ter, not so much for the loss of the few men as because it
proved to the Indians (as the senders intended it to prove) that the
Spaniards were not immortal gods after all, but could be killed the same
as other men.

As soon as Cortez heard the ill news he saw this danger at once, and
made a bold stroke to save himself. He had already strongly fortified
the adobe building in which the Spaniards were quartered; and now, going
by night with his officers to the house of the head war-captain, he
seized Moctezuma and threatened to kill him unless he at once gave up
the Indians who had attacked Vera Cruz. Moctezuma delivered them up, and
Cortez at once had them burned in public. This was a cruel thing, though
it was undoubtedly necessary to make some vivid impression on the
savages or be at once annihilated by them. There is no apology for this
barbarity, yet it is only just that we measure Cortez by the standard of
his time,--and it was a very cruel world everywhere then.

It is amusing here to read in pretentious text-books that "Cortez now
ironed Montezuma and made him pay a ransom of six hundred thousand marks
of pure gold and an immense quantity of precious stones." That is on a
par with the impossible fables which lured so many of the early
Spaniards to disappointment and death, and is a fair sample of the
gilded glamour with which equally credulous historians still surround
early America. Moctezuma did not buy himself free,--he never was free
again,--and he paid no ransom of gold; while as for precious stones, he
may have had a few native garnets and worthless green turquoises, and
perhaps even an emerald pebble, but nothing more.

Just at this crisis in the affairs of Cortez he was threatened from
another quarter. News came that Pamfilo de Narvaez, of whom we shall see
more presently, had landed with eight hundred men to arrest Cortez and
carry him back prisoner for his disobedience of Velasquez. But here
again the genius of the conqueror of Mexico saved him. Marching against
Narvaez with one hundred and forty men, he arrested Narvaez, enlisted
under his own banner the welcome eight hundred who had come to arrest
him, and hastened back to the City of Mexico.

Here he found matters growing daily to more deadly menace. Alvarado,
whom he had left in command, had apparently precipitated trouble by
attacking an Indian dance. Wanton as that may seem and has been charged
with being, it was only a military necessity, recogn