ad swelled to 7,500
fighting men, 20 pieces of field artillery, 30 machine guns, and some
7,500 camp-followers and women, making a total of more than 15,000
persons of all sexes and ages, who were being carried along on more
than twenty railroad trains, stretching over a dozen miles of single
track. The column was so long that some of my companions and I, when we
climbed a high hill near the front end of the column at Bachimba, found
it impossible to discern the tail end through our field-glasses. All
the hungry people that were being carried on all those twenty railroad
trains had to be fed, of course, so that none of us were surprised to
read in the Mexican newspapers that the Chihuahua campaign was now
costing Madero's Government nearly 500,000 pesos per day.

The battle at Bachimba must have swelled this budget. During this one
day's fight nearly two million rifle cartridges and more than 10,000
artillery projectiles were fired away by the Federals. Huerta's twenty
pieces of field artillery, neatly posted in a straight line on the open
plain, barely half a mile away from his ammunition railway train, kept
firing at the supposed rebel positions all day long without any
appreciable interruption, and all day long the artillery caissons and
limbers kept trotting to and fro between the batteries and ammunition
cars. Orozco had but 3,000 men with two pieces of so-called artillery,
with gun barrels improvised from railroad axles, so he once more
ordered a general retreat by way of his railroad trains, waiting at a
convenient distance on a bend of the road behind the intervening hills.
As at Rellano, at Conejos, and at other places in the campaign where
the railroad swept in big bends around the hills, no attempt was made
on the Federal side to cut off the rebels' retreat by short-cut
flanking movements of cavalry, of which Huerta had more than he could
conveniently use, or chose to use. The whole ten hours' bombardment and
rifle fire resulted in but fourteen dead rebels; but it won the
campaign for the Government, and earned for Huerta his promotion to
Major-General besides the proud title of "Hero of Bachimba."

President Madero and his anxious Government associates were more than
glad to receive the tidings of this "decisive victory." The only
trouble was that it did not decide anything in particular. Orozco and
his followers, while evacuating the capital of Chihuahua, kept on
wrecking railway property between Chihuahua