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Men and women with blanched faces, were fleeing to the hills. Others threw themselves upon the ground, too terror-stricken to move. I heard a voice at my elbow calling in English. It was the voice of a woman, young and fair. "This way," said I, and we hurried toward the massive rock from whose summit I had watched the battle of the Huascar and Amythist two years before.
Atahuallpa was accordingly brought up under his own eye, accompanied him, while in his tender years, in his campaigns, slept in the same tent with his royal father, and ate from the same plate.4 The vivacity of the boy, his courage and generous nature, won the affections of the old monarch to such a degree, that he resolved to depart from the established usages of the realm, and divide his empire between him and his elder brother Huascar.
But the royal fugitive was discovered before he had left the field; his little party was enveloped by clouds of the enemy, and nearly every one of the devoted band perished in defence of their Inca. Huascar was made prisoner, and the victorious chiefs marched at once on his capital, which they occupied in the name of their sovereign.11
Jim therefore made his way to the little conning-tower where Carlos Condell was directing the fighting of his ship; but before he had time to enter he saw the final act in the fight between the Huascar and the Esmeralda.
This was the love of gold. He determined to avail himself of it to procure his own freedom. The critical posture of his affairs made it important that this should not be long delayed. His brother, Huascar, ever since his defeat, had been detained as a prisoner, subject to the victor's orders.
The Covadonga very soon ran the Huascar hull-down, and had left the corvette about five miles astern before the latter got the wreckage of her foremast cleared away and resumed her pursuit at full speed; but Condell had improved the shining hour by putting his own little ship to rights, and getting up more powder and shell in readiness for the renewed attack which he knew must come.
After more desperate encounters, in one of which Huascar was taken prisoner, Atahuallpa possessed himself of Cuzco, and, assuming the diadem of the Incas, received the homage of the whole country. But his triumph was not to be for long. We left Pizarro preparing to leave Puná and cross to Tumbez.
He sighted the Huascar crawling slowly along the coast, with not a light to be seen aboard of her. Being short of coal, her fires were banked and she was carried forward by her own momentum. When there was danger of her losing steerage way, her engines would be started again and then shut down as before. Thus she was slowly creeping along the coast line.
Pizarro upon receiving the envoys sent by Huascar, to ask his aid against his brother Atahualpa, whom he represented as a rebel and usurper, saw at once all the advantages that might accrue to him from these circumstances.
I set my lantern down on one of the others so that the light fell across this one; then I raised the lid, and there before me lay, perfect as they had been on the day when Anda-Huillac, last High Priest of the Sun, had laid them there, the imperial robes and insignia that had last been worn by the ill-fated Huascar, son of the great Huayna-Capac.
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