Almagro was destined to receive small thanks for his intervention. The aged _conquistador_ laid claim to the city as part of his own dominions, and this woke into fresh activity the warfare between himself and Francisco Pizarro. Almagro, defeated, lost his head, a white and seventy-year-old head though it was. His fate by no means ended the tragedies in Peru. The current of sinister events was running here in a strangely full flood. It was only three years afterwards that Pizarro himself was murdered by his enemies, the adherents of Almagro's son, whom they wished to see elevated to the Governorship of the country, an event which actually occurred, although it proved of very short duration. By the time this had come about, the power of the Incas had been broken for good and all, so far as practical purposes were concerned. Driven from their temples and strongholds, certain sections of the race survived, although among them were remarkably few of the noble families who had formed the salt of the land. Great numbers of the rank and file of the race met with the fate which was at that time so universal throughout the country, or rather in its metal-bearing lands. They were sent to the mines, and, worked and flogged to death, their numbers diminished with a ghastly rapidity. Some sections, more fortunate, were at a rather later age set to agriculture, and, forced to somewhat more congenial tasks than the first workers, they continued to serve the Spaniards. CHAPTER VI SPANIARD AND NATIVE The collisions with the various peoples of the Continent had now afforded the _conquistadores_ an opportunity of testing the power of each. The force of the impact had, it is true, swept into the background the first peoples with whom they had come into contact; but, as the scanty numbers of the pioneers filtered across the new territories, they found that the task of annexation was by no means so easy in every case. So far as a warlike spirit was concerned, the difference between the aboriginal tribes of the tropics and those of the southern regions was most marked. The Incas were, in many respects, a warlike race--that is to say, they had possessed themselves by force of arms of the country in the neighbourhood of Lake Titicaca, wresting this from whatever tribe of the Aymaras it was which, highly civilized, had held the land before them. This nucleus of empire, once obtained, they had spread to the south and to the north, and to a certain extent to the east, conquering all with whom they had come into contact, with the notable exception of the Araucanians in Southern Chile.