The sequel will prove that, in choosing their chiefs, the colonists had made no mistake about him.
The Jaguar was just the chief these men required. He was young, handsome, and gifted with that fascination which improvises kingdoms; he spoke little, but each of his words left a reminiscence.
He understood what his comrades expected of him, and had achieved prodigies; for, as ever happens with a man born for great things, who rises proportionately and ever remains on a level with events, his position, by extending, had, as it were, enlarged his intellect; his glance had become infallible, his will of iron; he identified himself so thoroughly with his new position, that he no longer allowed himself to be mastered by any human feeling. His face seemed of marble, both in joy and sorrow. The enthusiasm of his comrades could produce neither flame nor smile on his countenance.
The Jaguar was not an ordinary ambitious man; he was grieved by the disagreement among the insurgents; he most heartily desired a fusion, which had become indispensable, and laboured with all his might to effect it; in a word, the young man had faith; he believed; for, in spite of the innumerable faults committed since the beginning of the insurrection by the Texans, he found such vitality in the work of liberty hitherto so badly managed, that he learned at length that in every human question there is something more powerful than force, than courage, even than genius, and that this something is the idea whose time has come, whose hour has struck by the clock of Deity. Hence he forgot all his annoyances in hoping for a certain future.
In order to neutralize, as far as possible, the isolation in which his band was left, the Jaguar had inaugurated certain tactics which had hitherto proved successful. What he wanted was to gain time, and perpetuate the war, even though waging an unequal contest. For this purpose he was obliged to envelop his weakness in mystery, show himself everywhere, stop nowhere, enclose the foe in a network of invisible adversaries, force him to stand constantly on guard, with his eyes vainly fixed on all points of the horizon, and incessantly harassed, though never really and seriously attacked by respectable forces. Such was the plan the Jaguar inaugurated against the Mexicans, whom he enervated thus by this fever of expectation and the unknown, the most terrible of all maladies for the strong.
Hence the Jaguar and the fifty or sixty horsemen he commanded were more feared by the Mexican government than all the other insurgents put together.
An extraordinary prestige attached to the terrible chief of these unsiegeable men; a superstitious fear preceded them, and their mere approach produced disorder among the troops sent to fight them.
The Jaguar cleverly profited by his advantages to attempt the most hazardous enterprises and the most daring strokes. The one he meditated at this moment was one of the boldest he had hitherto conceived, for it was nothing less than to carry off the conducta de plata and make a prisoner of Captain Melendez, an officer whom he justly considered one of his most dangerous adversaries, and with whom he, for that very reason, longed to measure himself, for he foresaw the light such a victory would shed over the insurrection, and the partisans it would immediately attract to him.
After leaving John Davis behind him, the Jaguar rapidly advanced toward a thick forest, whose dark outline stood out on the horizon, and in which he prepared to bivouac for the night, as he could not reach the Barranca del Gigante till late the following day. Moreover, he wished to remain near the two men he had detached as scouts, in order the sooner to learn the result of their operations.
A little after sunset, the insurgents reached the forest, and instantaneously disappeared under covert.