they found Outina himself, whom, prepossessed with ideas of
feudality, they regarded as the suzerain of a host of subordinate lords
and princes, ruling over the surrounding swamps and pine barrens. Outina
gratefully received the two prisoners whom Laudonniere had sent to
propitiate him, feasted the wonderful strangers, and invited them to
join him on a raid against his rival, Potanou. Laudonniere had promised
to join Satouriona against Outina, and Vasseur now promised to join
Outina against Potanon, the hope of finding gold being in both cases the
source of this impolitic compliance. Vasseur went back to Fort Caroline
with five of the men, and left Arlac with the remaining five to fight
the battles of Ontina.

The warriors mustered to the number of some two hundred, and the
combined force of white men and red took up their march. The wilderness
through which they passed has not yet quite lost its characteristic
features,--the bewildering monotony of the pine barrens, with their
myriads of bare gray trunks and their canopy of perennial green, through
which a scorching sun throws spots and streaks of yellow light, here on
an undergrowth of dwarf palmetto, and there on dry sands half hidden
by tufted wire-grass, and dotted with the little mounds that mark the
burrows of the gopher; or those oases in the desert, the "hummocks,"
with their wild, redundant vegetation, their entanglement of trees,
bushes, and vines, their scent of flowers and song of birds; or the
broad sunshine of the savanna, where they waded to the neck in grass; or
the deep swamp, where, out of the black and root-encumbered slough, rise
the huge buttressed trunks of the Southern cypress, the gray Spanish
moss drooping from every bough and twig, wrapping its victims like a
drapery of tattered cobwebs, and slowly draining away their life,
for even plants devour each other, and play their silent parts in the
universal tragedy of nature.

The allies held their way through forest, savanna, and swamp, with
Outina's Indians in the front, till they neared the hostile villages,
when the modest warriors fell to the rear, and yielded the post of honor
to the Frenchmen.

An open country lay before them, with rough fields of maize, beans, and
pumpkins, and the palisades of an Indian town. Their approach was seen,
and the warriors of Potanon swarmed out to meet them; but the sight of
the bearded strangers, the flash and report of the fire-arms, and the
fall of their