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"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.
"It was a strong city set with a stockade of tree-trunks driven into the ground, where they rooted and sent up great trees in which wild pigeons roosted. It was they that had seen the runners of Cofachique come in with the message from Far-Looking. All the wood knew, and the Indians knew, but not the Spaniards. Some of them suspected.
The best were along the Savannah River where some of my people had had a rookery since any of them could remember. Ayllon discovered the pearls when he came up from Hispaniola looking for slaves, but it was an evil day for him when he came again to fill his pockets with them, for by that time the lady of Cofachique was looking for Ayllon." "For Soto, you mean," said the Snowy Egret,
"He sent Maldonado, his captain, to cruise along the Gulf coast with the ships, and struck north toward Cofachique. That was in March, 1540, and already his men and horses were fewer because of sickness and skirmishes with the Indians.
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.
It is true that I knew by this time that the Cacica had sent to Tuscaloosa, but what was that to me? The Adelantado had left of his own free will, and I was not then Chief Woman of Cofachique. At the first of the Tuscaloosa towns the Black Warrior awaited them. He sat on the piazza of his house on the principal mound.
"It was the end of Mobila and the true end of the expedition," said the Princess. Rising she beckoned to her women. She had lost all interest in a story which had no more to do with Cofachique. "Both sides lost," said the Egret, "and that was the sad part of it. All the Indians were killed; even the young son of Tuscaloosa was found with a spear sticking in him.
"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.
"'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.
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.
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