Chapter VI: Part 6

If you sit there long enough and nobody comes by to interrupt, you can taste the salt of the spindrift over the banks of Cay Verde, and watch the palmetto leaves begin to wave like swords in the sea wind. That is what happened to Oliver and Dorcas Jane. The water stirred and shimmered and the long flock of flamingoes settled down, each to its own mud hummock on the crowded summer beaches. All at once Oliver thought of something.

"I wonder," he said, "if there are trails on the water and through the air?"

"Why, of course," said the Man-of-War Bird; "how else would we find our islet among so many? North along the banks till we sight the heads of Nassau, then east of Stirrup Cay, keeping the scent of the land flowers to windward, to the Great Bahama, and west by north to where blue water runs between the Biscayne Keys to the mouth of the Miami. That is how we reach the mainland in season, and back again to Cay Verde."

"It sounds like a long way," said Oliver.

"That's nothing," said the tallest Flamingo. "We go often as far east as the Windward Islands, and west to the Isthmus. But the ships go farther. We have never been to the place where the ships come from."

It was plain that the Flamingo was thinking of a ship as another and more mysterious bird. The Man-of-War Bird seemed to know better. The children could see, when he stretched out his seven-foot spread of wing, that he was a great traveler.

"What _I_ should like to know," he said, "is how the ships find their way. With us we simply rise higher and higher, above the fogs, until we see the islands scattered like green nests and the banks and shoals which from that height make always the same pattern in the water, brown streaks of weed, gray shallows, and deep water blue. But the ships, though they never seem to leave the surface of the water, can make a shorter course than we in any kind of weather."

Oliver was considering how he could explain a ship's compass to the birds, but only the tail end of his thinking slipped out. "They call some of them men-of-war, too," he chuckled.

"You must have thought it funny the first time you saw one," said Dorcas Jane.

"Not me, but my ancestors," said the Man-of-War Bird; "_they_ saw the Great Admiral when he first sailed in these waters. They saw the three tall galleons looming out of a purple mist on the eve of discovery, their topsails rosy with the sunset fire. The Admiral kept pacing, pacing; watching, on the one hand, lest his men surprise him with a mutiny, and on the other, glancing overside for a green bough or a floating log, anything that would be a sign of land. We saw him come in pride and wonder, and we saw him go in chains."

Like all the Museum people, the Man-of-War Bird said "we" when he spoke of his ancestors.

"There were others," said the Flamingo. "I remember an old man looking for a fountain."

"Ponce de Leon," supplied Dorcas Jane, proud that she could pronounce it.

"There is no harm in a fountain," said a Brown Pelican that had come sailing into Cuthbert Rookery with her wings sloped downward like a parachute. "It was the gold-seekers who filled the islands with the thunder of their guns and the smoke of burning huts."

The children turned toward the Pelican among the mangrove trees, crowded with nests of egret and heron and rosy hornbill.

The shallow water of the lagoon ran into gold-tipped ripples. In every one the low sun laid a tiny flake of azure. Over the far shore there was a continual flick and flash of wings, like a whirlwind playing with a heap of waste paper. Crooked flights of flamingoes made a moving reflection on the water like a scarlet snake, but among the queer mangrove stems, that did not seem to know whether they were roots or branches, there was a lovely morning stillness. It was just the place and hour for a story, and while the Brown Pelican opened her well-filled maw to her two hungry nestlings, the Snowy Egret went on with the subject.

"They were a gallant and cruel and heroic and stupid lot, the Spanish gold-seekers," she said. "They thought nothing of danger and hunger, but they could not find their way without a guide any further than their eyes could see, and they behaved very badly toward the poor Indians."

"We saw them all," said the Flamingo,--"Cortez and Balboa and Pizarro. We saw Panfilo Narvaez put in at Tampa Bay, full of zeal and gold hunger, and a year later we saw him at Appalache, beating his stirrup irons into nails to make boats to carry him back to Havana. We alone know why he never reached there."

The Pelican by this time had got rid of her load of fish and settled herself for conversation. "Whatever happened to them," she said, "they came back,--Spanish, Portuguese, and English,--back they came. I remember how Lucas de Ayllon came to look for the pearls of Cofachique--"

"Pearls!" said the children both at once.

"Very good ones," said the Pelican, nodding her pouched beak; "as large as hazel nuts and with a luster like a wet beach at evening. The best were along the Savannah River where some of my people had had a rookery since any of them could remember. Ayllon discovered the pearls when he came up from Hispaniola looking for slaves, but it was an evil day for him when he came again to fill his pockets with them, for by that time the lady of Cofachique was looking for Ayllon."

"For Soto, you mean," said the Snowy Egret,--

"Hernando de Soto, the Adelantado of Florida, and that is _my_ story."

"It is all one story," insisted the Pelican. "Ayllon began it. His ship put in at the Savannah at the time of the pearling, when the best of our young men were there, and among them Young Pine, son of Far-Looking, the Chief Woman.

