. No Christian woman would play so base a
part. Senora de la Vega could have no interest in betraying me. She hated
her savage husband too heartily to be the voluntary instrument of my
destruction, and she was so utterly wretched that I pitied her from my
soul.

A creole of pure Spanish blood and noble family, bereft of her husband,
forced to become the slave of a brutal Indian, and the constant associate
of hardly less brutal women, painfully conscious of her degradation,
hopeless of any amendment of her lot, poor Senora de la Vega's fate would
have touched the hardest heart. And she had little children at home! My
suspicions vanished even more quickly than they had been conceived, and
before I reached my quarters I had decided that, come what might, the
attempt should be made.

The next question was how and when. Clearly, the sooner the better; but
whether we had better set off at sunrise or sunset was open to doubt. By
leaving at sunset we should be less easily followed; on the other hand, we
should have greater difficulty in finding our way and be sooner missed. It
was generally about sunset that Mamcuna sent for me, and I knew that at
this time it would be well-nigh impossible for Senora de la Vega to leave
Chimu's house without being observed and questioned, perhaps followed. So
when we met as agreed, I told her that I had decided to make the attempt
on the next morning, and asked her to be in a grove of plantains, hard by,
an hour before dawn. I besought her, whatever she did, to be punctual; our
lives depended on our stealing away before people were stirring.

Meanwhile Gahra and I had laid our plans. He was to give out the night
before that we were setting off early next morning on a hunting
expedition. This would enable us, without exciting suspicion, to take a
supply of provisions, arms, and a led horse (for carrying any game we
might kill) and, as I hoped, give us a long start. For even when Senora de
la Vega was missed nobody would suspect that she had gone with us.

In the event--as we hoped, the improbable event--of our being overtaken or
intercepted, Gahra and I were resolved not to be taken alive; but we had,
unfortunately, no firearms; they were all lost in the snow-storm. Our only
weapons were bows and arrows and machetes. I carried the former merely as
a make-believe, to keep up my character as a hunter; for the same reason
we took with us a brace of dogs. If it came to fighting I should have to
p