d to be repaired almost rail by rail.

After more than a fortnight's slow progress, General Huerta struck
Orozco's forces at Conejos, in Chihuahua, near the branch line running
out to the American mines at Mapimi. Orozco's forces, finding
themselves heavily outnumbered and overmatched in artillery, hastily
evacuated Conejos, retreating northward up the railway line by means of
some half-dozen railway trains. Several weeks more passed before Huerta
again struck Orozco's forces at Rellano, in Chihuahua, close to the
former battlefield, along the railway, where his predecessor, General
Gonzalez Salas, had come to grief. This was in June.

Huerta, with nearly twice as many men and three times as much
artillery, drove Orozco back along the line of the railway after a two
days' long-range artillery bombardment, against which the rebels were
powerless. This battle, in which the combined losses in dead and
wounded on both sides were less than 200, was described in General
Huerta's official report as "more terrific than any battle that had
been fought in the Western Hemisphere during the last fifty years." In
his last triumphant bulletin from the field, General Huerta telegraphed
to President Madero that his brave men had driven the enemy from the
heights with a final fierce bayonet charge, and that their bugle blasts
of victory could be heard even then on the crest.

Pascual Orozco, on the other hand, reported to the revolutionary Junta
in El Paso that he had ordered his men to retire before the superior
force of the federals, and that they had accomplished this without
disorder by the simple process of boarding their waiting trains and
steaming slowly off to the north, destroying the bridges and culverts
behind him as they went along. One of my fellow war correspondents, who
served on the rebel side during this battle, afterward told me that the
federals, whose bugle calls Huerta heard on the heights, did not get up
to this position until two days after the rebels had abandoned their
trenches along the crest.

The subsequent advance of the federals from Rellano to the town of
Jimenez, Orozco's old headquarters, which had been evacuated by him
without firing a shot, lasted another week.

Here Huerta's army camped for another week. At Jimenez the long-brewing
unpleasantness between Huerta's regular officers and some of Madero's
bandit friends, commanding forces of irregular cavalry, came to a head.
The most noted of these f