“Friends and comrades and cavaliers of Spain! On yonder side are toil and hunger, nakedness, the pitiless storm and the drenching rain, and it may be a grave in the unknown wilderness. On this side are ease, and pleasure, and safety; but yonder lies El-Dorado with its gold and silver and gems, the glory of conquest and the hope of dominion. Here is Panama, poverty and dishonour. Now choose each of you that which seems to you best becoming a brave Castilian. For my part I go south.” And with that he stepped across the line. There he faced them, one man daring Fate which had already almost done its worst upon him, still defying its further terrors. The others, both his own men and Tafur’s, stared at him for a space, stricken dumb with wonder and reverence for him. Then Ruiz broke loose from the group amidst which he stood, and saying simply: “Señor Capitan, if none other follow you, I will!” walked across the line. Close following him came Pedro de Candia with his drawn sword across his shoulder, marching in silence like a soldier at parade. Then Alonso de Molina, who crossed himself and said-- “God must be with such a man as that. Come, comrades, yonder is the only road for a brave man!” And after him there came one by one eleven others, of whom some crossed the line in silence without looking back, while some prayed and others laughed, and others went sideways, beckoning to those behind as though mocking their lack of courage; but when the fifteenth man, who was named Juan de la Torre, had gone over, the rest hung back and not a man of them moved, but each looked at the other and then at the little group beyond the line and then at the ships. And so the Line of Fate was drawn, and so was the wheat divided from the chaff and the gold of true valour from the dross, and thus did Francisco Pizarro, the base-born captain of adventurers, draw his sword in the face of a frowning destiny, and with it trace on the shifting sands the line of a mighty nation’s fate, and thus did he step over it, he and those who were faithful to him, out of the obscurity of his former life into the light of a fame that shall last while the world endures. That afternoon Lorenzo Tafur sailed away with his ships and the faint-hearts who were not found worthy of great deeds; but after much argument and altercation he had been persuaded to leave a small portion of stores on the island, and he also took with him Bartolomeo Ruiz, the Pilot, charged with urgent messages to Almagro and De Luque, through whose hands came the funds that had been furnished by the Licentiate Espinosa for this and other expeditions, telling them of the resolution come to by Pizarro and his companions, and praying them to do all that in them lay to bring the succour they so sorely needed.