onty, and rowed by buckskin-clad voyageurs. On the Kankakee
thousands of buffaloes filled the plains, and La Salle's party killed
many, preparing the flesh in dried flakes by smoking it.

The buffaloes were left behind when they approached the great town on
the Illinois. La Salle glanced up at the rock he wanted fortified, but
no palisade or Frenchman was to be seen.

"It seems very quiet," he said to the men in his canoe, "and we have not
passed a hunter. There--there is the meadow where the town stood; but
where is the town?"

Heaps of ashes, charred poles, broken scaffolds, wolves prowling where
papooses had played, crows whirling in black clouds or sitting in rows
on naked branches, bones,--a horrible waste plain had taken the place of
the town.

The Frenchmen scattered over it, eagerly seeking some trace of Tonty and
his companions. They labored all day, until the sun set, among dreadful
sights which they could never forget, without finding any clue to his
fate.

They piled charred wood together and made a fire and camped among ruins.
But La Salle lay awake all night, watching the sharp-pointed autumn
stars march overhead, and suffering what must have seemed the most
unendurable of all his losses.

Determined not to give up his friend, he rose next morning and helped
the men hide their heavy freight in the rocks, leaving two of them to
hide with and guard it, and went on down the Illinois River. On one bank
the retreat of the invaded tribe could be traced, and on the other the
dead camp-fires of the Iroquois who had followed them. But of Tonty and
his Frenchmen there was still no sign.

La Salle saw the ruins of Fort Crevecoeur and his deserted vessel. And
so searching he came to the mouth of the Illinois and saw for the first
time that river of his ambitions, the Mississippi. There he turned back,
leaving a letter tied to a tree, on the chance of its sometime falling
into the hands of Tonty. There was nothing to do but to take his men and
goods from among the rocks near the destroyed town and return to Fort
Miamis, on the St. Joseph, which some of his followers had rebuilt. The
winter was upon them.

La Salle never sat and brooded over trouble. He was a man of action.
Shut in with his men and goods, and obliged to wait until spring
permitted him to take the next step, he began at once to work on Indian
hunters, and to draw their tribes towards forming a settlement around
the rock he meant to fortify on t