inmates of his harem, while the "household" of Cortéz 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 Cortéz, 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 Cortéz, 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 Cortéz, 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."
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 order that they might not make any mistakes in recognizing their numberless wives! None but Spanish heroes of a "holy war" ever exhibited such a picture of total depravity.