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.
[Illustration]
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.