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 City and Juarez, and the campaign kept growing more expensive every day.

It took Huerta from July until August to work his slow way from the center of Chihuahua to Ciudad Juarez on the northern frontier.  Before he reached this goal, though, the rebels had split into many smaller detachments, some of which cut his communications in the rear, while others harried his flanks with guerrilla tactics and threatened to carry the “war” into the neighboring State of Sonora.  So far as the trouble and expense to the Federal Government was concerned this guerrilla warfare was far worse than the preceding slow but sure railway campaign.  General Huerta himself, who was threatened with the loss of his eyesight from cataract, gave up trying to pursue the fleeing rebel detachments in person, but kept close to his comfortable headquarters in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City.  This unsatisfactory condition of affairs gave promise of enduring indefinitely, until President Madero in Mexico City, whose Government had to bear the financial brunt of it all, suddenly lost his patience and recalled Huerta to the capital, leaving the command in General Rabago’s hands.