ll night, Pierre?"

"They rocked me all night, Jacques. I can well endure what most men can,
but this is carrying politeness too far."

"I was not so favored. They would have saved you if they had killed the
rest of us. And they would have saved the good father, no doubt, since
the chief came and danced the calumet before him."

"Were these red cradle-rockers intending to make an end of us in the
night?"

"So the chief says; but he broke up the council, and will set us safely
on our journey up river to-day."

"I am glad of that," said Pierre. "Father Marquette hath not the
strength of the Sieur Jolliet for such rude wanderings. These southern
mists, and torturing insects, and clammy heats, and the bad food have
worked a great change in him."

"We have been gone but two months from the Mission of St. Ignace," said
Jacques. "They have the bigness of years."

"And many more months that have the bigness of years will pass before we
see it again."

They grew more certain of this, when, after toiling up the current
through malarial nights and sweltering days, the explorers left the
Mississippi and entered the river Illinois. There, above Peoria Lake,
another Illinois town of seventy-four lodges was found, and these
Kaskaskias so clung to the Blackrobe that he promised to come back
and teach them. From the head waters of the Illinois a portage was
made to Lake Michigan, and the French returned to the Bay of the Puans
alongshore. They had traveled over twenty-five hundred miles, and
accomplished the object of their journey.

Jolliet, with his canoe of voyageurs, his maps and papers, and the young
Indian boy given him by the Illinois chief, went on to Montreal. His
canoe was upset in the rapids of Lachine just above Montreal, and he
lost two men, the Indian boy, his papers, and nearly everything except
his life. But he was able to report to the governor all that he had seen
and done.

Marquette lay ill, at the Bay of the Puans, of dysentery, brought on by
hardship; and he was never well again. Being determined, however, to go
back and preach to the tribe on the Illinois River, he waited all winter
and all the next summer to regain his strength. He carefully wrote out
and sent to Canada the story of his discoveries and labors. In autumn,
with Pierre Porteret and the voyageur Jacques, he ventured again to the
Illinois. Once he became so ill they were obliged to stop and build him
a cabin in the wilderness, at the risk