1 files changed, 4425 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/41273-0.txt b/41273-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4512986
--- /dev/null
+++ b/41273-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4425 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41273 ***
+
+Transcriber's Note
+
+The text is given here as printed with the exception of several
+punctuation errors, which have been corrected and are noted in the
+End Notes. French titles are generally printed without accents, and are
+retained as such.
+
+Text in italics is rendered here as '_italic_. The 'oe' ligature is
+printed as separate characters.
+
+
+
+
+                          THE STORY OF TONTY
+
+
+
+
+                          THE STORY OF TONTY
+
+                                  BY
+
+                       MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD
+
+                             Illustrated
+
+                            [Illustration]
+
+                               CHICAGO
+                      A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY
+                                1890
+
+                              COPYRIGHT,
+                       BY A. C. MCCLURG AND CO.
+
+                              A.D. 1889.
+
+
+
+
+                              CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                    PAGE
+
+         INTRODUCTION                                  7
+
+
+         Book I.
+
+         A MONTREAL BEAVER FAIR.
+
+           I.  FRONTENAC                              11
+
+          II.  HAND-OF-IRON                           20
+
+         III. FATHER HENNEPIN                         28
+
+          IV.  A COUNCIL                              39
+
+           V.   SAINTE JEANNE                         48
+
+          VI.  THE PROPHECY OF JOLYCOEUR              57
+
+
+         Book II.
+
+         FORT FRONTENAC.
+
+            I.  RIVAL MASTERS                         71
+
+           II. A TRAVELLED FRIAR                      81
+
+          III. HEAVEN AND EARTH                       87
+
+           IV. A CANOE FROM THE ILLINOIS              96
+
+            V.  FATHER HENNEPIN'S CHAPEL             109
+
+           VI. LA SALLE AND TONTY                    118
+
+         VII. AN ADOPTION                            128
+
+         VIII. TEGAHKOUITA                           136
+
+           IX. AN ORDEAL                             146
+
+            X. HEMLOCK                               155
+
+
+         Book III.
+
+         FORT ST. LOUIS OF THE ILLINOIS.
+
+           I. IN AN EAGLE'S NEST                     167
+
+          II. THE FRIEND AND BROTHER                 176
+
+         III. HALF-SILENCE                           188
+
+          IV. A FÊTE ON THE ROCK                     200
+
+           V. THE UNDESPAIRING NORMAN                210
+
+          VI. TO-DAY                                 224
+
+
+
+
+                            INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+No man can see all of a mountain at once. He sees its differing sides.
+Moreover, it has rainy and bright day aspects, and summer and winter
+faces.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The romancer is covered with the dust of old books, modern books, great
+books, and out of them all brings in a condensing hand these pictures of
+two men whose lives were as large as this continent.
+
+La Salle is a definite figure in the popular mind. But La Salle's
+greater friend is known only to historians and students. To me the
+finest fact in the Norman explorer's career is the devotion he
+commanded in Henri de Tonty. No stupid dreamer, no ruffian at heart, no
+betrayer of friendship, no mere blundering woodsman--as La Salle has
+been outlined by his enemies--could have bound to himself a man like
+Tonty. The love of this friend and the words this friend has left on
+record thus honor La Salle. And we who like courage and steadfastness
+and gentle courtesy in men owe much honor which has never been paid to
+Henri de Tonty.
+
+
+
+
+                                Book I.
+
+                         A MONTREAL BEAVER FAIR.
+
+                              1678 A. D.
+
+
+
+
+                           THE STORY OF TONTY.
+
+
+
+
+                                   I.
+
+                               FRONTENAC.
+
+
+Along the entire river front of Montreal camp-fires faded as the
+amphitheatre of night gradually dissolved around them.
+
+Canoes lay beached in one long row as if a shoal of huge fish had come
+to land. The lodges made a new street along Montreal wharf. Oblong
+figures of Indian women moved from shadow to shine, and children stole
+out to caper beside kettles where they could see their breakfasts
+steaming. Here and there light fell upon a tranquil mummy less than a
+metre in length, standing propped against a lodge side, and blinking
+stoical eyes in its brown flat face as only a bark-encased Indian baby
+could blink; or it slept undisturbed by the noise of the awakening camp,
+looking a mummy indeed.
+
+The savage of the New World carried his family with him on every
+peaceable journey; sometimes to starve for weeks when the winter hunting
+proved bad. It was only when he went to war that he denied himself all
+squaw service.
+
+The annual beaver fair was usually held in midsummer, but this year the
+tribes of the upper lakes had not descended with their furs to Montreal
+until September. These precious skins, taken out of the canoes, were
+stored within the lodges.
+
+Every male of the camp was already greasing, painting, and feathering
+himself for the grand council, which always preceded a beaver fair.
+Hurons, Ottawas, Crees, Nipissings, Ojibwas, Pottawatamies, each jealous
+for his tribe, completed a process begun the night before, and put on
+what might be called his court dress. In some cases this was no dress at
+all, except a suit of tattooing, or a fine coat of ochre streaked with
+white clay or soot. The juice of berries heightened nature in their
+faces. But there were grand barbarians who laid out robes of beaver
+skin, ample, and marked inside with strange figures or porcupine quill
+embroidery. The heads swarming in this vast and dusky dressing-room were
+some of them shaven bare except the scalp lock, some bristling in a
+ridge across the top, while others carried the natural coarse growth
+tightly braided down one side, with the opposite half flowing loose.
+
+Montreal behind its palisades made a dim background to all this early
+illumination,--few domestic candles shining through windows or glancing
+about the Hôtel Dieu as the nuns began their morning devotions. Mount
+Royal now flickered a high shadow, and now massed inertly against stars;
+but the river, breathing forever like some colossal creature, reflected
+all the camp-fires in its moving scales.
+
+The guns of the fort had fired a salute to Indian guests on their
+arrival the evening before. But at sunrise repeated cannonading, a
+prolonged roll of drums, and rounds of musketry announced that the
+governor-general's fleet was in sight.
+
+Montreal flocked to the wharf where already the savages were arrayed in
+solemn ranks. Marching out of the fortress with martial music, past the
+Hôtel Dieu to the landing-place where Frontenac must step from his boat,
+came the remnant of the Carignan regiment. Even the Sulpitian
+brotherhood, whose rights as seigniors of Montreal island this governor
+had at one time slighted, appeared to do him honor. And gentle nuns of
+St. Joseph were seen in the general outpour of inhabitants.
+
+This governor-general, with all his faults, had a large and manly way of
+meeting colonial dangers, and was always a prop under the fainting heart
+of New France.
+
+His boats made that display upon the St. Lawrence which it was his
+policy and inclination to make before Indians. Officers in white and
+gold, and young nobles of France, powdered, and flashing in the colors
+of Louis' magnificent reign, crowded his own vessel,--young men who had
+ventured out to Quebec because it was the fashion at court to be skilled
+in colonial matters, and now followed Frontenac as far as Montreal to
+amuse themselves with the annual beaver fair. The flag of France, set
+with its lily-like symbol, waved over their heads its white reply to
+its twin signal on the fort.
+
+Frontenac stood at the boat's prow, his rich cloak thrown back, and his
+head bared to the morning river breath and the people's shouts. Being
+colonial king pleased this soldier, tired of European camps and the full
+blaze of royalty, where his poverty put him to the disadvantage of a
+singed moth.
+
+He came blandly gliding to the wharf, Louis de Buade, Count of
+Frontenac, and Baron of Palluau, and the only governor of New France who
+ever handled the arrogant Five Nations of the Iroquois like a strong
+father,[1]--a man who would champion the rights of his meanest colonist,
+and at the same time quarrel with his lieutenant in power to his last
+breath.
+
+Merchants of Quebec followed him with boat-loads of Indian supplies.
+Even Acadia had sent men to this voyage, for the Baron de Saint-Castin
+appeared in the fleet, with his young Indian Baroness. It is told of
+Saint-Castin that he had kept a harem in his sylvan principality of
+Pentegoet; but being a man of conscience, he confessed and reformed. It
+is also told of him that he never kept a harem or otherwise lapsed into
+the barbarisms of the Penobscots, among whom he carried missionaries and
+over whom he was a great lord. Type of the Frenchman of his day, he came
+to New France a lad in the Carignan regiment, amassed fortunes in the
+fur trade, and holding his own important place in the colony, goaded
+like a thorn the rival colony of New England along his borders.
+
+But most conspicuous to the eyes of Montreal were two men standing at
+Frontenac's right hand, a Norman and an Italian. Both were tall, the
+Italian being of deeper colors and more generous materials. His large
+features were clothed in warm brown skin. Rings of black hair thick as a
+fleece were cut short above his military collar. His fearless, kindly
+eyes received impressions from every aspect of the New World. There
+dwelt in Henri de Tonty the power to make men love him at
+sight,--savages as well as Europeans. He wore the dress of a French
+lieutenant of infantry, and looked less than thirty years old, having
+entered the service of France in his early youth.
+
+The other man, Robert Cavelier,--called La Salle from an estate he had
+once owned in France,--explorer, and seignior of Fort Frontenac and
+adjacent grants on the north shore of Lake Ontario, was at that time in
+the prime of his power. He was returning from France, with the king's
+permission to work out all his gigantic enterprises, with funds for the
+purpose, and one of the most promising young military men in Europe as
+his lieutenant.
+
+Montreal merchants on the wharf singled out La Salle with jealous eye,
+which saw in the drooping point and flaring base of his nose an endless
+smile of scorn. He was a man who had only to use his monopolies to
+become enormously rich, cutting off the trade of the lakes from
+Montreal. That he was above gain, except as he could use it for hewing
+his ambitious road into the wilderness, they did not believe. The
+merchants of Montreal readily translated the shyness and self-restraint
+of his solitary nature into the arrogance of a recently ennobled and
+successful man.
+
+La Salle had a spare face, with long oval cheeks, curving well inward
+beside the round of his sensitive prominent chin. Gray and olive tones
+still further cooled the natural pallor of his skin and made ashen brown
+the hair which he wore flowing.
+
+The plainness of an explorer and the elegance of a man exact in all his
+habits distinguished La Salle's dress against that background of
+brilliant courtiers.
+
+He moved ashore with Frontenac, who saluted benignly both the array of
+red allies and the inhabitants of this second town in the province.
+
+The sub-governor stepped out to escort the governor-general to the fort,
+bells rang, cannon still boomed, martial music pierced the heart with
+its thrill, and the Carignan squad wheeled in behind Frontenac's moving
+train.
+
+"Sieur de la Salle! Sieur de la Salle!" a little girl called, breaking
+away from the Sisters of St. Joseph, whose convent robes had enclosed
+her like palisades, "take me also in the procession!"
+
+This demand granted itself, so nimbly did she escape a nun's ineffectual
+grasp and spring between Tonty and La Salle.
+
+Frontenac himself had turned at the shrill outcry. He laughed when he
+saw the wilful young creature taking the explorer by the wrist and
+falling into step so close to his own person.
+
+A pursuing nun, unwilling to interrupt the governors train, hovered
+along its progress, making anxious signs to her charge, until she
+received an assuring gesture from La Salle. She then went back
+dissatisfied but relieved of responsibility; and the child, with a proud
+fling of her person, marched on toward the fort.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Frontenac was the only man the Iroquois would ever allow to
+      call himself their father. All other governors, English or
+      French, were simply brothers.
+
+
+
+
+                                  II.
+
+                             HAND-OF-IRON.
+
+
+"Mademoiselle the tiger-cat," said La Salle to Tonty, making himself
+heard with some effort above the din of martial sound.
+
+The young soldier lifted his hat with his left hand and made the child a
+bow, which she regarded with critical eyes.
+
+"I am the niece of Monsieur de la Salle," she explained to Tonty as she
+marched; "so he calls me tiger-cat."
+
+"Mademoiselle Barbe Cavelier is the tiger-cat's human name," the
+explorer added, laughing. "It is flattering to have this nimble animal
+spring affectionately on one from ambush; but I should soon have
+inquired after you at the convent, mademoiselle."
+
+"I did not spring affectionately on you," said Barbe; "I wanted to be in
+the procession."
+
+"Hast thou then lost all regard for thy uncle La Salle during his year
+of absence?"
+
+Barbe's high childish voice distinctly and sincerely stated, "No,
+monsieur; I have fought all the girls at the convent on your account.
+Jeanne le Ber said nothing against you; but she is a Le Ber. I am glad
+you came back in such grandeur. I was determined to be in the grandeur
+myself. But it is not a time to give you my cheek for a kiss."
+
+La Salle smiled over her head at Tonty. The Italian noted her marked
+resemblance to the explorer. She had the same features in delicate
+tints, the darkness of her eyelashes and curls only emphasizing the
+type. Already her small nose drooped at the point and flared at the
+base. As La Salle and his young kinswoman stepped together, Tonty gauged
+them alike,--two self-restraining natures with unmeasured endurance and
+individual force like the electric current.
+
+Montreal's square bastioned fort, by the mouth of a small creek flowing
+into the St. Lawrence, was soon reached from the wharf. It stood at the
+south end of the town.
+
+"My dear child," said La Salle, stating his case to Barbe, "it is
+necessary for me to go into the fort with Count Frontenac, and equally
+necessary you should go back at once to the Sisters. I will bring you
+out of the convent to-morrow to look at the beaver fair. This is
+Monsieur de Tonty, my lieutenant; let him take you back to the nuns. I
+shall be blamed if I carry you into the fort."
+
+Barbe heard him without raising objections. She looked at Tonty, who
+gave her his left hand and drew her out of the train.
+
+It swept past them into the fortress gates,--gallant music, faces
+returning her eager gaze with smiles, plumes, powdered curls, and laces,
+gold and white uniforms, soldiers with the sun flashing from their
+gun-barrels.
+
+Barbe watched the last man in. To express her satisfaction she then
+rose to the tip of one foot and hopped three steps. She was lightly and
+delicately made, and as full of restless grace as a bird. Her face and
+curls bloomed above and strongly contrasted with the raiment her convent
+guardians planned for a child dependent, not on their charity, but on
+their maternal care.
+
+The September morning enveloped the world in a haze of brightness, like
+that perfecting blue breath which we call the bloom upon the grape. A
+great landscape with a scarf of melting azure resting around its
+horizon, or ravelling to shreds against the mountain's breast, or
+pretending to be wood-smoke across the river, drew Tonty's eye from the
+disappearing pageant.
+
+That fair land was a fit spot whereon the most luxurious of
+civilizations should touch and affiliate with savages of the wilderness.
+Up the limpid green river the Lachine Rapids showed their teeth with
+audible roar. From that point Mount Royal could be seen rising out of
+mists and stretching its hind-quarters westward like some vast mastodon.
+But to Tonty only its front appeared, a globe dipped in autumn colors
+and wearing plumes of vapor. The sky of this new hemisphere rose in
+unmeasured heights which the eye followed in vain; there seemed no
+zenith to the swimming blinding azure.
+
+A row of booths for merchants had been built all along the outside of
+Montreal's palisades, and traders were thus early setting their goods in
+array.
+
+At the north extremity of the town that huge stone windmill built by the
+seigniors for defence, cast a long dewy shadow toward the west. Its
+loopholes showed like dark specks on the body of masonry.
+
+Sun-sparkles on the river were no more buoyant and changeable than the
+child at Tonty's side. Dimples came and went in her cheeks. Her blood
+was stirred by the swarming life around her.
+
+"Monsieur," she confided to her uncle's lieutenant, "I am meditating
+something very wicked."
+
+"Certainly that is impossible, mademoiselle," said Tonty, accommodating
+his step to her reluctant gait.
+
+"I am meditating on not going back to the convent."
+
+"Where would you go, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Everywhere, to see things."
+
+"But my orders are to escort you to the nuns. You would disgrace me as a
+soldier."
+
+Barbe lifted her gaze to his face and was diverted from rebellion. Tonty
+put out his arm to guard her, but a tall stalking brave was pushed
+against her in passing and immediately startled by the thud of her
+prompt fist upon his back. The Indian turned, unsheathing his knife.
+
+"Get out of my way, thou ugly big warrior," said Barbe, meeting his eye,
+which softened from fierceness to laughter, and holding her fist ready
+for further encounter.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The Indian made some mocking gestures and menaced her playfully with
+his thumb. Tonty threw his arm across her shoulder and moved her on
+toward the convent. Barbe escaped from this touch, an entirely new
+matter filling her mind.
+
+"Monsieur, even old Jonaneaux in our Hôtel Dieu hath not such a heavy
+hand as thou hast. Many a time hath he pulled me down off the palisade
+when I looked over to see the coureurs de bois go roaring by. But thou
+hast a hand like iron!"
+
+Tonty flushed, being not yet hardened to his misfortune.
+
+"It is a hand of iron. I am called Main-de-fer."[2]
+
+Barbe took hold of it in its glove. Of all the people she had ever met
+Tonty was the only person whose touch she did not resent.
+
+"The other hand is not like unto it, monsieur?"
+
+He gave her the other also, and she compared their weight. With a
+roguish lifting of her nostrils she inquired,--
+
+"Will every bit of you turn to metal like this heavy hand?"
+
+"Alas, no, mademoiselle; there is no hope of that."
+
+Tonty stripped his gauntlet off. With half afraid fingers she examined
+the artificial member. It was of copper.
+
+"Where is the old one, monsieur?"
+
+"It was blown off by a grenade at Messina last year."
+
+"Does it hurt?"
+
+"Not now. Except when I think of the service of Monsieur de la Salle,
+and of my being thus pieced out as a man."
+
+Barbe measured his height and breadth and warm-toned face with satisfied
+eyes. She consoled him.
+
+"There is so much of you, monsieur, you can easily do without a hand."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [2] "Henri de Tonty, surnommé Main-de-fer." Notes Sur Nouvelle
+      France.
+
+
+
+
+                                 III.
+
+                          FATHER HENNEPIN.
+
+
+"Thou art a comfort to a soldier, mademoiselle," said Tonty, heartily.
+
+"But not to a priest," observed Barbe. "For last birthday when I was
+eleven my uncle Abbé stuck out his lip and said I was eleven years bad.
+But my uncle La Salle kissed my cheek. There goeth François le Moyne."
+Her face became suddenly distorted with grimaces of derision beside
+which Tonty could scarcely keep his gravity. A boy of about her own age
+ran past, dropping her a sneer for her pains.
+
+"Monsieur, these Le Moynes and Sorels and Bouchers and Varennes and
+Joliets and Le Bers, they are all against my uncle La Salle. The girls
+talk about it in the convent. But he hath the governor on his side, so
+what can they do? I have pinched Jeanne le Ber at school, but she will
+never pinch back and it only makes her feel holier. So I pinch her no
+more. Do you know Jeanne le Ber?"
+
+"No," said Tonty, "I have not that pleasure."
+
+"Oh, monsieur, it is no pleasure. She says so many prayers. When I have
+prayers for penances they make me so tired I have to get up and hop
+between them. But Jeanne le Ber would pray all the time if her father
+did not pull her off her knees. My father and mother died in France. If
+they were alive they would not have to pull me off my knees."
+
+"But a woman should learn to pray, even as a man should learn to fight,"
+observed Tonty. "He stands between her and danger, and she should stand
+linking him to heaven."
+
+"I can fight for myself," said Barbe. "And everybody ought to say his
+own prayers; but it makes one disagreeable to say more than his share. I
+wish to grow up an agreeable person."
+
+They had reached the palisade entrance which fronted the river, Barbe's
+feet still lagging amid the lively scenes outside. She allowed Tonty to
+lead her with his left hand, thus sheltering her next the booths from
+streams of passing Indians and traders.
+
+Beside this open gate she would have lingered indefinitely, chattering
+to a guardian who felt her hatred of convent restraint, and gazing at
+preparations for the council: at prunes and chopped pieces of oxen being
+put to boil for an Indian feast; at the governor's chair from the
+fortress, where the sub-governor lived, borne by men to the middle of
+that space yearly occupied as the council ring. But a watchful Sister
+was hovering ready inside the palisade gate, and reaching forth her arm
+she drew her charge away from Tonty, giving him brief and scandalized
+thanks for his service.
+
+Barbe looked back. It was worth Tonty's while to catch sight of that
+regretful face smeared about its warm neck by curls, its lips parted to
+repeat and still repeat, "Adieu, monsieur. Adieu, monsieur."
+
+But two men had come between the disappearing child and him, one man,
+dressed partly like an officer and partly like a coureur de bois,
+throwing both arms around Tonty in the eager Latin manner.
+
+"My cousin Henri de Tonty, welcome to the New World. I waited with my
+gouty leg at the fortress for you; but when you came not, like a good
+woodsman, I tracked you down."
+
+"My cousin Greysolon du Lhut! Glad am I to find you so speedily. This
+cold and heavy hand belies me."
+
+"I heard of this hand. But the other was well lost, my cousin. Take
+courage in beholding me; I had nearly lost a leg, and not by good powder
+and shot either, but with gout which disgracefully loads up a man with
+his own dead members. But the Iroquois virgin, Catharine Tegahkouita,
+hath interceded for me."
+
+"Monsieur de Tonty will observe we have saints among the savages in New
+France," said the other man.
+
+He was a Récollet friar with sandalled feet, wearing a gray capote of
+coarse texture which was girt with the cord of Saint Francis. His
+peaked hood hung behind his shoulders leaving his shaven crown to
+glisten with rosy enjoyment of the sunlight. A crucifix hung at his
+side; but no man ever devoted his life to prayer who was so manifestly
+created to enjoy the world. He had a nose of Flemish amplitude depressed
+in the centre, fat lips, a terraced chin, and twinkling good-humored
+eyes. The gray capote could not conceal a pompous swell of the stomach
+and the strut of his sandalled feet.
+
+"My cousin Tonty," said Du Lhut, "this is Father Louis Hennepin from
+Fort Frontenac. He hath come down to Montreal[3] to meet Monsieur de la
+Salle and engage himself in the new western venture."
+
+"Venture!" exclaimed a keen-visaged man in the garb of a
+merchant-colonist who was carrying a bale of goods to one of the
+booths,--for no man in Montreal was ashamed to get profit out of the
+beaver fair. "Where your Monsieur de la Salle is concerned there will be
+venture enough, but no results for any man but La Salle."
+
+He set his bale down as if it were a challenge.
+
+Points of light sprung into Tonty's eyes and the blood in his face
+showed its quickening.
+
+"Monsieur," he spoke, "if you are a gentleman you shall answer to me for
+slandering Monsieur de la Salle."
