tecs could endure no
more. Their cup of iniquity seemed full, when Cortez, who had left a
wife in Cuba, sent to the little village of Tacuba, called by Diaz
Tlacupa, to fetch thence some "women of his _household_, among whom was
the daughter of Montezuma [he had already one daughter of Montezuma in
his power] whom he had given in charge of the King of Tlacupa, her
relative, when he marched against Narvaez."[36] The women being
rescued, Cortez afterward sent Ordaz, with four hundred men, which
brought on hostilities that ended in this night retreat.

THE HOUSEHOLD OF CORTEZ.

Cortez was worse than the Mormon governor of Utah, who is said to have
thirty-six wives in his household. But they are, at least, voluntary
inmates of his harem, while the "household" of Cortez had been taken by
violence. It is one of the prominent traits of Indian character that,
while they are inhuman to their female captives, they guard with the
utmost jealousy the virtue of their wives. Even among the debased
Indians of California, female infidelity is punished with death; and I
have seen the whole population of an Indian village on the Upper
Sacramento thrown into the utmost confusion--the women howling, and the
men brandishing their weapons--because a base Indian had sold his wife
to a still baser white man. "Such a thing was never," they said, "done
in the tribe before." And here we have Cortez, in contempt of even
Indian notions of virtue, sending to bring to his harem, by violence,
another daughter of Montezuma.

As Bernal Diaz goes more into detail than Cortez, he now and then drops
an expression that furnishes a clew to many an enigma otherwise
unexplainable. In speaking of the avarice of the officers, he lets fall
the following confession of his own infamy:

"This was a good hint to us in future, so that afterward, when we had
captured any beautiful Indian females, we concealed them, and gave out
that they had escaped. As soon as it was come to the marking day, or,
if any one of us stood in favor with Cortez, he got them secretly
marked [viz., branded with a red-hot iron] during the night-time, and
paid a fifth of their value to him. In a short time we possessed a
great number of such slaves."[37]

Never was there a band of Anglo-Saxon outlaws, cut-throats, pirates, or
buccaneers that reached that point of human depravity that they could
brand, as cattle are branded, with a red-hot iron, swarms of women
taken by violence, in orde