The Indian makes very few excuses for failure; and the Nahuatl had already elected a new head war-captain named Cuitlahuatzin in place of the unsuccessful Moctezuma. The latter was still a prisoner; and when the Spaniards brought him out upon the housetop to speak to his people in their behalf, the infuriated multitude of Indians pelted him to death with stones. Then, under their new war-captain, they attacked the Spaniards so furiously that neither the strong walls nor the clumsy falconets, and clumsier flintlocks, could withstand them; and there was nothing for the Spaniards but to cut their way out along one of the dykes in a last desperate struggle for life. The beginning of that six days' retreat was one of the bitterest pages in American history. Then was the Noche Triste (the Sad Night), still celebrated in Spanish song and story. For that dark night many a proud home in mother Spain was never bright again, and many a fond heart broke with the crimson bubbles on the Lake of Tezcuco. In those few ghastly hours two thirds of the conquerors were slain; and across more than eight hundred Spanish corpses the frenzied savages pursued the bleeding survivors. After a fearful retreat of six days, came the important running fight in the plains of Otumba, where the Spaniards were entirely surrounded, but cut their way out after a desperate hand-to-hand struggle which really decided the fate of Mexico. Cortez marched to Tlacala, raised an army of Indians who were hostile to the federation, and with their help laid siege to the City of Mexico. This siege lasted seventy-three days, and was the most remarkable in the history of all America. There was hard fighting every day. The Indians made a superb defence; but at last the genius of Cortez triumphed, and on the 13th of August, 1521, he marched victorious into the second greatest aboriginal city in the New World. These wonderful exploits of Cortez, so briefly outlined here, awoke boundless admiration in Spain, and caused the Crown to overlook his insubordination to Velasquez. The complaints of Velasquez were disregarded, and Charles V. appointed Cortez governor and captain-general of Mexico, besides making him Marquis de Oaxaca with a handsome revenue. Safely established in this high authority, Cortez crushed a plot against him, and executed the new war-captain, with many of the caciques (who were not potentates at all, but religious-military officers, whose hold on the superstitions of the Indians made them dangerous).