se medicine"
after the Indian fashion. He says himself, "I have tried these things,
and they were very successful."

When the four wanderers at last came together after their long
separation,--in which all had suffered untold horrors,--Vaca had then,
though still indefinitely, the key of hope. Their first plan was to
escape from their present captors. It took ten months to effect it, and
meantime their distress was great, as it had been constantly for so many
years. At times they lived on a daily ration of two handfuls of wild
peas and a little water. Vaca relates what a godsend it seemed when he
was allowed to scrape hides for the Indians; he carefully saved the
scrapings, which served him as food for days. They had no clothing, and
there was no shelter; and constant exposure to heat and cold and the
myriad thorns of that country caused them to "shed their skin like
snakes."

At last, in August, 1535, the four sufferers escaped to a tribe called
the Avavares. But now a new career began to open to them. That his
companions might not be as useless as he had been, Cabeza de Vaca had
instructed them in the "arts" of Indian medicine-men; and all four began
to put their new and strange profession into practice. To the ordinary
Indian charms and incantations these humble Christians added fervent
prayers to the true God. It was a sort of sixteenth-century
"faith-cure;" and naturally enough, among such superstitious patients it
was very effective. Their multitudinous cures the amateur but sincere
doctors, with touching humility, attributed entirely to God; but what
great results these might have upon their own fortunes now began to dawn
upon them. From wandering, naked, starving, despised beggars, and slaves
to brutal savages, they suddenly became personages of note,--still
paupers and sufferers, as were all their patients, but paupers of mighty
power. There is no fairy tale more romantic than the career thenceforth
of these poor, brave men walking painfully across a continent as masters
and benefactors of all that host of wild people.

Trudging on from tribe to tribe, painfully and slowly the white
medicine-men crossed Texas and came close to our present New Mexico. It
has long been reiterated by the closet historians that they entered New
Mexico, and got even as far north as where Santa Fe now is. But modern
scientific research has absolutely proved that they went on from Texas
through Chihuahua and Sonora, and never saw a