Couture had added the fatal sequel to the story of the Abbé and Joutel. Tonty heard it with mingled despair and rage. He thought of La Salle lying dead and unburied among the weeds beside a river hundreds of leagues in the wilderness; and he thought of the five men who had come to his fort and withheld the truth from him, the trusted lieutenant of their master. So La Salle was in good health when he parted from them on the other side of the Cenis villages! He remembered now the strange silence of Father Douay. The friar could not say that La Salle was well when he left him.

But the anger of Tonty rose most strongly against that priestly brother—the Abbé who had prevented Joutel from taking vengeance upon the murderers, who had accepted Tonty’s hospitality all through the winter while deceiving him, and who had run off with his secret to France after begging supplies under a letter from his dead brother.

But what of the little garrison on the shore of the Gulf, the forlorn fragment of the colony under Gabriel Barbier at the other Fort St. Louis? Tonty thought of Father Membré and of the hardships they had gone through together. Was it too late to save them? A year had gone by since the Abbé and his party had reached the fort on the Illinois. It was almost two years since they had left Barbier; yet the colony might still be alive. The master was gone and there was no one left to save them but himself.

Perhaps in making ready to lead a rescue party to the fort on the Gulf, Tonty forgot some of his anger atthe Abbé. Moreover, the Indian tribes between the Illinois and the sea had given the Abbé assurances that they would rally to an attack upon the Spaniards of the Southwest. Possibly he could do more than save the colony: it might be that he could fulfill the long cherished hope of La Salle by gathering a force of French and Indians and invading the territory of the hated Spaniards.

Twice Tonty had gone to the Gulf—once with La Salle and once in search of him. Now all that remained for him to do was to rescue the survivors whom La Salle’s death had left almost without hope. He sent Couture back on the trail by which the Abbé and his party had come, to get what information he could; but Couture’s canoe was wrecked a hundred leagues from the fort and he returned without news.

Then Tonty bought an Indian dugout and taking with him four or five Frenchmen, a Shawnee, and two Indian slaves, was on his way early in December. On the 17th, a village of Illinois Indians at the mouth of the river saw him go by; and a month later, near the mouth of the Arkansas, the Kappa tribe welcomed him with great joy and danced the calumet before him. He could not stop long at the Arkansas towns, but pushed on down the river to the country of the Taensas and the Natchez.

With a band of Taensas he left the Mississippi and struck off toward the west. After traveling some days across country they came upon the village of the Nachitoches, where they distributed presents and concluded peace with the Indians. Taking guides at this point they went up the Red River till they reached the village of the Cadadoquis, which lay upon the route by which the Abbé and Joutel and their companions had struggled out of the wilderness. Here the Indians told Tonty that Hiens and his party were farther on at a village known as Nabedache. These Nabedaches were the same Indians whom Joutel and the Abbé called the Cenis. At last Tonty was nearing the object of his expedition; a few more days and he would join the fragment of the party of La Salle and push on to the Gulf.

But what was this murmuring? The Frenchmen flatly refused to go farther; only one of them would stay with their leader. Tonty would push on nevertheless. With his one white man, the Shawnee, the two slaves, and five Cadadoquis as guides, he took up his march again early in April. The Frenchman strayed from the party and it was two long days before he found them again. Meanwhile, in crossing a river he had lost most of their powder&mdas............