Only a bronze-skinned, straight-haired, black-eyed lad who has yet to see his twentieth summer, and yet one who is ere long, for the sake of a pretty face and a pair of eyes brighter and softer than his own, to compass the ruin of one into whose presence his father would scarcely have dared to crawl uninvited through the dust. Of a sudden Pizarro’s charger raised his head, and after drinking in with widened nostrils a long, deep breath, let out a shrill, whinnying neigh which was instantly taken up by all the other animals in the troop, and with one accord they quickened their pace as though they had drunk in some new principle of life through the air they were breathing. “Ah,” cried Carvahal, straightening his short, thick legs out from his charger’s flanks, and throwing his arms wide apart, “Cuerpo de Jesu, the good beasts smell the green and the water at last! Carramba! Caballeros, some of us will be glad to get out of this, I fancy, for the good God seems to have made this accursed country in patches with pieces of Paradise and the Inferno, and then, for some wise purpose of His own, left it unfinished at that. It’s a land where one must either get fat and soft and lazy with luxury in valleys that would be no shame to Paradise itself, or else starve and parch in deserts hardly fit for a heretic to die in!” “It would be a dry desert and a hot one that would melt much of the fat off of that goodly carcase of thine, Carvahal,” said Pedro de Candia, with a laugh, half turning in his saddle towards him; “though doubtless that poor nag of thine would willingly carry thee over a few leagues of desert if thereby he could save himself a few pounds of thy weight to carry. More than once I have seen the poor beast look back at thee to see if thou wert not sweating thyself somewhat smaller.” “Ay, and I too,” laughed Alonso de Molina; “and yet though this heathen wilderness hath to-day had more rain than it has ever had, and that, too, dripping from good Christian skins, methinks thou, Carvahal, hast done less than any of us to lay the accursed dust.” “Even so,” growled Carvahal, “and for good reason too, for if there are many more rides like this before us some of ye will get to Atahuallpa’s camp, wherever the heathen may be lodged, with nothing more than your bones rattling inside your mail, and so a man or two with good flesh and blood inside his harness may be wanted when it comes to good honest blows, which the Lord in His mercy send as soon as may be, for this is cheerless work for Christian cavaliers.”