Meantime night had come upon the aged friar and his four companions on their way to Tonty at the upper village. Petit-Bled and Boisdardenne, in league with the conspirators at the fort, rose up and spiked the guns of L’Espérance and Boisrondet, and made off with the canoe after their fellows, leaving the Recollet and the two young men to find their way on foot and without means of defense to the village of the Kaskaskias.
Tonty heard the news of the mutiny with consternation and anger, and hastened back to the ruined fort. Everything of value seemed to have been taken, except the forge and some tools and arms too heavy for the deserters to carry on their flight. With this freight the heavy-hearted Tonty made his way back to the Kaskaskia village, where the lodges were once more filled by the returning warriors and hunters. After sending, by two routes, messengers to tell La Salle of the catastrophe, Tonty prepared for a new order of life. The fort and its garrison no longer gave him protection; but the Man with the Iron Hand was no coward. With his fragment of a band he entered the village and asked the Kaskaskias if he might live in their midst. They welcomed him to their kettles and their cabins, and shared with him and his men their food and their buffalo robes. The band of thirty or more that had come into the valley a few months before was now reduced to six—Tonty and his friend Boisrondet, the two young men, L’Espérance and Renault the Parisian, and the two friars—Father Membré having come up from the lower village.
CHAPTER XII
THE DEATH OF CHASSAGOAC
The summer of 1680 was an unquiet season, when every whisper of the wind seemed to bring ill news. Persistent rumors came to the Illinois of an alliance between the Iroquois and the Miamis. Seeing their fears the energetic man with the “medicine” arm began to teach his red brothers the arts of the white man: he showed them the use of guns and taught them how to fight as the white men fought.
One day a runner came into the village with news of the death of La Salle, followed a little later by another Indian who confirmed the evil tidings. The Illinois saw gloom in the face of Tonty; but his eyes flashed no less of fire and his step lacked none of its usual vigor, for he was every inch a chief. Then into the village a new rumor came whispering to the Indians that this dark-visaged chieftain with flowing hair was no Frenchman at all; that he came from a country far beyond France whose people bore no kinship or allegiance to the great King of the French.
Surely the situation looked worse for the Illinois with each passing day. If the white men were in league with the Iroquois, and if their kinsmen, the Miamis, had joined the enemy, they and their wives and children might well fear the time when the war cry of the painted Iroquois would echo in the valley of the Illinois. Defeated and overwhelmed, they would be eaten by their enemies. Did not the tribes of the Five Nations thus treat their captives? Consternation rose on the wings of fear. What hope had the Illinois against the tribes from the East?
From their long houses at the other end of the Great Lakes the famous Iroquois warriors had spread desolation among a hundred tribes. They had conquered and subjugated whole nations. Toward the south as far as the Cherokees and Catawbas they had made easy conquests. North of the Iroquois were the French on the St. Lawrence. Since Champlain had taken sides with the Canadian Indians against the Iroquois, three quarters of a century ago, the tribes of the Five Nations had hated the French. But they did not dare attack them. So now the West offered the best field for their eager ravages. From the Dutch in New Netherland, and later from their English successors, they had purchased guns and ammunition, and they had set their cruel hearts upon laying waste the valley of the Illinois—at least so the tribes of the West had heard and believed.
The Illinois had fought off the Iroquois before. Could they do it again? Their own warriors were experts with bows and arrows, and some of them had guns now; but the Iroquois warriors had every man his gun, and also his shield to ward off the feeble arrows of Western tribes. By their attacks other tribes had been almost exterminated, and their captives burned by slow fires with inconceivable tortures. What better chance had the Illinois, particularly if the treacherous Miamis joined the foe and the white men also proved to be enemies? So they watched Tonty narrowly; but the dark-eyed chief, with his forge and his tools, his restless stride, and his proud bearing, lived among them, and heeded not their anxious or suspicious looks.
The year seemed truly a calamitous one for the Indians. It was in those trying days that some Illinois were gathered in one of the long-roofed lodges, where on a bed made soft by the skins of buffalo lay a man close unto death. About him stood the men upon whom the nation relied to heal the sick and cure the wounded, to drive away the evil spirits, and to conjure the good spirits—the mysterious medicine men. They had worked long with the man who lay upon the bed, for he was a chief great in the councils of the Illinois nation.