et them
think we are covering only this."

I could but laugh. Two reckonings! After all, he was not Italian for
nothing!

"The master knows," he said, "and also Diego de Arana. But at least one
other should know. Two might drown or perish from sickness. I myself
might fall sick and die, though I will not believe it!" He paused a
moment, then said, looking directly at me, "I need one in whom I can
utterly confide. I should have had with me my brother Bartholomew. But
he is in England. A man going to seek a Crown jewel for all men should
have with him son or brother. Diego de Arana is a kinsman of one whom
I love, and he partly believes. But Roderigo Sanchez and the others
believe hardly at all. There is Fray Ignatio. He believes, and I confess
my sins to him. But he thinks only of penitents, and this matter needs
mind, not heart alone. Because of that sense of the stars, I tell you
these things."

The next day it came to me that in that Journal which he meant to make
like Caesar's Commentaries, he might put down the change in the _Santa
Maria's_ physicians and set my name there too often. I watched my chance
and finding it, asked that he name me not in that book. His gray eyes
rested upon me; he demanded the reason for that. I said that in Spain I
was in danger, and that Juan Lepe was not my name. More than that I did
not wish to say, and perchance it were wiser for him not to know. But I
would not that the powerful should mark me in his Journal or elsewhere!

Usually his eyes were wide and filled with light as though it were sent
into them from the vast lands that he continuously saw. But he could be
immediate captain and commander of things and of men, and when that was
so, the light drew into a point, and he became eagle that sees through
the wave the fish. Had he been the seer alone, truly he might have been
the seer of what was to be discovered and might have set others upon the
path. But he would not have sailed on the _Santa Maria_!

In his many years at sea he must many times have met men who had put to
sea out of fear of land. He would have sailed with many whose names, he
knew, were not those given them at birth. He must have learned to take
reasons for granted and to go on--where he wished to go on. So we gazed
at each other.

"I had written down," he said, "that you greatly helped the sick, and
upon Bernardo Nunez's going to the _Nina_, became our physician. But I
will write no more of you, and that wr