with witchcraft, the people seized and threw him into a river; and as he floated, by his own law he was declared a witch, and put to death accordingly. In more ways than one, he who invents a guillotine is often the first to suffer by it. It is not wise to sow dragons’ teeth, and expect therefrom a happy harvest.
Now Diego Velazquez had all his life been sowing dragons’ teeth, and hunting witches, and building guillotines, and brazen bulls.
Starting from Spain in the guise of a noble old soldier, as he advertised himself, though some said of him that his sword was bloodless and his bravery bravado, he served the usual apprenticeship in the New World, chasing, and mutilating, and murdering, and enslaving natives, working to death on his plantations those saved for this most cruel fate.
For this and similar service Diego Colon, then ruling the Indies at Española, sent him to Cuba to play governor there over those inoffensive and thrice unlucky savages. Fraud being native to his character, no sooner was he fairly seated than he repudiated his late master and benefactor, and reported directly to the king, even as his own captain of the Mexican expedition was now doing.
Another of his guillotines was the vile treatment of Grijalva for not disobeying orders, on which score he could not complain against Grijalva’s successor.
Yet, as head and heart frosted with time the Cuban governor was not happy: misdeeds never bring true or lasting happiness. His bitterness, however, was but in the bloom; the full fruit of his folly would come only after the consummation of events upon the continent, grand as yet beyond conception.
Ordinarily it is much easier to kill a man than to create one; in this instance it was extremely difficult to kill the man that he had made.