dage they consigned to the House of Hell.

Of these priests a certain Father Pedro was the boldest and the most
cruel. To and fro he passed, marking his path with the corpses of
idolaters, until he earned the name of the 'Christian Devil.' At length
he ventured too far in his holy fervour, and was seized by a clan of the
Otomie that had broken from our rule upon this very question of human
sacrifice, but which was not yet subjugated by the Spaniards. One day,
it was when we had ruled for some fourteen years in the City of Pines,
it came to my knowledge that the pabas of this clan had captured a
Christian priest, and designed to offer him to the god Tezcat.

Attended by a small guard only, I passed rapidly across the mountains,
purposing to visit the cacique of this clan with whom, although he had
cast off his allegiance to us, I still kept up a show of friendship,
and if I could, to persuade him to release the priest. But swiftly as I
travelled the vengeance of the pabas had been more swift, and I arrived
at the village only to find the 'Christian Devil' in the act of being
led to sacrifice before the image of a hideous idol that was set upon a
stake and surrounded with piles of skulls. Naked to the waist, his hands
bound behind him, his grizzled locks hanging about his breast, his keen
eyes fixed upon the faces of his heathen foes in menace rather than in
supplication, his thin lips muttering prayers, Father Pedro passed on to
the place of his doom, now and again shaking his head fiercely to free
himself from the torment of the insects which buzzed about it.

I looked upon him and wondered. I looked again and knew. Suddenly there
rose before my mind a vision of that gloomy vault in Seville, of a
woman, young and lovely, draped in cerements, and of a thin-faced
black-robed friar who smote her upon the lips with his ivory crucifix
and cursed her for a blaspheming heretic. There before me was the man.
Isabella de Siguenza had prayed that a fate like to her own fate should
befall him, and it was upon him now. Nor indeed, remembering all that
had been, was I minded to avert it, even if it had been in my power to
do so. I stood by and let the victim pass, but as he passed I spoke to
him in Spanish, saying:

'Remember that which it may well be you have forgotten, holy father,
remember now the dying prayer of Isabella de Siguenza whom many years
ago you did to death in Seville.'

The man heard me; he turned livid beneath h