CHAPTER I

Booty from Peru

TOWARD THE END OF A day in the year Fifteen Hundred and Thirty-one, as the air cooled slightly with the sun’s decline, the plaza of the little Spanish city of Panama grew languidly animate. The square had blazed, shimmered, and baked all day, shunned in its fervor except by those compelled to cross it in order to avoid the exertion of going round, or by the few straggling natives whose half-naked bodies and sun-tanned hides were proof; but this was the hour of listless awakening, and groups formed at the corners, exchanging gossip—if by a blessing there was gossip to exchange—and awaiting the