The Story of Tonty Part 20

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 a.s.sa.s.sins hiding here in our storehouse! Get out the boats!"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 s.p.a.ce, this far-reaching calamity widening like an eternally expanding circle around him. His rage at the a.s.sa.s.sins 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 ma.s.sacred 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 a.s.sa.s.sins, 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 n.o.body 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 Abbe 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 Abbe 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 windla.s.s 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 fete. The apartment was a rude frontier drawing-room, having furs, deer antlers, and s.h.i.+ning canoe paddles for its ornaments.

While Tonty hesitated, the door on the fortress side opened, and La Salle stepped into the room.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 coa.r.s.e 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.

Hoa.r.s.e 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 s.h.a.ggy robe were seen one instant against the palisades, as if his eye were pa.s.sing 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, crus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 Recollect 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 Abbe 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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....