Taxmar’s acute mind was adjusting itself to this event, which was not altogether unexpected.  He had heard more than Aguilar had about the previous visits of the Spaniards to that coast.  He asked Aguilar if he thought that the strange warriors would accept him, their countryman, as ambassador, and deal mildly with Taxmar and his people, if they let him go.  Aguilar answered that he thought they would.

Now freedom was within his grasp, and only one thing delayed him.  He could not leave his comrade Guerrero behind.  The sailor had married the daughter of a chief and become a great man in his adopted country.  Aguilar sent Indian messengers with the letter and a verbal message, and waited.

Guerrero had never known much about reading, and he had forgotten nearly all he knew.  He understood, however, that he could now return to Spain.  Before his eyes rose a picture of the lofty austere sierras, the sunny vineyards, the wine, so unlike pulque, the bread, so unlike flat cakes of maize, the maidens of Barcelona and Malaga, so very different from tattooed Indian girls.  And then he surveyed his own brawny arms and legs, and felt of his own grotesquely ornamented countenance.

To please the taste of his adopted people he had let himself be decorated as they were, for life,—­with tattooed pictures, with nose-ring, with ear-rings of gold set with rudely cut gems and heavy enough to drag down the lobe of the ear.  He would cut a figure in the streets of Seville.  The little boys would run after him as if he were a show.  He grinned, sighed mightily, and sent word to Aguilar that he thought it wiser to stay where he was.  Aguilar set out for the coast with the Cozumel Indians, but this delay had consumed all of the eight days appointed, and when they reached Point Cotoche the caravels had gone.

But a broken canoe and a stave from a water-barrel lay on the beach, and with the help of the messengers Aguilar patched up the canoe, and with the board for a paddle, made the canoe serve his need.  Following the coast they came to the narrowest part of the channel between the mainland and Cozumel, and in spite of a very strong current got across to the island.  No sooner had they landed when some Spaniards rushed out of the bushes, with drawn swords.  The Indians were about to fly in terror, but Aguilar called to them in their own language to have no fear.  Then he spoke to the Spaniards in broken Castilian, saying that he was a Christian, fell on his knees and thanked God that he had lived to hear his own language again.

The Spaniards looked at this strange figure in absolute bewilderment.  He was to all appearance an Indian.  His long hair was braided and wound about his head, he had a bow in his hand, a quiver of arrows on his back, a bag of woven grass-work hung about his neck by a long cord.  The pattern of the weaving was a series of interwoven crosses.  Cortes, giving up hope of rescuing any Christian captives, had left