Ojeda was asking Juan de la Cosa about the nature of the country.  It seemed to him the ideal field for a man of spirit and high heart.  How glorious a conquest would it be to abolish the vile superstitions of the barbarians and set up the altars of the true faith!

The pilot was a little amused and somewhat doubtful; he knew something of savages, and Ojeda and the priests on board did not.  It was not, he suggested, always easy to convert stubborn heathen.  A pig was a small animal, but Ojeda would remember that to the Moslem it was as great an object of aversion as a lion.

“Ho!” said Ojeda superbly, “that is quite—­” He was interrupted by a blow that knocked his legs out from under him and landed him on the ground in a sitting position with his hat over his eyes.

“Who did that?” he cried, leaping to his feet, hand on sword.

“Only a pig, my lord,” the sailor answered choking with half-swallowed laughter.  It was a pig, which the sailors had goaded to such a state of desperation that it had bolted straight into the group as a pig will, and was now galloping away, pursued by a great variety of maledictions and persons.  “They have got the creature now,” he added, “You are not hurt?” for Ojeda was actually pale with indignation and disgust.

“No,” sputtered the youth, “but that pig—­that p-pig—­” He looked around him with an eye which seemed to challenge any beholder of whatever condition, to laugh and be instantly run through.  Fortunately most of those on the wharf had been too much occupied to see Ojeda fall before the pig, and just then the trumpets blew, and all hastened to get back on board ship.

When an expedition is composed largely of hot-headed youths trained to the use of arms, each of whom has a code of honor as sensitive as a mimosa plant and as prickly as a cactus, the lot of their commanders is not happy.  It may have been Ojeda’s treasured talisman which saved him from several sudden deaths during the following weeks, but Juan de la Cosa privately believed it was partly the memory of the pig.  The young man had what might in another time and civilization have developed into a sense of humor.  It would not do for a hero with the world before him to get himself sent back to Spain because of some trivial personal quarrel.

On reaching Hispaniola the adventurers found plenty of real occupation awaiting them.  The little colony which the Admiral had left at Navidad on his first voyage had been wiped out.  The natives timidly explained that a fierce chief from the interior, Caonaba, had killed or captured all the forty men of the garrison and destroyed their fort.  Colon was obliged to remodel all his plans at a moment’s notice.  Instead of finding a colony well under way, and in control of the wild tribes or at least friendly with them, he found the wreck of a luckless attempt at settlement, and the kindly native villagers turned aloof and suspicious, and living in dread of a second raid by Caonaba.  He chose a site for a second settlement on the coast, where ships could find a harbor, not far from gold-bearing mountains which the natives described and called Cibao.  This sounded rather like Cipangu.