pitching his camp on the natural stronghold, and setting up palisades. It could be ascended at one corner only, and might be held by the smallest garrison. But that would rouse distrust in Indian neighbors whom the French could never spare. He therefore built his lodge like any other wigwam in the midst of the town. "You stopped at the Rock again, as you passed it, Monsieur de Tonty ?" inquired Boisrondet.

"Yes," replied Tonty. A line of anxiety stood upright between his black eyebrows. His face was flushed with heat, and his cap and clustering hair were pushed back from his forehead. The ends of his mustache swept down his face. The frontier dress adorned his large presence, for Tonty unconsciously carried with him always the air of courts and battlefields.

He struck dust off the stiff right gauntlet

which covered his metal hand.

"Never mind, Boisrondet. We will begin our fortification the moment Monsieur de La Salle arrives. The severest discipline in any campaign is waiting for reinforcements. On that rock you can see the country as from a cloud, except the prairie south and eastward beyond the ravine and the woods. If the fathers were of my mind they would be making their retreat on the Rock."

"And what spot have they selected for their retreat?"

66

A place about a league from here, not distant from the sulphur spring. L'Espérance helped them build their lodge, and we stocked it well for them. They themselves made a cross of two unhewn limbs, and planted it beside their door."

"I do congratulate them," laughed Boisrondet, "that they are able to make a religious retreat from these tiresome heathen. There were never two priests more disgusted with missionary work than Father Membré and Father Ribourde."

The peasant L'Espérance, stooping in gait and grizzled around the temples, flung some feathered game past Tonty's back at the listening French lad.

"Thou art young, thou little Renault," he called, “and I am old and tired. Dress these birds for the commandant's supper."

66

How many times have I told thee, L'Espérance," exclaimed Tonty, turning on him, "not to be constantly shirking upon the little Renault ?"

"But I will dress them," cried the little Renault, snatching up the task. "It is nothing for me to do, Monsieur de Tonty."

"I am tired," repeated L'Espérance in a mutter. "The lad is ever as full of spring as a grasshopper, yet must I bear all the wood, and dress all the game, and be the squaw of

the camp, and take revilings if he lifts a finger to be of use."

"Growler," laughed the little Renault, striking at the old man with the birds, "go into the lodge and lie down to sleep." And L'Espérance trotted in willingly, while around the lodge side, with the hunting spoil, trailed that youthful treble which had so often waked Tonty and Boisrondet early in dewy mornings.

The two men looked at each other with silent intelligence, and forbore to interfere. Neither ever spoke to the other about the little Renault as a girl, though Boisrondet had been present when her father put her in Tonty's charge at Fort Crèvecœur. The father was a sickly and despondent Parisian of the lesser nobles who had wedded and survived a peasant censitaire's stout daughter, and roved from trading-post to trading-post, putting his orphan into boy's attire that he might keep her with him through all experiences. His selfish life ending at Fort Crèvecœur, he desired to send his little Renault home to Paris, and Tonty, in consternation, took charge of her jointly with the priests.

To Tonty she was never a girl. She was a free and vivid spirit-pinkly clothed in flesh, perhaps, and certainly looking through happy black eyes, but having above everything else a tiptoe facility in dancing over dangerous spots.

Crowded among men at Crèvecœur she never seemed to hear any brutal jest. The chastening presence of priests made safer such a place for a young girl; yet there was in her a boyish quality which deceived all but her father's confidants. She had been born to the buckskin. She had never worn women's drapery ; her round childish limbs spurned any thought of it. The beautiful fire of virgin youth seemed to flash from her person. In an age when women were pretty toys or laden beasts she lived the life of a bird in the wilderness. The license of a savage camp in no way touched her. She had never suffered deeply, for the early teens are kind to natural sorrow; and all visible things around her she mingled in her mind with invisible saints.

Tonty lay down on the grass, but Boisrondet still stood in the large door.

"It fills me with envy to see you so tired, Monsieur," said the younger man.

"It was necessary that one of us should stay and guard our lodge and the little Renault," replied his commandant. "But this lying like lazy, voiceless dogs at a lodge door doth unman us. Nothing has happened since our setting forth at daybreak?"

"Nothing, except that the cry of insects in the grass never seemed so loud before."

