Then his thoughts shifted on to his first expedition southward from Panama, and he reviewed one by one with unsparing exactness the long succession of labours and disasters that had daunted well nigh every heart but his. He thought of his little, crazy, overloaded ships struggling against storms and contrary currents; of the pestilential swamps and fever-haunted forests through which he had led his ever-dwindling little band of followers, and of the twenty-seven men who, one by one, had starved to death under his eyes in Hunger Bay--just as those companions of his down yonder must soon starve if help did not come. Then at length his thoughts took a brighter hue as they turned back to the day on which that young naked savage lad, son of the cacique Commogre on the mountains above Darien, had laughed at the Spaniards for quarrelling about a few pounds’ weight of gold and, pointing to the southward, had told them of the unknown sea and the lands that lay along its borders where gold was as common as the stones by the wayside and silver as the wood in the forests; and lastly he remembered how he himself had had that brief glimpse of El-Dorado at Tacamez which had lured him on to this, his second, journey which had ended here on the desert shores of Gallo and in the pitiless clutches of famine and despair. Surely thoughts like these were enough to shake the heart and turn back the steps of many a man who might well yield to such ill-fortune and yet still be accounted brave; but it was not such a man who stood beside the flagstaff-cairn on Gallo and stared out in defiance of Fate itself over that dreary sea and into those all-circling glooms. If he had been he would never have written the name of Francisco Pizarro in letters of blood and flame across the Western World beside that of Hernando Cortes, and, though he knew it not, ere that day’s gloom had deepened into the darker gloom of night, he was to show by a few brief words and one all-decisive act what manner of man he truly was. The diggers on the beach had ended their task and were roasting the wretched fruits of their labours over a few smoky fires of mouldering sticks in the driest places among the rocks. But Pizarro, still seemingly lost in his thoughts, made no motion to join them at their meal, and presently a man whose short, sturdy, strong-built frame seemed to have defied so far both famine and sickness, came with short, active steps up on to the platform, carrying a drinking-can in one hand and a wooden platter in the other. “Since you did not come to your breakfast, Señor Capitan, I have brought it to you,” he said in a cheery voice, as Pizarro saw him and came to meet him. “’Tis poor fare enough, but as good as this God-forgotten wilderness affords. This is almost the last of the wine, but the fish is passable, though the biscuit would be better if there were more bread and less mould.”