Leaving one wagon at the Ochoa ranch and taking three days' rations cooked and more in case of a siege, we went out in the night to avoid Victorio's spies. Don Francisco Escapeda with Lieutenant Baylor were at the head of the column. Sergeant James B. Gillett and eight rangers followed in Indian file, each ranger with a Mexican by his side, showing they looked on us as volunteers in the Mexican service. We rode out along the hard sand road beyond Samalaejuca and sent spies ahead to locate the Apaches if possible. Before we reached the Candelarios we halted behind some mountains to await their report, but they could learn nothing certain. It was a bitterly cold night and a few of us made fires in the deep arroyos. We moved on toward the mountains north of the Candelarios and reached them early next morning to find a large fresh trail about two days old going in the direction of Lake Santa Maria, but, for fear of some stratagem, we divided our men. One party took the crest south of the trail where the massacre took place while the other went to the right. It was soon evident that the entire Apache band had left and that nothing remained for us but the sad duty of collecting the bodies of the dead Mexicans for burial. The second, or rescue party, had found the bodies of their kinsmen killed in the first ambuscade and had collected them and put them in a big crevice in the rocks. When they began to cover the corpses with loose stones the Indians, who had been watching them all the while just as a cat plays with a mouse before killing it, opened fire on the burial party and killed the last one of the unfortunate men. The saddest scene I ever witnessed was that presented as we gathered the bodies of the murdered men. At each fresh discovery of a loved friend, brother or father and the last hope fled that any had escaped, a wail of sorrow went up, and I doubt if there was a dry eye either of Mexican or Texan in the whole command. While the immediate relatives were hunting for those who had scattered in trying to escape, we moved south to the main tank in the Candelarios. The ascent was up a winding path on the steep mountainside to the bench where the tank, one of the largest in the west, was situated. The water coming down from a height, and big boulders falling into the tank, had cut a deep hole in the solid rock in which the water was retained. Although Victorio's band of three hundred animals and two hundred or more Indians and our command had been using the water it could scarcely be missed.