“Let’s not get caught. Let’s keep going.”
In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which is a fiction novel but also a semi-true historical story, John Joel Glanton and his gang of outlaws ride out from the Sonoran desert into Arizona where they encounter, outside the fortified walls of Tucson, a few dozen Chiricahua Apaches. It’s December of 1849 and Glanton and his mercenaries have for 200 pages been marauding all over the Mexican countryside, alternately hunting or being hunted by Apache warriors, but mainly murdering peaceful native communities and innocent Mexicans by the hundreds in order to gather whatever dark-haired scalps they can collect to defraud the capitals of various Mexican states that had contracted them to exterminate Apaches.