Page:The Mastering of Mexico.djvu/317

Rh impatience and ardent longing to begin our siege of the great city that Cortes ordered Sandoval to take two hundred soldiers, twenty musketeers and crossbowmen, fifteen horsemen, a strong body of Tlaxcalans, and to these to add twenty chieftains of Texcoco, and to fetch the woodwork. He was also to convey elders and children of Chalco to places of greater safety.

Moreover, he was to go to a town close by the road leading to Tlaxcala and punish the people for attacking a company of Spaniards who were passing through a narrow road in the mountains where they could march only one by one. Some of the Spaniards they killed in the pass; the blood of others they took prisoners still stained the idols and walls of the temple where the Indians had sprinkled it. Skins off the faces of two, tanned like skin for gloves, and the beards still on them, lay as an offering on an altar. The skins of four horses, also tanned with the hair on, hung before the main altar, alongside the horse shoes, as token of victory. Articles of Spanish dress were suspended as offerings before idols, while a pillar of one of the houses told us in letters written in charcoal, "Here the unfortunate Juan Yuste and others of his company were imprisoned." This Juan Yuste was a gentleman who had served under Narvaez.

These evidences of our brothers' suffering and