hereby Firmin was to undertake certain business
transactions from time to time, and to supply immediately certain
necessaries, for the due delivery of which Harry gave his friend the
most minute instructions. This completed what the Inca was pleased to
regard as a very excellent and satisfactory day's work.

And now the young Englishman began to find his time very fully occupied,
so much so, indeed, that the days seemed not nearly long enough to
enable him to accomplish the half of what he wished to do. There was,
for instance, the learning of the Quichua language. Harry had not been
domiciled in his palace twenty-four hours before it had become patent to
him that this was the first task which he must undertake; for very few
of the nobles had any knowledge whatever of Spanish, and the
inconvenience and loss of time involved in conversing through an
interpreter were far too great to be passively endured. And, since he
could do very little else as satisfactorily as he would wish until he
had mastered this rich and expressive language, he devoted four hours of
every day--two in the morning and two in the evening--to its study.
Then he soon learned that, exclusive of the inhabitants of the Valley of
the Sun, there were some three hundred and fifty thousand Indians
scattered up and down the country, at least one in every ten of whom
might be counted as a fighting man. These people had to be brought into
the valley, housed, fed, disciplined, in preparation for the time when
arms should be put into their hands; also--what was more difficult
still--matters had to be so arranged that the families of these men, and
all dependent upon them, should suffer neither loss nor inconvenience
from the drafting of the able-bodied into the valley. Then the
arrangements and preparations for the importation of arms and ammunition
into the country--everything connected with which had, of course, to be
done entirely without the knowledge of the authorities--involved a
tremendous amount of hard and intricate work. It is therefore not to be
wondered at that during the first six months of his reign the young Inca
was unable to spare a single hour for amusement.

But the moment was at hand when Harry was to enjoy some sport of a quite
unique character; and the way in which it came about was thus. As he
stood one morning in the palace garden, gazing out over the lake, with
his faithful henchman Arima close at hand, an idea suddenly occurred