The night was far spent before the place was cleared, and its doors closed and guarded. Juan Pizarro was riding slowly back toward the square when a Cañare, who had lurked about the Spaniard for an hour in a vain effort to approach and be heard without a cleft skull for his pains, touched his leg and sprang back with hands upraised. Juan halted.
"Well?" he demanded brusquely, scowling at the Indio. "Hast business with me? If so, be brisk." The Cañare jabbered a stream of broken words in Quichua, not intelligible, but something, it seemed to be, about the Inca,—enough to arrest the attention of Juan Pizarro, and he demanded impatiently of his brother:—
"What saith the dog, Gonzalo? Canst make it out? Here, thou, say it over and slowly."
The Cañare repeated his words with better effect,—with immediate and startling effect, for Juan turned with a shout to his companions: "Dost hear, Gonzalo? Do ye hear, Caballeros? The Inca hath fled the city!" He kicked the ribs of his horse and galloped madly to the palace of Viracocha, across the great court and into the hall that served as a guard-room, filling it with the clamor of hoofs, and throwing its occupants into confusion. They seized their arms in a panic.
"Ho! The trumpeter!" he roared. "Out, and sound to horse! Out, and sound to horse! _Presteza_! _Salta_! To horse! To horse!" He went out like a whirlwind. Before he had reached his quarters the shrill, quick notes were rising from the square. Again, and again, and again the stirring measure, and the stable was alive with men, tossing saddles, tugging at straps, swearing, and panting in a frenzy. One after another, and by twos and threes, the mailed riders swung into saddle, seized lances from the rack, and clattered out into the plaza. The line formed rapidly, and the plunging, kicking, and head-tossing of the excited steeds had hardly subsided before it was in column and, led by Juan Pizarro, took up a trot behind the Cañare.
The gloomy walls of the violated convent were growing gray in the dawn as the cavalcade roared past down the narrow, echoing streets and through the suburbs.
It was late afternoon when the troop reëntered Cuzco. It moved at a walk, and hanging on the pommel of the commander’s saddle was the _llautu_ of the Inca Manco. In the foremost rank of the column was a trooper without his helmet, with a bloody bandage across his face below the eyes. A weapon had passed the bars of his visor. Farther back was another, shorn of a pauldron and his right arm useless. In the rear, two Cañares carried a third on an improvised litter, dead. But in the middle of the column, between double files of troopers, marched the Inca and the Lord Mayta, blood-stained, bandaged, their arms bound behind their backs. Horses, riders, and the two prisoners, were splashed with mud.