“I see thou hast taken my meaning even before I spoke it, de Candia, and so thou hast left me but little more to say. We are few but strong against many whose only strength is in their numbers. It may be, as indeed seems most likely to me, that we have been decoyed by fair-seeming appearances into a trap, but if so this would not be the first time that the caged animal has turned and rent his captor. For us there is no escape save through the red road of battle and victory. These people, as I have said, are strong only in their numbers, and more than that, from what we have seen it is manifest that they are a huge body which moves and acts by the thought and will of a single head. “To strike the body would be but to bury our weapons, as it were, in a mountain of flesh, which would be as vain a work as striking an elephant with a dagger. Wherefore it will be as plain to you as it is to me that if we are to reduce this vast body to our will and purposes--nay, if we are to prevent it from eating us, alive or dead, at a mouthful, we must strike swift and straight and strong at its head. “In a word,” he went on, tapping with his forefinger on the table in front of him, “it is not upon this Inca empire with its innumerable legions that we must make war; it is upon Atahuallpa himself, and in that warfare our first weapon must be that of the weak: we must use cunning first and steel afterwards. Atahuallpa, himself a usurper who has divided the empire of his father in war with his brother, has, to my mind, led us here into a trap baited with a simulation of kindness and welcome and with the sight of gold and silver and gems such as we have here about us. It is for us, having no retreat, to take the fowler in his own snare.” He paused again and looked about him as though expecting an answer from some one. But no answer came. Bold as they were, the quiet daring of this tremendous proposition was more than they could grasp at the first view of it. For a hundred and sixty men, less than half a troop of cavalry, isolated in a strange land, cut off from all resources save such as they could make for themselves, in the midst of a land whose extent they only dimly dreamt of, and confronted and, it might be, surrounded with armies of unknown numbers, to take captive the lord and master of uncounted thousands looked at first sight an enterprise such as only demigods could dare, and yet another moment’s thought showed them that the masterful genius of Pizarro had in those few weighty sentences pointed out the only possible way to victory and the only means of saving the little army of adventurers from destruction.