Raiders commandeered trains and boarded flat cars and freight cars, perched on the roofs, clung to the ladders, crowding the cowcatcher of the locomotive. Soldados (soldiers) sang their cockroach songs as the train rolled, belts of ammunition across their shoulders and around their waists. [Illustration: Hacienda la Gavia, Estado de Mexico: wood figure, 5 feet tall.] [Illustration: Hacienda de Cocoyoc, Morelos: 16th-century chapel.] [Illustration: Hacienda de Tikuch, Yucatán: rear view, stairway to second floor residential area.] [Illustration: Hacienda de Chinameca, Morelos: residence and chapel. Emiliano Zapata assassinated here, 1919.] Women and children trailed the fighting battalions. Women were determined to prove themselves as resourceful as the men: They were out to avenge years of maltreatment. They robbed stores in towns and sacked hacienda wardrobes. They strutted in Parisian finery, wore silk hosiery, and elegant shawls. Women became terrorists in some regions. Thieves' markets cropped up in León, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Morelia. Women traded silverware for food, a blouse, a shirt, cigarettes. They traded Sevreware for ammunition and shoes for pistols. The women dynamited bank vaults and shared the money--government and counterfeit. They rifled safes and destroyed documents at haciendas--land grants, deeds, notarizations. They roared into a village, waving flimsy flags, encountering dogs barking and howling. They fired their rifles and pistols; they caroused and conscripted fighters. [Illustration: Hacienda de Canutillo, Durango: Pancho Villa buried here July 23, 1923.] [Illustration: Hacienda de la Erre, Guanajuato: 1673. Father Miguel Hidalgo began his march from this church.] The horde fought, retreated, lost, and fought again, seldom aware of a victory. When their dead piled up in cornfields and fields of maguey, too numerous to bury, they left them to be eaten by coyotes, dogs, buzzards. They learned to live as much life as possible between sunup and sundown. They copulated in the fields. They promised one another fidelity, they lost one another, they found someone else. Children, born in the field, were bundled into rebozos and lugged to the next encampment Again and again, they robbed the government troops of ammunition, rifles, revolvers, and machineguns. It was steal or quit fighting. They perpetrated more and more dangerous raids: They spied; they used a hot-air balloon; they filtered through troop concentrations; they passed themselves off as scouts; faithfully, they followed Pancho Villa and his henchmen and they vulturized the dead in the barrancas, on the haciendas, in the towns. Without boots or shoes they continued their barefoot war against the hacendados. Armed with machetes, men stole into enemy encampments and returned with guns. Some of the fighters believed the words of Zapata: "It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."