+
+"Jacques le Ber is a noble of the colony," declared Du Lhut, with the
+derisive freedom this great ranger and leader of coureurs de bois
+assumed toward any one; "for hath he not purchased his patent of King
+Louis for six thousand livres? But look you, my cousin Tonty, if the
+king allowed not us colonial nobles to engage in trade he would lose us
+all by starvation; for scarce a miserable censitaire on our lands can
+pay us his capon and pint of wheat at the end of the year."
+
+[Illustration: "Monsieur," spoke Tonty, "if you are a gentleman you
+shall answer to me for slandering Monsieur de la Salle."--_Page 32._]
+
+"I will answer to you, monsieur," said Jacques le Ber to the soldier,
+"that La Salle is the enemy of the colony, and the betrayer of them that
+have been his friends."
+
+Father Hennepin and Du Lhut caught Tonty's arms. Du Lhut then dragged
+him with expostulations inside the palisade gate, repeating Frontenac's
+strict orders that all quarrels should be suppressed during the beaver
+fair, and as the young man's furious looks still sought the merchant,
+reminding him of the harm he might do La Salle by an open quarrel with
+Montreal traders.
+
+"I, who am not bound to La Salle as close as thou art,--I tell you it
+will not do," declared Du Lhut.
+
+"Let the man keep his distance, then!"
+
+"Why, you hot-blooded fellow! why do you take these Frenchmen so
+seriously?"
+
+"Sieur de la Salle is my friend. I will strike any man who denounces
+him."
+
+"Oh, come out toward the mountain. Let us make a little pilgrimage,"
+laughed Du Lhut. "We must cool thee, Tonty, we must cool thee; or La
+Salle's enemies will lie in one heap the length of Montreal, mowed by
+this iron hand!"
+
+As Jacques le Ber carried forward his bale, Father Hennepin walked
+beside him dealing forth good-natured remonstrance with fat hands and
+out-turned lips.
+
+"My son, God save me from the man who doth nurse a grievance. Your case
+is simply this: our governor built a fort at Cataraqui, and it is now
+called Fort Frontenac. He put you and associates of yours in charge, and
+you had profit of that fort. Afterward, by his recommendation to the
+king, Sieur de la Salle was made seignior of Fort Frontenac and lands
+thereabout. This hast thou ever since bitterly chewed to the poisoning
+of thy immortal soul."
+
+"You churchmen all,--Jesuits, Sulpitians, or Récollets,--are over
+zealous to domineer in this colony," spoke Jacques le Ber, through the
+effort of carrying his bale.
+
+"My son," said Father Hennepin, swelling his stomach and inflating his
+throat, "why should I enter the mendicant order of Saint Francis and
+live according to the rules of a pure and severe virtue, if I felt no
+zeal for saving souls?"
+
+"I spoke of domineering," repeated the angry merchant.
+
+"And touching Monsieur de la Salle," said Father Hennepin, "I exhort
+thee not to love him; for who could love him,--but to rid thyself of
+hatred of any one."
+
+"Father Hennepin has not then attached himself to La Salle's new
+enterprise?"
+
+"I have a grand plan of discovery of my own," said the friar, deeply,
+rolling his shaven head, "an enterprise which would terrify anybody but
+me. The Sieur de la Salle merely opens my path. I will confess to thee,
+my son, that in youth I often hid myself behind the doors of
+taverns,--which were no fit haunts for men of holy life,--to hearken
+unto sailors' tales of strange lands. And thus would I willingly do
+without eating or drinking, such burning desire I had to explore new
+countries."
+
+The Father did not observe that Jacques le Ber had reached his own booth
+and was there arranging his goods regardless of explorations in strange
+lands, but walked on, talking to the air, his out-thrust lips rounding
+every word, until some derisive savage pointed out this solo.
+
+Jacques le Ber made ready to take his place in the governor's council,
+thinking wrathfully of his encounter with Tonty. He dwelt, as we all do,
+upon the affronts and hindrances of the present, rather than on his
+prospect of founding a strong and worthy family in the colony.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [3] The romancer here differs from the historian, who says Father
+      Hennepin met La Salle at Quebec.
+
+
+
+
+                                 IV.
+
+                             A COUNCIL.
+
+
+The North American savage, with an unerring instinct which republics
+might well study, sent his wisest men to the front to represent him.
+
+A great circle of Indians, ranged according to their tribes, sat around
+Frontenac when the stone windmill trod its noon shadow underfoot. Te
+Deum had been sung in the chapel, and thanks offered for his safe
+arrival. The principal men of Montreal, with the governor's white and
+gold officers, sat now within the circle behind his chair.
+
+But Frontenac faced every individual of his Indian children, moving
+before them, their natural leader, as he made his address of greeting,
+admonition, and approval, through Du Lhut as interpreter. The old
+courtier loved Indians. They appealed to that same element in him which
+the coureurs de bois knew how to reach. The Frenchman has a wild strain
+of blood. He takes kindly and easily to the woods. He makes himself an
+appropriate and even graceful figure against any wilderness background,
+and goes straight to Nature's heart, carrying all the refinements of
+civilization with him.
+
+The smoke of the peace pipe went up hour after hour. By strictest rules
+of precedence each red orator rose in his turn and spoke his tribe's
+reply to Onontio.[4] An Indian never hurried eloquence. The sun might
+tip toward Mount Royal, and the steam of his own deferred feast reach
+his nose in delicious suggestion. He had to raise the breeze of
+prosperity, to clear the sun, to wipe away tears for friends slain
+during past misunderstandings with Onontio's other children, and to open
+the path of peace between their lodges and the lodges of his tribe.
+Ottawa, Huron, Cree, Nipissing, Ojibwa, or Pottawatamie, it was
+necessary for him to bury the hatchet in pantomime, to build a great
+council-fire whose smoke should rise to heaven in view of all the
+nations, and gather the tribes of the lakes in one family council with
+the French around this fire forever.
+
+[Illustration: "Each red orator rose in his turn and spoke his tribe's
+reply."--_Page 40._]
+
+Children played along the river's brink, and squaws kept fire under the
+kettles. A few men guarded the booths along the palisades from
+pilferers, though scarce a possible pilferer roamed from the centre of
+interest.
+
+Crowds of spectators pressed around the great circle; traders who had
+brought packs of skins skilfully intercepted by them at some station
+above Montreal; interpreters, hired by merchants to serve them during
+the fair; coureurs de bois stretching up their neck sinews until these
+knotted with intense and prolonged effort. In this standing wall the
+habitant was crowded by converted Iroquois from the Mountain mission,
+who, having learned their rights as Christians, yielded no inch of room.
+
+The sun descended out of sight behind Mount Royal, though his presence
+lingered with sky and river in abundant crimsons. Still the smoke of the
+peace pipe rose above the council ring, and eloquence rolled its periods
+on. That misty scarf around the horizon, which high noon drove out of
+sight, floated into view again, becoming denser and denser. The pipings
+of out-door insects came sharpened through twilight, and all the
+camp-fires were deepening their hue, before a solemn uprising of
+Frenchmen and Indians proclaimed the council over.
+
+La Salle had sat through it at the governor's right hand, watching those
+bronze faces and restless eyes with sympathy as great as Frontenac's.
+He, also, was a lord of the wilderness. He could more easily open his
+shy nature to such red brethren and eloquently command, denounce, or
+persuade them, than stand before dames and speak one word,--which he was
+forced to attempt when candles were lighted in the candelabra of the
+fort.
+
+There was not such pageantry at Montreal as in the more courtly society
+of Quebec. The appearance of the governor with his train of young nobles
+drew out those gentler inhabitants who took no part in the bartering of
+the beaver fair.
+
+Perrot, the sub-governor, had known his period of bitter disagreement
+with Frontenac. Having made peace with a superior he once defied, he was
+anxious to pay Frontenac every honor, and the two governors were united
+in their policy of amusing and keeping busy so varied an assemblage as
+that which thronged the beaver fair. Festivity as grand as colonial
+circumstances permitted was therefore held in the governor's apartments.
+The guarded fortress gates stood open; torches burned within the walls,
+and blanketed savages stalked in and out.
+
+Yet that colonial drawing-room lacked the rude elements which go to
+making most pioneer societies. Human intercourse in frontier towns
+exposed to danger and hardship, though it may be hearty and innocent, is
+rarely graceful.
+
+But here was a small Versailles transplanted to the wilderness.
+Fragments of a great court met Indian-wedded nobles and women with
+generations of good ancestors behind them. Here were even the fashions
+of the times in gowns, and the youths of Louis' salon bowed and paid
+compliments to powdered locks. These French colonial nobles were poor;
+but with pioneer instinct they decorated themselves with the best
+garments their scanty money would buy. Here thronged Dumays, Le Moynes,
+Mousniers, Desroches, Fleurys, Baudrys, Migeons, Vigers, Gautiers, all
+chattering and animated. Here stood the Baroness de Saint-Castin like a
+statue of bronze. Here were those illustrious Le Moynes, father and
+sons, whose deeds may be traced in our day from the St. Lawrence to the
+Gulf of Mexico. Here Frontenac, with the graciously winning manner which
+belonged to his pleasant hours, drew to himself and soothed disaffected
+magnates of his colonial kingdom.
+
+All these figures, and the spectacles swarming around the beaver fair,
+like combinations in a kaleidoscope to be seen once and seen no more,
+gave Tonty such condensed knowledge of the New World as no ordinary days
+could offer.
+
+La Salle alone, though fresh from audiences at court and distinguished
+by royal favor, stood abashed and annoyed by the part he must play
+toward civilized people.
+
+"Look at the Sieur de la Salle," observed Du Lhut to Tonty. "There is a
+man who stands and fights off the approach of every other creature."
+
+"There never was a man better formed for friendship," retorted Tonty.
+"Touching his reserve, I call that no blemish, though he has said of it
+himself, it is a defect he can never be rid of as long as he lives, and
+often it spites him against himself."
+
+La Salle turned his shoulder on these associates, uneasily conscious
+that his weakness was observed, and put many moving figures between
+himself and them. He had the free gait of a woodsman tempered by the air
+of a courtier. More than one Montreal girl accusing gold-embroidered
+young soldiers of finding the Quebec women charming, turned her eyes to
+follow La Salle. Possible lord of the vast and unknown west, in the
+flower of his years, he was next to Frontenac the most considerable
+figure in the colony.
+
+Severe study in early youth and ambition in early manhood had crowded
+the lover out of La Salle. His practical gaze was oppressed by so many
+dames. It dwelt upon the floor, until, travelling accidentally to a
+corner, it rose and encountered Jacques le Ber's daughter sitting beside
+her mother.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [4] "This name was in Huron and Iroquois the translation of the
+      name of M. de Montmagny (Mons maguns, great mountain). The
+      savages continued calling the successors of Governor
+      Montmagny by the same name, and even to the French king they
+      applied the title 'Great Ononthio.'" Translated from note on
+      page 138, tome 1, Garneau's Histoire du Canada.
+
+
+
+
+                                  V.
+
+                            SAINTE JEANNE.
+
+
+When La Salle was seignior of Lachine, before the king and Frontenac
+helped his ambition to its present foothold, he had been in the habit of
+stopping at Jacques le Ber's house when he came to Montreal.
+
+The first day of the beaver fair greatly tasked Madame le Ber. She sat
+drowsily beside the eldest child of her large absent flock, and was not
+displeased to have her husband's distinguished enemy approach Jeanne.
+
+The wife of Le Ber had been called madame since her husband bought his
+patent of nobility; but she held no strict right to the title, even
+wives of the lesser nobles being then addressed as demoiselles. In that
+simple colonial life Jacques le Ber, or his wife in his absence, served
+goods to customers over his own counter. Madame le Ber was an excellent
+woman, who said her prayers and approached the sacraments at proper
+seasons. She had abundant flesh covered with dark red skin, and she
+often pondered why a spirit of a daughter with passionate longings after
+heaven had been sent to her. If Sieur de la Salle could draw the
+child's mind from extreme devotion, her husband must feel indebted to
+him.
+
+La Salle's face relaxed and softened as he sat down beside this
+sixteen-year-old maid in her colonial gown. She held her crucifix in her
+hands, and waited for him to talk. Jeanne made melody of his silences.
+As a child she had never rubbed against him for caresses, but looked
+into his eyes with sincere meditation. Having no idea of the explorer's
+aim, Jeanne le Ber was yet in harmony with him across their separating
+years. She also could stake her life on one supreme idea. La Salle was
+formed to subdue the wilderness; she was dimly and ignorantly, but with
+her childish might, undertaking that stranger region, the human soul.
+She looked younger than other girls of her age; yet La Salle was moved
+to say, using the name he had given her,--
+
+"You have changed much since last year, Sainte Jeanne."
+
+"Am I worse, Sieur de la Salle?" she anxiously inquired.
+
+"No. Better. Except I fear you have prayed yourself to a greater
+distance from me."
+
+"I name you in my prayers, Sieur de la Salle. Ever since my father
+ceased to be your friend I have asked to have your haughty spirit
+humbled."
+
+La Salle laughed.
+
+"If you name me at all, Sainte Jeanne, pray rather for the humbling of
+my enemies."
+
+"No, Sieur de la Salle. You need your enemies. I could ill do without
+mine."
+
+"Who could be an enemy to thee?"
+
+"There are many enemies of my soul. One is my great, my very great
+love."
+
+La Salle's face whitened and flushed. He cast a quick glance upon the
+dozing matron, the backs of people whose conversation buzzed about his
+ears, and returned to Jeanne's childlike white eyelids and
+crucifix-folding hands.
+
+"Whom do you love, Sainte Jeanne?"
+
+"I love my father so much, and my mother; and the children are too dear
+to me. Sometimes when I rise in the night to pray, and think of living
+apart from my dear father, the cold sweat stands on my forehead. Too
+many dear people throng between the soul and heaven. Even you, Sieur de
+la Salle,--I have to pray against thoughts of you."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Do not pray against me, Sainte Jeanne," said the explorer, with a
+wistful tremor of the lower lip. "Consider how few there be that love me
+well."
+
+Her eyes rested on him with divining gaze. Jeanne le Ber's eyes had the
+singular function of sending innumerable points of light swimming
+through the iris, as if the soul were in motion and shaking off
+sparkles.
+
+"If you lack love and suffer thereby," she instructed him, "it will
+profit your soul."
+
+La Salle interlaced his fingers, resting his hands upon his knees, and
+gave her a look which was both amused and tender.
+
+"And what other enemies has Sainte Jeanne?"
+
+"Sieur de la Salle, have I not often told you what a sinner I am? It
+ridicules me to call me saint."
+
+"Since you have grown to be a young demoiselle I ought to call you
+Mademoiselle le Ber."
+
+"Call me Sainte Jeanne rather than that. I do not want to be a young
+demoiselle, or in this glittering company. It is my father who insists."
+
+"Nor do I want to be in this glittering company, Sainte Jeanne."
+
+"The worst of all the other enemies, Sieur de la Salle, are vanity and a
+dread of enduring pain. I am very fond of dress." The young creature
+drew a deep regretful breath.
+
+"But you mortify this fondness?" said La Salle, accompanying with
+whimsical sympathy every confession of Jeanne le Ber's.
+
+"Indeed I have to humiliate myself often--often. When this evil desire
+takes strong hold, I put on the meanest rag I can find. But my father
+and mother will never let me go thus humbled to Mass."
+
+"Therein do I commend your father and mother," said La Salle; "though
+the outside we bear toward men is of little account. But tell me how do
+you school yourself to pain, Sainte Jeanne? I have not learned to bear
+pain well in all my years."
+
+Jeanne again met his face with swarming lights in her eyes. Seeing that
+no one observed them she bent her head toward La Salle and parted the
+hair over her crown. The straight fine growth was very thick and of a
+brown color. It reminded him of midwinter swamp grasses springing out of
+a bed of snow. A mat of burrs was pressed to this white scalp. Some of
+the hair roots showed red stains.
+
+"These hurt me all the time," said Jeanne. "And it is excellent torture
+to comb them out."
+
+She covered the burrs with a swift pressure, tightly closing her mouth
+and eyes with the spasm of pain this caused, and once more took and
+folded the crucifix within her hands.
+
+The explorer made no remonstrance against such self-torture, though his
+practical gaze remained on her youthful brier-crowned head. He heard a
+girl in front of him laugh to a courtier who was flattering her.
+
+"Hé, monsieur, I have myself seen Quebec women who dressed with odious
+taste."
+
+But Jeanne, wrapped in her own relation, continued with a tone which
+slighted mere physical pain,--
+
+"There is a better way to suffer, Sieur de la Salle, and that is from
+ill-treatment. Such anguish can be dealt out by the hands we love; but I
+have no friend willing to discipline me thus. My father's servant
+Jolycoeur is the only person who makes me as wretched as I ought to
+be."
+
+"Discipline through Jolycoeur," said La Salle, laughing, "is what my
+proud stomach could never endure."
+
+"Perhaps you have not such need, Sieur de la Salle. My father has many
+times turned him off, but I plead until he is brought back. He hath this
+whole year been a means of grace to me by his great impudence. If I say
+to him, 'Jolycoeur, do this or that,' he never fails to reply, 'Do it
+yourself, Mademoiselle Jeanne,' and adds profanity to make Heaven blush.
+Whenever he can approach near enough, he whispers contemptuous names at
+me, so that I cannot keep back the tears. Yet how little I endure, when
+Saint Lawrence perished on a gridiron, and all the other holy martyrs
+shame me!"
+
+"Your father does not suffer these things to be done to you?"
+
+"No, Sieur de la Salle. My father knows naught of it except my pity. He
+did once kick Jolycoeur, who left our house three days, so that I was
+in danger of sinking in slothful comfort. But I got him brought back,
+and he lay drunk in our garden with his mouth open, so that my soul
+shuddered to look at him. It was excellent discipline,"[5] said Jeanne,
+with a long breath.
+
+"Jolycoeur will better adorn the woods and risk his worthless neck on
+water for my uses, than longer chafe your tender nature," said La Salle.
+"He has been in my service before, and craved to-day that I would enlist
+him again."
+
+"Had my father turned him off?" asked Jeanne, with consternation.
+
+"He said Jacques le Ber had lifted a hand against him for innocently
+neglecting to carry bales of merchandise to a booth."
+
+"I did miss the smell of rum downstairs before we came away," said the
+girl, sadly. "And will you take my scourge from me, Sieur de la Salle?"
+
+"I will give him a turn at suffering himself," answered La Salle. "The
+fellow shall be whipped on some pretext when I get him within Fort
+Frontenac, for every pang he hath laid upon you. He is no stupid. He
+knew what he was doing."
+
+"Oh, Sieur de la Salle, Jolycoeur was only the instrument of Heaven.
+He is not to blame."
+
+"If I punish him not, it will be on your promise to seek no more
+torments, Sainte Jeanne."
+
+"There are no more for me to seek; for who in our house will now be
+unkind to me? But, Sieur de la Salle, I feel sure that during my
+lifetime I shall be permitted to suffer as much as Heaven could
+require."
+
+Man and child, each surrounded by his peculiar world, sat awhile longer
+together in silence, and then La Salle joined the governor.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [5] The asceticism here attributed to Mademoiselle Jeanne le Ber
+      was really practised by the wife of an early colonial noble.
+      See Parkman's Old Régime, p. 355.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VI.
+
+                   THE PROPHECY OF JOLYCOEUR.
+
+
+By next mid-day the beaver fair was at its height, and humming above the
+monotone of the St. Lawrence.
+
+Montreal, founded by religious enthusiasts and having the Sulpitian
+priests for its seigniors, was a quiet town when left to itself,--when
+the factions of Quebec did not meet its own factions in the street with
+clubs; or coureurs de bois roar along the house sides in drunken joy; or
+sudden glares on the night landscape with attendant screeching proclaim
+an Iroquois raid; or this annual dissipation in beaver skins crowd it
+for two days with strangers.
+
+Among colonists who had thronged out to meet the bearers of colonial
+riches as soon as the first Indian canoe was beached, were the coureurs
+de bois. They still swarmed about, making or renewing acquaintances,
+here acting as interpreters and there trading on their own account.
+
+Before some booths Indians pressed in rows, demanding as much as the
+English gave for their furs, though the price was set by law. French
+merchants poked their fingers into the satin pliancy of skins to search
+for flaws. Dealers who had no booths pressed with their interpreters
+from tribe to tribe,--small merchants picking the crumbs of profit from
+under their brethren's tables. There was greedy demand for the first
+quality of skins; for beaver came to market in three grades: "Castor
+gras, castor demi-gras, et castor sec."
+
+The booths were hung with finery, upon which squaws stood gazing with a
+stoical eye to be envied by civilized woman.
+
+The cassocks of Sulpitians and gray capotes of Récollet
+Fathers--favorites of Frontenac who hated Jesuits--penetrated in
+constant supervision every recess of the beaver fair. Yet in spite of
+this religious care rum was sold, its effects increasing as the day
+moved on.
+
+A hazy rosy atmosphere had shorn the sun so that he hung a large red
+globe in the sky. The land basked in melting tints. Scarcely any wind
+flowed on the river. Ste. Helen's Island and even Mount Royal, the
+seminary and stone windmill, the row of wooden houses and palisade tips,
+all had their edges blurred by hazy light.
+
+Amusement could hardly be lacking in any gathering of French people not
+assembled for ceremonies of religion. In Quebec the governor's court
+were inclined to entertain themselves with their own performance of
+spectacles. But Montreal had beheld too many spectacles of a tragic
+sort, had grasped too much the gun and spade, to have any facility in
+mimic play.
+
+Still the beaver fair was enlivened by music and tricksy gambols.
+Through all the ever opening and closing avenues a pageant went up and
+down, at which no colonist of New France could restrain his shouts of
+laughter,--a Dutchman with enormous stomach, long pipe, and short
+breeches, walking beside a lank and solemn Bostonnais. The two youths
+who had attired themselves for this masking were of Saint-Castin's
+train. That one who acted Puritan had drawn austere seams in his face
+with charcoal. His plain collar was severely turned down over a black
+doublet, which, with the sombre breeches and hose, had perhaps been
+stripped from some enemy that troubled Saint-Castin's border. The
+Bostonnais sung high shrill airs from a book he carried in one hand,
+only looking up to shake his head with cadaverous warning at his roaring
+spectators. One arm was linked in the Dutchman's, who took his pipe out
+of his mouth to say good-humoredly, "Ya-ya, ya-ya," to every sort of
+taunt.
+
+These types of rival colonies were such an exhilaration to the traders
+of New France that they pointed out the show to each other and pelted it
+with epithets all day.
