The Colonel stood bolt upright, carelessly looking out over the sunny plain. Immediately a roll of shots swept along their front. A bullet chirped overhead. Already the men had gone to work, unordered. Each soldier picked out a smooth place to lie and piled up a little heap of stones in front to shield him. They lay down grunting, loosening their belts and taking off their coats to be perfectly comfortable; then they began slowly and methodically to shoot. "There goes another," announced the Colonel. "Yours, Pedro." "Not Pedro’s at all," interrupted another man fretfully. "I got him." "O the devil you did," snapped Pedro. They quarreled.... The firing from the desert was now pretty general, and we could see the Federals slipping toward us under the protection of every bush and arroyo. Our men fired slowly and carefully, aiming a long time before they pulled the trigger, for the months with scanty ammunition around Torreon had made them economical. But now every hill and bush along our line held a little knot of sharpshooters, and looking back on the wide flats and fields between the hill and the railroad, I saw innumerable single horsemen and squads of them spurring through the brush. In ten minutes we would have five hundred men with us. The rifle fire along the line swelled and deepened until there was a solid mile of it. The Federals had stopped; now the dust-clouds began slowly to move backward in the direction of Lerdo. The fire from the desert slackened. And then, from nowhere, we suddenly saw the broad-winged vultures sailing, serene and motionless, in the blue.... The Colonel, his men and I democratically ate lunch in the shade of the village houses. Our meat was, of course, scorched, so we had to do the best we could with jerked beef and _piñole_, which seems to be cinnamon and bran, ground fine. I never enjoyed a meal so.... And when I left the men made up a double handful of cigarettes as a present. Said the Colonel: "_Amigo_, I am sorry that we had not time for a talk together. There are many things I want to ask you about your country—whether it is true, for example, that in your cities men have entirely lost the use of their legs and don’t ride horseback in the streets, but are borne about in automobiles. I had a brother once who worked on the railroad track near Kansas City, and he told me wonderful things. But a man called him ’greaser’ one day and shot him without that my brother did anything to him. Why is it your people don’t like Mexicans? I like many Americans. I like you. Here is a gift for you." He unbuckled one of his huge iron spurs, inlaid with silver, and gave it to me. "But we never had any time here for talk. These —— always annoy us, and then we have to get up and kill a few of them before we can have a moment’s peace...."