Before the end of the month Tonty and his party reached the Nabedache village where two years before the Abbé and his companions had left Hiens and his crew among the Indians. The Indians told various stories of the Frenchmen for whom Tonty was searching. Some said that Hiens and his party had gone off with their chiefs to fight the Spaniards; while others told him that three had been killed by another tribe and the rest had gone away in search of arrowheads. Tonty himself came to the firm conclusion that the Cenis had killed the survivors.

He was now many leagues beyond the Red River and within a few days’ journey of the scene of La Salle’s murder. Eighty leagues more would take him to the fort on the Bay of St. Louis. Tonty begged for guides, but the Cenis would give him none. Hiens and his men were not to be found. He looked at his remaining supply of gunpowder, so necessary for providing food as well as defense. It was almost gone. Even Tonty could go no farther. With heavy heart he gave the Indians some hatchets and glass beads in exchange for Spanish horses and turned back toward the Mississippi.

It was the 10th of May when they reached the Cadadoquis village on the Red River, and here they stopped for a week to rest their horses. Then with an Indian guide they started once more for the Coroa village. In all the ten years Tonty had spent in the wilds he never had suffered such hardships—not even during his bitter experiences in the winter of 1680, when with Father Membré and his young French companions he had struggled out of the clutches of the Iroquois in the valley of the Illinois and fought his way against cold and starvation to the friendly Pottawattomie village on Green Bay.

While leading one of the horses by the bridle across a swamp the guide imagined himself pursued by an alligator and tried to climb a tree. In his haste he entangled the bridle of Tonty’s horse, which was drowned. Fearful of punishment the guide made off to his people, leaving the party to find their way alone.

With Tonty in the lead they crossed, by one means or another, eight or ten swollen streams. Everywhere the country seemed drowned, for the spring freshets were on. They gave up their horses and carried their own baggage, wading day after day in water often up to their knees. They had to sleep and light their fires and cook their food on the trunks of fallen trees placed together. Only once did they find anything like dry land in the endless leagues of flooded country.

Their food gave out and they ate their dogs. There was nothing left and no wild animals were to be found in all the wet dreariness. One, two, three days passed with nothing to eat—only the water everywhere. On the evening of the third day, the 14th of July, they came at length to the Coroa village, where the chiefs feasted them for as many days as they had fasted. Here they found two of the men who had deserted; and toward the end of the month they all went on together to the towns at the mouth of the Arkansas River. The months of hardship had sapped even Tonty’s endurance, and now for nearly two weeks he lay sick with a fever among these kindly Indians.

It was late in September, 1689, when Tonty finally reached the towering rock at Fort St. Louis and climbed to its friendly summit to rest. In the weary ten months’ expedition he had neither found the bones of his friend, nor reached his fort on the Gulf, nor led an invading force into the land of the Spaniard. But he had done all that lay in his power to rescue his leader’s last garrison.

The Abbé had left his own brother unburied in the wilds, had deliberately for more than a year delayed any effort to rescue the survivors at the fort, and had gone off to France on funds obtained by fraud and deceit. But Tonty, almost alone, had braved every peril and hardship for nearly a year in a last courageous but unsuccessful effort to save the pitiful remnant of his friend’s ill-fated colony on the Bay of St. Louis.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE PITIFUL REMNANT