Atahualpa, suspecting a menace, stood up in his litter and ordered his soldiers to prepare. Pizarro and his men grasped their arms and rushed forth. The trumpets sounded; the mounted Spaniards rode to the charge; the Indians, stricken with terror at the sound of the guns, retreated in panic; and the Christians, falling upon the Inca army, triumphed, massacring the Indians like sheep. Then they raised their eyes to heaven, giving thanks for this great victory. The conquest of Peru was, by this easy victory, already theirs. The Inca chief had been taken prisoner in the engagement. He was a man of some thirty years of age, good-looking, fierce, stoic, a good reasoner and speaker, and the Spaniards regarded him as a wise man and treated him well at first. Probably they felt his superiority over them, these rude knights of the conquest. Great chiefs came from all parts of Peru to do him homage in his captivity. Huascar, his brother, had been murdered, it is said, by Atahualpa's orders; and Pizarro was wroth at this occurrence. The scene changes again. Fearing that, sooner or later, the white men would kill him, Atahualpa offered them a princely ransom for his release. "What ransom can you give?" asked Pizarro, seeing thereby a means of securing untold gold. "And when and how can you deliver it?" The imprisoned chieftain raised his arm to a white line that ran high around the wall of his chamber or cell. "I will fill this room up to that line with gold," he said--"gold as pots and vases, gold as nuggets and as dust. I will fill this room, also, twice over with silver, in addition. That shall be my ransom, and it shall be completed in two months' time." The offer, naturally, was accepted. "Have no fear," said Pizarro. The Inca sent swift messengers to Cuzco, the capital, hundreds of miles to the south, along the rugged Cordillera, with orders that two thousand Indians should bring the golden vessels from the temples and the palaces. One of the remarkable institutions of the Inca Empire was the system of posts, established along the famous roads. Relays of postmen or runners were kept stationed at the _tambos_ or post-houses. When a message was despatched, the runner ran his section at full speed, shouting out the message to the next waiting postman, who immediately proceeded to cover his stage in the same way; and thus the message was conveyed with the utmost speed for hundreds of miles. Stores of gold began to arrive--vases, jars, pots, some weighing as much as twenty-five pounds each of the precious metal. The Spaniards one day saw a remarkable spectacle upon the precipitous mountain track, on the farther side of the valley--a line of golden pots, borne on llamas, gleaming in the sun, coming to Cajamarca for the royal ransom.