Old Ruminavi himself rode at the first man who broke the line, caught his sword-thrust on his own Spanish buckler, and then dealt him so shrewd a blow with a huge, copper-headed mace that he hammered in the iron of his cap as though it had been parchment and broke his skull like an egg-shell beneath it. Almost at the same time the Inca, seeing three troopers playing sad havoc with their long swords among his own guards, put his Spanish lance down and charged one of them so strongly and so truly that he drove him from the saddle and flung him down among the struggling footmen, there to be speedily stabbed to death. And then, letting go his lance and unhooking his battle-axe, he clove another through helm and skull to the chin. Then he wrenched his axe out just in time to take a sword-cut from the other on his shield and drove the blade under his still up-lifted arm and hurled him too, crippled and bleeding, to the ground. “Santiago! that was well hit, Señor Inca!” shouted Michael Asterre through the bars of his vizor. He had just forced his way through the press towards the mounted and mailed figure, longing to find some worthy foe to prove his new armour and weapons, and when he saw the third man go down under the Inca’s fierce attack he made sure he had found one; but to his amazement and disgust the Inca only turned in his saddle towards him and then leapt his horse over the dead and dying and flung himself into another part of the battle. All through the long burning afternoon the fight raged fast and furious, and until sundown Michael Asterre sought to close with the mailed figure that carried the sacred plumes in its helmet, but ever without success. Once only they came to blows, and then the Inca contented himself with taking the savage sword-cut on his buckler, and once more avoided the single combat without returning it. There was another of the Spaniards, a man clad and armed like one of the meanest troopers, who also seemed to the Inca to meet him at every turn in the battle and three times he wounded him without taking a scratch back. Indeed so light and half-hearted were his blows that Manco took him at last for some soldier enfeebled by disease, and so avoided him too as not worthy of his own royal steel.