"The Indians had heard of ships by this time, but they still believed the Spaniards were Children of the Sun, and trusted them. They had not yet learned what a Spaniard will do for gold. They did not even know what gold was, for there was none of it at Cofachique. The Cacique came down to the sea to greet the ships, with fifty of his best fighting men behind him, and when the Spaniard invited them aboard for a feast, he let Young Pine go with them. He was as straight as a pine, the young Cacique, keen and strong-breasted, and about his neck he wore a twist of pearls of three strands, white as sea foam. Ayllon's eyes glistened as he looked at them, and he gave word that the boy was not to be mishandled. For as soon as he had made the visiting Indians drunk with wine, which they had never tasted before and drank only for politeness, the Spaniard hoisted sail for Hispaniola.

"Young Pine stood on the deck and heard his father calling to him from the shore, and saw his friends shot as they jumped overboard, or were dragged below in chains, and did not know what to do at such treachery. The wine foamed in his head and he hung sick against the rail until Ayllon came sidling and fidgeting to find out where the pearls came from. He fingered the strand on Young Pine's neck, making signs of friendship.

"The ship was making way fast, and the shore of Cofachique was dark against the sun. Ayllon had sent his men to the other side of the ship while he talked with Young Pine, for he did not care to have them learn about the pearls.

"Young Pine lifted the strand from his neck, for by Ayllon's orders he was not yet in chains. While the Spaniard looked it over greedily, the boy saw his opportunity. He gave a shout to the sea-birds that wheeled and darted about the galleon, the shout the fishers give when they throw offal to the gulls, and as the wings gathered and thickened to hide him from the guns, he dived straight away over the ship's side into the darkling water.

"All night he swam, steering by the death-fires which the pearlers had built along the beaches, and just as the dawn came up behind him to turn the white-topped breakers into green fire, the land swell caught him. Four days later a search party looking for those who had jumped overboard, found his body tumbled among the weeds along the outer shoals and carried it to his mother, the Cacica, at Talimeco.

"She was a wonderful woman, the Chief Woman of Cofachique, and terrible," said the Pelican. "It was not for nothing she was called Far-Looking. She could see the thoughts of a man while they were still in his heart, and the doings of men who were far distant. When she wished to know what nobody could tell her, she would go into the Silence; she would sit as still as a brooding pelican; her limbs would stiffen and her eyes would stare--

"That is what she did the moment she saw that the twist of pearls was gone from her son's neck. She went silent with her hand on his dead breast and looked across the seas into the cruel heart of the Spaniard and saw what would happen. 'He will come back,' she said; 'he will come back to get what I shall give him for _this_.'

"She meant the body of Young Pine, who was her only son," said the Pelican, tucking her own gawky young under her breast, "and that is something a mother never forgets. She spent the rest of her time planning what she would do to Lucas de Ayllon when he came back.

"There was a lookout built in the palmetto scrub below the pearling place, and every day canoes scouted far to seaward, with runners ready in case ships were sighted. Talimeco was inland about a hundred miles up the river and the Cacica herself seldom left it.

"And after four or five years Ayllon, with the three-plied rope of pearls under his doublet, came back.

"The Cacica was ready for him. She was really the Chief Woman of Cofachique,--the Cacique was only her husband,--and she was obeyed as no ordinary woman," said the Brown Pelican.

"She was not an ordinary woman," said the Snowy Egret, fluffing her white spray of plumes. "If she so much as looked at you and her glance caught your eye, then you had to do what she said, whether you liked it or not. But most of her people liked obeying her, for she was as wise as she was terrible. That was why she did not kill Lucas de Ayllon at the pearling place as the Cacique wished her to do. 'If we kill him,' said the Chief Woman, 'others will come to avenge him. We must send him home with such a report that no others of his kind will visit this coast again.' She had everything arranged for that."

The Egret settled to her nest again and the Pelican went on with the story.

"In the spring of the year Ayllon came loafing up the Florida coast with two brigantines and a crew of rascally adventurers, looking for slaves and gold. At least Ayllon said he was looking for slaves, though most of those he had carried away the first time had either jumped overboard or refused their food and died. But he had not been willing to tell anybody about the pearls, and he had to have some sort of excuse for returning to a place where he couldn't be expected to be welcomed.

"And that was the first surprise he had when he put to shore on the bluff where the city of Savannah now stands, with four small boats, every man armed with a gun or a crossbow.

"The Indians, who were fishing between the shoals, received the Spaniards kindly; sold them fish and fresh fruit for glass beads, and showed themselves quite willing to guide them in their search for slaves and gold. Only there was no gold: nothing but a little copper and stinging swarms of flies, gray clouds of midges and black ooze that sucked the Spaniards to their thighs, and the clatter of scrub palmetto leaves on their iron shirts like the sound of wooden swords, as the Indians wound them in and out of trails that began in swamps and arrived nowhere. Never once did they come any nearer to the towns than a few poor fisher huts, and never a pearl showed in any Indian's necklace or earring. The Chief Woman had arranged for that!

"All this time she sat at Talimeco in her house on the temple mound--"

"Mounds!" interrupted the children both at once. "Were they Mound-Builders?"

