Almost immediately a change seemed to come in the sound of the rifle fire, as if half of it had been suddenly cut off. At the same time twenty bugles shrilled. Rising, I noticed a line of running horsemen fleeing up the track, shouting something. More followed, galloping, at the place where the railroad passed beyond the trees on its way into town. The cavalry had been repulsed. All at once the whole plain squirmed with men, mounted and on foot, all running rearward. One man threw away his blanket, another his rifle. They thickened over the hot desert, stamping up the dust, until the flat was crowded with them. Right in front of me a horseman burst out of the brush, shouting, "The Federals are coming! To the trains! They are right behind!" The entire Constitutionalist army was routed! I caught up my blanket and took to my heels. A little way farther on I came upon a cannon abandoned in the desert, traces cut, mules gone. Underfoot were guns, cartridge-belts and dozens of serapes. It was a rout. Coming to an open space, I saw ahead a large crowd of fleeing soldiers, without rifles. Suddenly three men on horseback swept across in front of them, waving their arms and yelling. "Go back!" they cried. "They aren’t coming out! Go back for the love of God!" Two I didn’t recognize. The other was Villa. *CHAPTER X* *BETWEEN ATTACKS* About a mile back the flight was stopped. I met the soldiers coming back, with the relieved expression of men who have feared an unknown danger and been suddenly set free from it. That was always Villa’s power—he could explain things to the great mass of ordinary people in a way that they immediately understood. The Federals, as usual, had failed to take advantage of their opportunity to inflict a lasting defeat upon the Constitutionalists. Perhaps they feared an ambush like the one Villa had arranged at Mapula, when the victorious Federals sallied out to pursue Villa’s fleeing army after the first attack on Chihuahua, and were repulsed with heavy slaughter. Anyway, they did not come out. The men came straggling back, hunting in the mesquite for their guns and blankets, and for other people’s guns and blankets. You could hear them shouting and joking all over the plain. "_Oija_! Where are you going with that rifle? That’s my water-bag! I dropped my serape right here by this bush, and now it’s gone!" "O Juan," cried one man to another, "I always told you I could beat you running!" "But you didn’t, _compadre_. I was a hundred meters ahead, flying through the air like a cannon ball!..."