The whirring of the reaper ceased, and when the horses were unyoked the driver led them slowly from the field. As they passed by the farmer he looked lovingly towards them, and muttered to himself, “Dead ’orses and dead soldiers lying by ’undreds in the standing corn. . . . I wonder ’ow the folks out there in Belgium will ’ave a relish for their bread next year. This ’ere war’s a ’orrid business, coming as it does, too, on the top of my own loss . . . dead ’orses in the corn. . . .”
He took the straw out of his mouth, and walking up to one of his own sleek-sided carthorses, patted it lovingly, as if he wanted to make sure that it was still alive.
X
HIPPOMORPHOUS
On the 12th of October 1524, Cortes left Mexico on his celebrated expedition to Honduras. The start from Mexico was made to the sound of music, and all the population of the newly conquered city turned out to escort him for a few miles upon his way.
The cavalcade must have been a curious spectacle enough. Cortes himself and his chief officers rode partly dressed in armour, after the fashion of the time. Then came the Spanish soldiers, mostly on foot and armed with lances, swords, and bucklers, though there was a troop of crossbowmen and harquebusiers to whom “after God” we owed the Conquest, as an old chronicler has said when speaking of the Conquest of Peru. In Mexico they did good service also, although it was the horsemen that in that conquest played the greater part. Then came a force of three thousand friendly Indians from Tlascala, and last of all a herd of swine was driven slowly in the rear, for at that time neither sheep nor cattle were known in the New World.
Guatimozin, the captive King of Mexico, graced his conquerors’ triumphal march; and with the army went two falconers, Garci Caro and Alvaro Montañes, together with a band of music, some acrobats, a juggler, and a man “who vaulted well and played the Moorish pipe.”
Cortes rode the black horse which he had ridden at the siege of Mexico. Fortune appeared to smile upon him. He had just added an enormous empire to the Spanish crown, and proved himself one of the most consummate generals of his age. Yet he was on the verge of the great misfortune of his life, which at the same time was to prove him still a finer leader than he had been, even in Mexico.
His black horse also was about to play the most extraordinary rôle that ever horse has played in the whole history of the world.
With varying fortunes, now climbing mountains, now floundering in swamps, and again passing rivers over which they had to throw bridges, the expedition came to an open country, well watered, and the home of countless herds of deer. Villagutierre, in his History of the Conquest of the Province of Itza (Madrid, 1701), calls it the country of the Maçotecas, which name Bernal Diaz del Castillo says means “deer” in the language of those infidels. Fresh meat was scarce, and all the Spanish horsemen of those days were experts with the lance. Instantly Cortes and all his mounted officers set out to chase the deer. The weather was extraordinarily hot, hotter, so Diaz says, than they had had it since they left Mexico. The deer were all so tame that the horsemen speared them as they chose (los alancearon muy á su placer), and soon the plain was strewed with dying animals just as it used to be when the Indians hunted buffalo thirty or forty years ago.
Diaz says that the reason for the tameness of the deer was that the Maçotecas (here he applies the word to the Indians themselves) worshipped them as gods. It appears that their Chief God had once appeared in the image of a stag, and told the Indians not to hunt his fellow-gods, or even frighten them. Little enough the Spaniards cared for any gods not strong enough to defend themselves, for the deity that they adored was the same God of Battles whom we adore to-day.