"They built mounds," said the Pelican, "for the Cacique's house and the God-House, and for burial, with graded ways and embankments. The one at Talimeco was as tall as three men on horseback, as the Spaniards discovered later--Soto's men, not Ayllon's. _They_ never came within sound of the towns nor in sight of the league-long fields of corn nor the groves of mulberry trees. They lay with their goods spread out along the beach without any particular order and without any fear of the few poor Indians they saw.

"That was the way the Chief Woman had arranged it. All the men who came down to the ships were poorly dressed and the women wrinkled, though she was the richest Cacica in the country, and had four bearers with feather fans to accompany her. All this time she sat in the Silences and sent her thoughts among the Spaniards so that they bickered among themselves, for they were so greedy for gold that no half-dozen of them would trust another half-dozen out of their sight. They would lie loafing about the beaches and all of a sudden anger would run among them like thin fire in the savannahs, which runs up the sap wood of the pines, winding, and taking flight from the top like a bird. Then they would stab one another in their rages, or roast an Indian because he would not tell them where gold was. For they could not get it out of their heads that there was gold. They were looking for another Peru.

"Toward the last, Ayllon had to sleep in his ship at night so jealous his captains were of him. He had a touch of the swamp fever which takes the heart out of a man, and finally he was obliged to show them the three-plied rope of pearls to hold them. To just a few of his captains he showed it, but the Indian boy he had taken to be his servant saw them fingering it in the ship's cabin and sent word to the Chief Woman."

The sun rose high on the lagoon as the Pelican paused in her story, and beyond the rookery the children could see blue water and a line of surf, with the high-pooped Spanish ships rising and falling. Beyond that were the low shore and the dark wood of pines and the shining leaves of the palmettoes like a lake spattered with the light--split by their needle points. They could see the dark bodies of the Indian runners working their way through it to Talimeco. The Pelican went on with the story.

"'Now it is time,' said the Cacica, and the Cacique's Own--that was a band of picked fighting men--took down their great shields of woven cane from the god-house and left Talimeco by night. And from every seacoast town of Cofachique went bowmen and spearsmen. They would be sitting by their hearth-fires at evening, and in the morning they would be gone. At the same time there went a delegation from Talimeco to Lucas de Ayllon to say that the time of one of the Indian feasts was near, and to invite him and his men to take part in it. The Spaniards were delighted, for now they thought they should see some women, and maybe learn about gold. But though scores of Indians went down, with venison and maize cakes in baskets, no women went at all, and if the Spaniards had not been three fourths drunk, that would have warned them.

"When Indians mean fighting they leave the women behind," explained the Pelican, and the children nodded.

"The Spaniards sat about the fires where the venison was roasting, and talked openly of pearls. They had a cask of wine out from the ship, and some of their men made great laughter trying to dance with the young men of Cofachique. But one of the tame Indians that Ayllon had brought from Hispaniola with him, went privately to his master. 'I know this dance,' he said; 'it is a dance of death.' But Ayllon dared do nothing except have a small cannon on the ship shot off, as he said, for the celebration, but really to scare the Indians."

"And they were scared?"

"When they have danced the dance of death and vengeance there is nothing can scare Indians," said the Brown Pelican, and the whole rookery agreed with her.

"At a signal," she went on, "when the Spaniards were lolling after dinner with their iron shirts half off, and the guns stacked on the sand, the Indians fell upon them with terrible slaughter. Ayllon got away to his ships with a few of his men, but there were not boats enough for all of them, and they could not swim in their armor. Some of them tried it, but the Indians swam after them, stabbing and pulling them under. That night Ayllon saw from his ships the great fires the Indians made to celebrate their victory, and the moment the day popped suddenly out of the sea, as it does at that latitude, he set sail and put the ships about for Hispaniola, without stopping to look for survivors.

"But even there, I think, the Cacica's thought followed him. A storm came up out of the Gulf, black with thunder and flashing green fire. The ships were undermanned, for the sailors, too, had been ashore feasting. One of the brigantines--but not the one which carried Ayllon--staggered awhile in the huge seas and went under."

"And the pearls, the young chief's necklace, what became of that?" asked Dorcas.

"It went back to Talimeco with the old chief's body and was buried with him. You see, that had been the signal. Ayllon had the necklace with him in the slack of his doublet. He thought it would be a good time after the feast to show it to the Cacique and inquire where pearls could be found. He had no idea that it had belonged to the Cacique's son; all Indians looked very much alike to him. But when the Cacique saw Young Pine's necklace in the Spaniard's hand, he raised the enemy shout that was the signal for his men, who lay in the scrub, to begin the battle. Ayllon struck down the Cacique with his own sword as the nearest at hand. But the Cacique had the pearls, and after the fighting began there was no time for the Spaniard to think of getting them back again. So the pearls went back to Talimeco, with axes and Spanish arms, to be laid up in the god-house for a trophy. It was there, ten years later, that Hernando de Soto found them. As for Ayllon, his pride and his heart were broken. He died of that and the fever he had brought back from Cofachique, but you may be sure he never told exactly what happened to him on that unlucky voyage. Nobody had any ear in those days for voyages that failed; they were all for gold and the high adventure."

