ldn't face that. Get
those ships ready and stock them and pipe sailors aboard, or there'd be
our kind Queen and King to deal with!"

"Wherever it is, we're going. Great folk are too tall and broad for us!"

"So there comes another crowd in the square, before the church. Out
steps Captain Martin Pinzon, and he cries, 'Men of Palos, for all you
doubt it, 'tis a glorious thing that's doing! Here is the _Nina_ that my
brothers and I own. She's going with Don Cristoval the Admiral, and the
men who are bound to me for fishing and voyaging are going, and more
than that, there is going Martin Alonso Pinzon, for I'll ask no man to
go where I will not go!'

"Then up beside him starts his brothers Vicente and Francisco, and they
say they are going too. Fray Ignatio stands on the church steps and
cries that there are idolaters there, and he will go to tell them
about our Lord Jesus Christ! Then the alcalde gets up and says that
the Sovereigns must be obeyed, and that the _Santa Maria_ and the Pinta
shall be made ready. Then the pilots Sancho Ruiz and Pedro Nino and
Bartolomeo Roldan push out together and say they'll go, and others
follow, seeing they'll have to anyhow! So it went that day and the next
and the next, until now they've pressed all they need. So I say, we are
here, brother, flopping in the net!"

"When does he sail?"

"Day after to-morrow, 'tis said. But we who don't live in Palos have our
orders to be there to-night. Aren't you going too, mate?"

I answered that I hadn't thought of it, and immediately, out of the
whole, there rose and faced me, "You have thought of it all the time!"

Sancho spoke. "If you'll go with us to Captain Martin Pinzon, he'll
enter you. He'd like to get another strong man."

I said, "I don't know. I'll have to think of it. Here is Palos, and
yonder the headland with La Rabida."

We entered the town. They would have had me go with them wherever they
must report themselves. But I said that I could not then, and at the
mouth of their street managed to leave them. I passed through Palos and
beyond its western limit came again to that house of the poorest where
I had lodged six months before and waking all night had heard the Tinto
flowing by like the life of a man. Long ago I had had some training in
medicine, and in mind's medicine, and three years past I had brought a
young working man living then in Marchena out of illness and melancholy.
His parents dwelled here in this house by the