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There was no other point except the Pinon from which we could certainly see the enemy on their route and be ourselves hidden. This mountain, then, must be reached; and how were we to effect it without crossing the trail? After our arrival at Ojo de Vaca, Seguin drew the men together to deliberate on this matter.
"I should like one of those," she said, indicating a floating flower. "It's too far out," he responded, and she turned her slow scrutiny upon him. Her eyes were neither blue nor gray but green, the green of a stone. "That you are agreeable is more important than you know," she said deliberately. "And de Vaca " she conveyed a sense of disdain. "What is it that he wants so much from you?
He began, then, to make points, touches, wherever he chose with a remarkably timed twist he tore the cloth heart from Charles' wadding; he indicated, as though he were a teacher with a pointer, anatomical facts and regions; de Vaca seemed to be calling Charles' attention, by sharp premonitory taps, to what he might have been saying.
Cabeza de Vaca was one of Narvaez's men who was cast ashore in one of the two boats ever heard from, on the coast of Texas. He wandered for six years in that country before reaching the Spanish settlements in Old Mexico, and it was his account of what he saw there and in Florida that led to the later expeditions of both Soto and Coronado.
"There's no harm in the desert sun so long as you keep something between it and your head. I've known Indians to get along for days with only the shade of their arrows." The children snuggled under the feathery shadow of the mesquite beside him. "We're looking for the trail of the Iron Shirts," said Oliver. "Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca," added Dorcas Jane, who always remembered names.
At Guamanga, Vaca de Castro received another embassy from Almagro, of similar import with the former. The young chief again deprecated the existence of hostilities between brethren of the same family, and proposed an accommodation of the quarrel on the same basis as before. To these proposals the governor now condescended to reply.
At the same period, he received letters from Vaca de Castro, whose vigilant eye watched all the aspects of the time, -cautioning Gonzalo and his friends not to be seduced, by any wild schemes of reform, from their allegiance. And, to check still further these disorderly movements, he ordered his alcaldes to arrest every man guilty of seditious language, and bring him at once to punishment.
On getting aboard ship, Friar Gaspard presented his commission to Cueto and gave him a full account of the state of affairs, in presence of the licentiate Vaca de Castro, who still remained a prisoner in that vessel.
A combat with Indians ensued from which De Vaca and three others escaped with their lives. After spending six years with the Indians as captives, he reached Mexico in 1536, meanwhile making the journey here described. He returned to Spain in 1537, and in 1540 was made Governor of Paraguay, which he explored in 1543.
Cabeza de Vaca and his companions were soon afterwards joined by the Spaniards who had escaped from the wreck of another bark. At first they were in all eighty men; but in a short time their number was reduced to fifteen, as they were forced to winter on the island, exposed to excessive cold and great scarcity of provisions.
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