.
The soldiers launched a spirited attack, but they could not advance
under the withering fire rained down upon them. They retreated,
re-formed, and attacked again.
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.