After leaving Guadalupe the trail went south, following closely the stage road from Juarez to Chihuahua. Not long after leaving town we met a courier coming to Guadalupe from Don Ramon Arrandas' ranch, San Marcos de Cantarica, twenty-one miles distant, who informed us that the Apaches had killed a herder on that ranch and had taken four horses and sixteen mules of the stage company. We hurried onward and reached Cantarica at sunset, having traveled seventy-eight miles since 1 a.m. that morning. Both men and horses were rather tired. All was confusion at the ranch. The Mexican herder had been shrouded and laid out with a cross at his head and several little lighted candles near the body. Many women were sitting around the room with black shawls pulled up over their heads. The Apaches, numbering sixteen well armed and well mounted warriors, had slain their victim and captured the stock near the ranch just about noon. Mexican volunteers from Guadalupe and San Ignacio began to ride in until our combined force numbered twenty-five or twenty-six men. Everyone was excited at the thought of a brush with the redskins responsible for the murder. Accompanied by our volunteer allies we left the ranch at daylight next morning and picked up the trail at once. It led off south along the base of the Armagora Mountains or Sierra Bentanos. As the Mexicans were familiar with the country they took the lead and followed the trail rapidly. About 11 o'clock the trailers halted at the mouth of the Canyon del Moranos, an ugly black hole cut in the mountains, looking grim and defiant enough without the aid of Apache warriors. When we had joined the Mexicans--we were traveling some half a mile behind them--Lieutenant Baylor and Captain Garcia held a short conference. The lieutenant turned to me and said that Captain Garcia declared the Indians were in the canyon among the rocks, and ordered me to detail two men to guard our horses while we scaled the mountain on foot and investigated it. I could not bring myself to believe that a band of Indians that had killed a man and driven off all the stage stock the day before had gone only thirty miles and was now lying in wait for us. "You don't know the Apaches," Lieutenant Baylor declared when I voiced my thoughts. "They are very different from the plains Indians, the kind you have been used to following. These Apaches delight to get into the rocks and lay for their enemies." At the conference the Mexicans suggested that Lieutenant Baylor should take nine of his men and ten of their volunteers and follow the trail up the canyon, but the lieutenant declared that this would never do, as the Apaches had no doubt anticipated just such a move and hidden themselves in the cliffs where they could kill their attackers without exposing themselves in the least. He proposed scaling the mountain and following them down on top of the ridge in the Indians' rear. And this was the strategy finally adopted.