He had already been ill, but not seriously. Now he went to his house to take to his bed; and when a letter arrived not many days after from his sovereigns, reproaching him for his conduct, he groaned aloud, and turned his face to the wall. A few days later he died.
The part which Diego and Juan took was very much brighter than this. They had nothing wherewith to reproach themselves, and they enjoyed to the full the rôle of hero which was forced upon them.
At the convent, in particular, where Diego went with Juan the very first thing, they were made so much of that it is a wonder they were not ruined. The other boys followed them about like dumb cattle after a leader; and when either, but especially Diego, opened his lips, you would have thought some of the gold of Haiti was about to fall from them, so eagerly did his old schoolmates watch them.
As for the nuggets, Diego and Juan were not niggards with them, and would have melted them away in the warmth of their generosity in a very short time, had not Vicente Yanez Pinzon, the brother next to Martin Alonzo, and the captain of the Niña, taken him aside and talked with him.
Well, he had already been generous enough, so he permitted his cousin to take his money and put it in a safe place. And, indeed, some of the property bought with that money can be seen to this day, still owned by a Pinzon, too, in the little town of Moguer, about a league from Palos.
After that? Well, after that Diego and Juan made many a voyage to the newly discovered countries, and lived to learn what Christoval Colon never did learn—that they had actually discovered a new continent, and not Asia at all.
“DIEGO RELATES HIS ADVENTURES TO THE CONVENT BOYS.”
And they were with Vicente Yanez Pinzon when he and that Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, made the voyage together—an account of which voyage being widely read over Europe was the means of gaining for Vespucci the unmerited honor of having been the first to reach the continent, whereby his name is to this day attached to the country discovered.