e knew, was the best thing that could
happen to us; for it would save us from the worse fate, that surely
would come to us should we be captured, of being turned over to the
priests, that they might torture us before their heathen altars, and in
the end tear our still quivering hearts out. And that the wish of our
enemies--according to the Aztec custom--was rather to capture us than to
kill us was shown by the way in which they fought; for all their effort
was to disable us, and so to take us alive; nor did they seem to have
any great care, if only this purpose could be accomplished, how many of
themselves were slain.

Sometimes in my dreams the wild commotion of that most desperate combat
comes back to me. I see again before me the crowd of half-naked men,
curving in a semicircle measured by the length of my sword, their faces
distorted by the passionate anger that stirred their souls; and I see
one fierce face after another lose out of it the look of life, yet not
the look of hate, as my sword crunches into the vitals of the body to
which it belongs; and I hear the wild din around me, and the yells of
rage and of pain, and my feet tread in slippery pools of blood, and my
body aches with weariness, and sharp thrills of agony dart through the
strained muscles of my right arm--yet still I fight on, and on. And,
truly, all this seems more real to me now in my sleep than it did to me
then in its reality; for a dull weight of most desolate hopelessness
settled down upon me as I fought out to the end that most hopeless
battle--so that my spirit shared in the numbness of my body, and I cut
and parried and gave men their death-blows with the stolid energy of a
mere death-dealing machine.

It had been from the first no more than a question of minutes how long
this unequal fight would last; and when I heard a great yell from the
enemy, and perceived a flood of soldiers swirling inward through the
gate-way just beyond the fellows whom I was dealing with, I knew that
Tizoc's men had been beaten down or slain, and that the end was very
near at hand. As I glanced across the shoulders of the man whom I just
then put forever on the list of the non-combatants, I saw what seemed to
be an eddy in the midst of the crowd that was rushing into the Citadel;
and in the thick of the tightly knotted group that thus choked the
narrow way I saw Tizoc still laying about him with his sword. He was a
very ghastly object, for a cut on his head had l