"In the spring of the year Ayllon came loafing up the Florida coast with two brigantines and a crew of rascally adventurers, looking for slaves and gold. At least Ayllon said he was looking for slaves, though most of those he had carried away the first time had either jumped overboard or refused their food and died. But he had not been willing to tell anybody about the pearls, and he had to have some sort of excuse for returning to a place where he couldn't be expected to be welcomed. "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. _They_ never 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.