"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.Theynever 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.