+
+La Salle came out of the palisade gate of the town, leading by the hand
+a frisking little girl. He restrained her from farther progress into the
+moving swarm, although she dragged his arm.
+
+"Thou canst here see all there is of it, Barbe. The nuns did well to
+oppose your looking on this roaring commerce. You should be housed
+within the Hôtel Dieu all this day, had I not spoken a careless word
+yesterday. You saw the governor's procession. To-morrow he will start on
+his return. And I with my men go to Fort Frontenac."
+
+[Illustration: "The beaver fair was enlivened by music and tricksy
+gambols."--_Page 59._]
+
+"And at day dawn naught of the Indians can be found," added Barbe,
+"except their ashes and litter and the broken flasks they leave. The
+trader's booths will also be empty and dirty."
+
+"Come then, tiger-cat, return to thy cage."
+
+"My uncle La Salle, let me look a moment longer. See that fat man and
+his lean brother the people are pointing at! Even the Indians jump and
+jeer. I would strike them for such insolence! There, my uncle La Salle,
+there is Monsieur Iron-hand talking to the ugly servant of Jeanne le
+Ber's father."
+
+La Salle easily found Tonty. He was instructing and giving orders to
+several men collected for the explorer's service. Jolycoeur,[6] his
+cap set on sidewise, was yet abashed in his impudence by the mastery of
+Tonty. He wore a new suit of buckskin, with the coureur de bois' red
+sash knotted around his waist.
+
+"My uncle La Salle," inquired Barbe, turning over a disturbance in her
+mind, "must I live in the convent until I wed a man?"
+
+"The convent is held a necessary discipline for young maids."
+
+"I will then choose Monsieur Iron-hand directly. He would make a good
+husband."
+
+"I think you are right," agreed La Salle.
+
+"Because he would have but one hand to catch me with when I wished to
+run away," explained Barbe. "If he had also lost his feet it would be
+more convenient."
+
+"The marriage between Monsieur de Tonty and Mademoiselle Barbe Cavelier
+may then be arranged?"
+
+She looked at her uncle, answering his smile of amusement. But curving
+her neck from side to side, she still examined the Italian soldier.
+
+"I can outrun most people," suggested Barbe; "but Monsieur de Tonty
+looks very tall and strong."
+
+"Your intention is to take to the woods as soon as marriage sets you
+free?"
+
+"My uncle La Salle, I do have such a desire to be free in the woods!"
+
+"Have you, my child? If the wilderness thus draws you, you will sometime
+embrace it. Cavelier blood is wild juice."
+
+"And could I take my fortune with me? If it cumbered I would leave it
+behind with Monsieur de Tonty or my brother."
+
+"You will need all your fortune for ventures in the wilderness."
+
+"And the fortunes of all your relatives and of as many as will give you
+credit besides," said a priest wearing the Sulpitian dress. He stopped
+before them and looked sternly at Barbe.
+
+The Abbé Jean Cavelier had not such robust manhood as his brother. In
+him the Cavelier round lower lip and chin protruded, and the eyebrows
+hung forward.
+
+La Salle had often felt that he stooped in conciliating Jean, when Jean
+held the family purse and doled out loans to an explorer always kept
+needy by great plans.
+
+Jean had strongly the instinct of accumulation. He gauged the discovery
+and settlement of a continent by its promise of wealth to himself. His
+adherence to La Salle was therefore delicately adjusted by La Salle's
+varying fortunes; though at all times he gratified himself by handling
+with tyranny this younger and distinguished brother. Generous admiration
+of another's genius flowering from his stock with the perfect expression
+denied him, was scarcely possible in Jean Cavelier.
+
+"The Sisters said I might come hither with my uncle La Salle," replied
+Barbe, to his unspoken rebuke.
+
+"Into whose charge were your brother and yourself put when your parents
+died?"
+
+"Into the charge of my uncle the Abbé Cavelier."
+
+"Who brought your brother and you to this colony that he might watch
+over your nurture?"
+
+"My uncle the Abbé Cavelier."
+
+"It is therefore your uncle the Abbé Cavelier who will decide when to
+turn you out among Indians and traders."
+
+"You carry too bitter a tongue, my brother Jean," observed La Salle.
+"The child has caught no harm. My own youth was cramped within religious
+walls."
+
+"You carry too arrogant a mind now, my brother La Salle. I heard it
+noted of you to-day that you last night sat apart and deigned no word
+to them that have been of use to you in Montreal."
+
+La Salle's face owned the sting. Shy natures have always been made to
+pay a tax on pride. But next to the slanderer we detest the bearer of
+his slander to our ears.
+
+"It is too much for any man to expect in this world,--a brother who will
+defend him against his enemies."
+
+As soon as this regret had burst from the explorer, he rested his look
+again on Tonty.
+
+"I do defend you," asserted Abbé Cavelier; "and more than that I
+impoverish myself for you. But now that you come riding back from France
+on a high tide of the king's favor, I may not lay a correcting word on
+your haughty spirit. Neither yesterday nor to-day could I bring you to
+any reasonable state of humility. And all New France in full cry against
+you!"
+
+Extreme impatience darkened La Salle's face; but without further reply
+he drew Barbe's hand and turned back with her toward the Hôtel Dieu. She
+had watched her uncle the Abbé wrathfully during his attack upon La
+Salle, but as he dropped his eyes no more to her level she was obliged
+to carry away her undischarged anger. This she did with a haughty
+bearing so like La Salle's that the Abbé grinned at it through his
+fretfulness.
+
+He grew conscious of alien hair bristling against his neck as a voice
+mocked in undertone directly below his ear,--
+
+"Yonder struts a great Bashaw that will sometime be laid low!"
+
+The Abbé turned severely upon a person who presumed to tickle a priest's
+neck with his coarse mustache and astound a priest's ear with threats.
+
+He recognized the man known as Jolycoeur, who had been pushed against
+him in the throng. Jolycoeur, by having his eyes fixed on the
+disappearing figure of La Salle, had missed the ear of the person he
+intended to reach. He recoiled from encountering the Abbé, whose wrath
+with sudden ebb ran back from a brother upon a brother's foes.
+
+"You are the fellow I saw whining yesterday at Sieur de la Salle's
+heels. What hath the Sieur de la Salle done to any of you worthless
+woods-rangers, except give you labor and wages, when the bread you eat
+is a waste of his substance?"
+
+Jolycoeur, not daring to reply to a priest, slunk away in the crowd.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [6] Several historians identify Jolycoeur with the noted
+      coureur de bois and writer, Nicolas Perrot. But considering
+      the deed he attempted, the romancer has seen fit to portray
+      him as a very different person.
+
+
+
+
+                                Book II.
+
+                            FORT FRONTENAC.
+
+                               1683 A. D.
+
+
+
+
+                                  I.
+
+                            RIVAL MASTERS.
+
+
+The gate of Fort Frontenac opened to admit several persons headed by a
+man who had a closely wrapped girl by his side. Before wooden palisades
+and walls of stone enclosed her, she turned her face to look across the
+mouth of Cataraqui River and at Lake Ontario rippling full of submerged
+moonlight. A magnified moon was rising. Farther than eye could reach it
+softened that northern landscape and provoked mystery in the shadows of
+the Thousand Islands.
+
+South of the fort were some huts set along the margin of Ontario
+according to early French custom, which demanded a canoe highway in
+front of every man's door. West of these, half hid by forest, was an
+Indian village; and distinct between the two rose the huge white cross
+planted by Father Hennepin when he was first sent as missionary to Fort
+Frontenac.
+
+An officer appeared beside the sentinel at the gate, and took off his
+hat before the muffled shape led first into his fortress. She bent her
+head for this civility and held her father's arm in silence. Canoemen
+and followers with full knowledge of the place moved on toward barracks
+or bakery. But the officer stopped their master, saying,--
+
+"Monsieur le Ber, I have news for you."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"I have none for you," responded the merchant. "It is ever the same
+story,--men lost in the rapids and voyagers drenched to the skin.
+However, we had but one man drowned this time, and are only half dead of
+fatigue ourselves. Let us have some supper at once. What are your
+reports?"
+
+"Monsieur, the Sieur de la Salle arrived here a few hours ago from the
+fort on the Illinois."
+
+"The Sieur de la Salle?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur."
+
+"Why did you let him in?" demanded Le Ber, fiercely. "He hath no rights
+in this fortress now."
+
+"His men were much exhausted, monsieur."
+
+"He could have camped at the settlement."
+
+"Monsieur, I wish to tell you at once that the last families have left
+the settlement."
+
+"The Indians are yet there?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur. But our settlers were afraid our Indians would join the
+other Iroquois."
+
+"How many men had La Salle with him?"
+
+"No more than half your party, monsieur. There was Jolycoeur--"
+
+"I tell you La Salle has no rights in this fort," interrupted Le Ber.
+"If he meddles with his merchandise stored here which the government has
+seized upon, I will arrest him."
+
+"Yes, monsieur. The Father Louis Hennepin has also arrived from the
+wilderness after great peril and captivity."
+
+"Tell me that La Salle's man Tonty is here! Tell me that there is a full
+muster of all the vagabonds from Michillimackinac! Tell me that Fort St.
+Louis of the Illinois hath moved on Fort Frontenac!"
+
+The merchant's voice ascended a pyramid of vexation.
+
+"No, monsieur. Monsieur de Tonty is not here. And the Father Louis
+Hennepin[7] only rests a few days before the fatigue of descending the
+rapids to Montreal. It was a grief to him to find his mission and the
+settlement so decayed after only five years' absence."
+
+"Why do you fret me with the decay of the mission and breaking up of the
+settlement? If I were here as commandant of this fort I might then be
+blamed for its ruin. Perhaps my associates made a mistake in retaining
+an officer who had served under La Salle."
+
+The commandant made no retort, but said,--
+
+"Monsieur, I had almost forgotten to tell you we have another fair
+demoiselle within our walls to the honor of Fort Frontenac. The Abbé
+Cavelier with men from Lachine, arrived this morning, his young niece
+being with him. There are brave women in Montreal."
+
+"That is right,--that is right!" exclaimed the irritable merchant. "Call
+all the Cavelier family hither and give up the fortress. I heard the
+Abbé had ventured ahead of me."
+
+"Monsieur le Ber, what can they do against the king and the governor?
+Both king and governor have dispossessed La Salle. I admitted him as any
+wayfarer. The Abbé Cavelier came with a grievance against his brother.
+He hath lost money by him the same as others."
+
+"Thou shalt not be kept longer in the night air," said Le Ber, with
+sudden tenderness to his daughter. "There is dampness within these walls
+to remind us of our drenchings in the rapids."
+
+"We have fire in both upper and lower rooms of the officers' quarters,"
+said the commandant.
+
+They walked toward the long dwelling, their shadows stretching and
+blending over the ground.
+
+"Where have you lodged these men?" inquired Le Ber.
+
+The officer pointed to the barrack end of the structure made of hewed
+timbers. The wider portion intended for commandant's headquarters was
+built of stone, with Norman eaves and windows. Near the barracks stood
+a guardhouse. The bakery was at the opposite side of the gateway, and
+beyond it was the mill. La Salle had founded well this stronghold in the
+wilderness. Walls of hewed stone enclosed three sides, nine small cannon
+being mounted thereon.[8] Palisades were the defence on the water side.
+Fort Frontenac was built with four bastions. In two of these bastions
+were vaulted towers which served as magazines for ammunition.[9] A well
+was dug within the walls.
+
+"Have you no empty rooms in the officers' quarters?"
+
+The moon threw silhouette palisades on the ground, and made all these
+buildings cut blocks of shadow. There was a stir of evening wind in the
+forest all around.
+
+"The men are in the barracks. But Sieur de la Salle is in the officers'
+house."
+
+"May I ask you, Commandant," demanded Le Ber, "where you propose to
+lodge my daughter whom I have brought through the perils of the rapids,
+and cannot now return with?"
+
+"Mademoiselle le Ber is most welcome to my own apartment, monsieur, and
+I will myself come downstairs."
+
+"One near mine for yourself, monsieur. But with the Abbé and his niece
+and the boy and La Salle and Father Hennepin, to say no more, can we
+have many empty rooms? Father Hennepin is lodged downstairs, but La
+Salle hath his old room overlooking the river."
+
+"How does he appear, Commandant?"
+
+"Worn in his garb and very thin visaged, but unmoved by his misfortunes
+as a man of rock. Any one else would be prostrate and hopeless."
+
+"A madman," pronounced Le Ber.
+
+Careless laughter resounded from the barracks. Some water creature made
+so distinct a splash and struggle in Cataraqui River that imagination
+followed the widening circles spreading from its body until an island
+broke their huge circumference.
+
+"See that something be sent us from the bakehouse," said Le Ber to the
+commandant, before leading his daughter into the quarters. "My men have
+brought provisions from Montreal."
+
+"We can give you a good supper, monsieur. Two young deer were brought
+in to-day. As for Monsieur de la Salle," the commandant added, turning
+back from the door of the barracks, "you will perhaps not meet him at
+all in the officers' quarters. He ate and threw himself down at once to
+sleep, and he is in haste to set forward to Quebec."
+
+The bakehouse was illuminated by its oven fire which shone with a dull
+crimson through the open door, but failed to find out dusky corners
+where bales, barrels, and cook's tools were stored. The oven was built
+in the wall, of stone and cement. The cook, a skipping little fellow
+smocked in white and wearing a cap, said to himself as he raked out
+coals and threw them in the fireplace,--
+
+"What a waste of good material is this, when they glow and breathe with
+such ardor to roast some worthy martyr!"
+
+"The beginning of a martyr is a saint," observed a soldier of the
+garrison, putting his fur-covered head between door and door-post in the
+little space he opened. "We have a saint just landed at Fort Frontenac."
+
+He stepped in and shut the door, to lounge with the cook while the order
+he brought was obeyed.
+
+"Some of the best you have, with a tender cut of venison, for Jacques le
+Ber and his daughter. And some salt meat for his men in the barracks."
+
+The cook made light skips across the floor and returned with venison.
+
+"Well-timed, my child; for the coals are ready, and so are my cakes for
+the oven. Le Ber is soon served. Get upon your knees by the hearth and
+watch this cut broil, while I slice the larding for the sore sides of
+these fellows that labored through the rapids."
+
+When you are housed in a garrison the cook becomes a potentate; the
+soldier went willingly down as assistant.
+
+"Are all the demoiselles of Montreal coming to Fort Frontenac?" inquired
+the cook, skipping around a great block on which lay a slab of cured
+meat, and nicely poising his knife-tip over it.
+
+"That I cannot tell you," replied the soldier, beginning to perspire
+before the coals. "Le Ber's men have been talking in the barracks about
+this daughter of his. He brought her almost by force out of his house,
+where she has taken to shutting herself in her own room."
+
+"I have heard of this demoiselle," said the cook. "May the saints
+incline more women to shut themselves up at home!"
+
+"She is his favorite child. He brought her on this dangerous voyage to
+wean her from too much praying."
+
+"Too much praying!" exclaimed the cook.
+
+"He desires to have her look more on the world, lest she should die of
+holiness," explained the soldier.
+
+"Turn that venison," shouted the cook. "Was there ever a saint who liked
+burnt meat? I could lift this Jacques le Ber on a hot fork for dragging
+out a woman who inclined to stay praying in the house. Some men are
+stone blind to the blessings of Heaven!"
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [7] Historians return Father Hennepin to France in 1681.
+
+  [8] Parkman.
+
+  [9] Manuscript relating to early history of Canada.
+
+
+
+
+                                 II.
+
+                         A TRAVELLED FRIAR.
+
+
+The lower room of the officers' lodging was filled with the light of a
+fire. To the hearth was drawn a half-circle of men, their central figure
+being a Récollet friar, so ragged and weather-stained that he seemed
+some ecclesiastical scarecrow placed there to excite laughter and tears
+in his beholders.
+
+This group arose as Jacques le Ber entered with his daughter, and were
+eager to be of service to her.
+
+"There is a fire lighted in the hall upstairs by which mademoiselle can
+sit," said the sergeant of the fort.
+
+Le Ber conducted her to the top of a staircase which ascended the side
+of the room before he formally greeted any one present. He returned,
+unwinding his saturated wool wrappings and pulling off his cap of beaver
+skin. He was a swarthy man with anxious and calculating wrinkles between
+his eyebrows.
+
+"Do I see Father Hennepin?" exclaimed Le Ber, squaring his mouth, "or is
+this a false image of him set before me?"
+
+"You see Father Hennepin," the friar responded with dignity,--"explorer,
+missionary among the Sioux, and sufferer in the cause of religion."
+
+"How about that hunger for adventure,--hast thou appeased it?" inquired
+Le Ber with freedom of manner he never assumed toward any other priest.
+
+The merchant stood upon the hearth steaming in front of the tattered
+Récollet, who from his seat regarded his half-enemy with a rebuking eye
+impressive to the other men.
+
+"Jacques le Ber, my son, while your greedy hands have been gathering
+money, the poor Franciscan has baptized heathen, discovered and explored
+rivers; he has lived the famished life of a captive, and come nigh death
+in many ways. I have seen a great waterfall five hundred feet high,
+whereunder four carriages might pass abreast without being wet. I have
+depended for food on what Heaven sent. Vast fish are to be found in the
+waters of that western land, and there also you may see beasts having
+manes and hoofs and horns, to frighten a Christian."
+
+"And what profit doth La Salle get out of all this?" inquired Le Ber,
+spreading his legs before the fire as he looked down at Father Hennepin.
+
+"What I have accomplished has been done for the spread of the faith, and
+not for the glory of Monsieur de la Salle, who has treated me badly."
+
+"Does he ever treat any one well?" exclaimed Le Ber. "Does not every man
+in his service want to shoot him?"
+
+"He has an over-haughty spirit, which breaks out into envy of men like
+me," admitted the good Fleming, whose weather-seamed face and plump
+lips glowed with conscious greatness before the fire. "I have decided to
+avoid further encounter with Monsieur de la Salle while we both remain
+at Fort Frontenac, for my mind is set on peace, and it is true where
+Monsieur de la Salle appears there can be no peace."
+
+Jacques le Ber turned himself to face the chimney.
+
+"Thou hast no doubt accomplished a great work, Father Hennepin," he
+said, with the immediate benevolence a man feels toward one who has
+reached his point of view. "When I have had supper with my daughter I
+will sit down here and beg you to tell me all that befell your
+wanderings, and what savages they were who received the faith at your
+hands, and how the Sieur de la Salle hath turned even a Récollet Father
+against himself."
+
+"Perhaps Father Hennepin will tell about his buffalo hunt," suggested
+the sergeant of the fortress, "and how he headed a wounded buffalo from
+flight and drove it back to be shot."[10]
+
+Father Hennepin looked down at patches of buffalo hide which covered
+holes in his habit. He remembered the trampling of a furious beast's
+hoofs and the twitch of its short sharp horn in his folds of flesh as it
+lifted him. He remembered his wounds and the soreness of his bones which
+lasted for months, yet his lips parted over happy teeth and he roared
+with laughter.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [10] In reality this was Father Membré's adventure.
+
+
+
+
+                                 III.
+
+                          HEAVEN AND EARTH.
+
+
+Jeanne le Ber sat down upon a high-backed bench before the fire in the
+upper room. This apartment was furnished and decorated only by abundant
+firelight, which danced on stone walls and hard dark rafters, on rough
+floor and high enclosure, of the stairway. At opposite sides of the room
+were doors which Jeanne did not know opened into chambers scarcely
+larger than the sleepers who might lodge therein.
+
+She sat in strained thought, without unwrapping herself, though shudders
+were sent through her by damp raiment. When her father came up with the
+sergeant who carried their supper, he took off her cloak, smoothed her
+hair, and tenderly reproved her. He set the dishes on the bench between
+them, and persuaded Jeanne to eat what he carved for her,--a swarthy
+nurse whose solicitude astounded the soldier.
+
+Another man came up and opened the door nearest the chimney, on that
+side which overlooked the fortress enclosure. He paused in descending,
+loaded with the commandant's possessions, to say that this bedroom was
+designed for mademoiselle, and was now ready.
+
+"And thou must get to it as soon as the river's chill is warmed out of
+thy bones," said Le Ber. "I will sit and hear the worthy friar
+downstairs tell his strange adventures. The sound of your voice can
+reach me with no effort whatever. My bedroom will be next yours, or near
+by, and no harm can befall you in Fort Frontenac."
+
+Jeanne kissed his cheek before he returned to the lower room, and when
+the supper was removed she sat drying herself by the fire.
+
+The eager piety of her early girlhood, which was almost fantastic in its
+expression, had yet worked out a nobly spiritual face. She was a
+beautiful saint.
+
+For several years Jeanne le Ber had refused the ordinary clothing of
+women. Her visible garment was made of a soft fine blanket of white
+wool, with long sleeves falling nearly to her feet. It was girded to her
+waist by a cord from which hung her rosary. Her neck stood slim and
+white above the top of this robe, without ornament except the peaked
+monk's hood which hung behind it.
+
+This creature like a flame of living white fire stood up and turned her
+back to the ruddier logs, and clasped her hands across the top of her
+head. Her eyes wasted scintillations on rafters while she waited for
+heavenly peace to calm the strong excitement driving her.
+
+The door of Jeanne's chamber stood open as the soldier had left it. At
+the opposite side of the room a similar door opened, and La Salle came
+out. He moved a step, toward the hearth, but stopped, and the pallor of
+a swoon filled his face.
+
+"Sieur de la Salle," said Jeanne in a whisper. She let her arms slip
+down by her sides. The eccentric robe with its background of firelight
+cast her up tall and white before his eyes.
+
+In the explorer's most successful moments he had never appeared so
+majestic. Though his dress was tarnished by the wilderness, he had it
+carefully arranged; for he liked to feel it fitting him with an
+exactness which would not annoy his thoughts.
+
+No formal greeting preluded the crash of this encounter between La Salle
+and Jeanne le Ber. What had lain repressed by prayer and penance, or had
+been trodden down league by league in the wilds, leaped out with
+strength made mighty by such repression.
+
+Voices in loud and merry conversation below and occasional laughter came
+up the open stairway and made accompaniment to this half-hushed duet.
+
+"Jeanne," stammered La Salle.
+
+"Sieur de la Salle, I was just going to my room."
+
+She moved away from him to the side of the hearth, as he advanced and
+sat down upon the bench. Unconscious that she stood while he was
+sitting, as if overcome by sudden blindness he reached toward her with a
+groping gesture.
+
+"Take hold of my hand, Sainte Jeanne."
