Of Oliver, the Englishman, and their followers, no intelligence whatever. It is only doing the master of the farm justice, as well as his family, to say that deep distress was added to that they felt in their plight with the fear that their daring friends had all fallen into some trap of the cunning savages now foremost in opposition.
The aurora appeared, and the whole valley was revealed, full of the rebels, amongst whom was added, as well as the sixty marauders who held captain Pedrillo as chief, the full hundred Apaches, whose proud and domineering carriage defined them from the Yaquis born under the yoke which these had never experienced. Besides, before the heat of the day forced both besiegers and besieged to take a siesta, the already enormous concourse was swollen by the last fragments of the dispersed column finding their way thither, burdened with plunder.
All the morning had passed in rash and irregular attacks on the houses, but when they were not repulsed, the few score Indians who clambered over the stockade were cut down by the horsemen inside. Twice the Apaches had charged up to the walls, but, apparently, merely to test the watchfulness of the inmates and the range of their firearms, for they made no assault on the palisades, to pull and hack at which, or even more to alight and clamber over, would have been ignoble in a horse Indian.
Still no sign of the party that had sallied forth.
Successful in that sally of their own, the Mexican gentlemen wished to retaliate on the Apaches in particular for the insult implied in their departing from their war custom of never charging an enclosure or building of any kind. But don Benito reminded them of the ladies who would be undefended if the horsemen were cut off, and pointed to the swarms of carousing Indians blackening the rising ground, where they had mounted to watch the farm with lustful gaze.
Little by little, after Pedrillo and his mongrels had quieted the hatred of the revolted Yaquis for anyone who reminded them of the superior race, he obtained a kind of rule over their leaders, only less potent than that which they had promptly accorded the Apaches. Iron Shirt was an idol. The fact of his having but three days before swept down upon that same stronghold still defying their hosts, and snatched the proprietor's daughter and the cream of the horses merrily away, sufficed to make each of these warriors to be followed by a tag-rag of open-eyed Yaquis wherever they strayed in the wide encampment.
The food and liquor were placed under guard; the drunkards, who were plunged in stupor, were bundled into the hollows out of the way, the horse thieves who had been racing about were pulled off the bare backs, and made to squat down and await orders for their superabundant energy to be more profitably expended. The weapons were served out anew, with some discrimination as to the bearer, so that the strong were no longer puzzled with arms for which light-handed urchins sufficed, and the youths disembarrassed of immense spears like Goliath's, and clubs that the famous giant races of the Hidden Cities could alone have swung.
The women and children, too, were pushed back, and set to cooking and other menial offices, which must have bewildered them as to the advantages of revolution.
Therefore, Oliver and his associates soon beheld the impassible barrier spread out broadly between them, and the surrounded fort became during the day more and more formidable by these evidences of discipline.
Happily their neighbourhood was not suspected. The column defeated on the previous night was composed of ignorant boors, who thought not at all by day to give an intelligible account of the lancers, who, indeed, having charged them from the ambush, were not well examined in the hurry-scurry.