shipwrecked and obliged to put in at Villa Rica for repairs. They were soon persuaded by generous treatment to join Cortez in his expedition against Mexico. Thus by patience and kind words he gained one hundred and fifty men, twenty horses and an abundance of arms and ammunition—all from his avowed enemies.
While Cortez was at Tepeaca, the scene of his recent victories, a messenger came to the camp from Tlascala with sad tidings. Maxixca, the old chief who had been so true a friend to the white men, lay dying of small-pox—a disease of which the Indians had never heard until the Europeans came—which was then raging fearfully throughout the country. To some of his people this affliction was a fresh reason for hatred to the Spaniards, but Maxixca saw in them the children of Feathered Serpent. He believed that they had come in fulfillment of ancient prophecy to claim their old possessions and to lead him and his people to the one true God. In his last hours he sent to Cortez for some one to come and teach him how to approach this great Being in whose presence he soon might stand. The priest Olmedo came in hot haste, and found the dying chief with a crucifix before him, to which his eyes were turned his old idols, which his fathers worshiped, had all been given up, and he had taken this instead. It was all he had learned of Jesus. In an age when the Church so perverted the truths of the gospel, though not so much given to the worship of the Virgin as afterward, it is good to know that the teaching of Olmedo was plain enough to lead the anxious soul of Maxixca to his true Saviour, so that he died confessing his faith in "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world." Four other Tlascalan chiefs were baptized with him.
