Then he stepped back quickly and made a sign with his hand to Asterre. The next instant the rope was thrown round the Inca’s throat, noosed and knotted. As he felt the touch of it Atahuallpa started in his bonds and opened his eyes which a moment before he had closed. The next instant Asterre had passed the staff through the noose and given it a quick, wrenching turn. A short gasping cry broke from the Inca’s lips only to be instantly silenced as his executioner gave the staff another and yet stronger turn. Those who stood round saw by the light of the flaring torches a hideous change pass over the face of the doomed man. Yet another turn and his jaw fell and his tongue shot out as though forced from his crushed throat. For a few moments there was an awful silence broken only by the spluttering of the torches and the dull murmuring of prayers for the safety of the departing soul, and then Asterre released the staff. It spun round and dropped to the earth, and as it did so Atahuallpa’s head fell forward on his breast, and so died the son of Huayna-Capac and Zaïma, his queen and murderess. As soon as the Inca was proved to be dead the trumpet sounded and the square was cleared. In the midst stood the stake with the body still bound to it, left to a grim and solemn solitude, but after about an hour the Inca’s wives and sisters came in a sorrowful procession to Pizarro, praying that he would allow them to go and mourn by the body of their Lord, and this he, no doubt feeling some softness of soul, if not remorse, for the thing that he had helped to do, not only granted, but ordered that all the guards should draw back to the walls of the houses and the entrances to the square, leaving them unmolested for as long as they pleased. Then presently upon the still night air there rose the soft, wailing sounds of the Death Chant, and hour after hour this went on, ever growing fainter and fainter, till at last it ended in the long, shrill, piercing cry of a woman’s voice, and then all was still. The Spaniards thought that one by one they had worn themselves out with wailing and so fallen asleep; but when with the first light of dawn they went to take the Inca’s body away to lay it in the newly-built church of San Francisco, they learnt the true cause of the silence, for there in a circle round the stake at which their Lord had died they lay, maid and matron, each with her eyes upturned to his downbent head, and each with a slender dagger of gold taken from her dark unloosed tresses and plunged deep into her faithful heart. And so too died the wives and sisters and daughters of Atahuallpa, and among them lay the Princess Pillcu-Cica, fairest form of all, saved thus from dishonour by the parting of the gentle soul which had gone in the fulness of its simple faith to rejoin its murdered Lord in the Mansions of the Sun. BOOK IV CHAPTER I. A PAGE OF HISTORY