But as he went he feared her anger coming to meet him more than he
feared mine that waited him at home. One day while the Spanish soldiers
who were with him admired the arrows which he showed them in his quiver,
so beautifully made, he plunged the sharpest of them into his throat. He
was a poor thing," said the Princess proudly, "since he loved neither me
nor my aunt enough to serve one of us against the other. We succeeded
only in serving Soto, for now there was no one to carry word for the
Cacica to the men who were to fall upon the Spaniards and destroy them
as they had destroyed Ayllon.
"Perhaps," said the Princess, "if she had told me her plan and her
reason for it, things would have turned out differently. At any rate,
she need not have become, as she did finally, my worst enemy, and died
fighting me. At that time she was as mother and chief to me, and I could
never have wished her so much bitterness as she must have felt sitting
unvisited in the Place of the Silences, while I took the Adelantado
pearling, and the fighting men, who should have fallen upon him at her
word, danced for his entertainment.
"She had to come out at last to find what had happened to Islay, for
whose death she blamed me, and back she went without a word to me, like
a hot spider to spin a stronger web.
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