Once more in the history of heroic things the dreamer has confounded the practical men of affairs who had derided and obstructed his schemes till the visions had become realities, and who were now hiding their envy under the mask of eager service.
A little way behind him strides the giant form of Pedro de Candia, leading his horse with his arm through the bridle, and by his side walks Alonso de Molina, also bridle on arm, and with them are six others, all that are left of the gallant band that crossed the line on Gallo, and now hidalgos to a man. But there are some others with them who were not on Gallo, but who are destined to write their names as deeply and redly in the history of El-Dorado as any of them. A fat, white-haired, fiery-faced man, long past the prime of life, who rolls about in the saddle like a full meal-sack, and yet a man of mighty strength and limitless endurance, for all his fat, who can sleep as well on a horse as in a bed, and march and fight and plunder and fight again till he has worn out every man but himself, and then laugh at his troop and curse them for carpet-soldiers and faint-hearts. For this is Francisco Carvahal, the bitterest jester and the bloodiest fighter that you may read of in all the wars of the Conquerors.
Him you will see and hear of again—as you will of Hernando de Soto, stateliest knight of them all, and of Juan and Gonzalo and Hernando, the brothers of the Captain-General—and near him, mounted on a mule and garbed in the black habit of a Dominican friar, rides another of whom the same may be said. From under the cowl that is drawn over his head to shield it from the sun-rays looks out a dark, ascetic face, thin-lipped and peaked-nosed, with small, black, deep-set eyes and high narrow forehead.
That is the face of Fray Vincente de Valverde, sometime to be bishop of Cuzco and Grand Inquisitor of New Castile, a man who, like some others of his cloth that are riding or walking with him, has come out to the new land and its millions of unknown dwellers with the words of the Gospel of Peace on his lips and the fires of fanaticism blazing hot and cruel in his heart.
Yet one more of the company must be signalled out by name, so that what follows may be made the plainer.
He is an Indian youth, slim and agile; a son of the New World clothed in the garb of the Old. Handsome and yet cunning of countenance, he has already learnt to look with something like contempt upon those who were once his people, for this is Filipillo, or little Philip, the lad who was taken away from Tumbez some three years ago and baptized and carried to Spain, being destined, as it appears, to an office which, however poorly performed, nevertheless has given his name a place in the story of the New World, for he is now interpreter to His Excellency Don Francisco, and before many days are passed it shall be his to stand, as it were, between the Old World and the New, and pass through his ears and lips the words which did all that words could do to seal the fate of an empire and the destiny of millions.
Only a bronze-skinned, straight-haired, black-eyed lad who has yet to see his twentieth summer, and yet one who is ere long, for the sake of a pretty face and a pair of eyes brighter and softer than his own, to compass the ruin of one into whose presence his father would scarcely have dared to crawl uninvited through the dust.
Of a sudden Pizarro’s charger raised his head, and after drinking in with widened nostrils a long, deep breath, let out a shrill, whinnying neigh which was instantly taken up by all the other animals in the troop, and with one accord they quickened their pace as though they had drunk in some new principle of life through the air they were breathing.
“Ah,” cried Carvahal, straightening his short, thick legs out from his charger’s flanks, and throwing his arms wide apart, “Cuerpo de Jesu, the good beasts smell the green and the water at last! Carramba! Caballeros, some of us will be glad to get out of this, I fancy, for the good God seems to have made this accursed country in patches with pieces of Paradise and the Inferno, and then, for some wise purpose of His own, left it unfinished at that. It’s a land where one must either get fat and soft and lazy with luxury in valleys that would be no shame to Paradise itself, or else starve and parch in deserts hardly fit for a heretic to die in!”
“It would be a dry desert and a hot one that would melt much of the fat off of that goodly carcase of thine, Carvahal,” said Pedro de Candia, with a laugh, half turning in his saddle towards him; “though doubtless that poor nag of thine would willingly carry thee over a few leagues of desert if thereby he could save himself a few pounds of thy weight to carry. More than once I have seen the poor beast look back at thee to see if thou wert not sweating thyself somewhat smaller.”