Dusk was drawing down as I stole with little
trouble out of the house into the street and thence
into the maze of Santa Fe. That night I slept
with minstrels and jugglers, and at sunrise slipped
out of Cordova gate with muleteers. They were
for Cordova and I meant to go to Malaga. I meant
to find there a ship, maybe for Africa, maybe for
Italy, though in Italy, too, sits the Inquisition.
But who knows what it is that turns a man, unless we
call it his Genius, unless we call it God? I
let the muleteers pass me on the road to Cordova,
let them dwindle in the distance. And still I
walked and did not turn back and find the Malaga road.
It was as though I were on the sea, and my bark was
hanging in a calm, waiting for a wind to blow.
A man mounted on a horse was coming toward me from
Santa Fe. Watching the small figure grow larger,
I said, “When he is even with me and has passed
and is a little figure again in the distance, I will
turn south.”
He came nearer. Suddenly I knew him to be that
Master Christopherus who had entered the wedge of
shadow yesterday in the palace court. He was
out of it now, in the broad light, on the white road—on
the way to France. He approached. The ocean
before Palos came and stood again before me, salt
and powerful. The keen, far, sky line of it awoke
and drew!
Christopherus Columbus came up with me. I said,
“A
Palos sailor gives you good morning!”
Checking the horse, he sat looking at me out of blue-gray
eyes. I saw him recollecting. “Dress
is different and poorer, but you are the squire in
the crowd! `Sailor Palos sailor’—There’s
some meaning there too!”
He seemed to ponder it, then asked if I was for Cordova.
“No. I am going to Malaga where I take
ship.”
“This is not the Malaga road.”
“No. But I am in no hurry! I should
like to walk a mile with you.”
“Then do it,” he answered. “Something
tells me that we shall not be ill travelers together.”
I felt that also and no more than he could explain
it. But the reason, I know, stands in the forest
behind the seedling.
He walked his horse, and I strode beside. He
asked my name and I gave it. Juan Lepe.
We traveled Cordova road together. Presently
he said, “I leave Spain for France, and do you
know why?”
Said Juan Lepe, “I have been told something,
and I have gathered something with my own eyes and
ears. You would reach Asia by going west.”
He spoke in the measured tone of a recital often made
alike to himself and to others. “I hold
that the voyage from Palos, say, first south to the
Canaries and then due west would not exceed three
months. Yet I began to go west to India full
eighteen years ago! I have voyaged eighteen years,
with dead calms and head winds, with storms and back-puttings,
with pirates and mutinies, with food and water lacking,
