So the bloody, ruthless work went on, and ever the devoted throng round the Inca’s litter grew less and less, and the Spaniards forced their way nearer and nearer towards the sacred and hitherto inviolate person of the Son of the Sun. At length one of the men-at-arms, Michael Asterre by name, a soldier of huge frame and giant strength, burst through the last ring, struck down one of the bearers with a blow of his iron mace and, standing on his body, reached up and grasped Atahuallpa by the left arm. The litter rocked and swayed more violently than before, and just as Asterre was dragging him down a horse was driven close up, so close that the foam from its bit dripped upon the splendid feather work, and the deep voice of the Captain shouted-- “On thy life harm him not! Let go, I tell thee, or, by our Lady, I will cut thee down myself!” As Pizarro said this he stretched out his hand to save the falling Inca. At this moment Atahuallpa’s stupor vanished, and the flame of the old warrior spirit seemed to blaze out again at such an insult as no Inca had ever before suffered--the touch of a hostile hand. He snatched a dagger of polished copper from his girdle and struck at Pizarro with it, but before his hand fell a sword blade, whose hilt was in de Soto’s hand, leapt across the litter and struck the dagger from his hand. Yet the forceful stroke of the Inca’s arm beat the sword-blade down and drove the point into Pizarro’s wrist. “Well meant, de Soto, and I thank thee!” laughed Pizarro, as he saw the blood flow. “Yet I never thought that blood of mine would be shed by Spanish steel.”[13] Years afterwards he thought of this when the crime of that moment of his greatest triumph had been assessed at the bar of Eternal Justice, and the penalty of the ancient law, blood for blood, was about to be duly exacted. At the same moment de Soto’s horse, forced forward by the press behind it, stumbled against the litter and overturned it. Pizarro gripped the falling Inca and pulled him across his horse’s neck and, as he fell, Michael Asterre put out his hand and snatched the imperial borla from his brow. And thus was the Last of the Inca’s, the son of the great Huayna-Capac, and lord and master of many millions, discrowned by the hand of a common soldier who had embarked upon this wondrous enterprise for no better reason than to save himself from a debtors’ cell at Panama. BOOK III CHAPTER I. AN INCA’S RANSOM Nearly a week had passed since the massacre--for not even the Spanish chroniclers themselves have the hardihood to describe it as a battle--and Atahuallpa, but a few days ago the leader of a conquering host and the master of all the broad domains of the Incas, was now a close prisoner in that very House of the Serpent which he had ordered to be prepared for his reception before he came to his doom in Cajamarca.