While he was waiting and getting ready, the situation changed. Two companies of soldiers who wore yellowish khaki uniforms and helmets of unfamiliar shape came into the area. “Mexicans!” Nick Cantarella said in disgust. “Goddamn bean-eating greasers! Wonder how the hell Featherston pried ’em outa Francisco Jose.”

“Screw that.” Spartacus didn’t let the Mexican soldiers faze him. “What I wonder is, can them fuckers fight?”

“When the U.S. Army broke through in Pennsylvania last fall, it broke through against the Mexicans,” Cantarella said.

“Uh-huh, but y’all got barrels an’ airplanes an’ all that good shit.” Spartacus was nobody’s fool. “All we got is us, an’ we ain’t got so many of us.” He frowned in concentration. “Make them come at us, mebbe, an’ see how good they is.”

“Always better to meet them where you want to, not where they want to,” Moss said.

“Make sense,” Spartacus agreed. “Now we got to cipher out how them greasers can reckon they is doin’ what they wants when they is really doin’ jus’ what we aims to have ’em do.”

Arranging to have a letter intercepted in Plains turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. Moss’ only worry was that the Mexicans would decide it was too obviously a fraud. It told a fictitious comrade in the town where Spartacus’ band would be and what they planned to do for the next four days. One of the blacks sneaked into Plains at night and dropped the envelope that held the letter not far from the little hotel where Francisco Jose’s soldiers were garrisoned. Another black, one who lived in town, brought word the envelope had been found.

As Spartacus hoped, the Mexicans moved down the road from Plains toward Preston, the next town farther west. They marched in good order, with scouts well forward and with men out to either side to make sure they didn’t get hit from the flank. But the scouts saw nothing the guerrillas didn’t want them to, and the flank guards weren’t out far enough.