my hatred of de Garcia was the ruling passion of my life, a stronger
passion even than my love for the two dear women who have been its joy.
Indeed, though he is dead these many years I still hate him, and evil
though the desire be, even in my age I long that my vengeance was still
to wreak. While I remained among the Aztecs de Garcia would be their
enemy and mine, and I might meet him in war and kill him there. But if I
succeeded in reaching the Spanish camp, then it was almost sure that he
would bring about my instant death. Doubtless he had told such a tale of
me already, that within an hour I should be hung as a spy, or otherwise
made away with.

But I will cease from these unprofitable wonderings which have but one
value, that of setting out my strange necessity of choice between an
absent and a present love, and go on with the story of an event in which
there was no room to balance scruples.


While I sat musing on the couch the curtain was drawn, and a man entered
bearing a torch. It was Guatemoc as he had come from the fray, which,
except for its harvest of burning houses, was finished for that night.
The plumes were shorn from his head, his golden armour was hacked by the
Spanish swords, and he bled from a shot wound in the neck.

'Greeting, Teule,' he said. 'Certainly I never thought to see you alive
to-night, or myself either for that matter. But it is a strange world,
and now, if never before in Tenoctitlan, those things happen for which
we look the least. But I have no time for words. I came to summon you
before the council.'

'What is to be my fate?' I asked. 'To be dragged back to the stone of