"You arrive too late, my son! This is the work of the Indians."
"My mother!" the young man said, as he fell on his knees before the corpse.
"Yes, your mother! who died beneath their blows, while your sisters have been torn from me for ever."
"What do you say, father?"
"The truth," Don Pedro remarked. "Your sisters have been carried off, in spite of all the efforts we made to oppose it."
"Oh, father! father!" was all that Don Juan could answer, as he gave the old gentleman a look of painful regret.
The old general's features were frightfully contracted by the crushing grief that oppressed his heart as a husband and father, and yet, overcoming it by the strength of his will, he seized his son's hand:
"Don Juan, thirty years of happiness have passed since the day when the wife whom I lament for the first time laid her hand in mine, and now Heaven has taken her from me again! Two children, whom I love as I love you, Juan, were, with you, the fruits of that union, and Heaven has allowed them to be torn from my side! Still, I bow before His omnipotent will, because I am a Christian, and in the midst of my profound affliction, you are left to me, my son, to punish the cowards who attack women when they have men to face them. Don Juan, will you avenge your mother and sisters?"
The spectacle offered by this scene was very painful. Old Don Juan, bareheaded, was striving to appear calm, but the heavy tears that fell on his grey moustache were a flagrant contradiction of the resignation which he affected. Behind the old man's studied countenance could be discerned an immense grief, which was betrayed by the very violence of the stoicism which he displayed. Choked by sobs, the colonel remained dumb to his father's exhortations.
"Have you understood what I demand of you?" Don Juan again said to his son.