Till nightfall the Spaniards bombarded the shattered remains of the gates and the earthworks behind them, doing no great damage beyond the killing of about a score of people by cannon shot and arquebuss balls. But they attempted no assault that day. At length the darkness fell and their fire ceased, but not so our labours. Most of the men must guard the gates and the weak spots in the walls, and therefore the building of the barricades was left chiefly to the women, working under my command and that of my captains. Otomie herself took a share in the toil, an example that was followed by every lady and indeed by every woman in the city, and there were many of them, for the women outnumbered the men among the Otomie, and moreover not a few of them had been made widows on that same day. It was a strange sight to see them in the glare of hundreds of torches split from the resin pine that gave its name to the city, as all night long they moved to and fro in lines, each of them staggering beneath the weight of a basket of earth or a heavy stone, or dug with wooden spades at the hard soil, or laboured at the pulling down of houses. They never complained, but worked on sullenly and despairingly; no groan or tear broke from them, no, not even from those whose husbands and sons had been hurled that morning from the precipices of the pass. They knew that resistance would be useless and that their doom was at hand, but no cry arose among them of surrender to the Spaniards. Those of them who spoke of the matter at all said with Otomie, that it was better to die free than to live as slaves, but the most did not speak; the old and the young, mother, wife, widow, and maid, they laboured in silence and the children laboured at their sides. Looking at them it came into my mind that these silent patient women were inspired by some common and desperate purpose, that all knew of, but which none of them chose to tell. “Will you work so hard for your masters the Teules?” cried a man in bitter mockery, as a file of them toiled past beneath their loads of stone. “Fool!” answered their leader, a young and lovely lady of rank; “do the dead labour?” “Nay,” said this ill jester, “but such as you are too fair for the Teules to kill, and your years of slavery will be many. Say, how shall you escape them?” “Fool!” answered the lady again, “does fire die from lack of fuel only, and must every man live till age takes him? We shall escape them thus,” and casting down the torch she carried, she trod it into the earth with her sandal, and went on with her load. Then I was sure that they had some purpose, though I did not guess how desperate it was, and Otomie would tell me nothing of this woman’s secret. “Otomie,” I said to her that night, when we met by chance, “I have ill news for you.” “It must be bad indeed, husband, to be so named in such an hour,” she answered. “De Garcia is among our foes.” “I knew it, husband.” “How did you know it?”