Tonty smiled, finding in himself full response to this impatient restlessness. But even men

who were waiting in the midst of negative dangers might take some delight in that mellow picture of savage life.

The river was cut by a single canoe darting from the farther bank across to the town with impetuous rush like a water-fly. Boisrondet noted it, and thought idly that some hunter must be returning empty-handed and sullen. The little Renault could be heard caroling at the other end of the lodge while she plucked birds. Their lodge was divided into three apartments by stretched blankets, and hers was the central shrine. Tonty and Boisrondet occupied one end, and the other held L'Espérance, a forge, and some tools saved from the pillage of Crèvecoeur. The servant readily yielded his fire to the necessity of cooking, but it vexed him daily to have a mere boy-the little Renault, in fact-set apart as if more reverend than a priest. The priests, look you, had not been above sleeping and teaching in the lodges of the very Illinois.

Tonty lay with his head in the grass, letting the sun dazzle his half-shut eyes, while he piled upvisions of this Illinois country like those transparent clouds pinnacled in the zenith. His two years in the wilderness with La Salle had been a constantly rising tide of misfortune. But tides are obliged to ebb, and this silence must be the turn. La Salle had started to Fort Frontenac in March. He was surely retracing the five hundred leagues with supplies. La Salle could outmarch any man of New France.

They would soon fortify the Rock and make it a feudal castle to these timid savages. Neighboring tribes would gather close and help to form a strong principality. It would be easy from this vantage-point to penetrate that unexplored river called the Mississippi.

But a yell rent this structure of thought like a tongue of lightning, and Tonty bounded to his feet. Calls and cries streamed in every direction, as if the whole Indian town had become a shower of meteoric voices. The women started from their cornfields, wailing in alarm, and naked children sprawled and uttered the echo of woe. Cherry stones and the stakes won thereby were forgotten. The hunter who had crossed the river was surrounded with lamentation.

Tonty found his followers at his side almost as soon as the yell broke out. They had lived so long on the edge of peril that union was their first instinct. L'Espérance was wide awake. Tonty put the little Renault between Boisrondet and himself, and as the savage mob surrounded them he unconsciously held her with his sound arm. Little Renault's curls were full of bird down, but her black eyes were full of courage. "What is the matter?" demanded Tonty in imperfect Illinois.

VOL. XLII.- 72.

"The Iroquois are coming! The Iroquois are marching here to eat us up."

"The Iroquois," screamed a wrinkled old warrior, "are your allies. They are at peace with all the French. They are your friends. But you are no friends of ours. Children, these Frenchmen have come here to betray us. They have brought the Iroquois upon us."

Out came the knives, Tonty with iron-handed arm pushing them back-persuading, shouting. The Indians drowned his voice with yells. The very squaws ran with firebrands. Some of the furious multitude fell upon the French lodge, and its mats flew in every direction. From the midst of falling poles ran sinewy redbodied fellows dragging the tools and heavy forge which Tonty and his men had brought with such pains through the wilderness. The splash of the clinking mass in the river testified to their final use.

The lives of the Frenchmen standing back to back were scarcely a breath long. Tonty's stiff gauntlet kept the knives back, and he made his voice heard through the howling.

"If you kill us you kill yourselves. I tell you we are your friends. If you kill us your French father will not leave a man of you alive. We brought no invaders to your country. We know nothing about the Iroquois. But since they have come, I tell you we will go with you to fight them.”

II.

"FULL of intelligence and courage," as a priest has described Tonty in this strait, his . imperfect Illinois made the Indians slow to understand him. But as they understood, their tense threats relaxed; and with continued lamentation they turned to break up the camp.

The canoes were pushed out and filled with women, children, and provisions. Nearly all the young braves were away in a war-party in the northwest. The three or four hundred remaining were the oldest or youngest warriors. The Illinois Indian at his best estate was no model of courage. About sixty men accompanied the retreating town to a flat, wooded island down the river, where temporary lodges could be set up and defended.

The remainder at once began to prepare for battle. They brought wood and built great fires along the shore. Weapons were made ready, bodies greased and painted, and a kind of passover meal eaten.

The sun went down, and mists brooded on the river, but there was no silence all that night. The Illinois sang war-songs and danced wardances under the slow and majestic march of the stars. Their fires shone on the water, and their dark, leaping bodies threw shadows across the deserted town.

