shouting like fiends, sought to penetrate to the center of their enemy's forces in a hand to hand encounter.
Their foes discomfited, they divided the spoils of war and enslaved their prisoners, sometimes offering up one or more of them to propitiate their gods of war, after they had humiliated the captives with all the marks of ignominy they could devise and had heaped innumerable execrations upon the principal leaders of their enemy. Usually there was but one prisoner sacrificed; when dead, the leaders sucked a little blood from the victim's warm heart, and then his skull was formed into a bowl from which wine, in true Hunnic fashion, was drunk at a banquet. At the termination of their wars with the Spaniards, a congress was always called on a plain situated between the Biobio and Duqueco rivers, where the Spanish president and the vice-toqui met in the presence of the armies and agreed upon the articles of peace.
The Araucanians made war a principal business, and their youths were early instructed in the use of arms, seldom punished, and were even applauded for lying and insolence. It was a saying with them, that chastisement makes men cowardly. We do not read of their having such grand military contests and chivalrous initiations as the Incas provided for the young men in their annual huaracus, but there were many military games in which the boys engaged; the games called peuco and palican were those most participated in, the first of these being a mimic siege of a fortress, the second having every appearance of a drawn battle. Having given some general insight into the political and military organization, the disposition and appearance of the Araucanians, we will now turn our attention again to Pedro de Yaldivia.
By the death of the elder Almagro, Pizarro fancied