"What I want to know," said Dorcas, "is what became of the Cacica, and whether she saw Mr. de Soto coming and why, if she could look people in the eye and make them do what she wanted, she didn't just see Mr. de Ayllon herself and tell him to go home again."

"It was only to her own people she could do that," said the Pelican. "She could send her dream to them too, if it pleased her, but she never dared to put her powers to the test with the strangers. If she had tried and failed, then the Indians would have been certain of the one thing they were never quite sure of, that the Spaniards were the Children of the Sun. As for the horses, they never did get it out of their minds that they might be eaten by them. I think the Cacica felt in her heart that the strangers were only men, but it was too important to her to be feared by her own people to take any chances of showing herself afraid of the Spaniards. That was why she never saw Ayllon, and when it was at last necessary that Soto should be met, she left that part of the business to the young Princess."

"That," said the Snowy Egret, "should be my story! The egrets were sacred at Cofachique," she explained to the children; "only the chief family wore our plumes. Our rookery was in the middle swamp a day inland from Talimeco, safe and secret. But we used to go past the town every day fishing in the river. That is how we knew the whole story of what happened there and at Tuscaloosa."

Dorcas remembered her geography. "Tuscaloosa is in Alabama," she said; "that's a long way from Savannah."

"Not too long for the Far-Looking. She and the Black Warrior--that's what Tuscaloosa means--were of one spirit. In the ten or twelve years after the Cacique, her husband, was killed, she put the fear of Cofachique on all the surrounding tribes, as far as Tuscaloosa River.

"There was an open trail between the two chief cities of Cofachique and Mobila, which was called the Tribute Road because of the tribes that traveled it, bringing tribute to one or another of the two Great Ones. But not any more after the Princess who was called the Pearl of Cofachique walked in it."

"Oh, Princesses!" sighed Dorcas Jane, "if we could just see one!"

The Snowy Egret considered. "If the Pelicans would dance for you--"

"Have the Pelicans a _dance_?"

"Of all the dances that the Indians have," said the Egret, "the first and the best they learned from the Wing People. Some they learned from the Cranes by the water-courses, and some from the bucks prancing before the does on the high ridges; old, old dances of the great elk and the wapiti. In the new of the year everything dances in some fashion, and by dancing everything is made one, sky and sea, and bird and dancing leaf. Old time is present, and all old feelings are as the times and feelings that will be. These are the things men learned in the days of the Unforgotten, dancing to make the world work well together by times and seasons. But the Pelicans can always dance a little; anywhere in their rookeries you might see them bowing and balancing. Watch, now, in the clear foreshore."

True enough, on the bare, ripple-packed sand that glimmered like the inside of a shell, several of the great birds were making absurd dips and courtesies toward one another; they spread their wings like flowing draperies and began to sway with movements of strange dignity. The high sun filmed with silver fog, and along the heated air there crept an eerie feel of noon.

"When half a dozen of them begin to circle together," said the Snowy Egret, "turn round and look toward the wood."

At the right moment the children turned, and between the gray and somber shadows of the cypress they saw her come. All in white she was--white cloth of the middle bark of mulberries, soft as linen, with a cloak of oriole feathers black and yellow, edged with sables. On her head was the royal circlet of egret plumes nodding above the yellow circlet of the Sun. When she walked, it made them think of the young wind stirring in the corn. Around her neck she wore, in the fashion of Cofachique, three strands of pearls reaching to the waist, in which she rested her left arm.

"That was how the Spaniards saw her for the first time, and found her so lovely that they forgot to ask her name; they called her 'The Lady of Cofachique,' and swore there was not a lovelier lady in Europe nor one more a princess.

"Which might easily be true," said the Egret, "for she was brought up to be Cacica in Far-Looking's place, after the death of her son Young Pine."

The Princess smiled on the children as she came down the cypress trail. One of her women, who moved unobtrusively beside her, arranged cushions of woven cane, and another held a fan of painted skin and feather work between her and the sun. A tame egret ruffled her white plumes at the Princess's shoulder.

"I was telling them about the pearls of Cofachique," said the Egret who had first spoken to the children, "and of how Hernando de Soto came to look for them."

"Came and looked," said the Princess. One of her women brought a casket carved from a solid lump of cypress, on her knee. Around the sides of the casket and on the two ends ran a decoration of woodpeckers' heads and the mingled sign of the sun and the four quarters which the Corn Woman had drawn for Dorcas on the dust of the dancing-floor.

The Princess lifted the lid and ran her fine dark fingers through a heap of gleaming pearls. "There were many mule loads such as these in the god-house at Talimeco," she said; "we filled the caskets of our dead Caciques with them. What is gold that he should have left all these for the mere rumor of it?"

She was sad for a moment and then stern. "Nevertheless, I think my aunt, the Cacica, should have met him. She would have seen that he was a man and would have used men's reasons with him. She made Medicine against him as though he were a god, and in the end his medicine was stronger than ours."