+
+"And if I take hold of your hand, Sieur de la Salle," murmured the girl,
+bending toward him though she held her arms at her sides, "what profit
+will it be to either of us?"
+
+"I beg that you will take hold of my hand."
+
+Her hand, quivering to each finger tip, moved out and met and was
+clasped in his. La Salle's head dropped on his breast.
+
+Jeanne turned away her face. Voices and laughter jangled in the room
+below. In this silent room pulse answered pulse, and with slow encounter
+eyes answered the adoration of eyes. In terror of herself Jeanne uttered
+the whispered cry,--
+
+"I am afraid!"
+
+She veiled herself with the long sleeve of her robe.
+
+"And of what should you be afraid when we are thus near together?" said
+La Salle. "The thing to be afraid of is losing this. Such gladness has
+been long coming; for I was a man when you were born, Sainte Jeanne."
+
+"Let go my hand, Sieur de la Salle."
+
+"Do you want me to let it go, Sainte Jeanne?"
+
+"No, Sieur de la Salle."
+
+Dropping her sleeve Jeanne faced heaven through the rafters. Tears
+stormed down her face, and her white throat swelled with strong
+repressed sobs. Like some angel caught in a snare, she whispered her
+up-directed wail,--
+
+"All my enormity must now be confessed! Whenever Sieur de la Salle has
+been assailed my soul rose up in arms for him. Oh, my poor father! So
+dear has Sieur de la Salle been to me that I hated the hatred of my
+father. What shall I do to tear out this awful love? I have fought it
+through midnights and solitary days of ceaseless prayer. Oh, Sieur de la
+Salle, why art thou such a man? Pray to God and invoke the saints for
+me, and help me to go free from this love!"
+
+"Jeanne," said La Salle, "you are so holy I dare touch no more than this
+sweet hand. It fills me with life. Ask me not to pray to God that he
+will take the life from me. Oh, Jeanne, if you could reach out of your
+eternity of devotion and hold me always by the hand, what a man I might
+be!"
+
+She dropped her eyes to his face, saying like a soothing mother,--
+
+"Thou greatest and dearest, there is a gulf between us which we cannot
+pass. I am vowed to Heaven. Thou art vowed to great enterprises. The
+life of the family is not for us. If God showed me my way by thy side I
+would go through any wilderness. But Jeanne was made to listen in prayer
+and silence and secrecy and anguish for the word of Heaven. The worst
+is,"--her stormy sob again shook her from head to foot,--"you will be at
+court, and beautiful women will love the great explorer. And one will
+shine; she will be set like a star as high as the height of being your
+wife. And Jeanne,--oh, Jeanne! here in this rough, new world,--she must
+eternally learn to be nothing!"
+
+"My wife!" said La Salle, turning her hand in his clasp, and laying his
+cheek in her palm. "You are my wife. There is no court. There is no
+world to discover. There is only the sweet, the rose-tender palm of my
+wife where I can lay my tired cheek and rest."
+
+Jeanne's fingers moved with involuntary caressing along the lowest curve
+of his face.
+
+An ember fell on the hearth beside them, and Father Hennepin emphasized
+some point in his relation with a stamp of his foot.
+
+"You left a glove at my father's house, Sieur de la Salle, and I hid it;
+I put my face to it. And when I burned it, my own blood seemed to ooze
+out of that crisping glove."
+
+La Salle trembled. The dumb and solitary man was dumb and solitary in
+his love.
+
+"Now we must part," breathed Jeanne. "Heaven is strangely merciful to
+sinners. I never could name you to my confessor or show him this
+formless anguish; but now that it has been owned and cast out, my heart
+is glad."
+
+La Salle rose up and stood by the hearth. As she drew her hand from his
+continued hold he opened his arms. Jeanne stepped backward, her eyes
+swarming with motes of light. She turned and reached her chamber door;
+but as the saint receded from temptation the woman rose in strength. She
+ran to La Salle, and with a tremor and a sob in his arms, met his mouth
+with the one kiss of her life. As suddenly she ran from him and left
+him.
+
+La Salle had had his sublime moment of standing at the centre of the
+universe and seeing all things swing around him, which comes to every
+one successful in embodying a vast idea. But from this height he looked
+down at that experience.
+
+He stood still after Jeanne's door closed until he felt his own
+intrusion. This drove him downstairs and out of the house, regardless of
+Jacques le Ber, Father Hennepin, and the officers of the fortress, who
+turned to gaze at his transit.
+
+Proud satisfaction, strange in a ruined man, appeared on the explorer's
+face. He felt his reverses as cobwebs to be brushed away. He was loved.
+The king had been turned against him. His enemies had procured Count
+Frontenac's removal, and La Barre the new governor, conspiring to seize
+his estate, had ruined his credit. But he was loved. Even on this
+homeward journey an officer had passed him with authority to take
+possession of his new post on the Illinois River. His discoveries were
+doubted and sneered at, as well as half claimed by boasting
+subordinates, who knew nothing about his greater views. Yet the only
+softener of this man of noble granite was a spirit-like girl, who
+regarded the love of her womanhood as sin.
+
+La Salle stood in the midst of enemies. He stood considering merely how
+his will should break down the religious walls Jeanne built around
+herself, and how Jacques le Ber might be conciliated by shares in the
+profits of the West. Behind stretched his shadowed life, full of
+misfortune; good was held out to him to be withdrawn at the touch of his
+fingers. But this good he determined to have; and thinking of her, La
+Salle walked the stiffened frost-crisp ground of the fortress half the
+night.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV.
+
+                     A CANOE FROM THE ILLINOIS.
+
+
+When Barbe Cavelier awoke next morning and saw around her the stone
+walls of Fort Frontenac instead of a familiar convent enclosure, she sat
+up in her bed and laughed aloud. The tiny cell echoed. Never before had
+laughter of young girl been heard there. And when she placed her feet
+upon the floor perhaps their neat and exact pressure was a surprise to
+battered planks used to the smiting tread of men.
+
+Barbe proceeded to dress herself, with those many curvings of neck and
+figure, which, in any age, seem necessary to the fit sitting of a young
+maid in her garments. Her aquiline face glowed, full of ardent life.
+
+Some raindrops struck the roof-window and ran down its panes like tears.
+When Barbe had considered her astounding position as the only woman in
+Fort Frontenac, and felt well compacted for farther adventures, she
+sprung upon the bunk, and stood with her head near the roof, looking out
+into the fortress and its adjacent world. Among moving figures she
+could not discern her uncle La Salle, or her uncle the Abbé, or even her
+brother. These three must be yet in the officers' house. Dull clouds
+were scudding. As Barbe opened the sash and put her head out the morning
+air met her with a chill. Fort Frontenac's great walls half hid an
+autumn forest, crowding the lake's distant border in measureless expanse
+of sad foliage. Eastward, she caught ghostly hints of islands on misty
+water. The day was full of depression. Ontario stood up against the sky,
+a pale greenish fleece, raked at intervals by long wires of rain.
+
+But such influences had no effect on a healthy warm young creature,
+freed unaccountably from her convent, and brought on a perilous,
+delightful journey to so strange a part of her world.
+
+She noticed a parley going forward at the gate. Some outsider demanded
+entrance, for the sentry disappeared between the towers and returned
+for orders. He approached the commandant who stood talking with Jacques
+le Ber, the merchant of Montreal. Barbe could see Le Ber's face darken.
+With shrugs and negative gestures he decided against the newcomer, and
+the sentinel again disappeared to refuse admission. She wondered if a
+band of Iroquois waited outside. Among Abbé Cavelier's complaints of La
+Salle was Governor la Barre's accusation that La Salle stirred enmity in
+the Iroquois by protecting the Illinois tribe they wished to
+exterminate.
+
+"Even these Indians on the lake shore," meditated Barbe, "who settled
+there out of friendship to my uncle La Salle, may turn against him and
+try to harm him as every one does now that his fortunes are low. I would
+be a man faithful to my friend, if I were a man at all."
+
+She watched for a sight of the withdrawing party on the lake, and
+presently a large canoe holding three men shot out beyond the walls.
+One stood erect, gazing back at the fort with evident anxiety. Neither
+the smearing medium of damp weather nor increasing distance could rob
+Barbe of that man's identity. His large presence, his singular carriage
+of the right arm, even his features sinking back to space, stamped him
+Henri de Tonty.
+
+"He has come here to see my uncle La Salle, and they have refused to let
+him enter," she exclaimed aloud.
+
+Stripping a coverlet from her berth she whipped the outside air with it
+until the crackle brought up a challenge from below.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Fort Frontenac was a seignorial rather than a military post, and its
+discipline had been lax since the governor's Associates seized it, yet a
+sentinel paced this morning before the officers' quarters. When he saw
+the signal withdrawn and a lovely face with dark eyelashes and a topknot
+of curls looking down at him, he could do nothing but salute it, and
+Barbe shut her window.
+
+Dropping in excitement from the bunk, she ran across the upper room to
+knock at La Salle's door.
+
+A boy stood basking in solitude by the chimney.
+
+Her uncle La Salle's apartment seemed filled with one strong indignant
+voice, leaking through crevices and betraying its matter to the common
+hall.
+
+"You may knock there until you faint of hunger," remarked the lad at the
+hearth. "I also want my breakfast, but these precious Associates will
+let us starve in the fort they have stolen before they dole us out any
+food. I would not mind going into the barracks and messing, but I have
+you also to consider."
+
+"It is not anything to eat, Colin--it is pressing need of my uncle La
+Salle!"
+
+"The Abbé has pressing need of our uncle La Salle. It was great relief
+to catch him here at Frontenac. I have heard every bit of the lecture:
+what amounts our uncle the Abbé has ventured in western explorations;
+and what a fruitless journey he has made here to rescue for himself some
+of the stores of this fortress; and what danger all we Caveliers stand
+in of being poisoned on account of my uncle La Salle, so that the Abbé
+can scarce trust us out of his sight, even with nuns guarding you."
+
+To Barbe's continued knocking her guardian made the curtest reply. He
+opened the door, looked at her sternly, saying, "Go away, mademoiselle,"
+and shut it tightly again.
+
+She ran back to her lookout and was able to discern the same canoe
+moving off on the lake.
+
+"Colin," demanded Barbe, wrapping herself, "You must run with me."
+
+"Certainly, mademoiselle, and I trust you are making haste toward a
+table."
+
+"We must run outside the fortress."
+
+Though the boy felt it a grievance that he should follow instead of lead
+to any adventure, he dashed heartily out with her, intending to take his
+place when he understood the action. Rain charged full in their faces.
+The sentry was inclined to hold them at the fortress gate until he had
+orders, and Barbe's impatience darted from her eyes.
+
+"You will get me into trouble," he said. "This gate has been swinging
+over-much lately."
+
+"Let us out," persuaded Colin. "The Associates will not care what
+becomes of a couple of Caveliers."
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"My sister wishes to run to the Iroquois village," responded Colin, "and
+beg there for a little sagamite. We get nothing to eat in Fort
+Frontenac."
+
+The soldier laughed.
+
+"If you are going to the Iroquois village why don't you say your errand
+is to Catharine Tegahkouita? It is no sin to ask an Indian saint's
+prayers."
+
+Barbe formed her lips to inquire, "Has Tegahkouita come to Fort
+Frontenac?" But this impulse passed into discreet silence, and the man
+let them out.
+
+They ran along the palisades southward, Barbe keeping abreast of Colin
+though she made skimming dips as the swallow flies, and with a détour
+quite to the lake's verge, avoided the foundation of an outwork.
+
+Father Hennepin's cross stood up, a huge white landmark between habitant
+settlement on the lake, and Indian village farther west but visible
+through the clearing. Ontario seemed to rise higher and top the world,
+its green curves breaking at their extremities into white spatter, the
+one boat in sight making deep obeisance to heaving water.
+
+"Do you see a canoe riding yonder?" exclaimed Barbe to Colin, as they
+ran along wet sand.
+
+"Any one may see a canoe riding yonder. Was it to race with that canoe
+we came out, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Wave your arms and make signals to the men in it, Colin. They must be
+stopped. I am sure that one is Monsieur de Tonty, and they were turned
+away from the fortress gate. They have business with our uncle La Salle,
+and see how far they have gone before we could get out ourselves!"
+
+"Why, then, did you follow?" demanded her brother, waving his arms and
+flinging his cap in the rain. "They may have business with our uncle La
+Salle, but they have no business with a girl. This was quite my affair,
+Mademoiselle Cavelier."
+
+A maid whose feet were heavy with the mud of a once ploughed clearing
+could say little in praise of such floundering. She paid no attention to
+Colin's rebuke, but watched for the canoe to turn landward. Satisfied
+that it was heading toward them, Barbe withdrew from the border of the
+lake. She would not shelter herself in any deserted hut of the habitant
+village. Colin followed her in vexation to Father Hennepin's mission
+house, remonstrating as he skipped, and turning to watch the canoe with
+rain beating his face.
+
+They found the door open. The floor was covered with sand blown there,
+and small stones cast by the hands of irreverent passing Indian boys.
+The chapel stood a few yards away, but this whole small settlement was
+dominated by its cross.[11]
+
+Barbe and Colin were scarcely under this roof shelter before Tonty
+strode up to the door. He took off his hat with the left hand, his dark
+face bearing the rain like a hardy flower. Dangers, perpetual immersion
+in Nature, and the stimulus of vast undertakings had so matured Tonty
+that Barbe felt more awe of his buckskin presence than her memory of the
+fine young soldier in Montreal could warrant. She wanted to look at him
+and say nothing. Colin, who knew this soldier only by reputation, was
+eager to meet and urge him into Father Hennepin's house.
+
+Tonty's reluctant step crunched sand on the boards. He kept his gaze
+upon Barbe and inquired,--
+
+"Have I the honor, mademoiselle, to address the niece of Monsieur de la
+Salle?"
+
+"The niece and nephew of Monsieur de la Salle," put forth Colin.
+
+"Yes, monsieur. You may remember me as the young tiger-cat who sprung
+upon my uncle La Salle when you arrived with him from France."
+
+"I never forgot you, mademoiselle. You so much resemble Monsieur de la
+Salle."
+
+"It is on his account we have run out of the fort to stop you. He does
+not know you are here. I saw the sentinel close the gate against some
+one, and afterward your boat pushed out."
+
+"And did you shake a signal from an upper window in the fort?"
+
+"Monsieur, I could not be sure that you saw it, though I could see your
+boat."
+
+"She made it very much her affair," observed Colin, with the merciless
+disapproval of a lad. "Monsieur de Tonty, there was no use in her
+trampling through sand and rain like a Huron witch going to some herb
+gathering. It was my business to do the errand of my uncle La Salle.
+When she goes back she will get a lecture and a penance, for all her
+sixteen years."
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, "I am distressed if my withdrawal from Fort
+Frontenac causes you trouble. I meant to camp here. I was determined to
+see Monsieur de la Salle."
+
+"Monsieur," courageously replied Barbe, "you cause me no trouble at all.
+I thought you were returning to your fort on the Illinois. I did not
+stop to tell my brother, but made him run with me. It is a shame that
+the enemies of my uncle La Salle hold you out of Fort Frontenac."
+
+"But very little would you get to eat there," consoled young Cavelier.
+"We have had nothing to break our fast on this morning."
+
+"Then let us get ready some breakfast for you," proposed Tonty, as his
+men entered with the lading of the canoe. They had stopped at the
+doorstep, but Father Hennepin's hewed log house contained two rooms, and
+he pointed them to the inner one. There they let down their loads, one
+man, a surgeon, remaining, and the other, a canoeman, going out again in
+search of fuel.
+
+"Monsieur, it would be better for us to hurry back to the fortress and
+call my uncle La Salle."
+
+"Nothing will satisfy you, mademoiselle," denounced Colin. "Out you must
+come to stop Monsieur de Tonty. Now back you must go through weather
+which is not fitting for any demoiselle to face."
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, "if you return now it will be my duty to
+escort you as far as the fortress gate."
+
+Barbe drew her wrappings over her face, as he had seen a wild sensitive
+plant fold its leaves and close its cups.
+
+"I will retire to the chapel and wait there until my uncle La Salle
+comes," she decided, "and my brother must run to call him."
+
+"You may take to sanctuary as soon as you please," responded Colin, "and
+I will attend to my uncle La Salle's business. But the first call I make
+shall be upon the cook in this camp."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [11] "He (La Salle) gave us a piece of ground 15 arpents in front
+       by 20 deep, the donation being accepted by Monsieur de
+       Frontenac, syndic of our mission." From Le Clerc.
+
+
+
+
+                                  V.
+
+                      FATHER HENNEPIN'S CHAPEL.
+
+
+Tonty held a buffalo robe over Barbe during her quick transit from cabin
+to church. Its tanned side was toward the weather, and its woolly side
+continued to comfort her after she was under shelter. Tonty bestowed it
+around her and closed the door again, leaving her in the dim place.
+
+Father Hennepin's deserted chapel was of hewed logs like his dwelling. A
+rude altar remained, but without any ornaments, for the Récollet had
+carried these away to his western mission. Some unpainted benches stood
+in a row. The roof could be seen through rafters, and drops of rain with
+reiterating taps fell along the centre of the floor. A chimney of stones
+and cement was built outside the chapel, of such a size that its top
+yawned like an open cell for rain, snow, or summer sunshine. Within, it
+spread a generous hearth and an expanse of grayish fire-wall little
+marked by the blue incense which rises from burning wood.
+
+Barbe looked briefly around the chapel. She laid the buffalo hide before
+the altar and knelt upon it.
+
+Tonty returned with a load of fuel and busied himself at the fireplace.
+The boom of the lake, and his careful stirring and adjusting in ancient
+ashes, made a background to her silence. Yet she heard through her
+devotions every movement he made, and the low whoop peculiar to flame
+when it leaps to existence and seizes its prey.
+
+A torrent of fire soon poured up the flue. Tonty grasped a brush made of
+wood shavings, remnant of Father Hennepin's housekeeping, and whirled
+dust and litter in the masculine fashion. When he left the chapel it
+glowed with the resurrected welcome it had given many a primitive
+congregation of Indians and French settlers, when the lake beat up icy
+winter foam.
+
+Beside the fireplace was a window so high that its log sill met Barbe's
+chin as she looked out. Jutting roof and outer chimney wall made a snug
+spot like a sentry-box without. She dried her feet, holding them one at
+a time to the red hot glow, and glanced through this window at the
+mission house's sodden logs and crumbled chinking. The excitement of her
+sally out of Fort Frontenac died away. She felt distressed because she
+had come, and faint for her early convent breakfast.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She saw Tonty through the window carrying a dish carefully covered. He
+approached the broken pane, and Barbe eagerly helped him to unfasten the
+sash and swing it out. In doing this, Tonty held her platter braced by
+his iron-handed arm.
+
+The fare was passed in to her without apology, and she received it with
+sincere gratitude, afterward drawing a bench near the fire and sitting
+down in great privacy and comfort.
+
+The moccasins of a frontiersman could make no sound above flap of wind
+and pat of water. Tonty paced from window to chapel front, believing
+that he kept out of Barbe's sight. But after an interval he was amused
+to see, rising over the sill within, a topknot of curls, and eyes filled
+with the alert, shy spirit of the deer whose flesh she had just eaten.
+
+For some reason this scrutiny of Barbe's made him regret that he had
+lain aside the gold and white uniform of France, and the extreme uses to
+which his gauntlets had been put. Entrenched behind logs she
+unconsciously poured the fires of her youth upon Tonty.
+
+Not only was one pane in the sash gone, but all were shattered, giving
+easy access to his voice as he stood still and explained.
+
+"Frontenac is a lonely post, mademoiselle. It is necessary for you to
+have a sentinel."
+
+"Yes, monsieur; you are very good." Barbe accepted the fact with lowered
+eyelids. "Has my brother yet gone to call my uncle La Salle?"
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle. As soon as we could give him some breakfast he set
+out."
+
+"Colin is a gourmand. All very young people gormandize more or less,"
+remarked Barbe, with a sense of emancipation from the class she
+condemned.
+
+"I hope you could eat what I brought you?"
+
+"It was quite delicious, monsieur. I ate every bit of it."
+
+The boom of the lake intruded between their voices. Barbe's black
+eyelashes flickered sensitively upon her cheeks, and Tonty, feeling that
+he looked too steadily at her, dropped his eyes to his folded arms.
+
+"Monsieur de Tonty," inquired Barbe, appealing to experience, "do you
+think sixteen years very young?"
+
+"It is the most charming age in the world, mademoiselle."
+
+"Monsieur, I mean young for maturing one's plan of life."
+
+"That depends upon the person," replied Tonty. "At sixteen I was
+revolting against the tyranny which choked Italy. And I was an exile
+from my country before the age of twenty, mademoiselle."
+
+Barbe gazed straight at Tonty, her gray eyes firing like opals with
+enthusiasm.
+
+"And my uncle La Salle at sixteen was already planning his discoveries.
+Monsieur, I also have my plans. Many missionaries must be needed among
+the Indians."
+
+"You do not propose going as a missionary among the Indians,
+mademoiselle?"
+
+Barbe critically examined his smile. She evaded his query.
+
+"Are the Indian women beautiful, Monsieur de Tonty?"
+
+"They do not appear so to me, mademoiselle, though the Illinois are a
+straight and well-made race."
+
+"You must find it a grand thing to range that western country."
+
+"But in the midst of our grandeur the Iroquois threaten us even there.
+How would mademoiselle like to mediate between these invaders and the
+timid Illinois, suspected by one tribe and threatened by the other; to
+carry the wampum belt of peace on the open field between two armies, and
+for your pains get your scalp-lock around the fingers of a Seneca chief
+and his dagger into your side?"
+
+"Oh, monsieur!" whispered Barbe, flushing with the wild pinkness of
+roses on the plains, "what amusements you do have in the great west! And
+is it a castle on a mountain, that Fort St. Louis of the Illinois?"
+
+"A stockade on a cliff, mademoiselle."
+
+Tonty felt impelled to put himself nearer this delicate head set with
+fine small ears and quartered by the angles of the window-frame. When
+she meditated, her lashes and brows and aquiline curves and gray tones
+flushing to rose were delightful to a wilderness-saturated man. But he
+held to his strict position as sentinel.
+
+"Monsieur," said Barbe, "there is something on my mind which I will tell
+you. I was thinking of the new world my uncle La Salle discovered, even
+before you came to Montreal. Now I think constantly of Fort St. Louis of
+the Illinois. Monsieur, I dream of it,--I go in long journeys and never
+arrive; I see it through clouds, and wide rivers flow between it and me;
+and I am homesick. Yes, monsieur, that is the strangest thing,--I have
+cried of homesickness for Fort St. Louis of the Illinois!"
