"I came by that," he once said to me in answer to my question, "in what might be called an honest cause. A thousand miles from nowhere, where there is neither Law nor Right nor Wrong nor Justice, one--who may or may not have learned the Lord's Prayer at his mother's knee--would have put to death some score of helpless human creatures, slaughtered them like sheep."
"Why?" I asked.
"Why," said he, "there are but few motives that sway the evil that lies in all men, and of these greed of gold is first. And this man of whom I speak was a great force of evil, and is so still, for I never doubt that he is yet alive. For gold he would have murdered those who had never wronged him, who had indeed shown him nothing but kindness and hospitality. Fate decreed that this man's path and mine should cross; and because I stood between him and an ill-gotten fortune, I was struck a coward's blow. You would never guess the weapon, Dick, that gave me my beauty mark for life?"
He paused as if waiting for an answer, though I had none to give.
"Well, then," he continued, "it was a sceptre--the golden sceptre of a bygone dynasty of monarchs, ended four hundred years ago--kings of no naked savages, but emperors, rulers over an ancient civilisation that has crumbled to the dust, of a people who were cultured in their own way, industrious and great. It is something, we may imagine, to carry through life the scar that was given by the symbol of such authority and power."
"And where was this?" I asked.
"Where the mountains overtop the clouds," he answered, "where one may see the last of the sunset beyond the valleys of Peru, and the dawn rises from the dark forests of the Upper Amazon, in which, Dick, there are secrets that no man yet has ever lived to learn."
"It was the sceptre of the Incas!" I exclaimed; for I had read as a holiday task The Conquest of Peru.
"The very same that was hidden from Pizarro," he made answer, "together with all the gold of Huaraz and Cuzco."
"And who was the man who struck you?" I demanded.