Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 2.djvu/130

to arrange a good ambush, as I will recount hereafter to Your Majesty. The afternoon of that day, we returned to our camp, leaving everything we had gained assured and levelled, and the people of the city very boastful because they believed that we had retired out of fear. That afternoon, I called the alguacil mayor by messenger to come to our camp before daybreak with fifteen of his own and Pedro de Alvarado's horsemen. The alguacil mayor arrived the following morning at the camp with fifteen horsemen, and I obtained another
The
Ambush in
the Square
twenty-five from those at Cuyoacan, so that there were forty in all. I ordered ten of them to join in the morning with our force, and in conjunction with the brigantines to go in the same order as heretofore to attack the enemy and to destroy and capture everything possible; when the time for them to retire came, I would start with the other thirty horsemen. When the larger part of the city was demolished they should in the melee drive the enemy into their entrenchments and water streets, keeping them there until the hour of retiring, when I and the other thirty horsemen would secretly form an ambuscade in the large houses in the square. The Spaniards did as I ordered, and at one o'clock after mid-day I set out with the thirty horsemen, and stationed them in those houses while I went to the city and mounted the high tower as I habitually did. While I was there, some Spaniards opened a sepulchre and found in it more than fifteen hundred castellanos worth of articles in gold. At the hour of returning, I ordered that they should begin to withdraw in a compact body, and that from the first moment of leaving the square the horsemen should feign an attack, behaving as though they hardly dared to make it, choosing the time when they saw a great number of people in and about the whole square. The men posted in ambush longed for the hour to arrive,