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226 break friendship with the white men and help to destroy them all while disabled and in their power. Some of the younger chiefs would have accepted these proposals from the Aztecs, but old Maxixca rejected them. His scorn and indignation rose to such a pitch that he forgot the decorum which always prevails in an Indian council, and silenced one of the hot-headed young braves by turning him out of doors.

This generous sympathy of his allies was a great encouragement to Cortez. Shamed by the loyalty of their Indian friends, almost all the Spanish soldiers yielded to his persuasions to return to Mexico. Their first step was to open the highway between that city and the garrison at Villa Rica by an attack on the Tepeacas, a tribe who held two passes through the mountains, and who had murdered a number of Spanish travelers during the recent troubles. Their country bordered on Mexico and was tributary to it, and their Aztec neighbors were even then busy among them stirring up a war with the white men. In the battles with these people Cortez took hundreds of captives and vast spoil. Men, women and children were branded with a hot iron as slaves and divided among his own men and his allies, the first of many thousands of human beings who were afterward thus degraded by the Spaniards.

It was now very evident that all the Indians of Anahuac were watching the struggle between the Aztecs and the Spaniards, ready to take the side of the victor. The crushing defeat of the Tepeacas decided many of them; crowds began to flock to the standard of Cortez. The star of this bold adventurer was now in the ascendant. As an umpire among many warring tribes he settled their quarrels to his own advantage, and in a short time built