"Hah!" said the cavalier, as the arm of Botello fell heavily on his shoulder.—"Art thou taught wisdom and humility, at last? Let us descend, and swim."
As he moved, he became sensible that the shaft was still sticking in his hauberk. He grasped the feathered notch—the head was in the astrologer's heart. The stout wood snapped, as Botello fell. It struck him in the moment of his greatest hope. He dropped down a dead man.
While Amador stood confounded and struck with horror, he was seized, he knew not by whom, and suddenly found himself dragged through the water. Before he could well commend his soul to heaven, for he thought himself in the hands of the enemy, he beheld himself on firm land, while the voice of Cortes shouted in his ear,—
"Rouse thee, and die not like a sleeper! Hold me by the hand, and my good horse shall drag thee through the melée—I would sooner that my arm were hacked off than that thou shouldst sleep in the accursed lake: enough of thy blood rests in it, with Don Gabriel."
"Ay," thought the unhappy cavalier, "enough of my blood, and all of my heart. Don Gabriel, De Morlar, Lazaro, Lorenzo, and—ay, and Leila! Better that I were with them!"
A sudden cry from beyond the ditch interrupted his griefs.
"Pause, pause!" cried the voice. "Leave me not!—I am nigh!—I am Alvarado!"
The cavaliers looked back at these words, and beheld a man come flying, as it were, through the air over the ditch, perched on the top of a long Chinantlan spear, the bottom of which was hidden in the water. He fell quite clear of the sluice, after making a leap which even his comrades, who had not individually seen it, held impossible for mortal man, and which, even to this day, has preserved to the spot the name of the Salto, or leap, of Alvarado.
The appearance of the Tonatiuh was hailed with shouts of joy; and the Spaniards, receiving it as a good omen, closed their ranks, and slowly, for every inch was contested, fought their way to the shore. When they trode upon the firm ground, the little star had vanished in the gray beams of morning; and a thick mist rising up from the water like a curtain, concealed from the eyes of the fugitives, along with the accursed signal-fire, the fatal towers and temples of Mexico.
Thus closed a night of horror and wo, memorable as the Noche Triste, or Melancholy Night, of Mexican history, and paralleled perhaps, in modern days, if we consider the loss of the retreating army as compared with its numbers, only by the famous and most lamentable passage of the Berezina. More than four thousand Tlascalans, and five hundred Spaniards, were left dead on the causeway, or in the lake. Of the prisoners, but two or three escaped; two sons and as many daughters of Montezuma, with five tributary kings, as well as many princes and nobles, perished. All the cannon were utterly lost, left to rust and rot in the salt flood that had so often resounded to their roar; and of more than an hundred proud war-steeds that champed the bit so fiercely at midnight, scarce twenty jaded hacks snuffed the breath of morning.