Outside the gate La Salle's limbs failed. The laboring Abbé then dragged him along, and it seemed an immense détour he was obliged to make to pass the extended foundation.
"Now you will believe my words which I spoke this morning concerning the peril we all stand in," panted this sorely taxed brother. "The Cavelier family is destroyed. My brother La Salle--Robert--my child! Shall I give you absolution?"
"If you had ever taken my advice, this miserable end had not come upon you."
"Oh, my brother," lamented Jean Cavelier, tucking up his cassock as he bent to the strain, "I have but one consolation in my wretchedness. This is better for you than the marriage you would have made. What business have you to ally yourself with Le Ber? What business have you with marriage at all? For my part, I would object to any marriage you had in view, but Le Ber's daughter was the worst marriage for you in New France."
"Tonty!" gasped La Salle. With the swiftness of an Indian, Tonty was flying across the clearing. The explorer's unwary messenger Jolycoeur he had left behind him bound with hide thongs and lying in Father Hennepin's inner room.
"Yes, yonder comes your Monsieur de Tonty who so easily gave up your post on the Illinois," panted the Abbé Cavelier. "Like all your worthless followers he hath no attachment to your person."
"There is more love in his iron hand," La Salle's paralyzing mouth flung out, "than in any other living heart!"
Needing no explanation from the Abbé, the commandant from Fort St. Louis took strong hold of La Salle and hurried him to the mission house. They faced the wind, and Tonty's cap blew off, his rings of black hair flaring to a fierce uprightness.
The surgeon ran out of the dwelling and met and helped them in, and thus tardily resistance to the poison was begun, but it had found its hardiest victim since the day of Socrates.
Tonty's iron hand brought out of Jolycoeur immediate confession of the poison he had used.
In an age when most cunning and deadly drugs were freely handled, and men who would not shed blood thought it no sin to take enemies neatly off the scene by the magic of a dish, Jolycoeur was not without knowledge of a plant called hemlock, growing ready to the hand of a good poisoner in the New World.