When all had taken their places, five more gunshots were fired, and a brilliant cavalcade came up. Nocobotha, who marched at their head, with Doña Concha on his right and Don Valentine on his left, held his totem in his hand. After them came the principal Ulmens and caraskens of the united nations, with their brilliant ornaments of gold and precious stones.
Nocobotha got off his horse, held out his hand to Doña Concha to help her to dismount, mounted the scaffold, led her to the second chair, and himself stopped before the first one, though without sitting down. His ordinary pale features were inflamed, his eyes seemed swollen by watching, and he incessantly wiped away the perspiration that stood on his forehead. Something unusual was going on within him. Doña Concha's pallor was extreme, but her face was tranquil.
The Ulmens surrounded the scaffold, and at a third cannonade, the priests stepped on one side and displayed a securely bound man lying on the ground in their midst. The matchi turned to the crowd.
"All you who listen to me, the Sun, our ancestor, has smiled on our arms, and Gualichu himself fought for us. The empire of the Incas is established, the Indians are free, and the supreme chief of the Patagonian nation, Nocobotha, is about to place on his head the diadem of Athahualpa. In the name of the new emperor and ourselves we are about to offer to the Sun from whom he is descended, the most grateful of all sacrifices. Priests, bring up the victim."
The priests laid the unhappy wretch in the trough of the altar. He was a colonist made prisoner at the taking of Población del Sur; indeed the pulquero in whose shop the gauchos were accustomed to drink their chicha.
In the meanwhile Nocobotha trembled as if smitten with ague. He had a buzzing in his ears; his temples beat violently, and his eyes were suffused with blood. He supported himself on one of the arms of his chair.
"What is the matter?" Doña Concha asked him.
"I do not know," he answered; "the heat, the excitement, perhaps—I am stifling; I hope it will be nothing."
The unfortunate pulquero had been stripped of all his clothes, with the exception of his trousers, and he uttered heart-rending cries. The matchi approached him, brandishing his knife.
"Oh, it is frightful!" Doña Concha exclaimed, burying her face in her hands.