It was perhaps as well that Tonty was compelled to turn back, for he could have done little good even if he had been able to press on and reach the Bay of St. Louis. When he was at the Cenis or Nabedache village pleading for guides, the Spaniards had already marched from Mexico to attack the French fort and its little garrison, and were encamped on the hill where La Salle had left Barbier in charge of the survivors. But others had preceded them, and they found the buildings in ruins. Scattered here and there were boxes and bits of supplies; doors were unhinged, barrels broken open, and in the near-by meadow were dead bodies of Frenchmen.

On May 1, into the camp of the Spaniards walked two men. Painted and savage and dressed in buffalo hides, these two strangers were L’Archevêque and Grollet, the servant of Duhaut, and Ruter’s half-savage companion. They had come to give themselves up to the Spaniards rather than endure longer their wretched existence among the Indians.

Three months before, so they told the Spanish officer, the meager garrison under Barbier, just recovering from a siege of smallpox, was set upon by howling Karankawan Indians who massacred the inhabitants and pillaged the fort. Gabriel Barbier and Father Membré both were killed outright. Barbier’s wife with a three-months-old babe at her breast was saved for a time by the Indian women; but the warriors, returning and finding her still alive, murdered her also, and, seizing the baby by the feet, beat its brains out against a tree.

Thus the colony had paid for the offense of Moranget and his men when they had first landed on the red men’s shores and robbed the native camp of canoes and blankets. After the massacre, L’Archevêque and Grollet claimed that they had come to the fort and buried fourteen of the dead.

Many years later there came to the ears of Tonty a remarkable tale of some who had escaped the killing at the fort on the Bay. Among those who had remained with Barbier was the widow Talon, whose husband had been lost on one of La Salle’s first expeditions to hunt the river. One of her daughters had died of sickness at the fort. Her oldest boy Pierre had been taken by La Salle to the village of the Cenis to learn their language. Though she did not know it on the day of the massacre, Pierre had for a year and a half been running wild like the Indians themselves, in the Cenis country. A chief of the Cenis had taken him, together with young Meusnier, under his own protection.

But the widow still kept four of the children with her in the fort. Then came that awful day when the Indians fell upon them. Before the eyes of her children the widow was killed. But the Indian women took compassion upon the four little ones, carried them off on their backs, and adopted them into their own families. The oldest was a young girl named Mary Magdalene Talon, and her younger brothers were Jean Baptiste, Robert, and Lucien—one of whom, now a boy of four, had been born on the way over from France. With these four the squaws had rescued a young boy called Eustache Bréman.

In the lodges of Indians the five children were brought up by their foster mothers with as much care as the dusky children of the tribe. For many years the girl and her young brothers lived as the Indians lived. They ate meat as their red brothers did—raw, sun-baked, or half-cooked. The boys learned to run and to ride and to draw the bow; and like the Indians themselves they learned to run to the nearest stream each morning at break of day and plunge naked into the water, whatever the season might be.

One day the Karankawas took sharp thorns and pricked holes through the skin of the arms and faces and other parts of the bodies of these French children. Then, having burned in the fire a walnut branch, they crushed the charcoal into powder, mixed it with a little water, and forced it into the holes in their fair skin. It was very painful at first, but the pain soon passed away and then each adopted child appeared tattooed with marks that no washing could take out.

Jean Baptiste and young Bréman were soon old enough to be off with the braves. Perhaps the only habit of life which they could not learn was the eating of human flesh. Once the warriors fell upon a tribe of the Tonkawans and killed many, and for three days Jean Baptiste went without food because his foster people gave him nothing to eat save the flesh of the men they had slain.

Meanwhile among the Cenis or Nabedaches, Hiens and his party had been having strange experiences—fighting in the savage wars and living in the round thatched huts of the Indians. But it was not in the nature of things for this band of survivors to live peaceably among themselves. Ruter, the half-savage deserter who had talked one night with Joutel by the Cenis lodge-fire, quarreled with Hiens (so came the tale to Tonty) and kille............