here was more sharp fighting, but nothing like the Homeric combats of
the first investment. The Peruvians had risen all over the land.
Detached parties of Spaniards had been cut off without mercy.
Francisco Pizarro was besieged in Lima. Messengers and ships were
despatched in every direction, craving assistance. Francisco did not
know what had happened in Cuzco, and the brothers in that city began to
despair of their being extricated from their terrible predicament.
Help came to them from an unexpected source.

We left Almagro marching toward Chili. His was no lovely promenade
through a pleasant, smiling, fertile, wealthy land. He traversed vast
deserts under burning skies. He climbed lofty mountains in freezing
cold and found nothing. In despair, he turned back to Peru. The
limits assigned to Pizarro were {102} not clear. Almagro claimed that
the city of Cuzco was within his province, and determined to return and
take it. On the way his little army, under the command of a very able
soldier named Orgonez, met and defeated a large army of Peruvians.
This, taken with the arrival of the harvest time, which must of
necessity be gathered if the people were not to starve, caused the
subsequent dissipation of the Peruvian army. The Inca maintained a
fugitive court in the impregnable and secret fastnesses of the
mountains, but the Peruvians never gave any more trouble to the
Spaniards. They had spent themselves in this one fierce but futile
blow. I am glad for the sake of their manhood that at least they had
fought one great battle for their lands and liberties.

[Illustration: "He Threw His Sole Remaining Weapon in the Faces of the
Escaladers"]

VII. "The Men of Chili" and the Civil Wars

Almagro, assisted by treachery on the part of some of the Spaniards who
hated the Pizarros, made himself master of the city, and, breaking his
plighted word, seized Hernando and Gonzalo.

Meanwhile Francisco, the Marquis, had despatched a certain captain
named Alvarado with a force to relieve Cuzco. Almagro marched out with
his army and defeated the superior force of Alvarado in the battle of
Abancay, in July, 1537, in which, through the generalship of Orgonez,
Alvarado's troops were captured with little or no loss in Almagro's
army. Almagro had left Gonzalo Pizarro behind in Cuzco, but had taken
Hernando, heavily guarded, with him. Orgonez had urged Almagro to put
both of them to death. "Dead men," he pithily remarked