The rich valley of the Illinois grew dimmer and dimmer under the starlight. Tonty could no longer see the river’s brown surface, but he could distinguish the little trail of foam down its centre churned by rapids above. Twisted pines, which had tangled their roots in everlasting rock, hung below him, children of the air. Some man of the garrison approached the windlass and let down the bucket with creak and rattle. He waited with the ear of custom for its clanking cry as it plunged, its gurgle and struggle in the water, and the many splashes with which it ascended.
His face showed as a pale spot in the dusk when he rose from the doorstep and came into the room to light a candle. Barbe must be brought out from her silent ordeal and comforted and fed.
Tonty set his lighted candle on a table and considered how he should approach her door. The furniture of the room had been hastily carried in that morning from its uses in the fête. The apartment was a rude frontier drawing-room, having furs, deer antlers, and shining canoe paddles for its ornaments.
While Tonty hesitated, the door on the fortress side opened, and La Salle stepped into the room.
Tonty’s voice died in his throat. The joy and terror of this sight held him without power to move.
It was La Salle; a mere shred of his former person, girt like some skeleton apostle with a buffalo hide which left his arm bones naked as well as his journey roughened feet. Beard had started through his pallid skin, and this and his wild hair the wilderness had dressed with dead leaves. A piece of buffalo leather banded his forehead like a coarse crown, yet blood had escaped its pressure, for a dried track showed darkly down the side of his neck. Tonty gave no thought to the manitou of a waterfall from whose shrine La Salle had probably stripped that Indian offering of a buffalo robe. It did not seem to him incredible that Robert Cavelier should survive what other men called a death wound, and naked, bleeding, and starving, should make his way for six months through jungles of forest, to his friend.
Hoarse and strong from the depths of his breast Tonty brought out the cry,—
“O my master, my master!”
“Tonty,” spoke La Salle, standing still, with the rapture of achievement in his eyes, “I have found the lost river!”