small means. > Unpleasant as it may be, the survivors may as well bear in mind that it will be less difficult another
So the conspirators are promptly seized and sentenced, Escudero and Cermeño to be hanged, Umbría to lose his feet, and others to receive each two hundred lashes.2 Under cover of his cloth Padre Diaz, the ringleader and most guilty of them all, escapes with a reprimand. As for the rest, though among them were some equally guilty, they were treated with such dissembling courtesy and prudence as either to render them harmless or to convert them into friends.
“Happy the man who cannot write, if it save him from such business as this!” exclaimed the commander, as he affixed his name to the death-warrants.
For notwithstanding his inexorable resolve he was troubled, and would not see his comrades die though they would have sacrificed him. On the morning of the day of execution he set off at breakneck speed for Cempoala, after ordering two hundred soldiers to follow with the horses and join a similar force which had left three days before under Alvarado.3