XI
THE THUNDER BIRDS
"Glory is all very well," said Juan de Saavedra to Pedro de Alvarado as the squadron left the island of Cozumel, "but my familiar spirit tells me that there is gold somewhere in this barbaric land or Cortes would not be with us."
Alvarado's peculiarly sunny smile shone out. He was a ruddy golden-haired man, a type unusual in Spaniards, and the natives showed a tendency to revere him as the sun-god. Life had treated him very well, and he had an abounding good-nature.
"It will be the better," he said comfortably, "if we get both gold and glory. I confess I have had my doubts of the gold, for after all, these Indians may have more sense than they appear to have."
"People often do, but in what way, especially?"
"Amigo, put yourself in the place of one of these caciques, with white men bedeviling you for a treasure which you never even troubled yourself to pick up when it lay about loose. What can be more easy than to tell them that there is plenty of it somewhere else—in the land of your enemies? That is Pizarro's theory, at any rate."
Saavedra laughed. "Pizarro is wise in his way, but as I have said, Cortes is our commander."
"What has that to do with it?"
"If you had been at Salamanca in his University days you wouldn't ask. He never got caught in a scrape, and he always got what he was after."