"Well, that is possible," John replied; "but for all that, I will watch him."
"As you please."
"Well, let us be off."
The American followed his Chief, casting a parting look of suspicion on the old man. The latter did not seem to trouble himself at all about this aside. Apparently indifferent to what went on around him, he waited, quietly leaning on his rifle, till it pleased the Jaguar to give the command for departure. At length, the word "march" ran from rank to rank, and the column started.
These men, the majority of whom were accustomed to long marches in the desert, placed their feet so softly on the ground, that they seemed to glide along like phantoms, so silent was their march. At this moment, as if the sky wished to be on their side, an immense black cloud spread across the heavens and interrupted the moonbeams, substituting, almost without transition, a deep obscurity for the radiance that previously prevailed, and the column disappeared in the gloom. A few paces ahead of the main body, the Jaguar, White Scalper, and John Davis marched side by side.
"Bravo!" the young man muttered; "Everything favours us."
"Let us wait for the end," the American growled, whose suspicions, far from diminishing, on the contrary were augmented from moment to moment.
Instead of leaving the camp on the aide of the hacienda, whose gloomy outline was designed, sinister and menacing, on the top of the hill, the Scalper made the column take a long circuit, which skirted the rear of the camp. The deepest silence prevailed on the plain, the camp and hacienda seemed asleep, not a light gleamed in the darkness, and it might be fancied, on noticing so profound a calm, that the plain was deserted; but this factitious calm held a terrible tempest, ready to burst forth at the first signal.
These men, who walked on tiptoe, sounding the darkness around them, and with their finger placed on the rifle trigger, felt their hearts beat with impatience to come into collision with their enemies. It was a singular coincidence, a strange fatality, which caused the besiegers and besieged to attempt a double surprise at the same hour, almost at the same moment, and send blindly against each other men who on either side advanced with the hope of certain success, and convinced that they were about to surprise asleep the too confident enemy, whom they burned to massacre.
So soon as they had left the camp, the insurgents drew near the river, whose banks, covered with thick bushes and aquatic plants, would have offered them, even in bright day, a certain shelter from the Mexicans. On coming within about half a league of the entrenchments, the column halted; the Scalper advanced alone a few yards, and then rejoined the Jaguar.