ns to venture against such devils."

The Chickasaws, occupying a tract of country now stretching across
northern Mississippi and western Tennessee, were friendly to the English
and willing to encroach on the French. They interrupted river traffic
and practiced every cruelty on their prisoners. D'Artaguette knew
as well as the early explorers that in dealing with savages it is a
fatal policy to overlook or excuse their ill-behavior. They themselves
believed in exact revenge, and despised a foe who did not strike back,
their insolence becoming boundless if not curbed. So he had planned with
Le Moyne de Bienville a concerted attack on these allies of the English.
Bienville, bringing troops up river from New Orleans, was to meet him in
the Chickasaw country on a day and spot carefully specified.

[Illustration: Autograph of Bienville.]

The brilliant pageant of canoes went on down the river, seeming to grow
smaller, until it dwindled to nothingness in the distance.

But in the course of weeks only a few men came back, sent by the
Chickasaws, to tell about the fate of their leaders. The troops from
New Orleans did not keep the appointment, arriving too late and then
retreating. D'Artaguette, urged by his Indians, made the attack with
such force as he had, and his brave array was destroyed. He and the
Chevalier Vincennes, with Laland, Father Senat, and many others, a circle
of noble human torches, perished at the stake. People lamented aloud in
Kaskaskia and Cahokia streets, and the white flag of France slipped down
to half-mast on Fort Chartres.

This victory made the Chickasaw Indians so bold that scarcely a French
convoy on the river escaped them. There is a story that a young girl
reached the gate of Fort Chartres, starving and in rags, from wandering
through swamps and woods. She was the last of a family arrived from
France, and sought her sister, an officer's wife, in the fort. The
Chickasaws had killed every other relative; she, escaping alone, was
ready to die of exposure when she saw the flag through the trees.

But another captain of Fort Chartres, no bolder than young Pierre
D'Artaguette, but more fortunate, named Neyon de Villiers, twenty years
afterwards led troops as far east as the present state of Pennsylvania,
and helped his brother, Coulon de Villiers, continue the struggle
betwixt French and English by defeating, at Fort Necessity, the English
commanded by a young Virginia officer named George Washingt