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, his voice vibrating, "there is a stranger
+thing. It is this,--that a man with a wretched hand of iron should
+suddenly find within himself a heart of fire!"
+
+When this confession had burst from him he turned his back without
+apology, and Barbe's forehead sunk upon the window-sill.
+
+Within the chapel, drops from the cracked roof still fell in succession,
+like invisible fingers playing scales along the boards. Outside was the
+roar of the landlocked sea, and the higher music of falling rain. Barbe
+let her furtive eyes creep up the sill and find Tonty's large back on
+which she looked with abashed but gratified smiles.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he begged without turning, "forgive what I have said."
+
+"Certainly, monsieur," she responded. "What was it that you said?"
+
+"Nothing, mademoiselle, nothing."
+
+"Then, monsieur, I forgive you for saying nothing."
+
+Tonty, in his larger perplexity at having made such a confession without
+La Salle's leave, missed her sting.
+
+Nothing more was said through the window. Barbe moved back, and the
+stalwart soldier kept his stern posture; until La Salle, whose approach
+had been hidden by chimney and mission house, burst abruptly into view.
+As he came up, both he and Tonty opened their arms. Strong breast to
+strong breast, cheek touching cheek, spare olive-hued man and dark
+rich-blooded man hugged each other.
+
+Barbe's convent lessons of embroidery and pious lore had included no
+heathen tales of gods or heroes. Yet to her this sight was like a vision
+of two great cloudy figures stalking across the world and meeting with
+an embrace.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VI.
+
+                         LA SALLE AND TONTY.
+
+
+When one of the men had been called from the mission house to stand
+guard, they came directly into the chapel, preferring to talk there in
+the presence of Barbe.
+
+La Salle kissed her hand and her cheek, and she sat down before the
+fire, spreading the buffalo skin under her feet.
+
+As embers sunk and the talk of the two men went on, she crept as low as
+this shaggy carpet, resting arms and head upon the bench. The dying fire
+made exquisite color in this dismal chapel.
+
+"The governor's man, when he arrived to seize Fort St. Louis, gave you
+my letter of instructions, Tonty?"
+
+"Yes, Monsieur de la Salle."
+
+"Then, my lad, why have you abandoned the post and followed me? You
+should have stayed to be my representative. They have Frontenac.
+Crévecoeur was ruined for us. If they get St. Louis of the Illinois
+entirely into their hands they will claim the whole of Louisiana, these
+precious Associates."
+
+Tonty, laying his sound arm across his commandant's shoulder, exclaimed,
+"Monsieur, I have followed you five hundred leagues to drag that rascal
+Jolycoeur back with me. He told at Fort St. Louis that this should be
+your last journey."
+
+La Salle laughed.
+
+"Let me tie Jolycoeur and fling him into my canoe, and I turn back at
+once. I can hold your claims on the Illinois against any number of
+governor's agents. Take the surgeon Liotot in Jolycoeur's place.
+Liotot came with me, anxious to return to France."
+
+"Jolycoeur is no worse than the others, my Tonty, and he has had many
+opportunities. How often has my life been threatened!"
+
+"He intends mischief, monsieur. If I had heard it before you set out,
+this journey need not have been made."
+
+"Tonty," declared the explorer, "I think sometimes I carry my own
+destruction within myself. I will not chop nice phrases for these hounds
+who continually ruin my undertakings by their faithlessness. If a man
+must keep patting the populace, he can do little else. But I am glad you
+overtook me here. My Tonty, if I had a hundred men like you I could
+spread out the unknown wilderness and possess it as that child possesses
+that hide of buffalo."
+
+Though their undertakings were united, and the Italian had staked his
+fortune in the Norman's ventures, La Salle always assumed, and Tonty
+from the first granted him, entire mastery of the West. Both looked with
+occupied eyes at Barbe, who felt her life enlarged by witnessing this
+conference.
+
+"Monsieur, what aspect have affairs taken since you reached Fort
+Frontenac?"
+
+"Worse, Tonty, than I dreaded when I left the Illinois. You know how
+this new governor stripped Fort Frontenac of men and made its
+unprotected state an excuse for seizing it, saying I had not obeyed the
+king's order to maintain a garrison. And you know how he and the
+merchants of Montreal have possessed themselves of my seigniory here.
+They have sold and are still busy selling my goods from this post,
+putting the money into their pockets. I spent nearly thirty-five
+thousand francs improving this grant of Frontenac. But worse than that,
+Tonty, they have ruined my credit both here and in France. Even my
+brother will no more lift a finger for me. The king is turned against
+me. The fortunes of my family--even the fortune of that child--are
+sucked down in my ruin."
+
+Barbe noted her own bankruptcy with the unconcern of youth. Monsieur de
+Tonty's face, when you looked up at it from a rug beside the hearth,
+showed well its full rounded chin, square jaws, and high temples, the
+richness of its Italian coloring against the blackness of its Italian
+hair.
+
+"They call me a dreamer and a madman, these fellows now in power, and
+have persuaded the king that my discoveries are of no account."
+
+"Monsieur," exclaimed Tonty, "do you remember the mouth of the great
+river?"[12]
+
+Face glowed opposite face as they felt the log walls roll away from
+environing their vision. It was no longer the wash of the Ontario they
+heard, but the voice of the Mexican gulf. The yellow flood of
+Mississippi poured out between marsh borders. Again discharges of
+musketry seemed to shake the morasses beside a naked water world, the
+Te Deum to arise, and the explorer to be heard proclaiming,--
+
+"In the name of the most high, mighty, invincible, and victorious
+Prince, Louis the Great, by the grace of God king of France and of
+Navarre, Fourteenth of that name, I, this ninth day of April, one
+thousand and six hundred and eighty-two, in virtue of the commission of
+his Majesty, which I hold in my hand and which may be seen by all whom
+it may concern, have taken and do now take, in the name of his Majesty
+and of his successors to the crown, possession of this country of
+Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all the
+nations, people, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals,
+fisheries, streams, and rivers within the extent of the said Louisiana,
+from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio,
+as also along the river Colbert or Mississippi, and the rivers which
+discharge themselves thereinto, from its source beyond the country of
+the Nadouessioux, as far as its mouth at the sea, or Gulf of
+Mexico."[13]
+
+"Monsieur," exclaimed Tonty, "the plunderers of your fortune cannot take
+away that discovery or blot out the world you then opened. And what is
+Europe compared to this vast country? At the height of his magnificence
+Louis cannot picture to himself the grandeur of this western empire.
+France is but the palm of his hand beside it. It stretches from endless
+snow to endless heat; its breadth no man may guess. Nearly all the
+native tribes affiliate readily with the French. We have to dispute us
+only the English who hold a little strip by the ocean, the Dutch with
+smaller holding inland, and a few Spaniards along the Gulf."
+
+"And all may be driven out before the arms of France," exclaimed La
+Salle. "These crawling merchants and La Barre,--soldier, he calls
+himself!--see nothing of this. Every man for his own purse among them.
+But thou seest it, Tonty. I see it. And we are no knights on a crusade.
+Nor are we unpractised courtiers shredding our finery away on the briers
+of the wilderness. This western enterprise is based on geographical
+facts. No mind can follow all the development of that rich land. It is
+an empire," declared La Salle, striding between hearth and
+chancel-rail, unconscious that he lifted his voice to the rafters of a
+sanctuary, "which Louis might drop France itself to grasp!"
+
+"The king will be convinced of this, Monsieur de la Salle, when you
+again have his ear. When you have showed him what streams of commerce
+must flow out through a post stationed at the mouth of the Mississippi.
+France will then have a cord drawn half around this country."
+
+"Tonty, if you could be commandant of every fort I build, navigator of
+every ship I set afloat, if you could live in every man who labors for
+me, if you could stand forever between those Iroquois wolves and the
+tribes we try to band for mutual protection, and at the same time, if
+you could always be at my side to ward off gun, knife, and poison,--you
+would make me the most successful man on earth."
+
+"I have travelled five hundred leagues to ward poison away from you,
+monsieur. And you laugh at me."
+
+[Illustration: "Tonty, if you could be commandant of every fort I
+build," etc.--_Page 124._]
+
+"For your pains, I will dismiss Jolycoeur to-day, and take Liotot with
+me."
+
+"And will you come here as soon as you dismiss him and let my men
+prepare your food?"
+
+"Willingly. Fort Frontenac, with my rights in it denied, is no halting
+place for me. To-morrow I set out again to France, and you to the fort
+on the Illinois. But, Tonty--"
+
+La Salle's face relaxed into tenderness as he laid his hands upon his
+friend's shoulders. The Italian's ardent temperament was the only agent
+which ever fused and made facile of tongue and easy of confidence that
+man of cold reserve known as La Salle. The Italian guessed what he had
+to say. They both glanced at Barbe and flushed. But the nebulous thought
+surrounding the name of Jeanne le Ber was never condensed to spoken
+word.
+
+Tonty's sentinel opened the chapel door and broke up this council. He
+said an Indian stood there with him demanding to be admitted.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [12] Relation of Henri de Tonty (cited in Margry, I). "Comme cette
+       rivière se divise en trois chenaux, M. de la Salle fut
+       descouvrér celuy de la droite, je fus à celuy du mileu et le
+       Sieur d'Autray à celuy de la gauche."
+
+  [13] Abridged from Francis Parkman's version of La Salle's
+       proclamation. The Procès Verbal is a long document.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VII.
+
+                             AN ADOPTION.
+
+
+"What does he want?" inquired Tonty.
+
+"He is determined to speak with you, Monsieur de Tonty, from what I can
+gather out of his words."
+
+"Let him wait in the mission house, then," said Tonty, "until Monsieur
+de la Salle has ended his business."
+
+"I have ended," said La Salle. "It is time I ordered my men and baggage
+and canoes out of Fort Frontenac."
+
+"Monsieur, remain, and let an order from you be taken to the gate."
+
+"Some of those sulky fellows need my hand over them, Tonty. Besides,
+there are matters which must be definitely settled before I leave the
+fort. I have need to go myself, besides the obligation to deliver this
+runaway girl, on whom her uncle La Salle is always bringing penances."
+
+Barbe sprung up and put herself in the attitude of accompanying him.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, "the rain is still falling. If Monsieur de
+la Salle can carry this hide over you, it will be some protection."
+
+He took up the buffalo skin, and shook it to loosen any dust which
+might be clinging to the shag.
+
+"Monsieur, you are very good," she answered. "But it is not necessary
+for me."
+
+"Mademoiselle cares very little about a wetting," said La Salle. "She
+was born to be a princess of the backwoods. Call in your Indian before
+we go, Tonty. He may have some news for us."
+
+Tonty spoke to the sentinel, whose fingers visibly held the door, and he
+let pass a tall Iroquois brave carrying such a bundle of rich furs as
+one of that race above the condition of squaw rarely deigned to lift.
+His errand was evidently peaceable. He paused and stood like a prince.
+Neither La Salle nor Tonty remembered his face, though both felt sure he
+came from the mission village of friendly Iroquois near Fort Frontenac.
+
+"What does my brother want?" inquired La Salle, with sympathy he never
+showed to his French subordinates.
+
+"He waits to speak to his white brother with the iron hand," answered
+the Iroquois.
+
+"Have you brought us bad news?" again inquired La Salle.
+
+"Good news."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It is only to my brother with the iron hand."
+
+"Can you not speak in the presence of Monsieur de la Salle?" demanded
+Tonty.
+
+With exquisite reserve the Indian stood silent, waiting the conditions
+he needed for the delivery of his message.
+
+"It is nothing which concerns me," said La Salle to Tonty. He prepared
+to stalk into the weather with Barbe.
+
+Tonty spoke a few words to the waiting savage, who heard without
+returning any sign, and then followed Barbe, stretching the buffalo hide
+above her head. When La Salle observed this he failed to ridicule his
+lieutenant, but took one side of the shaggy canopy in his own hold. It
+was impossible for the girl to go dry-shod, but Tonty directed her way
+over the best and firmest ground. They made a solemn procession, for not
+a word was spoken. When they came to the fortress gate, Tonty again
+bestowed the robe around her as he had done when she entered the chapel,
+and stood bareheaded while Barbe--whispering "Adieu, monsieur"--passed
+out of his sight.
+
+"I have thought of this, Tonty," said La Salle as he entered; "when she
+is a few years older she shall come to the fort on the Illinois, if I
+again reap success."
+
+"Monsieur de la Salle, I am bound to tell you it will be dangerous for
+me ever to see mademoiselle again."
+
+"Monsieur de Tonty," responded the explorer with his close smile, "I am
+bound to tell you I think it will be the safest imaginable arrangement
+for her."
+
+The gate closed behind him, and Tonty carried back an exhilarated face
+to the waiting Iroquois.
+
+He entered Father Hennepin's chapel again, and the Indian followed him
+to the hearth.
+
+They stood there, ready for conference, the small black savage eye
+examining Tonty's face with open approval.
+
+"Now let me have your message," said the Italian. "Have I ever seen you
+before? What is your name?"
+
+"Sanomp," answered the Iroquois. "My white brother with the iron hand
+has not seen me before."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+He spread open on the bench Barbe had occupied a present of fine furs
+and dried meat.
+
+"Why does my brother bring me these things?" inquired Tonty, realizing
+as he looked at the gift how much of this barbarian's wealth was
+bestowed in such an offering.
+
+"Listen," said Sanomp.[14] He had a face of benevolent gravity,--the
+unhurried, sincere face of man living close to Nature. "It is a chief of
+the Seneca tribe who speaks to my white brother."
+
+"I have met a chief of the Seneca tribe before," remarked Tonty,
+smiling. "It was in the country of the Illinois, and he wrapped my
+scalp-lock around his fingers."
+
+Sanomp smiled, too, without haste, and continued his story.
+
+"I left my people to live near the fort of my French brothers because it
+was told me the man with a hand of iron was here. When I came here the
+man with a hand of iron was gone. So I waited for him. Our lives are
+consumed in waiting for the best things. Five years have I stood by the
+mouth of Cataraqui. And this morning the man with a hand of iron passed
+before my face."
+
+He spoke a mixture of French and Iroquois which enabled Tonty to catch
+his entire meaning.
+
+"But this hand could not betray me from the lake, to eyes that had never
+seen me before," objected the Italian.
+
+Advancing one foot and folding his arms in the attitude of a narrator,
+the Indian said,--
+
+"Listen. At that time of life when a young Iroquois retires from his
+tribe to hide in the woods and fast until his okie[15] is revealed to
+him, four days and four nights the boy Sanomp lay on the ground, rain
+and dew, moonlight and sunlight passing over him. The boy Sanomp looked
+up, for an eagle dropped before his eyes. He then knew that the eagle
+was his okie, and that he was to be a warrior, not a hunter or
+medicine-man. But the eagle dropped before the feet of a soldier the
+image of my white brother, and the soldier held up a hand of yellow
+metal. The boy heard a voice coming from the vision that said to him,
+'Warrior, this is thy friend and brother. Be to him a friend and
+brother. After thou hast seven times followed the war path go and wait
+by the mouth of Cataraqui until he comes.' So when I had seven times
+followed the war path I came, and my brother being passed by, I waited."
+
+Tonty's square brown Italian face was no more sincere than the redder
+aquiline visage fronting him and telling its vision.
+
+"My brother Sanomp comes in a good time," he remarked.
+
+The Iroquois next took out his peace pipe and pouch of tobacco. While he
+filled the bowl and stooped for an ember, Tonty stripped the copper hand
+of its glove. He held it up before Sanomp as he received the calumet in
+the other. An aboriginal grunt of strong satisfaction echoed in the
+chapel.
+
+"Hand of yellow metal," said Sanomp.
+
+Tonty gravely smoked the pipe and handed it back to Sanomp. Sanomp
+smoked it, shook the ashes out and put it away.
+
+Thus was the ceremony of adoption finished. Without more talk, the red
+friend and brother turned from his white friend and brother and went
+back to his own world.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [14] Sanomp was suggested to the romancer by La Salle's faithful
+     Shawanoe follower, Nika, and an Indian friend and brother in
+     "Pontiac."
+
+  [15] Guardian Manitou. See Introduction to "Jesuits in North America."
+
+
+
+
+                                VIII.
+
+                             TEGAHKOUITA.
+
+
+Barbe ran breathless up the stairway, glad to catch sight of her uncle
+the Abbé so occupied at the lower hearth that he took no heed of her
+return.
+
+She had counted herself the only woman in Fort Frontenac, yet she found
+a covered figure standing in front of the chamber door next her own.
+
+Though Barbe had never seen Catharine Tegahkouita[16] she knew this must
+be the Iroquois virgin who lived a hermit life of devotion in a cabin at
+Lachine, revered by French and Indians alike. How this saint had reached
+Fort Frontenac or in whose behalf she was exerting herself Barbe could
+not conjecture. Tegahkouita had interceded for many afflicted people and
+her prayers were much sought after.
+
+The Indian girl kept her face entirely covered. No man knew that it was
+comely or even what its features were like. The chronicler tells us when
+she was a young orphan beside her uncle's lodge-fire her eyes were too
+weak to bear the light of the sun, and in this darkness began the
+devotion which distinguished her life. What was first a necessity,
+became finally her choice, and she shut herself from the world.
+
+To Barbe, Tegahkouita was an object of religious awe tempered by that
+criticism in which all young creatures secretly indulge. She sat on the
+bench as if in meditation, but her eyes crept up and down that straight
+and motionless and blanket-eclipsed presence. She knew that Tegahkouita
+was good; was it not told of the Indian girl that she rolled three days
+in a bed of thorns, and that she often walked barefooted in ice and
+snow, to discipline her body? She was not afraid of Tegahkouita. But she
+wished somebody else would come into the room who could break the
+saint's death-like silence. Sainthood was a very safe condition, but
+Barbe found it impossible to admire the outward appearance of a living
+saint.
+
+La Salle had stopped at the barracks to order out his men, and Colin who
+had taken to that part of the fort for amusement, watched their transfer
+with much interest.
+
+Wind was conquering rain. It blew keenly from the southwest, and sung at
+the corners of Frontenac, whirling dead leaves like fugitive birds into
+the area of the fort. La Salle's men turned out of their quarters with
+reluctance to exchange safety and comfort for exposure and a leaky camp.
+The explorer stood and saw them pass before him bearing their various
+burdens, excepting one man who slouched by the door of the bakehouse as
+if he had stationed himself there to see that they passed in order out
+of the gate.
+
+"Come here, you Jolycoeur," called La Salle, lifting his finger.
+
+Jolycoeur, savagely hairy, approached with that look of sulky menace
+La Salle never appeared to see in his servants.
+
+"Where is your load of goods?" inquired the explorer.
+
+[Illustration: "'Come here, you Jolycoeur,' called La Salle."--_Page
+138._]
+
+Jolycoeur lifted a quick look, and dropping it again, replied, "Sieur
+de la Salle, I was waiting for the cook to hand me out the dishes you
+ordered against you came back."
+
+La Salle examined him through half-shut eyes. It was this man's constant
+duty to prepare his food. Tonty and his brother Jean had so occupied his
+morning that he had found no time for eating. A man inured to hardships
+can fast with very little thought about the matter, but he decided if
+Jolycoeur had not yet handled this meal he might hazard some last
+service from a man who had missed so many opportunities.
+
+"Did you cook my breakfast?" he inquired.
+
+"Sieur de la Salle, I dared not put my nose in the bakehouse. This cook
+is the worst man in Fort Frontenac."
+
+The cook appearing with full hands in his door, La Salle said to
+Jolycoeur, "Carry those platters into the lodge," and he watched the
+minutest action of the man's elbows, walking behind him into the lower
+apartment of the dwelling. A table stood there on which Jolycoeur
+began to arrange the dishes with surly carelessness.
+
+The explorer forgot him the moment they entered, for two people occupied
+this room in close talk. Challenging whatever ill Jacques le Ber and the
+Abbé Cavelier had prepared, La Salle advanced beyond the table with the
+chill and defiant bearing natural to him.
+
+"Monsieur le Ber and I have been discussing this alliance you are so
+anxious to make with his family," spoke the Abbé.
+
+The explorer met Le Ber's face full of that triumphant contempt which
+men strangely feel for other men who have fallen and become
+stepping-stones of fortune to themselves. He turned away without answer,
+and began to eat indifferently from the dishes Jolycoeur had left
+ready, standing beside the table while he ate.
+
+"If Jacques le Ber were as anxious for the marriage as yourself,--but I
+told you this morning, my brother La Salle, what madness it must seem to
+all sane men,--it could not be arranged. His daughter hath refused to
+see you."
+
+"My thanks are due to my brother the Abbé for his nice management of all
+my affairs," sneered La Salle. "I comprehend there is nothing which he
+will not endeavor to mar for me. It surely is madness which induces a
+man against all experience to confide in his brother."
+
+Jean Cavelier replied with a shrug and a spread of the hands which said,
+"In such coin of gratitude am I always paid."
+
+"Sieur de la Salle," volunteered Le Ber, rising and coming forward with
+natural candor, "it is not so long ago that your proposal would have
+made me proud, and the Abbé hath not ill managed it now. Monsieur, I
+wish my girl to marry. I have been ready for any marriage she would
+accept. She has indeed shown more liking for you than for any other man
+in New France. Monsieur, I would far rather have her married than bound
+to the life she leads. But if you were in a position to marry, Jeanne
+refuses your hand."
+
+"Has she said this to you?" inquired La Salle.
+
+"I have not seen her to-day," replied Le Ber. "She has the Iroquois
+virgin Tegahkouita with her. I brought Tegahkouita here because she was
+besought for some healing in our Iroquois lodges near the fort."
+
+Jacques le Ber stopped. But La Salle calmly heard him thus claim
+everything pertaining to Fort Frontenac.
+
+"We must do what we can to hold these unstable Indians," continued Le
+Ber. "Monsieur, before I could carry your proposal to Jeanne, she sends
+me Tegahkouita, as if they had some holy contrivance for reading
+people's minds. Your brother will confirm to you the words Tegahkouita
+brought."
+
+"Mademoiselle le Ber will pray for you always, my brother La Salle. But
+she refuses even to see you."
+
+"It is easy enough for Jeanne to put you in her prayers," remarked the
+discontented father, "she hath room enough there for all New France."
+
+The man who had more than once sprung into the midst of hostile savages
+and carried their admiration by a word, now stood silent and musing. But
+his face expressed nothing except determination.
