"Lord High Admiral!" murmured one. "An office second only to royalty! This foreigner demands promotion over us who have been fighting and draining our veins and our purses for Spain this many a year!" "Governor-General with power to select his own deputies!" murmured another. "Why, he would be monarch absolute! What proof has he ever given that he knows how to govern!" "One tenth of all goods acquired by trade _or any other method_," protested still another. "What other method has he in mind?--robbery, piracy, murder, forsooth? And then, when complaints of his 'other method' are made, he alone is to judge the case! A sorry state of justice, indeed!" Now, when you see this from the Spaniards' point of view, can you not understand their indignation? Yet Columbus, too, had cause for indignation. True, these soldiers of Spain had risked much, but on land, and aided by powerful troops. _He_ was offering to go with a few men on a small ship across a vast unexplored sea; and that seemed to him a far greater undertaking than a campaign against the Moors. His position was much like that of the modern inventor who resents having the greater part of the profits of his invention given to those who promote it. Columbus's friends, the few men who had encouraged him and believed in him ever since he came to Spain, begged him to accept less, but he was inflexible. He was prepared to make the biggest journey man had ever dreamed of, and not one iota less would he take for it. But no such rewards would Talavera promise, and thus ended the interview for which Columbus had waited nearly seven years! And so he rode away from the lovely Moorish city, weary and dejected, yet hoping for better treatment when he should lay his plans before the French king. His ride took him across the fertile Vega (plain) of Granada and into a narrow mountain pass where the bleak Elvira Range towers three thousand feet above the road. But smiling plain and frowning mountain were alike to the brooding traveler. He noticed neither; nor, when he started across the ancient stone bridge of Pinos, did he notice that horsemen were galloping after him. They were Queen Isabella's messengers sent to bid the bold navigator return. They overtook him in the middle of the bridge, and then and there his trip to France ended. The queen, they told him, would accept his terms unconditionally. And Isabella kept her word. The next time Christopher Columbus rode forth from Granada it was not with bowed head and heavy heart, but with his whole soul rejoicing. We may be sure that he turned back for a last affectionate look at the lovely mountain city; for it had given him what historians now call "the most important paper that ever sovereign put pen to, "--a royal order for the long-desired ships and men with which to discover "lands in the west." CHAPTER II THE YOUTH OF COLUMBUS