Anthony, bent on winning his own ends, cared nothing for the ethics of a duel. When he saw his man ready to drop he thrust forward and pinned him against a post. But he did not drive his sword through the Spaniard, as was his right, as the don nodded permission, and as the whole colony now assembled whooped and howled and begged for him to do. Instead, he signaled the crowd to silence and, withdrawing his blade, wiped it airily on a bit of lace kerchief and announced: "I present his life to the fort. He is expert. Such will do good work against the Chickasaw."
The crowd, who a minute before would have been glad to see his blood spurt, now greeted the Spaniard with hurrahs, dragged him to the kitchen, and feasted him. Pensacola, a much older place than Biloxi, had learned to conserve its products. There was no food shortage among these Spaniards.
Don Francisco Martin seemed to be regretting that irony about gentlemen. He gave Anthony a friendly hand and said, sincerely, "I will be glad to grant you any request I can."
And the Picard du Gay said, simply, as one man to another, "My people are starving; unless you feed us we must perish."
So a ship was loaded with stores. Lest the hunger-wild Frenchmen should eat food without proper cooking and thus add an epidemic to their woes, the don ordered the half-deck covered with great bowls. Each was filled with the savory stew of venison and com or rice and dried fish which the Indians dub sagimity.
And who shall say how that ship came in? The starving French, lost to all feeling but the primitive call of hunger, thronged the bay to watch her drop anchor. They wept aloud and gurgled with laughter. They danced and hugged one another. They rushed into the water, stretching bony fingers; got beyond their depth, and had to be rescued with scoldings and ridicule in the midst of the utmost confusion. When the boat began to unload, the grateful French kissed the hands of their enemies, the Spaniards, and knelt to bathe their feet with happy tears.
As the sagimity came to shore they fell upon it and guzzled like kittens in the cream, quite unashamed. They stood upon the beach to sup and to feed one another. From one bowl to another they hurried, abandoning this, shoving it aside for that, running to another, stepping on it, heedlessly crushing it down into fragments. They had endured slow starvation with pathetic dignity, but the smell and sight of savory stew was too much for decorum, and half the emptied jars were thrown aside with a crash in the mad rush for full ones.
Many settlements have perished for lack of food. Starvation is an ill as old as the human race. It shows its skeleton head at some place on our globe almost every year of the world. The Great River itself has had many hungry times, but none quite so strange as this one when lifelong foes became friends and the beach was strewn with fragments of the crockery brought by the rescuers.
The Indians, who, while waiting their turn at the feast, looked on at the uncontrollable appetites of the succored French, pointed with stolid significance to the long pile of ruined dishes on the beach of Deer Island.
When Anthony, offering food to them, asked what they meant, they answered: "What has happened once can happen again and yet again. In the time of our fathers we, too, were fed by enemies as you are saved to-day, and there we got our name, for the guardian Indians of the Mississippi are called Biloxi, and the word Biloxi means the Broken Pots."