"If you could tell us about it--" invited Dorcas Jane.

XII

HOW THE IRON SHIRTS CAME TO TUSCALOOSA: A TELLING OF THE TRIBUTE ROAD BY THE LADY OF COFACHIQUE

"There was a bloom on the sea like the bloom on a wild grape when the Adelantado left his winter quarters at Anaica Apalache," said the Princess. "He sent Maldonado, his captain, to cruise along the Gulf coast with the ships, and struck north toward Cofachique. That was in March, 1540, and already his men and horses were fewer because of sickness and skirmishes with the Indians. They had for guide Juan Ortiz, one of Narvaez's men who had been held captive by the Indians these eight years, and a lad Perico who remembered a trading trip to Cofachique. And what he could not remember he invented. He made Soto believe there was gold there. Perhaps he was thinking of copper, and perhaps, since the Spaniards had made him their servant, he found it pleasanter to be in an important position.

"They set out by the old sea trail toward Alta-paha, when the buds at the ends of the magnolia boughs were turning creamy, and the sandhill crane could be heard whooping from the lagoons miles inland. First went the captains with the Indian guides in chains, for they had a way of disappearing in the scrub if not watched carefully, and then the foot soldiers, each with his sixty days' ration on his back. Last of all came a great drove of pigs and dogs of Spain, fierce mastiffs who made nothing of tearing an Indian in pieces, and had to be kept in leash by Pedro Moron, who was as keen as a dog himself. He could smell Indians in hiding and wood smoke three leagues away. Many a time when the expedition was all but lost, he would smell his way to a village.

"They went north by east looking for gold, and equal to any adventure. At Achese the Indians, who had never heard of white men, were so frightened that they ran away into the woods and would not come out again. Think what it meant to them to see strange bearded men, clad in iron shirts, astride of fierce, unknown animals,--for the Indians could not help but think that the horses would eat them. They had never heard of iron either. Nevertheless, the Spaniards got some corn there, from the high cribs of cane set up on platforms beside the huts.

"Everywhere Soto told the Caciques that he and his men were the Children of the Sun, seeking the highest chief and the richest province, and asked for guides and carriers, which usually he got. You may be sure the Indians were glad to be rid of them so cheaply.

"The expedition moved toward Ocute, with the bloom of the wild vines perfuming all the air, and clouds of white butterflies beginning to twinkle in the savannahs."

"But," said Dorcas, who had listened very attentively, "I thought Savannah was a place."

"Ever so many places," said the Princess; "flat miles on miles of slim pines melting into grayness, sunlight sifting through their plumy tops, with gray birds wheeling in flocks, or troops of red-headed woodpeckers, and underfoot nothing but needles and gray sand. Far ahead on every side the pines draw together, but where one walks they are wide apart, so that one seems always about to approach a forest and never finds it. These are the savannahs.

"Between them along the water-courses are swamps; slow, black water and wide-rooted, gull-gray cypress, flat-topped and all adrip with moss. And everywhere a feeling of snakes--wicked water-snakes with yellow rims around their eyes.

"They crossed great rivers, Ockmulgee, Oconee, Ogechee, making a bridge of men and paddling their way across with the help of saddle cruppers and horses' tails. If the waters were too deep for that, they made piraguas--dug-out canoes, you know--and rafts of cane. By the time they had reached Ocute the Spaniards were so hungry they were glad to eat dogs which the Indians gave them, for there was such a scarcity of meat on all that journey that the sick men would sometimes say, 'If only I had a piece of meat I think I would not die!'"

"But where was all the game?" Oliver insisted on knowing.

"Six hundred men with three hundred horses and a lot of Indian carriers, coming through the woods, make a great deal of noise," said the Princess. "The Spaniards never dared to hunt far from the trail for fear of getting lost. There were always lurking Indians ready to drive an arrow through a piece of Milan armor as if it were pasteboard, and into the body of a horse over the feather of the shaft, so that the Spaniards wondered, seeing the little hole it made, how the horse had died.

"Day after day the expedition would wind in and out of the trail, bunching up like quail in the open places, and dropping back in single file in the canebrake, with the tail of the company so far from the head that when there was a skirmish with the Indians at either end, it would often be over before the other end could catch up. In this fashion they came to Cofaque, which is the last province before Cofachique."

"Oh," said Dorcas, "and did the Chief Woman see them coming? The one who was Far-Looking!"

"She saw too much," said the Egret, tucking her eggs more warmly under her breast. "She saw other comings and all the evil that the White Men would bring and do."

"Whatever she saw she did her best to prevent," said the Princess. "Three things she tried. Two of them failed. There are two trails into the heart of Cofachique, one from the west from Tuscaloosa, and the other from Cofaque, a very secret trail through swamp and palmetto scrub, full of false clues and blind leads.

"Far-Looking sat in the god-house at Talimeco, and sent her thought along the trail to turn the strangers back; but what is the thought of one woman against six hundred men! It reached nobody but the lad Perico, and shook him with a midnight terror, so that he screamed and threw himself about. The Spaniards came running with book and bell, for the priest thought the boy was plagued by a devil. But the soldiers thought it was all a pretense to save himself from being punished for not knowing the trail to Cofachique.

