DOWN into Sonora the trail of the raiders led them, but the Mexicans, versed in the ways of the Apaches, loitered not upon the trail. Pushing their stolen stock to the utmost of the endurance of man and beast they kept ahead of their pursuers. Yet to accomplish it they were compelled to average from sixty to seventy miles a day through rough mountains and across fiery, dust-choked flats, thirst-tortured, wearied, quirting on their jaded mounts in sullen effort to outdistance the avenging red demons that they never saw, but who experience, torture-won, told them followed relentlessly just below the northern horizon. Brave men, these, whose courage on countless savage, unsung fields deserves a fairer recognition than it has received at the hands of the chroniclers north of the Line. Exhausted, half-starved, the troopers rode at last into a cattle ranch near Nacozari, where, after turning the stock over to a dozen cowboys, they were asleep almost before they could satisfy the pangs of hunger. Twenty miles behind them, their deep chests rising and falling unhurriedly, trotted the twenty upon their trail. There were old men among them and youths yet unmatured, but nowhere was there sign of fatigue, though for three days and nights they had hung doggedly to the trail of mounted men, gaining in the last day almost all the distance they had lost while the horses of the Mexicans were fresh. Just before dark they halted within sight of the ranch and from vantage points of concealment saw their herd grazing under the watchful eyes of the dozen vaqueros. Quenching their thirst in the nauseous, sun-heated contents of their septic water bottles, allaying their hunger with bits of dried meat, tough as leather and stinking to heaven, they waited. They were not resting, they were merely waiting. Mighty men were these, as nearly immune to fatigue as human flesh may ever be, or ever has been. Some there were among them, however, who, feeling perhaps a hint of rebellion upon the part of overdriven muscles, cut switches from ready mesquite and lashed recalcitrant legs until they bled, scarifying them to renewed life and vitality. Shoz-Dijiji was not of these. He had not tired. Prone behind a little bush, chewing upon a bit of strength-giving carrion, his sober, unchanging eyes bored through the dusk down to the unsuspecting vaqueros and the herd. They held mostly upon a browsing pinto, Nejeunee, friend, as his name implied, pal, comrade, prized possession of this son of Geronimo. Shoz-Dijiji owned two other ponies. They, too, were there; but they were not to him as was Nejeunee.