They could but admire the sagacity with which the enemy had selected his lair. They must attack through two high-walled gorges where machine-guns waited to mow them down. But the _Americanos_ meant to reach those guns before they were discovered, and after that the impregnable strong-hold would become a trap without exits.
The column had therefore divided, each section taking a guide. The guides, with bayonets at their backs as reminders of their mission, had gone forward and with passwords bespoken the sentries, whose voices had been choked off in the pitchy darkness before they could give outcry.
Then came the mountain yell, but it came only from the narrower gorge, and it was accompanied by musketry which the steep walls echoed and re-echoed. The flood of flight surged into a wave of disorganized rout toward the other opening--where it fell back in broken spray from volley and bayonet. Useless now were the machine-guns; worse than useless the impregnable walls of rock. The insurgent forces, remembering their red iniquities, asked no terms or quarter, but hurled themselves on the bayonets and went down in the close chaos of bolo and clubbed musket. "And luckiest of them that fell, were those of them that died."
It was a little keyhole picture of red and black inferno, while it lasted, but it did not last long.
Yet, of General Rosario and his white prisoners there was no trace. That wily leader had gone on with a small escort before nightfall, and no one was left to tell what direction he had taken.
So it happened that when the two survivors of the ambuscade came tottering into the camp which they had hoped to reach much sooner, they found the main detachment just leaving. Had it not been belated by the delay of the successful expedition into the hills, it would have passed this point twenty-four hours ago, and the half-dead refugees would have been too late.
It had taken Henry Falkins and Newt Spooner two days instead of one to cover that ten miles of _bosque_. They had come staggering, sometimes gibbering, and rarely were both of them sane. Sometimes they raved in duet, but during the first day Newt kicked and pummeled his superior forward as long as he could walk. After that, he carried, dragged and rolled the limp figure, obsessed only by the fixed idea that he had a package to deliver somewhere "over yon." Frequently he forgot that the package was a thing of life. Frequently, too, he madly beat it and swore at it, but always he worked it forward, falling time after time to rise again and stumble ahead. Then Newton Spooner became a thing without consciousness, and a faint spark of realization flickered back into the murk of the major's brain, and laid on his sick soul the same necessity. That day, or part of it, he dragged and carried and kicked. At last, with neither fully conscious, they linked arms about each other's shoulders, gazed at each other with wild, agonized eyes, mumbled at each other with swollen tongues, and shambled, crawled and hitched along together.