+
+"You shall see her yourself," Jacques le Ber exclaimed, with the
+shrewdness of a man holding present advantage, yet gauging fully his
+antagonist's force. "You and I were once friends, Sieur de la Salle. I
+might obtain a worse match for my girl."
+
+"I will see her," said La Salle, more in the manner of affirming his own
+wish than of accepting a concession.
+
+He mounted the stairs, with Le Ber behind him, the Abbé Cavelier
+following Le Ber.
+
+As the father expected, Tegahkouita stood as a bar in front of Jeanne's
+chamber door. Slightly spreading her blanketed arms this Indian girl of
+peculiar gifts said slowly and melodiously in a voice tuned by much
+low-spoken prayer, "Mademoiselle Jeanne le Ber says, 'Tell Sieur de la
+Salle I will pray for him always, but I must never see his face
+again.'"
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [16] The romancer differs from the historian--Charlevoix, tome 2--who
+       records that Catharine Tegahkouita died in 1678.
+
+
+
+
+                                 IX.
+
+                             AN ORDEAL.
+
+
+"When I have seen Mademoiselle le Ber," La Salle replied to the blanket
+of Tegahkouita, "I shall understand from herself what her wishes are in
+this matter."
+
+"Sieur de la Salle cannot see her," spoke Tegahkouita. "She hath no word
+but this, and she will not see Sieur de la Salle again."
+
+"I say he shall see her!" exclaimed the Montreal merchant, with asperity
+created by so many influences working upon his daughter. "He may look
+upon her this minute!"
+
+Jeanne le Ber's presence in Fort Frontenac scarcely surprised Barbe, so
+great was her amazement at the attitude of her uncle La Salle. That he
+should be suing to Le Ber's daughter seemed as impossible as any
+rejection of his suit. She felt toward the saint she had pinched at
+convent that jealous resentment peculiar to women who desire to have the
+men of their families married, yet are never satisfied with the choice
+those men make. Even Barbe, however, considered it a sacrilegious act
+when Le Ber shook his daughter's door and demanded admittance.
+
+Jeanne's complete silence, like a challenge, drew out his imperative
+force. He broke through every fastening and threw the door wide open.
+
+The small, bare room, scarcely wider than its entrance, afforded no
+hiding-places. There was little to catch the eye, from rude berth to
+hooks in the ruder wall, from which the commandant's clothing had so
+lately been removed.
+
+Jeanne, the focus of this small cell, had flown to its extremity. As the
+door burst from its fastenings, everybody in the outer room could see
+her standing against the wall with noble instinct, facing the breakers
+of her privacy, but without looking at them. Her eyes rested on her
+beads, which she told with rapid lips and fingers. A dormer window
+spread its background of light around her head.
+
+The recoil of inaction which followed Le Ber's violence was not felt by
+Tegahkouita. With the swift silence of an Indian and the intuition of a
+devotee, she at once put herself in the sleeping cell, and kneeled
+holding up a crucifix before Jeanne. As this symbol of religion was
+lifted, Jeanne fell upon her knees.
+
+Le Ber had not intended to enter, but indignation drove him on after
+Tegahkouita. He stood aside and did not approach his child,--a jealous,
+remorseful, anxious, irritated man.
+
+La Salle could see Jeanne, though with giddy and indistinct vision. Her
+wool gown lay around her in carven folds, as she knelt like a victim
+ready for the headsman's axe.
+
+One of the proudest and most reticent men who ever trod the soil of the
+New World was thus reduced to woo before his enemy and his kindred; to
+argue against those unseen forces represented by the Indian girl, and to
+fight death in his own body with every pleading respiration. For
+blindness was growing over his eyes. His lungs were tightened. When his
+back was turned in the room below, Jolycoeur had mixed a dish for him.
+
+La Salle's hardihood was the marvel of his followers. A body and will of
+electric strength carried him thousands of miles through ways called
+impassable. Defeat could not defeat him. But this struggle with Jeanne
+le Ber was harder than any struggle with an estranged king, harder than
+again bringing up fortune from the depths of ruin, harder than tearing
+his breath of life from the reluctant air. He reared himself against the
+chimney-side, pressing with palms and stretched fingers for support, yet
+maintaining a roused erectness.
+
+"Jeanne!" he spoke; and eyes less blind than his could detect a sinking
+of her figure at the sound, "I have this to say."
+
+With a plunging gait which terrified Barbe by its unnaturalness, La
+Salle attempted to place himself nearer the silent object he was to
+move. As he passed through the doorway he caught at the sides, and then
+stretched out and braced one palm against the wall. Thus propped he
+proceeded, articulating thickly but with careful exactness.
+
+"Jeanne, when I have again brought success out of failure, I shall
+demand you in marriage. Your father permits it."
+
+Her trembling lips prayed on, and she gave no token of having heard him,
+except the tremor which shook even the folds of her gown.
+
+Too proud to confess his peril and make its appeal to her, and
+suppressing before so many witnesses her tender name of Sainte, he
+labored on as La Salle the explorer with the statement of his case.
+
+"Perhaps I cannot see you again for some years. I do not ask words--of
+acceptance now. It is enough--if you look at me."
+
+La Salle leaned forward. His eyeballs appeared to swell and protrude as
+he strained sight for the slightest lifting of the veil before that
+self-restraining spirit.
+
+Barbe's wailing suddenly broke all bounds in the outer room. "My uncle
+the Abbé! Look at my uncle La Salle! He cannot breathe--he is going to
+die! Somebody has poisoned or stabbed my uncle La Salle!"
+
+Jean Cavelier with lower outcry ran to help the explorer. But even a
+brother and a priest has his limitations. La Salle pushed him off.
+
+When Barbe saw this, she threw herself to the floor and hid her face
+upon the bench. Her kinsman and the hero of her childhood was held over
+the abyss of death in the hand of Jeanne le Ber, while those who loved
+him must set their teeth in silence.
+
+But neither this childish judge, nor the father watching for any slight
+motion of eyelids which might direct all his future hopes and plans,
+knew what sickening moisture started from every pore of Jeanne le Ber.
+Still she lifted her fainting eyes only as high as the crucifix
+Tegahkouita held before her. Compared to her duty as she saw it, she
+must count as nothing the life of the man she loved.
+
+The Indian girl's weak sight had no plummet for the face of this greater
+devotee. Passionately white, its lips praying fast, it stared at the
+crucifix. Cold drops ran down from the dew which beaded temples and
+upper lip. Sieur de la Salle--Sieur de la Salle was dying, and asking
+her for a look! The lifting of her eyelids, the least wavering of her
+sight, would sweep away the vows she had made to Heaven, and loosen her
+soul for its swift rush to his breast. To be the wife of La Salle! Her
+mutter became almost audible as she slid the beads between her fingers.
+God would keep her from this deadly sin.
+
+The gigantic will of La Salle, become almost material and visible, fell
+upon her with a cry which must have broken any other endurance.
+
+"Jeanne! look at me now--you _shall_ look at me now!"
+
+Hoarse shouts of battle never tingled through blood as did the voice of
+this isolated man.
+
+Jeanne's lips twitched on; she twisted her hands in tense knots against
+her neck, and her eyes maintained the level of the cross.
+
+Silence--that fragment of eternity--then filled up the room, submerging
+strained ears. There were remote sounds, like the scream of wind cut by
+the angles of Fort Frontenac; but no sound which pierced the silence
+between La Salle and Jeanne le Ber.
+
+He turned around and cast himself through the doorway with a lofty tread
+as if he were trying to mount skyward. The Abbé Cavelier extended both
+arms and kept him from stumbling over the settle which Barbe was
+baptizing with her anguish. She looked up with the distorted visage of
+one who weeps terribly, and saw the groping explorer led to the
+staircase. His feet plunged in the descent.
+
+To this noise was added a distinct thud from Jeanne le Ber's room as her
+head struck the floor. She lay relaxed and prostrate, and her father
+lifted her up. Before rising to his feet with her he passed his hand
+piteously across her bruised forehead.
+
+[Illustration: "She twisted her hands in tense knots against her
+neck."--_Page 152._]
+
+
+
+
+                                  X.
+
+                               HEMLOCK.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Jolycoeur, lounging with his shoulders against the barrack wall, gave
+furtive attention to La Salle as the explorer appeared within the fort.
+Even his eye was deceived by his master's bearing in giving him the
+signal to approach.
+
+The wind was helpful to La Salle, but he only half met daylight and saw
+Jolycoeur taking strange shapes.
+
+"Go to Father Hennepin's old mission house," he slowly commanded, "and
+send Monsieur de Tonty directly to me."
+
+The man, not daring to disobey until he could take refuge in Fort
+Frontenac with the gates closed behind the explorer, went on this
+errand.
+
+"What ails Sieur de la Salle?" inquired the cook, coming out of his
+bakehouse to get this news of a sentinel.
+
+They both watched the Abbé Cavelier making vain efforts to get hold of
+his misdirected brother.
+
+"Gone mad with pride," suggested the sentinel. "The less he prospers
+the loftier I have always heard he bears himself. Would the governor of
+New France climb the wind with a tread like that?"
+
+Outside the gate La Salle's limbs failed. The laboring Abbé then dragged
+him along, and it seemed an immense détour he was obliged to make to
+pass the extended foundation.
+
+"Now you will believe my words which I spoke this morning concerning the
+peril we all stand in," panted this sorely taxed brother. "The Cavelier
+family is destroyed. My brother La Salle--Robert--my child! Shall I give
+you absolution?"
+
+"Not yet," gasped La Salle.
+
+"If you had ever taken my advice, this miserable end had not come upon
+you."
+
+"I am not ended," gasped La Salle.
+
+"Oh, my brother," lamented Jean Cavelier, tucking up his cassock as he
+bent to the strain, "I have but one consolation in my wretchedness. This
+is better for you than the marriage you would have made. What business
+have you to ally yourself with Le Ber? What business have you with
+marriage at all? For my part, I would object to any marriage you had in
+view, but Le Ber's daughter was the worst marriage for you in New
+France."
+
+"Tonty!" gasped La Salle. With the swiftness of an Indian, Tonty was
+flying across the clearing. The explorer's unwary messenger Jolycoeur
+he had left behind him bound with hide thongs and lying in Father
+Hennepin's inner room.
+
+"Yes, yonder comes your Monsieur de Tonty who so easily gave up your
+post on the Illinois," panted the Abbé Cavelier. "Like all your
+worthless followers he hath no attachment to your person."
+
+"There is more love in his iron hand," La Salle's paralyzing mouth flung
+out, "than in any other living heart!"
+
+Needing no explanation from the Abbé, the commandant from Fort St. Louis
+took strong hold of La Salle and hurried him to the mission house. They
+faced the wind, and Tonty's cap blew off, his rings of black hair
+flaring to a fierce uprightness.
+
+The surgeon ran out of the dwelling and met and helped them in, and thus
+tardily resistance to the poison was begun, but it had found its
+hardiest victim since the day of Socrates.
+
+Tonty's iron hand brought out of Jolycoeur immediate confession of the
+poison he had used.
+
+In an age when most cunning and deadly drugs were freely handled, and
+men who would not shed blood thought it no sin to take enemies neatly
+off the scene by the magic of a dish, Jolycoeur was not without
+knowledge of a plant called hemlock, growing ready to the hand of a good
+poisoner in the New World.
+
+Noon stood in the sky, half shredding vapors, and lighting cool sparkles
+upon the lake. Afternoon dragged its mute and heavy hours westward.
+
+Men left the mission house and entered it again, carrying wood or water.
+
+The sun set in the lake, parting clouds before his sinking visage and
+stretching his rays like long arms of fire to smite the heaving water.
+
+[Illustration: "His rings of black hair flaring to a fierce
+uprightness."--_Page 158._]
+
+Twilight rose out of the earth and crept skyward, blotting all visible
+shore. Fort Frontenac stood an indistinct mass beside the Cataraqui, as
+beside another lake. Stars seemed to run and meet and dive in long
+ripples. The wash of water up the sand subsided in force as the wind
+sunk, leaving air space for that ceaseless tune breathed by a great
+forest.
+
+Overhead, from a port of cloud, the moon's sail pushed out suddenly,
+less round than it had been the night before, and owning by such
+depression that she had begun tacking toward her third quarter. Fort and
+settlements again found their proportions, and Father Hennepin's cross
+stood clear and fair, throwing its shadow across the mission house.
+
+Within the silent mission house warmth and redness were diffused from
+logs piled in the chimney.
+
+The Abbé Cavelier's cassock rose and fell with that sleep which follows
+great anxiety and exhaustion. He reclined against the lowest step of a
+broken ladder-way which once ascended from corner to loft. The men,
+except one who stood guard outside in the shadow of the house, were
+asleep in the next room.
+
+La Salle rested before the hearth on some of the skins Tonty had
+received from his Indian friend and brother. Whenever the explorer
+opened his eyes he saw Tonty sitting awake on the floor beside him.
+
+"Sleep," urged La Salle.
+
+"I shall not sleep again," said Tonty, "until I see you safely on your
+way toward France."
+
+"This has been worse than the dose of verdigris I once got."
+
+"Jolycoeur says he used hemlock," responded Tonty. "He accused
+everybody in New France of setting him on to the deed, but I silenced
+that."
+
+"I had not yet dismissed him, Tonty. The scoundrel hath claims on me for
+two years' wages."
+
+"He should have got his wages of me," exclaimed Tonty, "if this proved
+your death. He should have as many bullets as his body could hold."
+
+"Tonty, untie the fellow and turn him out and discharge his wages for me
+with some of the skins you have put under me." La Salle rose on his
+elbow and then sat up. His face was very haggard, but the practical
+clear eye dominated it. "These fellows cannot balk me. I have lost all
+that makes life, except my friend. But I shall come back and take the
+great west yet! A man with a purpose cannot be killed, Tonty. He goes
+on. He must go on."
+
+
+
+
+                              Book III.
+
+                     FORT ST. LOUIS OF THE ILLINOIS.
+
+                              1687 A. D.
+
+
+
+
+                                  I.
+
+                         IN AN EAGLE'S NEST.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+"Fort Lewis is in the country of the Illinois and seated on a steep Rock
+about two hundred Foot high, the River running at the Bottom of it. It
+is only fortified with Stakes and Palisades, and some Houses advancing
+to the Edge of the Rock. It has a very spacious Esplanade, or Place of
+Arms. The Place is naturally strong, and might be made so by Art, with
+little expence. Several of the Natives live in it, in their Huts. I
+cannot give an Account of the Latitude it stands in, for want of proper
+Instruments to take an Observation, but Nothing can be pleasanter; and
+it may be truly affirmed that the Country of the Illinois enjoys all
+that can make it accomplished, not only as to Ornament, but also for its
+plentiful Production of all Things requisite for the Support of human
+Life.
+
+"The Plain, which is watered by the River, is beautified by two small
+Hills about half a League distant from the Fort, and those Hills are
+cover'd with groves of Oaks, Walnut-Trees, and other Sorts I have named
+elsewhere. The Fields are full of Grass, growing up very high. On the
+Sides of the Hills is found a gravelly Sort of Stone, very fit to make
+Lime for Building. There are also many Clay Pits, fit for making of
+Earthen Ware, Bricks, and Tiles, and along the River there are Coal
+Pits, the Coal whereof has been try'd and found very good."[17]
+
+The young man lifted his pen from the paper and stood up beside a box in
+the storehouse which had served him as table, at the demand of a
+priestly voice.
+
+"Joutel, what are you writing there?"
+
+"Monsieur the Abbé, I was merely setting down a few words about this
+Fort St. Louis of the Illinois in which we are sheltered. But my candle
+is so nearly burned out I will put the leaves aside."
+
+"You were writing nothing else?" insisted La Salle's brother, setting
+his shoulders against the storehouse door.
+
+"Not a word, monsieur."
+
+The Abbé's ragged cassock scarcely showed such wear as his face, which
+the years that had handled him could by no means have cut into such deep
+grooves or moulded into such ghastly hillocks of features.
+
+"I cannot sleep to-night, Joutel," said the Abbé Cavelier.
+
+"I thought you were made very comfortable in the house," remarked
+Joutel.
+
+"What can make me comfortable now?"
+
+They stood still, saying nothing, while a candle waved its feeble plume
+with uncertainty over its marsh of tallow, making their huge shadows
+stagger over log-wall or floor or across piled merchandise. One side of
+the room was filled with stacked buffalo hides, on which Joutel,
+nightly, took the complete rest he had earned by long tramping in
+southern woods.
+
+He rested his knuckles on the box and looked down. A Norman follower of
+the Caveliers, he had done La Salle good service, but between the Abbé
+and him lay a reason for silence.
+
+"Tonty may reach the Rock at any time,"[18] complained the Abbé to the
+floor, though his voice must reach Joutel's ears. "There is nothing I
+dread more than meeting Tonty."
+
+"We can leave the Rock before Monsieur de Tonty arrives," said Joutel,
+repeating a suggestion he had made many times.
+
+"Certainly, without the goods my brother would have him deliver to me,
+without a canoe or any provision whatever for our journey!"
+
+"They say here that Monsieur de Tonty led only two hundred Indians and
+fifty Frenchmen to aid the new governor in his war against the
+Iroquois," observed Joutel. "He may not come back at all."
+
+[Illustration: "Joutel, what are you writing there?"--_Page 169._]
+
+"I have thought of that," the Abbé mused. "If Tonty be dead we are
+indeed wasting our time here, when we ought to be well on our way to
+Quebec, to say naught of the voyage to France. But this fellow in charge
+of the Rock refuses to honor my demands without more authority."
+
+"He received us most kindly, and we have been his guests a month," said
+Joutel.
+
+"I would be his guest no longer than this passing night if my
+difficulties were solved," said the Abbé. "For there is even Colin's
+sister to torment me. I know not where she is,--whether in Montreal or
+in the wilderness between Montreal and this fort. If I had taken her
+back with Colin to France, she would now be safe with my mother. There
+was another evidence of my poor brother's madness! He was determined
+Mademoiselle Cavelier should be sent out to Fort St. Louis. When he
+sailed on that last great voyage, he sat in one of the ships the king
+furnished him and in the last lines he wrote his mother refused to tell
+her his destination! And at the same time he wrote instructions to the
+nuns of St. Joseph concerning the niece whose guardian he never was. She
+must be sent to Fort St. Louis at the first safe opportunity! She was to
+have a grant in this country to replace her fortune which he had used.
+And this he only told me during his fever at St. Domingo on the voyage."
+
+Joutel folded and put away his notes. The Abbé's often repeated
+complaints seldom stirred a reply from him. Though on this occasion he
+thought of saying,--
+
+"Monsieur de Tonty may bring news of her from Montreal."
+
+"You understand, Joutel," exclaimed the Abbé, approaching the candle,
+"that it is best,--that it is necessary not to tell Tonty what we know?"
+
+"I have understood what you said, Monsieur the Abbé."
+
+"You are the only man who gives me anxiety. All the rest are willing to
+keep silence. Is it not my affair? I wish you would cease writing your
+scraps. It irritates me to come into this storehouse and find you
+writing your scraps." He looked severely at the young man, who leaned
+against the box making no further promise or reply. Then seizing the
+candle, the Abbé stepped to a bed made of bales, where, wrapped in skins
+and blankets, young Colin Cavelier lay uttering the acknowledgement of
+peaceful sleep. Another boy lay similarly wrapped on the floor beside
+him.
+
+The priest's look at these two was brief. He went on to the remaining
+man in the room, a hairy fellow, lying coiled among hides and pressed
+quite into a corner. The man appeared unconscious, emitting his breath
+in short puffs.
+
+Abbé Cavelier gazed upon him with shudders.
+
+The over-taxed candle flame stooped and expired, the scent of its
+funeral pile rising from a small red point in darkness.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [17] Joutel. English Translation "from the edition just published at
+       Paris, 1714 A. D."
+
+  [18] "Le Rocher," this natural fortress was commonly called by the
+       French. See Charlevoix.
+
+
+
+
+                                 II.
+
+                       THE FRIEND AND BROTHER
+
+
+While Abbé Cavelier stood in the storehouse, Tonty, a few miles away,
+was setting his camp around a spring of sulphur water well known to the
+hunters of St. Louis. The spring boiled its white sand from unmeasured
+depths at the root of an oak, and spread a pool which slipped over its
+barrier in a thin stream to the Illinois.
+
+Though so near his fortress, Tonty and Greysolon du Lhut, fresh from
+their victorious campaign with the governor of New France against the
+Iroquois, thought it not best to expose their long array of canoes in
+darkness on the river. They had with them[19] women and
+children,--fragments of families, going under their escort to join the
+colony at Fort St. Louis.
+
+Du Lhut's army of Indians from the upper lakes had returned directly to
+their own villages to celebrate the victory; but that unwearied rover
+himself, with a few followers, had dragged his gouty limbs across
+portages to the Illinois, to sojourn longer with Tonty.
+
+Their camp was some distance from the river, up an alluvial slope of
+the north shore. Opposite, a line of cliffs, against which the Illinois
+washes for miles, caught the eye through darkness by its sandy glint;
+and not far away, on the north side of the river, that long ridge known
+as Buffalo Rock made a mass of gloom.
+
+Dependent and unarmed colonists were placed in the centre of the camp.
+Tonty himself, with his usual care on this journey, had helped to pitch
+a tent of blankets and freshly cut poles for Mademoiselle Barbe Cavelier
+and the officer's wife, who clung to her in the character of guardian.
+The other immigrants understood and took pleasure in this small
+temporary home, built nightly for a girl whose proud silence among them
+they forgave as the caprice of beauty. The wife of the officer
+Bellefontaine, on her part, rewarded Tonty by attaching her ceaseless
+presence to Barbe. She was a timid woman, very small-eyed and silent,
+who took refuge in Barbe's larger shadow, and found it convenient for an
+under-sized duenna whose husband was so far in the wilds.
+
+Mademoiselle Cavelier was going to Fort St. Louis at the first
+opportunity since her uncle La Salle's request, made three years before.
+
+At this time it was not known whether La Salle had succeeded or failed
+in his last enterprise. He had again convinced the king. His seigniories
+and forts were restored to him, and governor's agents and associates
+driven out of his possessions. He had sailed from France with a fleet of
+ships, carrying a large colony to plant at the Mississippi's mouth. His
+brother the Abbé Cavelier, two nephews, priests, artisans, young men,
+and families were in his company, which altogether numbered over four
+hundred people.
+
+Fogs or storms, or dogged navigators disagreeing with and disobeying
+him, had robbed him of his destination; for news came back to France, by
+a returning ship, of loss and disaster and a colony dropped like
+castaways on some inlet of the Gulf.
