"For four?" exclaimed Balboa, as the old man retreated from the cell. "Who else have you enmeshed in your net, base wretch? Will not one victim suffice you? Who are they? Tell me."

"Who?" repeated the old man, mockingly, peering at his victim through the bars. "Why, who but Hernan de Arguello, Hernan Muños, Valderrabano, and Botello. Were they simply your friends, it were enough; but they are more: they are traitors to the king, and to me, Pedrarias de Avila, governor-in-chief of Darien, whose authority you have endeavored to usurp."

"They, my officers, condemned to die merely because they were friends, and loyal to me," groaned Balboa as, left in the solitude of his cell, he sank helpless to the floor. "Truly is this Pedrarias a fiend, an intimate of the devil, and scarce human! And they will die, being my friends, but no man's enemies."

Realizing that he had proceeded so far it was impossible to leave Balboa alive in the same land with himself, Pedrarias left no stone unturned to accomplish his death. Urged to activity by promise of the command of Balboa's expedition in the event of his death, the vile lawyer, Espinosa, found an indictment against the five which warranted his master in proclaiming they were doomed to die for treason against the king. The proclamation was made at Acla, and not in Antigua, where resided most of the settlers, because, as Pedrarias knew, it would provoke an uprising of the people.

While they were supremely loyal to the crown, and, in their timidity, afraid to declare against its representative, Pedrarias, the people of Darien were yet well inclined towards Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, and most of them his friends, because of his possessing many lovable qualities which the governor lacked.

When, affrighted at the vindictiveness of Pedrarias, Espinosa explained to him that the verdict against Balboa was technical only, and that on account of his great services he should be inclined to mercy, the fiend replied: "No, if he has merited death, let him suffer it. Die he must, and shall, and on your head be his blood!"

XX
THE END OF VASCO NUÑEZ DE BALBOA
1517

WE are compelled, in this chapter, to narrate the details of a horrible crime, to commit which the name of justice was invoked by its perpetrator, Pedro Arias de Avila, the one-time governor of Darien. We have followed the hero of this story, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, through the various stages of his career: a penniless adventurer, self-elected governor of Darien, savior of the settlement when on the point of dissolution, subjugator of the caciques, discoverer of the Pacific, faithful servant of the king, builder of the first brigantines that ploughed the waters of the great Southern Ocean. We are now to behold him led forth from his prison cell as a criminal, a traitor to his sovereign, and executed in the very town which was founded, through his unwearied efforts, in chief Careta's province.

He was then scarcely forty-two years of age, in the prime of life, seven long years of which had been passed in the wilderness of Darien. He had labored, he had fought, he had committed crimes against humanity—all that his sovereign might acquire a realm beyond the sea—and this was his reward: to perish as a felon, to die as a traitor, "in the full career of his glory, one of the most deserving of the Spanish discoverers—a victim to the basest and most perfidious envy." He had, indeed, deserved well of his king, for of all the Spaniards who explored the regions of America, he was one of the greatest, the most persistent in carrying the flag of his country into unknown lands, in compelling the inhabitants to accept his religion and acknowledge the sovereignty of Spain.

He was not the first of the Spanish explorers and conquistadores to experience that king's ingratitude, nor the last to meet a violent death. Columbus and Cortés died in their beds, but they were victims of their sovereign's neglect. De Soto, worn out by his toils, perished on the bank of the Mississippi, which became his grave. Ponce de Leon, returning to Florida, the land he had discovered, received his death-wound from an Indian arrow. Pizarro was assassinated, by men he had reduced to poverty and exasperated by his taunts.