Tonty and Boisrondet sat apart, also sleepless, taking counsel together. L'Espérance had been missing since the tumult of embarking. He, also, had taken a canoe and slipped away. Both masters were severe on him until they found next forenoon that he only went to bring the priests back, lest some of his faith should die without absolution.

Boisrondet had brought some of the scattered mats for the little Renault, and she hid in them as in a nest from the growing chill of night, sleeping like some sylvan creature reliant on the power that sheltered it.

Scouts sent out in darkness came back at early morning with news. They had seen the army of Iroquois creeping under cover of woods, armed with guns and pistols, and carrying rawhide bucklers. They had seen, they said, scowling aside at the Frenchmen,- La Salle himself leading the invaders. And at that the whole camp again rushed to take Tonty and his followers by the throat.

"If all the Iroquois had stolen French clothes you would believe there were many Monsieur de La Salles coming to fight you," declared Tonty. "He does not turn upon his brothers as you do. I tell you we will go with you to fight the Iroquois.'

The frenzied tribe at once threw themselves into their canoes with these allies and crossed the river.

It seemed to both guardians that nothing could be done with the little Renault except to carry her into the action. Boisrondet gave a . bitter thought to the selfishness of her father, and Tonty regretted not sending her with the priests. But life in her rose to the occasion. Her moccasins moved in swift unison with Tonty's and Boisrondet's up the wooded hill and across a tangled ridge. Her buckskin blouse was scratched by briers, but she herself went laughing and rose-lipped like Diana, carrying a weapon and eager for game. It seemed to Boisrondet the cruelest thing ever done, this shouldering a child into battle with wolfish men.

Few of the Illinois Indians had guns. They were armed with bows and arrows. They swarmed out on the prairie to attack the Iroquois, who came from covert with whoops and prancings, and roar of firearms and low song of flying shaft mixed with savage battle-cries. At the instant of encounter Tonty saw how it must go with his allies. They were no match for the Iroquois with all forces mustered, and this fragment of them began to give back even in the fury of onset.

He offered to carry a wampum belt to the Iroquois and to try to stop the fight, and the leaders gladly gave him the flag of truce and sent a young brave with him.

Tonty started out across the open field towards the smoking guns of the Iroquois with this Indian at his right side. He felt a touch on his left elbow, and turned his eyes to find little Renault and Boisrondet keeping abreast of him. He stopped and commanded:

"Go back-both of you. Boisrondet, your orders were to take care of the lad."

"Monsieur," said Boisrondet, to the spat of Iroquois bullets on the prairie sod all around them, "the little Renault would not be kept back."

"Monsieur de Tonty, we go with you," she

said.

"You will go back," repeated Tonty, meeting the living light of her eyes with military decision. "Boisrondet, pick up the lad and carry him back. Your duty as a soldier and a gentleman is to keep him out of this danger."

Boisrondet seized and lifted the little Renault in his arms. She struggled with all an untamed creature's physical repugnance to handling, and with all a woman's despair at being dragged from the object to which she clings. In her frenzy she struck Boisrondet upon his bulging forehead with no unmuscular fist.

"Go back with them," said Tonty to the willing young Indian. And running on alone, he did not see the Iroquois arrow which stooped, jarred, and stood upright in the girl's shoulder.

The young Indian alone saw it, and pulled it out as he hurried at the heels of Boisrondet, who felt his load relaxing while he panted and trampled through resin weed and yellow flowers back to the Illinois lines.

Tonty had left his gun when he took up the belt of peace. He held the wampum strip as high as his arm could reach, and rushed directly upon the muzzles pointed at him. His dark skin and frontiersman's dress scarcely distinguished him from the savage mob which closed around him, and before he could speak one of the Iroquois warriors stabbed him in the side. The knife struck a rib and made only a deep gash instead of killing him. He half fell, but caught himself, and opened lips from which blood, not words, gushed first. He held up and shook the wampum belt, and an Iroquois chief shouted that he must be a Frenchman, since his ears were not pierced. This brought some about him who opened his shirt and tried to stop the wound. But the great howling multitude-which an Indian army must become before it can act as an engine of war-was for finishing him.

Tonty spat the blood from his mouth, and declared to them that the Illinois were under the protection of the French king and governor. He demanded that they should be let alone.

