the altar was. As I rounded the great stone I saw a
very grievous sight: an old man lying upon the bare rock, a great gash
in his forehead from which the blood had flowed down over his face and
breast, making him a most ghastly object to look upon; and there was
about him a certain limpness that told of many broken bones. He turned
his head at the sound of my footsteps, but it was plain that the blood
flowing into his eyes had blinded him, and that he could not see me. He
made a feeble motion to clear his eyes, but dropped his partly raised
arm suddenly and with a moan of pain. I recognized him at a glance. He
was the Cacique, the chief, and also, as I had shrewdly guessed, the
priest of the village--the very last person whom I would have desired to
meet in that place.

"Ah, thou art come to me at last, Benito!" he said, speaking in a low
and broken voice. "I have been praying to our gods that they would send
thee to me--for my death has come, and it is needful that the one secret
still hidden from thee, my successor, should be told. I was on the
altar's top, and thence I fell."

I perceived in what the Cacique said that there was hope for me. He
could not see me, and he evidently believed that I was the second chief
of the village, Benito--an Indian who had talked much with me, and the
tones of whose voice I knew well. Doubtless my clumsy attempt to
simulate the Indian's speech would have been detected quickly under
other circumstances, but the Cacique believed that no other man could
have come to him in that place; and his whole body was wrung with
torturing pains, and he was in the very article of death. And so it was,
my prudence leading me to speak few and simple words, and my good-luck
still standing by me, he never guessed whose hands in his last moments
ministered to him.

As I raised his head a little and rested it upon my knee, he spoke
again, very feebly and brokenly: "On my breast is the bag of akin. In
it is the Priest-Captain's token, and the paper that shows the way to
where the stronghold of our race remains. Only with me abides this
secret, for I am of the ancient house, as thou art also, whence sprung
of old our priests and kings. Only when the sign that I have told thee
of--but telling thee not its meaning--comes from heaven, is the token to
be sent, and with it the call for aid. Once, as thou knowest, that sign
came, and the messenger, our own ancestor, departed. But there was anger
then against