The coureur de bois agreed to silence. They took him to New Orleans, an abject prisoner.
Yet many days later, when there came messengers, one tumbling over the other in their frantic haste to tell of a massacre of settlers at several small posts, he began to babble his story, and the cry went round: "The Natchez! The Natchez did it. We must subdue the Natchez!"
The young wives from France were panic-stricken at this frightful menace of armed savages. Husbands who for themselves would not have minded a few Indians on the war-path were now excited by the uncontrollable terror of the women. They demanded of Bienville the extinction of the Natchez. A mob spirit grew.
"Do you see the gray moss hanging from the live-oaks?" these citizens cried. "The Spanish and the Indians call its clusters 'French wigs.' If we do not kill these Natchez, then shall our hair dangle in like festoons from every branch."
"Give us action!" howled the soldiers. "We came to protect the colony. Now is the time to strike!"
The distressed governor sighed heavily. He could not afford mutiny of his troops nor the desertion of his citizens. Neither could he trust the Natchez, who no longer trusted him.
"It is the beginning of the end," he told Anthony, sadly. "The condition of peace between two nations for which our priests hoped is too ideal. None of us on either side are self-controlled enough to maintain it."
He hastily filled his bateaux with several hundred men, hurried under sail and oar up the Mississippi to Fort Rosalie, marched out from there, took the Natchez by surprise, and fell upon them with gun and bayonet.
Now Anthony loved a fight. For his vivacious nature it was the best way to clear the air. Pummeling some rude fellow who needed it was a satisfaction. But this battle was not a fight. It was war; cruel, bloody war. His whole soul sickened at cutting down these Indians whose artistic, half-civilized towns had so often been his shelter. He had a childish fancy that if he had been given time to go about among them with the fiddle they loved, he could have brought peace again.