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.
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