All this, as he soon showed me, was happening as though the Fates which rule the world had especially prepared it for my coming. The people had no leader save a man who had been himself a tyrant before, and none trusted him, but looked to him only to serve their own ends. Those who had the power were hated, and those who sought to seize it were distrusted. But better than all was the utter, and, as far as all men, save ourselves, could see, the hopeless poverty of the country. Long years of plundering had emptied the treasury. Commerce was leaving the shores, and industries were languishing throughout the land. No man trusted his neighbour, for nearly all were in debt, and none could get paid, and my own people, the slaves of the children of the Spaniards, and the sport of their blind and brutal jesting, had borne their heavy burdens till their backs were sore, sore as their patient hearts were, and they would bear them no longer. From the country which is called Ecuador, and which in my other life had been Quito, the kingdom of Atahuallpa, to the southern confines of Bolivia, which had once been part of the Land of the Four Regions, the dominions of my own father, all were ready to throw down their long-borne burdens and turn and rend their oppressors and those whose fathers had robbed them of the land that had once been theirs. I well remember the very words in which Francis Hartness told me all this at much greater length than I have set it down here; and this is what he said when, as the stars were paling in the sky above us and the eastern mountains were beginning to stand out sharply against the growing light of the coming dawn, our long talk drew to its close,-- 'In short, Vilcaroya, if I were given to that sort of thing, I could believe that the very Fates themselves had conspired to prepare the way for you. You have come back to the world and to your own country at the very moment that these miserable wretches are getting ready to tear each other to pieces. The government is as hopeless as it is impossible, and the popular party, as they call themselves, have neither a leader that they can trust, nor money to buy weapons and pay their soldiers with. The treasury is empty, for, so to speak, almost the last dollar had been stolen. The native troops have had no regular pay for months, and I believe they would desert to a regiment if they once believed that you are what you are, and that you possess, as you do, the means of paying them well and honestly for their help.