Then I sat upon the stool, and my arms being left sound and strong, I hacked with the sharp sword at the wooden bars of the window, severing them one by one till there was a space big enough for us to creep through.  This being done and no one having appeared to disturb us, Otomie clad me in the clothes of a Spanish soldier which Marina had brought, for I could not dress myself.  What I suffered in the donning of those garments, and more especially in the pulling of the long boot on to my burnt foot, can never be told, but more than once I stopped, pondering whether it would not be better to die rather than to endure such agonies.  At last it was done, and Otomie must put on the red and yellow robe, a garb of shame such as many honest Indian women would die sooner than be seen in, and I think that as she did this, her agony was greater than mine, though of another sort, for to her proud heart, that dress was a very shirt of Nessus.  Presently she was clad, and minced before me with savage mockery, saying: 

‘Prithee, soldier, do I look my part?’

‘A peace to such fooling,’ I answered; ’our lives are at stake, what does it matter how we disguise ourselves?’

’It matters much, husband, but how can you understand, who are a man and a foreigner?  Now I will clamber through the window, and you must follow me if you can, if not I will return to you and we will end this masquerade.’

Then she passed through the hole swiftly, for Otomie was agile and strong as an ocelot, and mounting the stool I made shift to follow her as well as my hurts would allow.  In the end I was able to throw myself upon the sill of the window, and there I was stretched out like a dead cat till she drew me across it, and I fell with her to the ground on the further side, and lay groaning.  She lifted me to my feet, or rather to my foot, for I could use but one of them, and we stared round us.  No one was to be seen, and the sound of revelry had died away, for the crest of Popo was already red with the sunlight and the dawn grew in the valley.

‘Where to?’ I said.

Now Otomie had been allowed to walk in the camp with her sister, the wife of Guatemoc, and other Aztec ladies, and she had this gift in common with most Indians, that where she had once passed there she could pass again, even in the darkest night.

‘To the south gate,’ she whispered; ’perhaps it is unguarded now that the war is done, at the least I know the road thither.’

So we started, I leaning on her shoulder and hopping on my right foot, and thus very painfully we traversed some three hundred yards meeting nobody.  But now our good luck failed us, for passing round the corner of some buildings, we came face to face with three soldiers returning to their huts from a midnight revel, and with them some native servants.

‘Whom have we here?’ said the first of these.  ‘Your name, comrade?’

‘Good-night, brother, good-night,’ I answered in Spanish, speaking with the thick voice of drunkenness.