others were
sentenced to be hanged.

"Comrades," said one of the condemned, appealing to the soldiers, "will
you stand by and see us butchered?"

"These," retorted Laudonniere, "are no comrades of mutineers and
rebels."

At the request of his followers, however, he commuted the sentence to
shooting.

A file of men, a rattling volley, and the debt of justice was paid. The
bodies were hanged on gibbets, at the river's mouth, and order reigned
at Fort Caroline.

CHAPTER VI. 1564, 1565.

FAMINE. WAR. SUCCOR.

While the mutiny was brewing, one La Roche Ferriere had been sent out as
an agent or emissary among the more distant tribes. Sagacious, bold,
and restless, he pushed his way from town to town, and pretended to
have reached the mysterious mountains of Appalache. He sent to the fort
mantles woven with feathers, quivers covered with choice furs, arrows
tipped with gold, wedges of a green stone like beryl or emerald, and
other trophies of his wanderings. A gentleman named Grotaut took up
the quest, and penetrated to the dominions of Hostaqua, who, it was
pretended, could muster three or four thousand warriors, and who
promised, with the aid of a hundred arquebusiers, to conquer all the
kings of the adjacent mountains, and subject them and their gold mines
to the rule of the French. A humbler adventurer was Pierre Gambie, a
robust and daring youth, who had been brought up in the household of
Coligny, and was now a soldier under Laudonniere. The latter gave him
leave to trade with the Indians,--a privilege which he used so well that
he grew rich with his traffic, became prime favorite with the chief
of the island of Edelano, married his daughter, and, in his absence,
reigned in his stead. But, as his sway verged towards despotism, his
subjects took offence, and split his head with a hatchet.

During the winter, Indians from the neighborhood of Cape Canaveral
brought to the fort two Spaniards, wrecked fifteen years before on the
southwestern extremity of the peninsula. They were clothed like the
Indians,--in other words, were not clothed at all,--and their uncut hair
streamed loose down their backs. They brought strange tales of those
among whom they had dwelt. They told of the King of Cabs, on whose
domains they had been wrecked, a chief mighty in stature and in power.
In one of his villages was a pit, six feet deep and as wide as a
hogshead, filled with treasure gathered from Spanish wrecks on adjacent
r