“Ay, and I too,” laughed Alonso de Molina; “and yet though this heathen wilderness hath to-day had more rain than it has ever had, and that, too, dripping from good Christian skins, methinks thou, Carvahal, hast done less than any of us to lay the accursed dust.”
“Even so,” growled Carvahal, “and for good reason too, for if there are many more rides like this before us some of ye will get to Atahuallpa’s camp, wherever the heathen may be lodged, with nothing more than your bones rattling inside your mail, and so a man or two with good flesh and blood inside his harness may be wanted when it comes to good honest blows, which the Lord in His mercy send as soon as may be, for this is cheerless work for Christian cavaliers.”
“That is well put, Carvahal,” said Candia, joining in the laugh that the old soldier’s sally raised, and glancing with no little satisfaction from his own mighty frame to the slim, graceful form of Molina, “yet methinks thou wilt not be the only one that gets there unmelted. Ay, it is an accursed land, as thou sayest, and will need a plenteous blessing of heathen gold applied to good Christian profit to sanctify it, for it seems full of evil enchantments.
“Look at those hills yonder. All day we have been riding and walking and labouring alongside them and towards them, and they are no whit nearer than when we started. And as for that green yonder—who knows that we shall reach it to-day or to-morrow? It looks but a couple of leagues away, and yet it may be twenty, or not there at all in reality, but only put there to lure us on by some enchantment of the false gods that these heathens pray to.”
“Thy horse knows better than that, Candia!” snorted Carvahal after a long sniff at the new element that was stealing into the air. “He can smell the grass and water if thou canst not; and so can I, cool and fresh and sweet. Ah, the smell of it is like a good draught of Jerez. I tell thee, to-night we shall camp amidst green fields by cool running waters. Carramba! we have had our bit of Hell to-day for our sins, and to-night we shall see a bit of Paradise for our labours.”
“Labours!” laughed Molina, seeing a chance to turn the tables on the jester. “Call ye these labours, my knight of the ample waistband! Why, it is but a summer’s day’s ride. Hadst thou been with us on Gallo, or on Gorgona or at Puerto de Hambre thou wouldst have learnt more of labour in getting thy breakfast than thou hast done in all this pleasure trip of ours from San Miguel here. And yet, maybe it was well for thee that thou wast swashbuckling in Italy at the time. What say you, Candia? Would it not have been hard for us to refrain when none of us had tasted meat for a month had we had so juicy a morsel within reach?”
“Ay,” said Candia, “that may well be. He would have kept the lot of us on Gallo for a month after the ships sailed away.”
“Carrajo, hombrecito!” Carvahal roared through the laugh that followed, “you are wrong there. It was well for you that I was killing Frenchmen in Italy rather than starving with you on Gallo, for ere I had taken in an inch of my waistband I would have eaten the lot of you and made soup of your bones. But there—a truce to jesting, which is dry work anywhere without wine, and more than ever in a wilderness like this. What think you of the prospects, Candia? Were you ever pledged to a madder-seeming task than this?”
“Mad it may be,” he answered more seriously, “yet those who would do great things must not fear going mad in the daring of them, and we have not done so badly so far. We have our fort at San Miguel and our ships on the coast, with Panama behind us, and El-Dorado in front of us, and more than that, is not all the news we have had good?
“Have not these heathens been fighting amongst themselves for years, and are we not coming like strong men armed into a house that is divided against itself? This Atahuallpa, by all accounts, is a base-born usurper and ruthless tyrant. He has devastated the land with civil war, thrown his half-brother Huascar, the rightful heir, into durance, and made the streets of the Golden City red with the blood of his kindred? Hast thou not seen enough of war and politics to know how great advantage this may be to us?”