Page:Vol 2 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/647

Rh that all he said about the marqués del Valle having given him a commission to France and to certain high officials was untrue. The next day, mounted on mules and bound hands and feet, the brothers Baltasar and Pedro de Quesada, sexagenarians, were taken to the scaffold to be beheaded; they acknowledged having taken part in a plot against the king. Baltasar de Sotelo met with the same fate.

It becomes my duty here to record one of those hellish acts which makes one blush for one's race, which makes one wonder how superior powers can sit and smile on them. Sapient philosophers may charge it to the times, and there leave it, scarcely knowing what they say; religionists would place it among the mysteries of providence and expect us to be satisfied; there still remains the fact, a most ignoble and worse than beastly one, and wherein man may see something of himself as he is to-day.

While the executions of the 8th were going on in the presence of the people, there lay in one of the rooms of the royal buildings Martin Cortés, Marina's son, undergoing bodily torture. The father had conquered the country for Spain, and the mother had been his most devoted friend and helper; and here now was the son, stretched on a bed of mortal agony, because to his grizzly judge at the trial he would divulge nothing of the secrets of his confederates, were any such secrets in his keeping.

Happy invention! that of water and cord, as administered at the hands of Pero Baca and Juan Navarro by order of Muñoz. It does not add to the