The Trail Book Part 17

"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 sh.o.r.e 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.d-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-p.o.o.ped Spanish ships rising and falling. Beyond that were the low sh.o.r.e 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 G.o.d-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 lat.i.tude, 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 ash.o.r.e 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 G.o.d-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. n.o.body 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 foresh.o.r.e."

True enough, on the bare, ripple-packed sand that glimmered like the inside of a sh.e.l.l, 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 un.o.btrusively 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 woodp.e.c.k.e.rs' 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 G.o.d-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 G.o.d, and in the end his medicine was stronger than ours."

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

[Ill.u.s.tration]

XII