The Jaguar gave a parting nod to his friend or accomplice, whichever the reader pleases to call him, placed himself at the head of the band, and started at a gallop.
This John was no other than John Davis, the slave-dealer, whom the reader probably remembers to have come across in the earlier chapters of this story. How it is we find him again in Texas, forming part of a band of outlaws, and become the pursued instead of the pursuer, would be too long to explain at this moment. Let us purpose eventually to give the reader full satisfaction on the point.
John and his comrades let themselves be apprehended by Captain Melendez's scouts, without offering the slightest opposition. We have already described how they behaved in the Mexican camp; so we will follow the Jaguar at present.
The young man seemed to be, and really was, the chief of the horsemen at whose head he rode.
These individuals all belonged to the Anglo-Saxon race, and to a man were North Americans.
What trade were they carrying on? Surely a very simple one.
For the moment they were insurgents; most of them came to Texas at the period when the Mexican government authorized American immigration. They had settled in the country, colonized it, and cleared it; in a word, they ended by regarding it as a new country.
When the Mexican government inaugurated that system of vexations, which it never gave up again, these worthy fellows laid down the pick and the spade to take up the Kentucky rifle, mounted their horses, and broke out in overt insurrection against an oppressor who wished to ruin and dispossess them.
Several bands of insurgents were thus hastily formed on various points of the Texan territory, fighting bravely against the Mexicans wherever they met with them. Unfortunately for them, however, these bands were isolated; no tie existed among them to form a compact and dangerous whole; they obeyed chiefs, independent one of the other, who all wished to command, without bowing their own will to a supreme and single will, which would have been the only way of obtaining tangible results, and conquering that independence, which, owing to this hapless dissension, was still regarded as a Utopia by the most enlightened men in the country.
The horsemen we have brought on the stage were placed under the orders of the Jaguar, whose reputation for courage, skill, and prudence was too firmly established in the country for his name not to inspire terror in the enemies whom chance might bring him across.