“Mother of God, have mercy! Help! O Christ, save me!”
A light, nervous footfall echoed from the square, and the entrance to the hut was darkened for an instant. Rapier in hand, de Sancerre sprang into the centre of the room. As Manatte, with an oath upon his swollen lips, turned upon the intruder, the Frenchman drove his sword straight through a snow-white robe into a black heart. Without a groan, the evil scion of a royal race fell dead upon the ground.
“Thank God, I came in time!” exclaimed de Sancerre, as he withdrew his rapier from Manatte’s breast and turned toward Doña Julia, who, faint and breathless, leaned against the wall facing him. “Doña Julia de Aquilar,” he cried, tossing his dripping sword to the ground and crossing the room at a stride, “I kiss your hand.” Falling upon one knee the courtier pressed his lips to the cold, trembling fingers in his grasp.
“Mother of Mary, I thank thee for thy care,” murmured Doña Julia raising her eyes to heaven from the smiling, upturned face of de Sancerre.
It was upon a tableau which might have suggested, to other eyes, a worldling praying to a saint for pardon for the murder of a giant that Coheyogo, followed by Noco and Cabanacte, gazed as he entered the hut and attempted to read the story of the grim picture by which he was confronted. De Sancerre, who had doffed his white robes in the Great Sun’s cabin, still knelt at the feet of the pale and agitated girl. Near the centre of the room lay the bleeding, motionless body of the sacrilegious sun-worshipper. Thrown from a shelf by the recent tumult in the room, a great bunch of magnolia blossoms lay scattered close to Manatte’s head, a floral halo of which death itself still left him most unworthy.
Springing to his feet and pointing toward the youth he had slain, de Sancerre said, calmly, to Noco:
“Tell the chief priest this, that yonder scoundrel insulted the spirit of the sun. For this he died. It was this sword,” he went on, picking up his rapier and wiping the blood from the blade with a handful of flowers, “which saved Coyocop from his polluting kiss. I know not who he is, but were he ten thousand times a son of suns he well deserved his death.”
Coheyogo stood gazing down at the set face of Manatte as Noco repeated to him the Frenchman’s words.
“Stand at the entrance outside the hut,” said the chief priest, curtly, to Cabanacte, “and bid no one enter upon pain of death. Of what has happened here, breathe not a word. Go!”
Crawling through the entrance, Cabanacte drew himself erect in the sunlight, a sentry against whose behests none of the chattering sun-worshippers, who had poured into the square to learn the meaning of the cry which had echoed from Coyocop’s abode, dared protest.