you from your sins, and prepare you to enter
the kingdom of Heaven."

"I worship the Maker of all things," the Inca firmly replied. "As much
as I desire to live, I will not forsake the faith of my fathers to
prolong my life."

Two hours after sunset, the sound of the trumpet assembled the Spanish
soldiers by torchlight in the great square of Caxamarca. It was the
evening of the twenty-ninth of August, 1533. The clanking of chains
was heard as the victim, manacled hand and foot, toiled painfully over
the stone pavement of the square. He was bound by chains to the stake;
the combustible fagots were piled up around him. Friar Vincent then,
it is said, holding up the cross before the victim, told him that if
he would embrace Christianity he should be spared the cruel death by
the flames, and experience in its stead only the painless death of the
garotte, and that the Inca did, while thus chained to the stake,
abjure his religion and receive the rite of baptism. In reference to
this representation Mr. Lambert A. Wilmer, in his admirable life of
Ferdinand De Soto, says:

"As the traducers of the dead Inca were permitted to tell
their own story without fear of contradiction, it is
impossible to assign any limits to their fabrications. And
their testimony is probable, only when it tends to criminate
themselves. Perhaps the greatest injustice which these
slanderers have done to Attahuallapa's memory, was by
pretending that he became an apostate to his own religion
and a convert to Catholicism just before his death.

"If this story were true, how could Pizarro justify himself,
or how could the Pope and the king of Spain excuse him for
putting a Christian to death on account of sins committed by
an infidel. Surely the royal penitent, when he entered the
pale of the Holy Catholic Church, would be entitled to a
free pardon for those errors of conduct which were
incidental to his unregenerate condition. We are told that
when the Inca had consented to be baptized by Father
Vincent, Pizarro graciously commuted his sentence, and
allowed him to be strangled before his body was reduced to
ashes."

These fictions were doubtless contrived to illustrate Pizarro's
clemency, and Father Vincent's apostolic success.

The probability is, as others state, that the Inca remained firm to
the end; the torch was applied, and while the consuming fla