One of the braves snatched Tonty's cap and waved it high on a gun. At that the half-sus

pended firing broke out more fiercely than ever. He urged and demanded with all his strength. A cry rose in front that the Illinois were advancing, and that instant Tonty felt a hand grasp and twist his scalp-lock. He looked over his shoulder at the fierce face of a Seneca chief; but an Onondaga knocked the scalping-knife from the Seneca's hand.

Tonty was spun in a whirlwind of clamor and threats, putting his own shout against the noise of savage throats, and proclaiming that the Illinois had countless Frenchmen to fight with or to avenge them.

No one ever worked with imperious courage more successfully on the temper of Indians. The quarrel sank to his demands. Old men ran to stop the young braves from firing.

The little Renault had been docile, and walked willingly up the ridge with Boisrondet. She told him she was ashamed of her behavior and of keeping him out of the action. But she said nothing about her wound to a man who would insist upon examining it. The arrow stab in her buckskin blouse gave no vent to the blood, for that had taken to moving in a slow trickle down her back. Boisrondet, trembling betwixt chagrin and rapture, said little, but kept his gaze upon her and around her like an atmosphere of protection.

She sat down facing the fire, and Boisrondet stood by her, on his part seeing neither smoke nor moving figures, neither dew on the turf nor distant blue strips of forest.

Two Récollet capotes moved down among the waiting Illinois, for L'Espérance had not tarried about bringing the priests. They hurried to meet Tonty. He came staggering back across the open prairie holding up an Iroquois wampum belt as the sign of his success.

The little Renault let her restrained breath escape in a sob.

"He is safe! But he is pitching forward! He is wounded, monsieur! They have hurt him!"

She herself reeled as Tonty did before the priests received him in their arms, and a deadly sickness, the like of which the little Renault had never felt before, brought her head down among the knotty herbage of the hill.

III.

THE clear September morning seemed to stream around Tonty's eyes in long pennons of flame as Father Ribourde and Father Membré helped him to reach his allies. He was still under a nightmare, and struggled for speech to warn his weak people of the treacherous enemy who were checked only by his threats. He held up the wampum belt and told the Illinois that it was an Iroquois peace, but it

would be wisdom on their part to retreat from an Iroquois peace. If they and their families withdrew down the river, leaving some of their wise men in sight of signals, he would treat with the invaders and try to induce them to leave the country.

The small army which had escaped defeat could indeed see nothing better to do. They recrossed the river to their town, and set the lodges on fire, thankful for any chance of saving their national life.

An Indian might have little sentiment about his lodge, which was only a shelter, and never contained very much besides the row of fires. If destroyed, it could be rebuilt anywhere with new poles and mats. But his dead, on platform or in earth, were sacred relics to him. In the fleet of canoes retreating down the Illinois River many a shaven, dusky head was turned, many a mournful eye rested on that spot which could be no longer kept, and might soon be desecrated by a wolfish enemy.

Boisrondet and L'Espérance with the Récollet friars set to work to repair their own lodge, which the Illinois had torn down. Here the priests gave Tonty's wound a better dressing than that of his wild surgeons, and the little Renault lay on her blanket at a distance from him, seeking no remedy for her stiff hurt except to keep him in her sight.

Tonty had made the Iroquois pause; but they promptly crossed the river and prowled. over that great field of smoking lodges. They took such poles and posts as had not burned, and built themselves a rough fort in the midst of the abandoned town.

Boisrondet found some blankets which he hung around the little Renault when night came. But she needed no privacy for sleep. He thought the prowling and yelling of the Iroquois made her toss, and draw her breath in tremulous starts. In the morning he was careful to get food for her, while he let L'Espérance serve Tonty and the priests. The Illinois had carried away much of their corn from the underground storehouses, but their ungathered fields still stood; and while the invaders trampled the crop, L'Espérance found some supplies for the inmates of Tonty's lodge. The little Renault awoke with fever, but that day was so full of effort and danger that the men, her guardians, overlooked her state.

They were called to a council by the savages. Tonty rose up and went with his followers into the sapling fort.

On the girl's fever-swimming eyes the circle of hideous Iroquois faces and half-naked bodies made grotesque impression.

Tonty sat in front of her, on each side of him a priest. When he had to rise they helped him; but on his feet he was like the cliff across the