all hope of setting eyes upon my son again, and let her die in ignorance!" And while he spoke he angrily tore the paper into fragments.
"It must have been an Indian who brought the letter," observed Manangani.
"Not one of our party. It is known well enough that I am often here, but I shall not come again. Now; do you return to the mountains. I will keep watch in the town. The feast day comes, and we shall see whether it be a festival of rejoicing for the oppressors or the oppressed." With this parting direction the two Indians each departed on his own way.
The plot of the Indians had been deeply laid, and the time for its execution was adroitly chosen. The population of Peru was reduced to a comparatively small number of Spaniards and half-breeds. From the forests of Brazil, from the mountains of Chili, from the plains of La Plata, the hordes of Indians had been summoned, and would find it an easy task to cover the whole territory which was to be the theater of revolution. Once let the larger towns, Lima, Cusco, and Puno, fall into their hands, and victory was all their own. There was no fear of the Colombian troops, who had recently been driven out by the Peruvian government, returning to assist their adversaries in the hour of their necessity.
And it can hardly be doubted that this revolutionary movement would have resulted in entire success if its intention had been confided to none but Indian breasts: among them there was no fear of treachery.
But they knew not that there was a man who already had obtained a private audience with Gambarra, and had apprized him that the schooner Annunciation had been unlading firearms of every description into the canoes and pirogues of the Indians at the mouth of the Rimac; they knew not that that man had gone to claim a reward from the Peruvian Government for the very service of exposing their own proceedings.
A double game was this. The man who for a large payment had chartered his ship to Sambo for the conveyance of the arms, had gone at once to the president and betrayed the existence of the conspiracy.
The man was Samuel the Jew.