"Nobody really knew it, because the Cofachiquans, who were at war with Cofaque, had hidden it as a fox covers the trail to her lair. But after beating about among the sloughs and swamps like a rabbit in a net, and being reduced to a ration of eighteen grains of corn, the Spaniards came to the river about a day's journey above the place where Lucas de Ayllon's men had died. They caught a few stray Indians, who allowed themselves to be burnt rather than show the way to their towns,--for so the Cacica had ordered them,--and at last the expedition came to a village where there was corn."

"But I shouldn't think the Indians would give it to them," said Dorcas.

"Indians never refuse food, if they have it, even to their enemies," said the Princess.

The children could see that this part of the story was not pleasant remembering for the Lady of Cofachique. She pushed the pearls away as though they wearied her, and her women came crowding at her shoulder with soft, commiserating noises like doves. They were beautiful and young like her, and wore the white dress of Cofachique, a skirt of mulberry fiber and an upper garment that went over the left shoulder and left the right arm bare except for the looped bracelets of shell and pearl. Their long hair lay sleek across their bosoms and, to show that they were privileged to wait upon the Chief Woman, they had each a single egret's plume in the painted bandeau about her forehead.

"Far-Looking was both aunt and chief to me," said the Princess; "it was not for me to question what she did. Our country had been long at war with Cofaque, at cost of men and corn. And Soto, as he came through that country, picked up their War Leader Patofa, and the best of their fighting men, for they had persuaded him that only by force would he get anything from the Cacica of Cofachique. The truth was that it was only by trusting to the magic of the white men that Patofa could get to us. The Adelantado allowed him to pillage such towns as they found before he thought better of it and sent Patofa and his men back to Cofaque, but by that time the thing had happened which made the Cacica's second plan impossible. Our fighting men had seen what the Spaniards could do, and I had seen what they could be."

Proudly as she said it, the children could see, by the way the Princess frowned to herself and drummed with her fingers on the cypress wood, that the old puzzle of the strangers who were neither gods nor men worked still in her mind.

"The Cacica's first plan," she went on, "which had been to lose them in the swamps and savannahs, had failed. Her second was to receive them kindly and then serve them as she had served Ayllon.

"They made their camp at last across the river from Talimeco, and I with my women went out to meet them as a great Cacique should be met, in a canoe with an awning, with fan-bearers and flutes and drums. I saw that I pleased him," said the Princess. "I gave him the pearls from my neck, and had from him a ring from his finger set with a red stone. He was a handsome and a gallant gentleman, knowing what was proper toward Princesses."

"And all this time you were planning to kill him?" said Dorcas, shocked.

The Princess shook her head.

"Not I, but the Cacica. She told me nothing. Talimeco was a White Town; how should I know that she planned killing in it. She sat in the Place of the Silences working her mischief and trusted me to keep the Spaniards charmed and unsuspicious. How should I know what she meant? I am chief woman of Cofachique, but I am not far-looking.

"I showed the Adelantado the god-house with its dead Caciques all stuffed with pearls, and the warrior-house where the arms of Ayllon were laid up for a trophy. It would have been well for him to be contented with these things. I have heard him say they would have been a fortune in his own country, but he was bitten with the love of gold and mad with it as if a water moccasin had set its fangs in him. I had no gold, and I could not help him to get Far-Looking into his power.

"That was his plan always, to make the chief person of every city his hostage for the safety of his men. I would have helped him if I could," the Princess admitted, "for I thought him glorious, but the truth was, I did not know.

"There was a lad, Islay, brought up with me in the house of my aunt, the Cacica, who went back and forth to her with messages to the Place of the Silences, and him I drove by my anger to lead the Spaniards that way. But as he went he feared her anger coming to meet him more than he feared mine that waited him at home. One day while the Spanish soldiers who were with him admired the arrows which he showed them in his quiver, so beautifully made, he plunged the sharpest of them into his throat. He was a poor thing," said the Princess proudly, "since he loved neither me nor my aunt enough to serve one of us against the other. We succeeded only in serving Soto, for now there was no one to carry word for the Cacica to the men who were to fall upon the Spaniards and destroy them as they had destroyed Ayllon.

"Perhaps," said the Princess, "if she had told me her plan and her reason for it, things would have turned out differently. At any rate, she need not have become, as she did finally, my worst enemy, and died fighting me. At that time she was as mother and chief to me, and I could never have wished her so much bitterness as she must have felt sitting unvisited in the Place of the Silences, while I took the Adelantado pearling, and the fighting men, who should have fallen upon him at her word, danced for his entertainment.

"She had to come out at last to find what had happened to Islay, for whose death she blamed me, and back she went without a word to me, like a hot spider to spin a stronger web. This time she appealed to Tuscaloosa. They were of one mind in many things, and between them they kept all the small tribes in tribute.

