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"And after four or five years Ayllon, with the three-plied rope of pearls under his doublet, came back. "The Cacica was ready for him. She was really the Chief Woman of Cofachique, the Cacique was only her husband, and she was obeyed as no ordinary woman," said the Brown Pelican. "She was not an ordinary woman," said the Snowy Egret, fluffing her white spray of plumes.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"'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.
"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."
Soto would have soothed him, but one of Soto's men, made angry with the insolence of the Indian who had brought the Cacique's answer, seized the man by his cloak, and when the Indian stepped quickly out of it, answered as quickly with his sword. Suddenly, out of the dark houses, came a shower of arrows." "It was the plan of the Cacica of Cofachique," explained the Egret.
"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.
Four days later a search party looking for those who had jumped overboard, found his body tumbled among the weeds along the outer shoals and carried it to his mother, the Cacica, at Talimeco. "She was a wonderful woman, the Chief Woman of Cofachique, and terrible," said the Pelican. "It was not for nothing she was called Far-Looking.
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