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The How The Iron Shirts Came To Tuscaloosa
by
“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.”