"It was about the time of the year when they should be coming with it along the Tribute Road, and the Cacica sent them word that if they could make the Spaniards believe that there was gold in their hills, she would remit the tribute for one year. There was not much for them to do, for there were hatchets and knives in the tribute, made of copper, in which Soto thought he discovered gold. It may be so: once he had suspected it, I could not keep him any longer at Talimeco. The day that he set out there went another expedition secretly from the Cacica to Tuscaloosa. 'These men,' said the message, 'must be fought by men.' And Tuscaloosa smiled as he heard it, for it was the first time that the Cacica had admitted there was anything that could not be done by a woman. But at that she had done her cleverest thing, because, though they were friends, the Black Warrior wanted nothing so much as an opportunity to prove that he was the better warrior.

"It was lovely summer weather," said the Princess, "as the Spaniards passed through the length of Cofachique; the mulberry trees were dripping with ripe fruit, the young corn was growing tall, and the Indians were friendly. They passed over the Blue Ridge where it breaks south into woody hills. Glossy leaves of the live-oak made the forest spaces vague with shadows; bright birds like flame hopped in and out and hid in the hanging moss, whistling clearly; groves of pecans and walnuts along the river hung ropy with long streamers of the purple muscadines.

"You have heard," said the Lady of Cofachique, hesitating for the first time in her story, and yet looking so much the Princess that the children would never have dared think anything displeasing to her, "that I went a part of the way with the Adelantado on the Tribute Road?" Her lovely face cleared a little as they shook their heads.

"It is not true," she said, "that I went for any reason but my own wish to learn as much as possible of the wisdom of the white men and to keep my own people safe in the towns they passed through. I had my own women about me, and my own warriors ran in the woods on either side, and showed themselves to me in the places where the expedition halted, unsuspected by Soto. It was as much as any Spaniard could do to tell one half-naked Indian from another.

"The pearls, too,"--she touched the casket with her foot,--"the finest that Soto had selected from the god-house, I kept by me. I never meant to let them go, though there were some of them I gave to a soldier ... there were slaves, too, of Soto's who found the free life of Cofachique more to their liking than the fruitless search for gold...."

"She means," said the Snowy Egret, seeing that the Princess did not intend to say any more on that point, "that she gave them for bribes to one of Soto's men, a great bag full, though there came a day when he needed the bag more than the pearls and he left them scattered on the floor of the forest. It was about the slaves who went with her when she gave Soto the slip in the deep woods, that she quarreled afterward with the old Cacica."

"At the western border of Cofachique, which is the beginning of Tuscaloosa's land," went on the Princess, "I came away with my women and my pearls; we walked in the thick woods and we were gone. Where can a white man look that an Indian cannot hide from him? It is true that I knew by this time that the Cacica had sent to Tuscaloosa, but what was that to me? The Adelantado had left of his own free will, and I was not then Chief Woman of Cofachique. At the first of the Tuscaloosa towns the Black Warrior awaited them. He sat on the piazza of his house on the principal mound. He sat as still as the Cacica in the Place of Silences, a great turban stiff with pearls upon his head, and over him the standard of Tuscaloosa like a great round fan on a slender stem, of fine feather-work laid on deerskin. While the Spaniards wheeled and raced their horses in front of him, trying to make an impression, Soto could not get so much as the flick of an eyelash out of the Black Warrior. Gentleman of Spain as he was and the King's own representative, he had to dismount at last and conduct himself humbly.

"The Adelantado asked for obedience to his King, which Tuscaloosa said he was more used to getting than giving. When Soto wished for food and carriers, Tuscaloosa gave him part, and, dissembling, said the rest were at his capital of Mobila. Against the advice of his men Soto consented to go there with him.

"It was a strong city set with a stockade of tree-trunks driven into the ground, where they rooted and sent up great trees in which wild pigeons roosted. It was they that had seen the runners of Cofachique come in with the message from Far-Looking. All the wood knew, and the Indians knew, but not the Spaniards. Some of them suspected. They saw that the brush had been cut from the ground outside the stockade, as if for battle.

"One of them took a turn through the town and met not an old man nor any children. There were dancing women, but no others. This is the custom of the Indians when they are about to fight,--they hide their families.

"Soto was weary of the ground," said the Princess. "This we were told by the carriers who escaped and came back to Cofachique. He wished to sit on a cushion and sleep in a bed again. He came riding into the town with the Cacique on a horse as a token of honor, though Tuscaloosa was so tall that they had trouble finding a horse that could keep his feet from the ground, and it must have been as pleasant for him as riding a lion or a tiger. But he was a great chief, and if the Spaniards were not afraid to ride neither would he seem to be. So they came to the principal house, which was on a mound. All the houses were of two stories, of which the upper was open on the sides, and used for sleeping. Soto sat with Tuscaloosa in the piazza and feasted; dancing girls came out in the town square with flute-players, and danced for the guard.

"But one of Soto's men, more wary than the rest, walked about, and saw that the towers of the wall were full of fighting men. He saw Indians hiding arrows behind palm branches.

