end to weaken the hold of the Priest Captain upon those who remained
faithful to him; and, being shut up with his whole army and a multitude
of non-combatants within those great stone walls, a very terrible foe,
against which stone walls are no defence, presently would attack him in
the shape of hunger. Therefore we had only to wait--maintaining the
while a vigilant patrol of guard-boats on the lake, so that no fresh
supplies might reach the garrison in the city--in the sure conviction
that our foe would of his own accord come forth to give us battle, and
that we then would have the advantage of standing wholly on the
defensive until some happy turn of chance should so favor us that we
would risk nothing in making an assault.

It was a very fortunate thing for us that matters stood in this way; for
wellnigh the whole of the trained army of the Aztlanecas was with the
Priest Captain, and against this well-disciplined body of men our own
hastily assembled and imperfectly organized army would have made but a
poor showing had we met on equal terms. Even under the existing
circumstances, so favorable in many ways to our success, Tizoc and the
other military officers who were with us did not at all disguise their
anxiety as to what might be the outcome of the battle so soon to be
fought; and especially did they dread some well-planned stealthy
movement of the enemy, by which our camp might be suddenly set upon and
fairly carried before our own untrained forces could be rallied from the
bewilderment and confusion into which they would be thrown by the shock
of such surprise.

Rayburn, who had seen a good deal of Indian fighting in his time, fully
shared in this feeling of anxiety. "Indian fights, you see," he said,
"are not like any other kind of fights. The side that wins has got to do
it with a whoop and a hurrah. Indians haven't got any staying power in
them. They can't hold out against anybody who stands up against them
squarely, and won't be scared by a howling rush into running away.
That's the reason why our little bit of an army at home is strong enough
to police our whole Indian frontier. A single troop of our boys--if the
fighting's square, and they haven't been corralled in an ambush--can
stand off a whole tribe; and they can do it because they just get their
backs together and won't give in. What bothers me about the fight that
we're going to have is that the regulars are on the other side. Of
course, being Indian