Joutel folded and put away his notes. The Abbé's often repeated complaints seldom stirred a reply from him. Though on this occasion he thought of saying,--
"Monsieur de Tonty may bring news of her from Montreal."
"You understand, Joutel," exclaimed the Abbé, approaching the candle, "that it is best,--that it is necessary not to tell Tonty what we know?"
"I have understood what you said, Monsieur the Abbé."
"You are the only man who gives me anxiety. All the rest are willing to keep silence. Is it not my affair? I wish you would cease writing your scraps. It irritates me to come into this storehouse and find you writing your scraps." He looked severely at the young man, who leaned against the box making no further promise or reply. Then seizing the candle, the Abbé stepped to a bed made of bales, where, wrapped in skins and blankets, young Colin Cavelier lay uttering the acknowledgement of peaceful sleep. Another boy lay similarly wrapped on the floor beside him.
The priest's look at these two was brief. He went on to the remaining man in the room, a hairy fellow, lying coiled among hides and pressed quite into a corner. The man appeared unconscious, emitting his breath in short puffs.
Abbé Cavelier gazed upon him with shudders.
The over-taxed candle flame stooped and expired, the scent of its funeral pile rising from a small red point in darkness.
[17] Joutel. English Translation "from the edition just published at Paris, 1714 A. D."
[18] "Le Rocher," this natural fortress was commonly called by the French. See Charlevoix.
While Abbé Cavelier stood in the storehouse, Tonty, a few miles away, was setting his camp around a spring of sulphur water well known to the hunters of St. Louis. The spring boiled its white sand from unmeasured depths at the root of an oak, and spread a pool which slipped over its barrier in a thin stream to the Illinois.
Though so near his fortress, Tonty and Greysolon du Lhut, fresh from their victorious campaign with the governor of New France against the Iroquois, thought it not best to expose their long array of canoes in darkness on the river. They had with them[19] women and children,--fragments of families, going under their escort to join the colony at Fort St. Louis.