"Back he went to the house where Soto was, to warn him, but already the trouble had begun. Tuscaloosa, making an excuse, had withdrawn into the house, and when Soto wished to speak to him sent back a haughty answer. Soto would have soothed him, but one of Soto's men, made angry with the insolence of the Indian who had brought the Cacique's answer, seized the man by his cloak, and when the Indian stepped quickly out of it, answered as quickly with his sword. Suddenly, out of the dark houses, came a shower of arrows."

"It was the plan of the Cacica of Cofachique," explained the Egret. "The men of Mobila had meant to fall on the Spaniards while they were eating, but because of the Spanish gentleman's bad temper, the battle began too soon."

"It was the only plan of hers that did not utterly fail," said the Princess, "for with all her far-looking she could not see into the Adelantado's heart. Soto and his guard ran out of the town, every one with, an arrow sticking in him, to join themselves to the rest of the expedition which had just come up. Like wasps out of a nest the Indians poured after them. They caught the Indian carriers, who were just easing their loads under the walls. With every pack and basket that the Spaniards had, they carried them back into the town, and the gates of the stockade were swung to after them."

"All night," said the Egret, "the birds were scared from their roost by the noise of the battle. Several of the horses were caught inside the stockade; these the Indians killed quickly. The sound of their dying neighs was heard at all the rookeries along the river."

"The wild tribes heard of it, and brought us word," said the Princess. "Soto attacked and pretended to withdraw. Out came the Indians after him. The Spaniards wheeled again and did terrible slaughter. They came at the stockade with axes; they fired the towers. The houses were all of dry cane and fine mats of cane for walls; they flashed up in smoke and flame. Many of the Indians threw themselves into the flames rather than be taken. At the last there were left three men and the dancing women. The women came into the open by the light of the burning town, with their hands crossed before them. They stood close and hid the men with their skirts, until the Spaniards came up, and then parted. So the last men of Mobila took their last shots and died fighting."

"Is that the end?" said Oliver, seeing the Princess gather up her pearls and the Egret preparing to tuck her bill under her wing. He did not feel very cheerful over it.

"It was the end of Mobila and the true end of the expedition," said the Princess. Rising she beckoned to her women. She had lost all interest in a story which had no more to do with Cofachique.

"Both sides lost," said the Egret, "and that was the sad part of it. All the Indians were killed; even the young son of Tuscaloosa was found with a spear sticking in him. Of the Spaniards but eighteen died, though few escaped unwounded. But they lost everything they had, food, medicines, tools, everything but the sword in hand and the clothes they stood in. And while they lay on the bare ground recovering from their wounds came Juan Ortiz, who had been sent seaward for that purpose, with word that Maldonado lay with the ships off the bay of Mobila,--that's Mobile, you know,--not six days distant, to carry them back to Havana.

"And how could Soto go back defeated? No gold, no pearls, no conquests, not so much as a map, even,--only rags and wounds and a sore heart. In spite of everything he was both brave and gallant, and he knew his duty to the King of Spain. He could not go back with so poor a report of the country to which he had been sent to establish the fame and might of His Majesty. Forbidding Juan Ortiz to tell the men about the ships, with only two days' food and no baggage, he turned away from the coast, from his home and his wife and safe living, toward the Mississippi. He had no hope in his heart, I think, but plenty of courage. And if you like," said the Egret, "another day we will tell you how he died there."

"Oh, no, please," said Dorcas, "it is so very sad; and, besides," she added, remembering the picture of Soto's body being lowered at night into the dark water, "it is in the School History."

"In any case," said the Egret, "he was a brave and gallant gentleman, kind to his men and no more cruel to the Indians than they were to one another. There was only one of the gentlemen of Spain who never had _any_ unkindness to his discredit. That was Cabeza de Vaca; he was one of Narvaez's men, and the one from whom Soto first heard of Florida,--but that is also a sad story."

Neither of the children said anything. The Princess and her women lost themselves in the shadowy wood. The gleam here and there of their white dresses was like the wing of tall white birds. The sun sailing toward noon had burnt the color out of the sky into the deep water which could be seen cradling fresh and blue beyond the islets. One by one the pelicans swung seaward, beating their broad wings all in time like the stroke of rowers, going to fish in the clean tides outside of the lagoons.

The nests of the flamingoes lay open to the sun except where here and there dozed a brooding mother.

"Don't you know any not-sad stories?" asked Dorcas, as the Egret showed signs again of tucking her head under her wing.

"Not about the Iron Shirts," said the Egret. "Spanish or Portuguese or English; it was always an unhappy ending for the Indians."

"Oh," said Dorcas, disappointed; and then she reflected, "If they hadn't come, though, I don't suppose we would be here either."

"I'll tell you," said the Man-of-War Bird, who was a great traveler, "they didn't all land on this coast. Some of them landed in Mexico and marched north into your country. I've heard things from gulls at Panuco. You don't know what the land birds might be able to tell you."

XIII

HOW THE IRON SHIRTS CAME LOOKING FOR THE SEVEN CITIES OF CIBOLA; TOLD BY THE ROAD-RUNNER