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. On reaching the top of a small hill which commanded the landscape, the Jaguar halted, and ordered his men to dismount and prepare to camp. A bivouac is soon organized in the desert. A sufficient space is cleared with axes, fires are lighted at regular distances to keep off wild beasts; the horses are picketed, and sentries placed to watch over the common safety, and then everybody lies down before the fire, rolls himself in his blanket, and that is all. These rough men, accustomed to brave the fury of the seasons, sleep as profoundly under the canopy of the sky, as the denizens of towns in their sumptuous mansions.