"An even-handed bargain with you then; give me General Bustamente," she remarked earnestly, "and I will deliver her up to you."
"Oh!" said Antinahuel, with a bantering smile, "a woman is but a mockingbird; the man who puts faith in her words——"
On hearing the chief throw in her face the words she herself had uttered only a few minutes before, she stamped with impatience.
"Well, then," she cried, almost bursting with rage, "take her then!—take the woman! and may my curses cling to her!"
Antinahuel uttered a tiger-like roar, and rushed out of the room.
"Ah!" cried the Linda in a hoarse voice, and with an expression impossible to be described, "may not the love of this wretch avenge me better than all the tortures I could have invented!"
In a few minutes the chief returned precipitately, his features distorted by fury and disappointment.
"She has fled!" he shouted. It was true. Rosario and the Indian to whose charge the Linda had given her had both disappeared. No one knew what had become of them. Antinahuel immediately dispatched his mosotones in all directions in search of them. The Linda was left in the toldo a prey to indescribable rage; she was cheated of her vengeance! She felt crushed under the weight of the helplessness to which she was reduced.