+
+The evening meal was eaten and sentinels were posted. Even petulant
+children had ceased to fret within the various enclosures. Indians and
+Frenchmen lay asleep under their canoes which they had carried from the
+river, and by propping with stones or stakes at one side, converted into
+low-roofed shelters.
+
+Barbe's tent was beside the spring near the camp-fire. She could, by
+parting overlapped blanket edges, look out of her cloth house into those
+living depths of bubbling white sand, so like the thoughts of young
+maids. Two or three fallen leaves, curled into quaint craft, slid across
+the pool's surface, hung at its barrier, and one after the other slipped
+over and disappeared along the thread of water. A hollow of light was
+scooped above the camp-fire, outside of which darkness stood an
+impenetrable rind, for the sky had all day been thickened by clouds.
+
+The Demoiselle Bellefontaine, tucked neatly as a mole under her ridge,
+rested from her fears in sleep; and Barbe made ready to lie down also,
+sweeping once more the visible world with a lingering eye. She saw an
+Indian creeping on hands and knees toward Tonty's lodge. He entered
+darkness the moment she saw him. The girl arose trembling and put on her
+clothes. She had caught no impression of his tribe; but if he were a
+warrior of the camp, his crawling so secretly must threaten harm to
+Tonty. She did not distinctly know what she ought to do, except warn
+Monsieur de Tonty.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+But on a sudden the iron-handed commandant ran past her tent, shouting
+to his men. There was a sound like the rushing of bees through the air,
+and horrible faces smeared with paint, tattooed bodies, and hands
+brandishing weapons closed in from darkness; the men of the camp rose up
+with answering yells, and the flash and roar of muskets surrounded Barbe
+as if she were standing in some nightmare world of lightning and
+thunder. She heard the screams of children and frightened mothers. She
+saw Tonty in meteor rushes rallying men, and striking down, with nothing
+but his iron hand, a foe who had come to quarters too close for
+fire-arms. Indian after Indian fell under that sledge, and a cry of
+terror in Iroquois French, which she could understand, rose through the
+whoop of invasion,--
+
+"The Great-Medicine-Hand! The Great-Medicine-Hand!"
+
+Brands were caught from the fire and thrown like bolts, sparks hissing
+as they flew. Her tent was overturned and she fell under it with the
+Demoiselle Bellefontaine, who uttered muffled squeals.
+
+When Barbe dragged her companion out of the midst of poles, all the
+hurricane of action had passed by. Its rush could be heard down the
+slope, then the splashing of bodies and tumultuous paddling in the
+river. Guns yet flashed. She heard Frenchmen and Illinois running with
+their canoes down to the water to give chase. Farther and farther away
+sounded the retreat, and though women and children continued to make
+outcry, Barbe could hear no groans.
+
+The brands of the fire were still scattered, but hands were busy
+collecting and bringing them back,--processions of gigantic glow-worms
+meeting by dumb appointment in a nest of hot ashes and trodden logs. All
+faces were drowned in the dark until these re-united embers fitfully
+brought them out. A crowd of frightened immigrants drew around the
+blaze, calling each other by name, and demanding to know who was
+scalped.
+
+Barbe saw nothing better to do than to stand beside her wrecked tent,
+and the Demoiselle Bellefontaine burrowed closely to her, uttering
+distressed noises.
+
+The pursuers presently returned and quieted the camp. Tonty had not lost
+a man, though a few were wounded. The attacking party carried off with
+them every trace of their repulse.
+
+Overturned lodges were now set straight, and as soon as Bellefontaine's
+wife found hers inhabitable she hid herself within it. But Barbe waited
+to ask the busy commandant,--
+
+"Monsieur de Tonty, have you any wound?"
+
+"No, mademoiselle," he answered, pausing to breathe himself, and seize
+upon an interview so unusual. "I hope you have not been greatly
+disturbed. The Iroquois are now entirely driven off, and they will not
+venture to attack us again."
+
+With excited voice Barbe assured him she had remained tranquil through
+the battle.
+
+"We do not call this a battle," laughed Tonty. "These were a party of
+Senecas, who rallied after defeat and have followed us to our own
+country. They tried to take the camp by surprise, and nearly did it; but
+Sanomp crept between sentinels and waked me."
+
+"Who is Sanomp, monsieur?"
+
+"Do you remember the Iroquois Indian who came to Father Hennepin's
+chapel at Fort Frontenac?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur; was he among these Senecas?"
+
+"The Senecas are his tribe of the Iroquois, mademoiselle. He was among
+them; but he has left his people for my sake. These Indians have visions
+and obey them. He said the time had come for him to follow me."
+
+"Sanomp was then the Indian I saw creeping toward your tent. Did he
+fight against his own people?"
+
+"No, mademoiselle. While Du Lhut and I flew to rouse the camp, he sat
+doggedly down where he found me. This was a last chance for the Senecas.
+We are so near Fort St. Louis, and almost within shouting distance of
+our Miamis on Buffalo Rock. Such security makes sentinels careless.
+Sanomp crept ahead of the others and whispered in my ear, taking his
+chance of being brained before I understood him. He has proved himself
+my friend and brother, mademoiselle, to do this for me, and moreover to
+bear the shame of sitting crouched like a squaw through a fray."
+
+"Everybody loves and fears Monsieur de Tonty,"[20] observed Barbe, with
+sedate accent.
+
+Tonty breathed deeply.
+
+"Am I an object of fear to you, mademoiselle? Doubtless I have grown
+like a buffalo," he ruminated. "Perhaps you feel a natural aversion
+toward a man bearing a hand of iron."
+
+"On the contrary, it seemed a great convenience among the Indians,"
+murmured Barbe, and Tonty laughed and stood silent.
+
+The camp was again settling to rest, and fewer swarming figures peopled
+the darkness. Winding and aspiring through new fuel the camp-fire once
+more began to lift its impalpable pavilion, and groups sat around it
+beneath that canopy of tremulous light, with rapid talk and gesture
+repeating to each other their impressions of the Senecas' attack.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, lifting his left hand to his bare head, for
+he had rushed hatless into action, "good-night. The guards are
+doubled. You are more secure than when you lay down before."
+
+"Good-night, monsieur," replied Barbe, and he opened her tent for her,
+when she turned back.
+
+"Monsieur de Tonty," she whispered swiftly, "I have had no chance during
+this long journey,--for with you alone would I speak of it,--to demand
+if you believe that saying against yourself which they are wickedly
+charging to my uncle La Salle?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, how could I believe that Monsieur de la Salle said in
+France he wished to be rid of me? One laughs at a rumor like that."
+
+"The tales lately told about his madness are more than I can bear."
+
+"Mademoiselle, Monsieur de la Salle's enemies always called his great
+enterprises madness."
+
+"Can you imagine where he now is, Monsieur de Tonty?"
+
+"Oh, heavens!" Tonty groaned. "Often have I said to myself,--Has
+Monsieur de la Salle been two years in America, and I have not joined
+him, or even spoken with him? It is not my fault! As soon as I believed
+he had reached the Gulf of Mexico I descended the Mississippi. I
+searched all those countries, every cape and every shore. I demanded of
+all the natives where he was, and not one could tell me a word. Judge of
+my pain and my dolor."[21]
+
+They stood in such silence as could result from two people's ceasing to
+murmur in the midst of high-pitched voices.
+
+"Monsieur de Tonty," resumed Barbe, "do you remember Jeanne le Ber?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, I never saw her."
+
+"She refused my uncle La Salle at Fort Frontenac, and I detested her for
+it. In the new church at Montreal she has had a cell made behind the
+altar. There she prays day and night. She wears only a blanket, but the
+nun who feeds her says her face is like an angel's. Monsieur, Jeanne le
+Ber fell with her head bumping the floor,--and I understood her. She had
+a spirit fit to match with my uncle La Salle's. She thought she was
+right. I forgave her then, for I know, monsieur, she loved my uncle La
+Salle."
+
+When Barbe had spoken such daring words she stepped inside her tent and
+dropped its curtain.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [19] "On his return he brought back with him the families of a number
+       of French immigrants, soldiers, and traders. This arrival of the
+       wives, sisters, children, and sweethearts of some of the
+       colonists, after years of separation, was the occasion of great
+       rejoicing."--John Moses' History of Illinois.
+
+  [20] "He was loved and feared by all," says St. Cosme.
+
+  [21] Tonty's words in "Dernieres Decouvertes dans L'Amerique
+       Septentrional."
+
+
+
+
+                                 III.
+
+                            HALF-SILENCE.
+
+
+The October of the Mississippi valley--full of mild nights and mellow
+days and the shine of ripened corn--next morning floated all the region
+around Fort St. Louis in silver vapor. The two small cannon on the Rock
+began to roar salutes as soon as Tonty's line of canoes appeared moving
+down the river.
+
+To Barbe this was an enchanted land. She sat by the Demoiselle
+Bellefontaine and watched its populous beauty unfold. Blue lodge-smoke
+arose everywhere. Tonty pointed out the Shawnee settlement eastward, and
+the great town of the Illinois northwest of the Rock,--a city of high
+lodges shaped like the top of a modern emigrant wagon. He told where
+Piankishaws and Weas might be distinguished, how many Shawanoes were
+settled beyond the ravine back of the Rock, and how many thousand
+people, altogether, were collected in this principality of Monsieur de
+la Salle.
+
+A castellated cliff with turrets of glittering sandstone towered above
+the boats, but beyond that,--round, bold, and isolated, its rugged
+breasts decked with green, its base washed by the river,--the Rock[22]
+of St. Louis waited whatever might be coming in its eternal leisure.
+Frenchmen and Indians leaped upon earthworks at its top and waved a
+welcome side by side, the flag of France flying above their heads.
+
+At Barbe's right hand lay an alluvial valley bordered by a ridge of
+hills a mile away. Along this ancient river-bed Indian women left off
+gathering maize from standing stalks, and ran joyfully crying out to
+receive their victorious warriors. Inmates poured from the settlement of
+French cabins opposite and around the Rock. With cannon booming
+overhead, Tonty passed its base followed by the people who were to
+ascend with him, and landed west of it, on a sandy strip where the
+voyager could lay his hand on that rugged fern-tufted foundation. Barbe
+and the Demoiselle Bellefontaine followed him along a path cut through
+thickets, around moss-softened irregular heights of sandstone, girdled
+in below and bulging out above, so that no man could obtain foothold to
+scale them. Gnarled tree-roots, like folds of snakes caught between
+closing strata, hung, writhed in and out. The path, under pine needles
+and fallen leaves, was cushioned with sand white as powdered snow.
+Behind the Rock, stretching toward a ravine, were expanses of this lily
+sand which looked fresh from the hands of the Maker, as if even a
+raindrop had never indented its whiteness.
+
+Three or four foot-holes were cut in the southeast flank of rock wall.
+An Indian ran down from above and flung a rope over to Tonty. He mounted
+these rocky stirrups first, helped by the rope, and knelt to reach back
+for Barbe and the Demoiselle Bellefontaine. The next ascent was up
+water-terraced rock to an angle as high as their waists. Here two more
+stirrups were cut in the rock. Ferns brushed their faces, and shrubs
+stooped over them. The heights were studded thick with gigantic trees
+half-stripped of leaves. Rust-colored lichens and lichens hoary like
+blanched old men, spread their great seals on stone and soil.
+
+Wide water-terraced steps, looking as if cut for a temple, ascended at
+last to the gate. Through this Tonty led his charge upon a dimpled
+sward, for care had been taken to keep turf alive in Fort St. Louis.
+
+Recognition and joy were the first sensations of many immigrants
+entering, as the people they loved received them. But Barbe felt only
+delicious freedom in such a crag castle. There was a sound of the sea in
+pine trees all around. The top of the Rock was nearly an acre in extent.
+It was fortified by earthworks, except the cliff above the river, which
+was set with palisades and the principal dwellings of the fort. There
+were besides, a storehouse, a block-house, and several Indian lodges.
+But the whole space--so shaded yet so sunny, reared high in air yet
+sheltered as a nest--was itself such a temple of security that any
+buildings within it seemed an impertinence. The centre, bearing its
+flagstaff, was left open.
+
+Two priests, a Récollet and a Sulpitian, met Tonty and the girl he led
+in, the Sulpitian receiving her in his arms and bestowing a kiss on her
+forehead.
+
+"Oh, my uncle Abbé!" Barbe gasped with surprise. "Is Colin with you? Is
+my uncle La Salle here?"
+
+But Tonty, swifter than the Abbé's reply, laid hold of the Récollet
+Father and drew him beside Abbé Cavelier, demanding without greeting or
+pause for courteous compliment,--
+
+"Is Monsieur de la Salle safe and well? You both come from Monsieur de
+la Salle!"
+
+"He was well when we parted from him," replied the Abbé Cavelier,
+looking at a bunch of maiden-hair fern which Barbe had caught from a
+ledge and tucked in the bosom of her gown. "We left him on the north
+branch of the Trinity River, Monsieur de Tonty."
+
+The Récollet said nothing, but kept his eyes fixed on his folded hands.
+Tonty, too eager to mark well both bearers of such news, demanded again
+impartially,--
+
+"And he was well?"
+
+"He left us in excellent health, monsieur."
+
+"How glad I am to find you in Fort St. Louis!" exclaimed Tonty. "This is
+the first direct message I have had from Monsieur de la Salle since he
+sailed from France. How many men are in your party? Have you been made
+comfortable?"
+
+"Only six, monsieur. We have been made quite comfortable by your officer
+Bellefontaine."
+
+[Illustration: "And he was well?"--_Page 192._]
+
+"Monsieur the Abbé, where did Monsieur de la Salle land his colony?"
+
+"On a western coast of the Gulf, monsieur. It was most unfortunate. Ever
+since he has been searching for the Mississippi."
+
+"While I searched for him. Oh, Fathers!" Tonty's voice deepened and his
+swarthy joyful face set its contrast opposite two downcast churchmen,
+"nothing in Fort St. Louis is good enough for messengers from Monsieur
+de la Salle. What can I do for you? Did he send me no orders?"
+
+"He did commit a paper to my hand, naming skins and merchandise that he
+would have delivered to me, as well as a canoe and provisions for our
+journey to New France."
+
+"Come, let me see this paper," demanded Tonty. "Whatever Monsieur de la
+Salle orders shall be done at once; but the season is now so advanced
+you will not push on to New France until spring."
+
+"That is the very reason, Monsieur de Tonty, why we should push on at
+once. We have waited a month for your return. I leave Fort St. Louis
+with my party to-morrow, if you will so forward my wishes."
+
+"Monsieur the Abbé, it is impossible! You have yet told me nothing of
+all it is necessary for me to know touching Monsieur de la Salle."
+
+"To-morrow," repeated the Abbé Cavelier, "I must set out at dawn, if you
+can honor my brother's paper."
+
+Tonty, with a gesture of his left hand, led the way to his quarters
+across the esplanade. As Barbe walked behind the Récollet Father, she
+wondered why he had given no answer to any of Tonty's questions.
+
+Her brother advanced to meet her, and she ran and gave him her hands and
+her cheek to kiss. They had been apart four years, and looked at each
+other with scrutinizing gaze. He overtopped her by a head. Barbe
+expected to find him tall and rudely masculine, but there was change in
+him for which she was not prepared.
+
+"My sister has grown charming," pronounced Colin. "Not as large as the
+Caveliers usually are, but like a bird exquisite in make and graceful
+motion."
+
+"Oh, Colin, what is the matter?" demanded Barbe, with direct dart. "I
+see concealment in your face!"
+
+"What do you see concealed? Perhaps you will tell me that." He became
+mottled with those red and white spots which are the blood's protest
+against the will.
+
+"The Récollet Father did not answer a word to Monsieur de Tonty's
+questions, Colin; and the voice of my uncle the Abbé sounded unnatural.
+Is there wicked power in those countries you have visited to make you
+all come back like men half asleep from some drug?"
+
+"Yes, there is!" exclaimed the boy; "I hate that wilderness. When we are
+once in France I will never venture into such wilds again. They dull me
+until my tongue seems dead."
+
+"And, Colin, you did leave my uncle La Salle quite well?"
+
+"It was he who left us. He was in excellent health the last time we saw
+him." The boy spoke these words with precision, and Barbe sighed her
+relief.
+
+"For myself," she said, "I love this wild world. I shall stay here until
+my uncle La Salle arrives."
+
+"Our uncle the Abbé will decide that," replied Colin. "It is unfortunate
+that you left Montreal. Your only hope of staying here rests on the hard
+journey before us, and the risks we run of meeting winter on the way. I
+wish you had been sent to France. I wish we were all in France now."
+Colin's face relaxed wistfully.
+
+Two crows were scolding in the trees below them. Barbe felt ready to
+weep; as if the tender spirit of autumn had stolen through her, as mists
+steal along the hills. She sat down on the grassy earthwork, and Colin
+picked some pine needles from a branch and stood silent beside her,
+chewing them.
+
+But those vague moods which haunt girlhood held always short dominion
+over Barbe. She was in close kinship with the world around, and the life
+of the fort began to occupy her.
+
+The Rock was like a small fair with its additional inhabitants, who were
+still running about in a confusion of joyful noises. Children, delighted
+to be freed from canoes at so bright a time of day, raced across the
+centre, or hid behind wigwam or tree, calling to each other. An Indian
+stalked across to the front of the Rock, and Barbe watched him reach out
+through an opening in the low log palisade. A platform was there built
+on the trunks of two leaning cedars. The Indian unwound a windlass and
+let down a bucket to the river below. She heard its distant splash and
+some of its resounding drips on the way up. Living in Fort St. Louis was
+certainly like living on a cloud.
+
+"I will go into the officers' house," suggested Colin, "and see how the
+Abbé's demands are met by Monsieur de Tonty. We shall then know if we
+are to set out for Quebec to-morrow."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [22] Parkman states its actual height to be only a hundred and
+       twenty-five feet.
+
+
+
+
+                                 IV.
+
+                       A FÊTE ON THE ROCK.[23]
+
+
+Barbe did not object or assent. Youth shoves off any evil day by
+ignoring it, and Colin left her in lazy enjoyment of the populous place.
+
+The Demoiselle Bellefontaine approached to ask if she desired to come to
+the apartment the commandant reserved for her; but Barbe replied that
+she wished to sit there and amuse herself awhile longer with the novelty
+of Fort St. Louis.
+
+A child she had noticed on the journey brought her, as great treasure, a
+handful of flints and crumble-dust from the sandstone. They sorted the
+stuff on her knee,--fat-faced dark French child and young girl fine
+enough to be the sylvan spirit of the Rock.
+
+Mademoiselle Cavelier's wardrobe was by no means equal to that gorgeous
+period in which she lived, being planned by her uncle the Abbé and
+executed by the frugal and exact hands of a self-denying sisterhood. But
+who can hide a girl's supple slimness in a gown plain as a nun's, or
+take the blossom-burnish off her face with colonial caps? Dark curls
+showed around her temples. Barbe's aquiline face had received scarcely a
+mark since Tonty saw it at Fort Frontenac. The gentle monotonous
+restraint of convent life had calmed her wild impulses, and she was in
+that trance of expecting great things to come, which is the beautiful
+birthright of youth.
+
+While she was sorting arrow-head chips, her uncle came out of Tonty's
+quarters and cast his eye about the open space in search of her. At his
+approach Barbe's playmate slipped away, and the Abbé placed himself in
+front of her with his hands behind him.
+
+Barbe gave him a scanty look, feeling sure he came to announce the next
+day's journey. This man, having many excellences, yet roused constant
+antagonism in his brother and the niece most like that brother. When he
+protruded his lower lip and looked determined, Barbe thought if the sin
+could be set aside a plunge in the river would be better than this
+journey.
+
+"I have a proposal for you, my child," said the Abbé. "It comes from
+Monsieur de Tonty. He tells me my brother La Salle encouraged him to
+hope for this alliance, and I must declare I see no other object my
+brother La Salle had in view when he sent you to Fort St. Louis.
+Monsieur de Tonty understands the state of your fortune. On his part, he
+holds this seigniory jointly with my brother, and the traffic he is able
+to control brings no mean revenue. It is true he lacks a hand. But it
+hath been well replaced by the artificer, and he comes of an Italian
+family of rank."
+
+Barbe's head was turned so entirely away that the mere back of a scarlet
+ear was left to the Abbé. One hand clutched her lap and the other pulled
+grass with destructive fingers.
+
+"Having stated Monsieur de Tonty's case I will now state mine,"
+proceeded her uncle. "I leave this fort before to-morrow dawn. I must
+take you with me or leave you here a bride. The journey is perilous for
+a small party and we may not reach France until next year. And an
+alliance like this will hardly be found in France for a girl of
+uncertain fortune. Therefore I have betrothed you to Monsieur de Tonty,
+and you will be married this evening at vespers."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"You have stated Monsieur de Tonty's case, and you have stated yours,"
+said Barbe. "I will now state mine. I will not be married to any man at
+a day's notice."
+
+"May I ask what it is you demand, mademoiselle?" inquired the Abbé, with
+irony, "if you propose to re-arrange any marriage your relatives make
+for you."
+
+"I demand a week between the betrothal and the marriage."
+
+"A week, mademoiselle!" her uncle laughed. "We who set out must give
+winter a week's start of us for such a whim! You will be married
+to-night or you will return with me to France. I will now send Monsieur
+de Tonty to you to be received as your future husband."
+
+"I will scratch him!" exclaimed Barbe, with a flash of perverseness, at
+which her uncle's cassocked shoulders shook until he disappeared within
+doors.
+
+She left the earthwork and went to the entrance side of the fort. There
+she stood, whispering with a frown,--"Oh, if you please, monsieur, keep
+your distance! Do not come here as any future husband of mine!"
+
+She had, however, much time in which to prepare her mind before Tonty
+appeared.
+
+All eyes on the Rock followed him. He shone through the trees, a
+splendid figure in the gold and white uniform of France, laid aside for
+years but resumed on this great occasion.
+
+When he came up to Barbe he stopped and folded his arms, saying
+whimsically,--
+
+"Mademoiselle, I have not the experience to know how one should approach
+his betrothed. I never was married before."
+
+"It is my case, also, monsieur," replied Barbe.
+
+"How do you like Fort St. Louis?" proceeded Tonty.
+
+"I am enchanted with it."
+
+"You delight me when you say that. During the last four years I have not
+made an improvement about the land or in any way strengthened this
+position without thinking, Mademoiselle Cavelier may sometime approve of
+this. We are finding a new way of heating our houses with underground
+flues made of stone and mortar."
