Then he reached back with his right hand, pulled out the horn hanging across his back, brought it to his thick lips, and blew into it three times, his cheeks filling out with air as he did so. Beyond the bordering crest three whistles responded to his signal.

In the distance, from among a conical heaping of reeds and rotten hay, many men came forth, one after the other. They were dark and polished like old bronze statues, their chests and legs bare.

Quickly they came to meet Demetrio.

“They burned my house!” he said in response to their inquisitive looks.

There were curses, threats, insults.

Demetrio let them vent. Then he brought a bottle out from his shirt, took a drink, wiped it with the back of his hand, and passed it to the man next to him. The bottle went around from mouth to mouth and was quickly emptied. The men licked their lips.

“God willin’,” Demetrio said, “tomorrow, or perhaps even tonight, we will get another close-up of the Federales. What do you say, muchachos? Ready to show ’em ’round these paths and trails?”

The half-naked men jumped up and down, howling with joy. Then they repeated the insults, the curses, and the threats.

“We don’t know how many of ’em there’s gonna be,” Demetrio stated, scrutinizing the faces around him. “But back in Hostotipaquillo,3Julián Medina4challenged all the pigs and Federales in town with just half a dozen scraggly men armed with knives sharpened on a metate,5and he crushed ’em all.”

“And what do Medina’s men have that we don’t have?” said a massive, robust, bearded man with very dark, thick eyebrows and sweet eyes. “All I know,” he added, “is that if tomorrow I don’t have me a Mauser rifle, a good cartridge belt, pants, and shoes, then my name’s not Anastasio Montañés. Seriously! Look here, Quail,6don’t tell me you don’t believe me? I’ve been pumped fulla lead half a dozen times already. Ask my compadre Demetrio here if you don’t believe me. You know, I’m no more afraid of a little ball of candy than I am of bullets. Don’t tell me that ya don’t believe me?”

“Long live Anastasio Montañés!” Lard7yelled.

“No,” Anastasio replied. “Long live our leader Demetrio Macías. And long live God in heaven and long live the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

“Long live Demetrio Macías!” they all yelled.

They lit a fire using straw and dry wood, and placed strips of fresh meat on the live coals. Gathered around the fire, sitting back on their haunches, they hungrily smelled the meat as it sizzled and crackled on the embers.

Near them, piled up on the blood-soaked ground, lay the golden hide of a calf, while the rest of the meat hung between two huisache trees,8suspended with twine, set to cure in the sun and the air.

“Okay, then,” Demetrio said. “As you see, other than my thirty-thirty9here, we don’t have more than twenty rifles. If there’s only a few of ’em, we hit ’em until there’s none of ’em left. And if there’s a lot of ’em, well then, then we give ’em a good run till they’re at least good ’n scared.”

He loosened the belt from around his waist, untied one of its knots, and offered its contents to his comrades.

“Salt!” they exclaimed with joy, each taking a pinch with the tips of his fingers.

They ate avidly. When they had had enough, they lay back with their stomachs up to the sun and sang sad, monotonous songs, screeching shrill screams into the sky after each verse.

III

Demetrio Macías’s twenty-five men slept amid the weeds of the Sierra until the sound of the horn woke them up. Pancracio was blowing it from one of the mountaintops.

“It’s time, muchachos. Look alive!” Anastasio Montañés said, inspecting the springs of his rifle.

But an hour went by without the sound of anything other than the singing of the cicadas in the grassland and the croaking of the frogs in the hollows.

The first silhouette of a soldier was finally seen along the tallest ridge of the trail just as the last beams of moonlight were fading in the slightly pinkish girdle of dawn. After him others appeared, followed by another ten, and then by another hundred. But all of them quickly vanished in the shadows. And then, as the splendid sun rose and shone brightly, the side of the cliff was covered with people: tiny men on tiny horses.

“Look at ’em, how purty they look!” Pancracio exclaimed. “Come on, muchachos, let’s go have us some fun!”

Those small moving pieces alternated between blending into the thickness of the chaparral and blackening farther below against the ocher of the crag.

The voices of the leaders and the soldiers could be heard distinctly below them.

Demetrio gave a signal, and the springs of all the rifles stretched and cocked.

“Fire!” he ordered in a hushed voice.

Twenty-one men fired at once, and as many Federales fell from their horses. The others, surprised, remained stationary, like bas-reliefs against the side of the cliff.

A new discharge, and another twenty-one men rolled from rock to rock, their skulls cracked.

“Show yourselves, bandits! Come out, dirty dogs!”

“Death to the corn-grinding thieves!”

“Death to the cattle rustlers!”

The Federales yelled at the enemy, but Macías and his men remained hidden, stationary, and quiet, happy simply to continue practicing a marksmanship that was already their pride and fame.

“Look, Pancracio,” said the Indian,1a man dark everywhere except for his teeth and the whites of his eyes. “This bullet’s for the one tha’s tryin’ to run behind that pitahaya cactus over there! Son of a ... ! Take that! Didya see that, right in ’is head? Now for the one ridin’ on that gray horse .