ttle stream. Indians awaited them at
the landing, with gifts of bread, beans, and fish, and piteous prayers
for their chief, upon whose liberation they promised an ample supply of
corn. As they were deaf to all other terms, Laudonniere yielded,
released the chief, and received in his place two hostages, who were
fast bound in the boats. Ottigny and Arlac, with a strong detachment of
arquebusiers, set forth to receive the promised supplies, for which,
from the first, full payment in merchandise had been offered. Arrived at
the village, they filed into the great central lodge, within whose dusky
precincts were gathered the magnates of the tribe. Council-chamber,
forum, banquet-hall, dancing-hall, palace, all in one, the royal
dwelling could hold half the population in its capacious confines. Here
the French made their abode. Their armor buckled, their
arquebuse-matches lighted, they stood, or sat, or reclined on the
earthen floor, with anxious eyes watching the strange, dim scene, half
lighted by the daylight that streamed down through the hole at the apex
of the roof. Tall, dark forms stalked to and fro, quivers at their
backs, bows and arrows in their hands, while groups, crouched in the
shadow beyond, eyed the hated guests with inscrutable visages, and
malignant, sidelong eyes. Corn came in slowly, but warriors were
mustering fast. The village without was full of them. The French
officers grew anxious, and urged the chiefs to greater alacrity in
collecting the promised ransom. The answer boded no good, "Our women are
afraid, when they see the matches of your guns burning. Put them out,
and they will bring the corn faster."

Outina was nowhere to be seen. At length they learned that he was in one
of the small huts adjacent. Several of the officers went to him,
complaining of the slow payment of his ransom. The kindness of his
captors at Fort Caroline seemed to have won his heart. He replied, that
such was the rage of his subjects that he could no longer control
them,--that the French were in danger,--and that he had seen arrows
stuck in the ground by the side of the path, in token that war was
declared. Their peril was thickening hourly, and Ottigny resolved to
regain the boats while there was yet time.

On the twenty-seventh of July, at nine in the morning, he set his men in
order. Each shouldering a sack of corn, they marched through the rows of
squalid huts that surrounded the great lodge, and out betwixt the
inter