Half an hour later we crept through the brush a quarter of a mile from the outskirts of Gomez and came upon a tiny ranch of six or eight adobe huts, with a street running between. In the lee of one of the houses lounged and sprawled about sixty of Contreras’ ragged fighters. They were playing cards and talking lazily. Down the street, just around the corner, which pointed straight as a die toward the Federal positions, a storm of bullets swept continually, whipping up the dust. These men had been on duty at the front all night. The countersign had been "no hats," and they were bare-headed in the broiling sun. They had had no sleep and no food, and there wasn’t any water for half a mile. "There is a Federal cuartel up ahead there that is firing," explained a boy about twelve years old. "We’ve got orders to attack when the artillery comes." An old man squatting against the wall asked me where I came from. I said New York. "Well," he said, "I don’t know anything about New York, but I’ll bet you don’t see such fine cattle going through the streets as you see in the streets of Jiminez." "You don’t see any cattle in the streets of New York," I said. He looked at me incredulously. "What, no cattle? You mean to tell me that they don’t drive cattle through the streets up there? Or sheep?" I said they didn’t. He looked at me as if he thought I was a great liar; then he cast his eyes on the ground and thought deeply. "Well," he pronounced finally, "then I don’t want to go there!..." Two skylarking boys started a game of tag; in a minute twenty full-grown men were chasing each other around in great glee. The card players had one short deck of torn cards, and at least eight people were trying to play some game and arguing about the rules at the top of their voices, or perhaps there weren’t enough cards to go around. Four or five had crawled into the shade of the house, singing satirical love songs. All this time the steady infernal din up ahead never relented, and the bullets spattered in the dust like rain drops. Occasionally one of the men would slouch over, poke his rifle around the corner and fire.... We stayed there about half an hour. Then two gray cannons came rocketing out of the brush behind and wheeled into position in a dry ditch seventy-five yards away on the left. "I guess we’re going in a minute," said the boy. At that moment three men galloped up from the rear, evidently officers. They were entirely exposed to rifle fire over the roofs of the huts, but jerked up their horses with the shots yelling all around, contemptuous of them. The first to speak was Fierro, the superb great animal of a man who had murdered Benton.