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tion, they prostrated themselves in the streets while the 
air was rent with piercing shrieks and wild exclama- 
tions, mixed with curses against his destroyers ; amidst 
which the last king of the children of the sun was torn 
in pieces by his executioners. 
But although Pizarro and his companions succeeded 
for a time in their career of blood and rapine, the pun- 
ishment of retribution was awarded them with dreadful 
severity. Pizarro, after having caused his old friend 
and fellow adventurer Diego de Almagro to be strangled 
in prison, for the sake of more effectually carrying his 
ambitious schemes into execution, was assassinated in 
his own palace, by the friends of Almagro, whose son was 
also beheaded for assuming supreme command,— while 
of the two brothers of Pizarro, Ferdinand and Gonzalo, 
we find one suffering death as a traitor, and the other 
enduring confinement for twenty-three years in a prison, 
both having followed the same career of crime as their 
brother the discoverer had done. While Carjaval, an 
able, but most ferocious warrior, a great prompter of 
the actions of Gonzalo Pizarro, and with whom he was 
executed, as a climax to this scene of carnage and 
ruthless war, actually boasted at the place of execution 
that he had massacred with his own hand 1400 Spa- 
niards, and 20,000 Indians ! ! 
Such was the beginning and the end of those men, 
who plunged a peaceable and virtuous people into 
wretchedness and despair for their own private ambition 
and inordinate love of gain. No act, however cruel,— no 
crime however ghastly- — neither the tie of friendship nor 
