"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?"
"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.
[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."
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.