The Trail Book by Mary Austin et al

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"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.

"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.

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