I let him go thinking that I would come to him presently.
But I, too, had to act under the god of friends. In Diego
Lopez's room I found quill and ink and paper, and there I
wrote a letter to Don Enrique, and finding Diego gave it to
him to be given in two hours into Don Enrique's hand.
Then Juan Lepe the squire changed in his own room, narrow
and bare as a cell, to the clothing of Juan Lepe the sailor.



CHAPTER VII

DUSK was drawing down as I stole with little trouble
out of the house into the street and thence into the
maze of Santa Fe. That night I slept with minstrels
and jugglers, and at sunrise slipped out of Cordova gate
with muleteers. They were for Cordova and I meant to go to
Malaga. I meant to find there a ship, maybe for Africa,
maybe for Italy, though in Italy, too, sits the Inquisition.
But who knows what it is that turns a man, unless we call
it his Genius, unless we call it God? I let the muleteers
pass me on the road to Cordova, let them dwindle in the
distance. And still I walked and did not turn back and
find the Malaga road. It was as though I were on the sea,
and my bark was hanging in a calm, waiting for a wind to
blow. A man mounted on a horse was coming toward me
from Santa Fe. Watching the small figure grow larger, I
said, "When he is even with me and has passed and is a
little figure again in the distance, I will turn south."