"I go on."
"Ah! I see. Thanks, my friend, for your dismissal then, but—I go on also."
Montoro clenched his hands tightly.
"It will be a load off my heart, Juan, if you will return."
"Without you?—never. You must keep your load."
They had begun to move on again slowly before this short dialogue was ended; but now a bitter, imploring moan from the poor creature with them helped Montoro to forget all but her troubles, and making a sign to her, they hurried on as rapidly as before.
After all, as far as Juan de Cabrera was concerned, any excitement, even to the excitement of deadly peril, was better than peace and quietness. He rather liked the sensation of feeling as though a dozen or two pairs of those lean, small, redskin hands were stretching out from every doorway to clutch at him, and that he had a sword by his side which should win him freedom. Montoro for the time thought of nothing at all, but his purpose to rescue his native servant from the bloody altar of the horrible war-god Huitzilopotchli.
Arrived at the foot of the mound on which the chief temple was built, the guide paused, and looked at her companions as though with some compunction for having brought them into so great peril; but her regrets were then too late. They had caught sight of a spectacle which had filled them with loathing indignation; and they sprang up the mound, rushed up the great flight of stone steps in the centre of the temple with a fierce shout, regardless of prudence, indifferent to all consequences, and gained the platform just in time to witness the completion of a third awful act of heathen faith.
On a huge block of jasper, with a slightly convex surface, lay the living, human, palpitating sacrifice. Around him were gathered six of the war-god's priests, hardened to their awful office by almost daily custom. Men fitted for such duties they looked, with their wild eyes, their long and matted locks flowing in wild disorder over their shoulders, and their sable, crimson-stained robes covered with hieroglyphic scrolls of mystic import.
Five of these weird, sombre, butcher-priests held down the head and limbs of the victim. The sixth, clad in a scarlet mantle, emblematic of the office, cut open the breast of the sacrifice with a sharp razor of the volcanic itztli, inserted his hand in the wound, and tore away the beating heart from the yet writhing body; the awful trophy was held for one moment up on high, then cast at the feet of the idol to which it was devoted.[6]