itten gratefully of them.

In the spring his thirteen surviving companions determined to escape.
Vaca was too sick to walk, and they abandoned him to his fate. Two other
sick men, Oviedo and Alaniz, were also left behind; and the latter soon
perished. It was a pitiable plight in which Vaca now found himself. A
naked skeleton, scarce able to move, deserted by his friends and at the
mercy of savages, it is small wonder that, as he tells us, his heart
sank within him. But he was one of the men who never "let go." A
constant soul held up the poor, worn body; and as the weather grew less
rigorous, Vaca slowly recovered from his sickness.

For nearly six years he lived an incomparably lonely life, bandied about
from tribe to tribe of Indians, sometimes as a slave, and sometimes only
a despised outcast. Oviedo fled from some danger, and he was never heard
of afterward; Vaca faced it, and lived. That his sufferings were almost
beyond endurance cannot be doubted. Even when he was not the victim of
brutal treatment, he was the worthless encumbrance, the useless
interloper, among poor savages who lived the most miserable and
precarious lives. That they did not kill him speaks well for their
humane kindness.

The thirteen who escaped had fared even worse. They had fallen into
cruel hands, and all had been slain except three, who were reserved for
the harder fate of slaves. These three were Andres Dorantes, a native of
Bejar; Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado, a native of Salamanca; and the
negro Estevanico, who was born in Azamor, Africa. These three and Vaca
were all that were now left of the gallant four hundred and fifty men
(among whom we do not count the deserters at Santo Domingo) who had
sailed with such high hopes from Spain, in 1527, to conquer a corner of
the New World,--four naked, tortured, shivering shadows; and even they
were separated, though they occasionally heard vaguely of one another,
and made vain attempts to come together. It was not until September,
1534 (nearly seven years later), that Dorantes, Castillo, Estevanico,
and Vaca were reunited; and the spot where they found this happiness was
somewhere in eastern Texas, west of the Sabine River.

But Vaca's six years of loneliness and suffering unspeakable had not
been in vain,--for he had acquired, unknowingly, the key to safety; and
amid all those horrors, and without dreaming of its significance, he had
stumbled upon the very strange and interesting clew which