indeed strove to give him every consolation in his last days, but all his endeavours proved fruitless; melancholy had sunk too deeply into his heart. The caziquedom then devolved upon his son, from whom Alvarado extorted even more gold than from the father.
Alvarado then sent a small detachment of his troops to visit the other townships of the province, and distributed these among the settlers of the new town which he founded, to which he gave the name of Segura, because most of the new inhabitants had formerly settled in the town of Segura de la Frontera, or Tepeaca. After he had done all this, he ordered the vast quantity of gold he had collected from the townships to be securely packed, in order that he might take it with him to Mexico, and hand it over to Cortes; for he pretended that the latter had desired him to collect all the gold he possibly could, as it was to be forwarded to his majesty, to make up for the loss of that which Jean Florin had carried off to France; and that he had received particular instructions from our general not to divide any of it among the men who accompanied him on this expedition. When Alvarado was about to make preparations for his departure, a certain portion of his troops, mostly musketeers and crossbow-men, formed a conspiracy to put him and his brothers to death, because he had refused, after their repeated solicitations, to give them any share of the gold, or to distribute among them any very lucrative Indian townships.
This plot was fortunately discovered to father Olmedo by one of the conspirators, named Trebijo, the evening preceding the night on which the bloody deed was to have been carried out. Father Olmedo instantly communicated what he had heard to Alvarado, who was about to start, in company of some of the conspirators, to go a hunting. Alvarado therefore pretended to be taken with a sudden pain in his side, and turning to those who were to have accompanied him, he said, "Gentlemen, I must return to my quarters; let a barber immediately come to bleed me."