+
+"That must be agreeable, monsieur."
+
+"We often have hunting parties from the Rock. This country is full of
+game."
+
+"It is pleasant to amuse one's self, monsieur."
+
+Tonty had many a time seen the silent courtship of the Illinois. He
+thought now of those motionless figures sitting side by side under a
+shelter of rushes or bark from morning till night without exchanging a
+word.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I hope this marriage is agreeable to you?"
+
+"Monsieur de Tonty," exclaimed Barbe, "I have simply been flung at your
+head to suit the convenience of my relatives."
+
+"Was that distasteful to you?" he wistfully inquired.
+
+"I am not fit for a bride. No preparation has been made for me."
+
+"I thought of making some preparation myself," confessed Tonty. "I got a
+web of brocaded silk from France several years ago."
+
+"To be clothed like a princess by one's bridegroom," said Barbe,
+wringing her gown skirt and twisting folds of it in her fingers. "That
+might be submitted to. But I could not wear the web of brocade around me
+like a blanket."
+
+"There are fifty needlewomen on the Rock who can make it in a day,
+mademoiselle."
+
+"And in short, monsieur, to be betrothed in the morning and married the
+same day is what no girl will submit to!"
+
+Tonty, in the prime of his manhood and his might as a lover was too
+imposing a figure for her to face; she missed seeing his swarthy pallor
+as he answered,--
+
+"I understand from all this, mademoiselle, that you care nothing for me.
+I have felt betrothed to you ever since I declared myself to Monsieur de
+la Salle at Fort Frontenac. How your pretty dreaming of the Rock of St.
+Louis and your homesick cry for this place did pierce me! I said, 'She
+shall be my wife, and I will bring home everything that can be obtained
+for her. That small face shall be heart's treasure to me. Its eyes will
+watch for me over the Rock.' On our journey here, many a night I took my
+blanket and lay beside your tent, thanking the saints for the sweet
+privilege of bringing home my bride. Mademoiselle," said Tonty,
+trembling, "I will kill any other man who dares approach you. Yet,
+mademoiselle, I could not annoy you by the least grief! Oh, teach a
+frontiersman what to say to please a woman!"
+
+"Monsieur de Tonty," panted Barbe. "You please me too well, indeed! It
+was necessary to come to an understanding. You should not make me
+say,--for I am ashamed to tell,--how long I have adored you!"
+
+As Tonty's quick Italian blood mounted from extreme anguish to extreme
+rapture, he laughed with a sob.
+
+Fifty needlewomen on the Rock made in a day a gown of the web of
+brocaded silk. The fortress was full of preparation for evening
+festivity. Hunters went out and brought in game, and Indians carried up
+fish, new corn, and honey from wild bee trees. All the tables which the
+dwellings afforded were ranged in two rows at opposite sides of the
+place of arms, and decorated with festoons of ferns and cedar, and such
+late flowers as exploring children could find.
+
+Some urchins ascended the Rock with an offering of thick-lobed prickly
+cactus which grew plentifully in the sand. The Demoiselle Bellefontaine
+labored from place to place, helping her husband to make this the most
+celebrated fête ever attempted in Fort St. Louis.
+
+As twilight settled--and it slowly settled--on the summit, roast
+venison, buffalo steaks, and the odor of innumerable dishes scented the
+air. Many candles pinned to the branches of trees like vast candelabra,
+glittered through the dusk. Crows sat on the rocks below and gabbled of
+the corn they had that day stolen from lazy Indian women.
+
+There was no need of chapel or bell in a temple fortress. All the
+inhabitants of the Rock stood as witnesses. Colin brought Barbe from the
+dwelling with the greater part of the web of brocaded silk dragged in
+grandeur behind her. Tonty kissed her hand and led her before the
+priests. When the ceremony ended a salute was fired.
+
+The Illinois town could hear singing on the Rock and see that stronghold
+glittering as if it had been carried by torches. Music of violin and
+horn, laughter, dancing, and gay voices in repartee sounded on there
+through half the hours of the night.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [23] "The joyous French held balls, gay suppers, and wine parties on
+       the Rock."--Old History of Illinois.
+
+
+
+
+                                  V.
+
+                        THE UNDESPAIRING NORMAN.
+
+
+The morning star yet shone and the river valley was drenched with half
+frosty dew, and filled with silver mist when the Abbé Cavelier and his
+party descended to their canoes and set off up the river. They had made
+their farewells the night before, but Tonty and Greysolon du Lhut
+appeared, Tonty accompanying them down the descent. He came up with a
+bound before the boat was off, thundered at Bellefontaine's door, and
+pulled that sleepy officer into the open air, calling at his ear,--
+
+"What fellow is this in the Abbé's party who kept out of my sight until
+he carried his load but now to the canoe?"
+
+"You must mean Teissier, Monsieur de Tonty. He has lain ailing in the
+storehouse."
+
+"Look,--yonder he goes."
+
+Tonty made Bellefontaine lean over the eastern earthwork, but even the
+boat was blurred upon the river.
+
+"That was Jolycoeur," declared Tonty, "whom Monsieur de la Salle
+promised me he would never take into his service again. That fellow
+tried to poison Monsieur de la Salle at Fort Frontenac."
+
+"Monsieur de Tonty," remonstrated the subordinate, "I know him well. He
+was here a month. He told me he was enlisted at St. Domingo, while
+Monsieur de la Salle lay in a fever, to replace men who deserted. He is
+a pilot and his name is Teissier."
+
+"Whatever his real name may be we had him here on the Rock before you
+came, and he was called Jolycoeur."
+
+"At any rate," said Du Lhut, "his being of Abbé Cavelier's company
+argues that he hath done La Salle no late harm."
+
+Tonty thought about the matter while light grew in the sky, but
+dismissed it when the priest of Fort St. Louis summoned his great family
+to matins. On such pleasant mornings they were chanted in the open air.
+
+The sun rose, drawing filaments from the mass of vapor like a spinner,
+and every shred disappeared while the eye watched it. Preparations went
+forward for breakfast, while children's and birds' voices already
+chirped above and below the steep ascent.
+
+One urchin brought Tonty a paper, saying it was Monsieur Joutel's, the
+young man who slept in the storehouse and was that morning gone from the
+fort.
+
+"Did he tell you to give it to me?" inquired Tonty.
+
+"Monsieur," complained the lad, "he pinned it in the cap of my large
+brother and left order it was to be given to you after two days. But my
+large brother hath this morning pinned it in my cap, and it may work me
+harm. Besides, I desire to amuse myself by the river, and if I lost
+Monsieur Joutel's paper I should get whipped."
+
+"I commend you," laughed Tonty, as he took the packet. "You must have no
+secrets from your commandant."
+
+The child leaped, relieved, toward the gate, and this heavy
+communication shook between the iron and the natural hand. Tonty spread
+it open on his right gauntlet.
+
+He read a few moments with darkening countenance. Then the busy people
+on the Rock were startled by a cry of awful anguish. Tonty rushed to the
+centre of the esplanade, flinging the paper from him, and shouted, "Du
+Lhut--men of Fort St. Louis! Monsieur de la Salle has been murdered in
+that southern wilderness! We have had one of the assassins hiding here
+in our storehouse! Get out the boats!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Men and women paused in their various business, and children, like
+frightened sheep, gathered closely around their mothers. The clamorous
+cry which disaster wrings from excitable Latins burst out in every part
+of the fortress. Du Lhut grasped the paper and read it while he limped
+after Tonty.
+
+With up-spread arms the Italian raved across the open space, this
+far-reaching calamity widening like an eternally expanding circle around
+him. His rage at the assassins of La Salle--among whom he had himself
+placed a man whom he thought fit to be trusted--and his sorrow broke
+bounds in such sobs as men utter.
+
+"Oh, that I might brain them with this hand! Oh, wretched people on
+these plains! What hope remains to us? What will become of all these
+families, whose resource he was, whose sole consolation! It is despair
+for us! Thou wert one of the greatest men of this age,--so useful to
+France by thy great discoveries, so strong in thy virtues, so respected,
+so cherished by people even the most barbarous. That such a man should
+be massacred by wretches, and the earth did not engulf them or the
+lightning strike them dead!"[24]
+
+Tonty's blood boiled in his face.
+
+"Why do you all stand here like rocks instead of getting out the boats?
+Get out the boats! They stripped my master; they left his naked body to
+wolves and crows on Trinity River. Get ready the canoes. I will hunt
+those assassins, down to the last man, through every forest on this
+continent!"
+
+"You did not finish this relation,"[25] shouted Du Lhut at his ear. "Can
+you get revenge on dead men? The men who actually put their hands in the
+blood of La Salle are all dead. Those who killed not each other the
+Indians killed."
+
+Tonty turned with a furious push at Du Lhut which sent him staggering
+backward.
+
+"Is Jolycoeur dead? I will run down this forgiving priest of a brother
+of Monsieur de la Salle's, and the assassin he harbored here under his
+protection he shall give up to justice!"
+
+"Thou mad-blooded loyal-hearted Italian!" exclaimed Du Lhut, dragging
+him out of the throng and holding him against a tree, "dost thou think
+nobody can feel this wrong except thee? I would go with thee anywhere if
+it could be revenged. But hearken to me, Henri de Tonty; if you go after
+the Abbé it will appear that you wish to strip him of the goods he bore
+away."
+
+"He brought an order from Monsieur de la Salle," retorted Tonty. "On
+that order I would give him the last skin in the storehouse. What I will
+strip him of is the wretch he carries in his forgiving bosom!"
+
+"And you will put a scandal upon this young girl your bride, who has
+this sorrow also to bear. Are you determined to denounce her uncle and
+her brother before this fortress as unworthy to be the kinsmen of La
+Salle? She has now no consolation left except in you. Will you burn the
+wound of her sorrow with the brand of shame?"
+
+Tonty leaned against the tree, pallor succeeding the pulsing of blood in
+his face. He looked at Du Lhut with piteous black eyes, like a stag
+brought down in full career.
+
+"The Abbé Cavelier," Bellefontaine was whispering to one of the
+immigrants, "carried from this fortress above four thousand livres worth
+of furs, besides other goods!"
+
+"And left mademoiselle married without fortune," muttered back the
+other. "He did well for himself by concealing the death of Sieur de la
+Salle."
+
+Men and women looked mournfully at each other as Tonty walked across the
+fort and shut himself in his house. They wondered at hearing no crying
+within it such as a woman might utter upon the first shock of her grief.
+With La Salle's own instinct Barbe locked herself within her room. It
+was not known to the people of Fort St. Louis, it was not known even to
+Tonty, how she lay on the floor with her teeth set and faced this fact.
+
+Tonty sat in his door overlooking the cliff all day.
+
+Clouds sailed over the Rock. The lingering robins quarrelled with crows.
+That glittering pinnacled cliff across the ravine shone like white
+castle turrets. Smoke went up from the lodges on the plains as it had
+done during the six months La Salle's bones were bleaching on Trinity
+River; but now a whisper like the whisper of wind in September
+corn-leaves was rushing from lodge to lodge. Tonty heard tribe after
+tribe take up the lament for the dead.
+
+Not only was it a lament for La Salle; but it was also for their own
+homes. He and Tonty had brought them back from exile, had banded them
+for strength and helped them ward off the Iroquois. His unstinted
+success meant their greatest prosperity. The undespairing Norman's death
+foreshadowed theirs, with all that silence and desolation which must
+fall on the Rock of St. Louis before another civilization possessed it.
+
+Night came, and the leaves sifted down in its light breeze as if only
+half inclined to their descent. The children had been quieted all day.
+To them the revelry of the night before seemed a far remote occasion, so
+instantly are joy and trouble set asunder.
+
+The rich valley of the Illinois grew dimmer and dimmer under the
+starlight. Tonty could no longer see the river's brown surface, but he
+could distinguish the little trail of foam down its centre churned by
+rapids above. Twisted pines, which had tangled their roots in
+everlasting rock, hung below him, children of the air. Some man of the
+garrison approached the windlass and let down the bucket with creak and
+rattle. He waited with the ear of custom for its clanking cry as it
+plunged, its gurgle and struggle in the water, and the many splashes
+with which it ascended.
+
+His face showed as a pale spot in the dusk when he rose from the
+doorstep and came into the room to light a candle. Barbe must be brought
+out from her silent ordeal and comforted and fed.
+
+Tonty set his lighted candle on a table and considered how he should
+approach her door. The furniture of the room had been hastily carried in
+that morning from its uses in the fête. The apartment was a rude
+frontier drawing-room, having furs, deer antlers, and shining canoe
+paddles for its ornaments.
+
+While Tonty hesitated, the door on the fortress side opened, and La
+Salle stepped into the room.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Tonty's voice died in his throat. The joy and terror of this sight held
+him without power to move.
+
+It was La Salle; a mere shred of his former person, girt like some
+skeleton apostle with a buffalo hide which left his arm bones naked as
+well as his journey roughened feet. Beard had started through his pallid
+skin, and this and his wild hair the wilderness had dressed with dead
+leaves. A piece of buffalo leather banded his forehead like a coarse
+crown, yet blood had escaped its pressure, for a dried track showed
+darkly down the side of his neck. Tonty gave no thought to the manitou
+of a waterfall from whose shrine La Salle had probably stripped that
+Indian offering of a buffalo robe. It did not seem to him incredible
+that Robert Cavelier should survive what other men called a death wound,
+and naked, bleeding, and starving, should make his way for six months
+through jungles of forest, to his friend.
+
+Hoarse and strong from the depths of his breast Tonty brought out the
+cry,--
+
+"O my master, my master!"
+
+"Tonty," spoke La Salle, standing still, with the rapture of achievement
+in his eyes, "I have found the lost river!"
+
+He moved across the room and went out of the cliff door. His gaunt limbs
+and shaggy robe were seen one instant against the palisades, as if his
+eye were passing that starlit valley in review, the picture in miniature
+of the great west. He was gone while Tonty looked at him.
+
+The whisper of water at the base of the rock, and of the sea's sweet
+song in pines, took the place of the voice which had spoken.
+
+A lad began to carol within the fortress, but hushed himself with sudden
+remembrance. That brooding body of darkness, which so overlies us all
+that its daily removal by sunlight is a continued miracle, pressed
+around this silent room resisted only by one feeble candle. And Tonty
+stood motionless in the room, blanched and exalted by what he had seen.
+
+Barbe's opening her chamber door startled him and set in motion the
+arrested machinery of life.
+
+"What has been here, monsieur?" she asked under her breath.
+
+Tonty, without replying, moved to receive her, crushing under his foot a
+beech-nut which one of the children of the fortress had dropped upon the
+floor. Barbe's arms girded his great chest.
+
+"Oh, monsieur," she said with a sob, "I thought I heard a voice in this
+room, and I know I would myself break through death to come back to
+you!"
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [24] Translated from Tonty's lament over La Salle in "Dernieres
+       Decouvertes dans L'Amerique Septentrional."
+
+  [25] Joutel's Journal gives a long and exact account of La Salle's
+       assassination and the fate of all who were concerned in it.
+       The murder, by the conspirators, of his nephew Moranget, his
+       servant Saget, and his Indian hunter Nika--which preceded and
+       led to his death--is not mentioned in this romance.
+
+       To this day it is not certainly known what became of La Salle's
+       body. Father Anastase Douay, the Récollect priest who
+       witnessed his death, told Joutel at the time that the
+       conspirators stripped it and threw it in the bushes. But
+       afterward he declared La Salle lived an hour, and he himself
+       confessed the dying man, buried him when dead, and planted a
+       cross on his grave. So excellent a historian as Garneau gives
+       credit to this story.
+
+       In reality the Abbé Cavelier and his party treated Tonty with
+       greater cruelty than the romancer describes. They lived over
+       winter on his hospitality, departed loaded with his favors,
+       and told him not a word of the tragedy.
+
+       Joutel's account of it, much condensed from the old English
+       translation, reads thus:--
+
+          "The conspirators hearing the shot (fired by La Salle
+          to attract their attention) concluded it was Monsieur
+          de la Sale who was come to seek them. They made ready
+          their arms and Duhaut passed the river with
+          Larcheveque. The first of them spying Monsieur de la
+          Sale at a Distance, as he was coming towards them,
+          advanced and hid himself among the high weeds, to wait
+          his passing by, so that Monsieur de la Sale suspected
+          nothing, and having not so much as charged his Piece
+          again, saw the aforesaid Larcheveque at a good distance
+          from him, and immediately asked for his nephew
+          Moranget, to which Larcheveque answered, That he was
+          along the river. At the same time the Traitor Duhaut
+          fired his Piece and shot Monsieur de la Sale thro' the
+          head, so that he dropped down dead on the Spot, without
+          speaking one word.
+
+          "Father Anastase, who was then by his side, stood stock
+          still in a Fright, expecting the same fate,... but the
+          murderer Duhaut put him out of that Dread, bidding him
+          not to fear, for no hurt was intended him; that it was
+          Dispair that had prevailed with them to do what he
+          saw....
+
+          "The shot which had killed Monsieur de la Sale was a
+          signal ... for the assassins to draw near. They all
+          repaired to the place where the wretched corpse lay,
+          which they barbarously stripped to the shirt, and vented
+          their malice in opprobrious language. The surgeon Liotot
+          said several times in scorn and derision, There thou
+          liest, Great Bassa, there thou liest. In conclusion they
+          dragged it naked among the bushes and left it exposed to
+          the ravenous wild Beasts.
+
+          "When they came to our camp ... Monsieur Cavelier the
+          priest could not forbear telling them that if they would
+          do the same by him he would forgive them his" (La
+          Salle's) "murder.... They answered they had Nothing to
+          say to him.
+
+          ... "We were all obliged to stifle our Resentment that
+          it might not appear, for our Lives depended upon it....
+          We dissembled so well that they were not suspicious of
+          us, and that Temptation we were under of making them
+          away in revenge for those they had murdered, would have
+          easily prevailed and been put in execution, had not
+          Monsieur
+
+          Cavelier, the Priest, always positively opposed it,
+          alleging that we ought to leave vengeance to God."
+
+       The Récollet priest, who had seen La Salle's death, answered
+       no questions at Fort St. Louis. Teissier, one of the
+       conspirators, had obtained the Abbé's pardon. The others
+       could truly say La Salle was well when they last saw him.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI.
+
+                                TO-DAY.
+
+
+It is recorded that the Abbé Cavelier and his party arrived safely in
+France, and that he then concealed the death of La Salle for awhile that
+he might get possession of property which would have been seized by La
+Salle's creditors. He died "rich and very old" says the historian,[26]
+though he was unsuccessful in a petition which he made with his nephew
+to the king, to have all the explorer's seigniorial propriety in America
+put in his possession. Like Father Hennepin--who returned to France and
+wrote his entertaining book to prove himself a greater man than La
+Salle--the Abbé Cavelier was skilful in turning loss to profit.
+
+It is also recorded that Henri de Tonty, at his own expense, made a long
+search with men, canoes, and provisions, for La Salle's Texan
+colony--left by the king to perish at the hands of Indians; that he was
+deserted by every follower except his Indian and one Frenchman, and
+nearly died in swamps and canebrakes before he again reached the fort on
+the Illinois.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-day you may climb the Rock of St. Louis,--called now Starved Rock
+from the last stand which the Illinois made as a tribe on that fortress,
+a hundred years ago, when the Iroquois surrounded and starved them,--and
+you may look over the valley from which Tonty heard the death lament
+arise.
+
+A later civilization has cleared it of Indian lodges and set it with
+villages and homesteads. A low ridge of the old earthwork yet remains on
+the east verge. Behind the Rock, slopes of milk-white sand still stretch
+toward a shallow ravine. Beyond that stands a farmhouse full of the
+relics of French days. The iron-handed commandant of the Rock has left
+some hint of his strong spirit thereabouts, for even the farmer's boy
+will speak his name with the respect boys have for heroic men.
+
+Crosses, beads, old iron implements, and countless remains of La Salle's
+time, turn up everywhere in the valley soil.
+
+Ferns spring, lush and vivid, from the lichened lips of that great
+sandstone body. The stunted cedars lean over its edge still singing the
+music of the sea. Sunshine and shade and nearness to the sky are yet
+there. You see depressions in the soil like grass-healed wounds, made by
+the tearing out of huge trees; but local tradition tells you these are
+the remains of pits dug down to the rock by Frenchmen searching for
+Tonty's money. At the same time, local tradition is positive that Tonty
+came back, poor, to the Rock to die, in 1718.
+
+Death had stripped him of every tie. He had helped to build that city
+near the Mississippi's mouth which was La Salle's object, and had also
+helped found Mobile. The great west owes more to him than to any other
+man who labored to open it to the world. Yet historians say the date of
+his death is unknown, and tradition around the Rock says he crept up the
+stony path an old and broken man, helped by his Indian and a priest,
+died gazing from its summit, and was buried at its west side. The
+tribes, while they held the land, continued to cover his grave with wild
+roses. But men may tread over him now, for he lies lost in the earth as
+La Salle was lost in the wilderness of the south.
+
+No justice ever was done to this man who gave to his friends with both
+hand of flesh and hand of iron, caring nothing for recompense; and whom
+historians, priests, tradition, savages, and his own deeds unite in
+praising. But as long as the friendship of man for man is beautiful, as
+long as the multitude with one impulse lift above themselves those men
+who best express the race, Henri de Tonty's memory must stand like the
+Rock of St. Louis.[27]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [26] Parkman.
+
+  [27] "In 1690 the proprietorship of Fort St. Louis was granted to
+       Tonty jointly with La Forest.... In 1702 the governor of
+       Canada, claiming that the charter of the fort had been
+       violated, decided to discontinue it. Although thus officially
+       abandoned it seems to have been occupied as a trading post
+       until 1718. Deprived of his command and property, Tonty
+       engaged with Le Moyne d'Iberville in various successful
+       expeditions."--John Moses' History of Illinois.
+
+
+                            THE END.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note
+
+The following errors are noted. The page numbers in this table refer to
+those of the original. The French 'Récollet' is spelled twice as
+'Récollect'. The instance appearing in a footnote is left as is, but
+that in the text itself was changed to match all other occurrences.
+
+   56 | He is no stupid                           | _sic._
+      |                                           |
+   73 | No more than half your party, monsieur[.] | Added period.
+      |                                           |
+  190 | flank of rock wall                        | _sic._
+      |                                           |
+  197 | The Récolle[c]t Father did not answer     | Removed 'c' for
+      |                                           | consistency.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Story of Tonty, by Mary Hartwell Catherwood
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41273 ***