relief to the fort. This time the party was composed of twenty men,
some of them clad in deerskin, others in the garments of those who had
died. On April 11 they started out.

Months went by. Then, to the surprise of those in the fort, one
evening La Salle reappeared, followed by eight men of the twenty who
had gone out with him. One had been lost, {269} two had deserted, one
had been seized by an alligator, and six had given out on the march and
probably perished. The survivors had encountered interesting
experiences. They had crossed the Colorado on a raft. Nika, La
Salle's favorite Shawanoe hunter, who had followed him to France and
thence to Texas, had been bitten by a rattlesnake, but had recovered.
Among the Cenis Indians, a branch of the Caddo family, which includes
the famed Pawnees, they met with the friendliest welcome and saw plenty
of horses, silver lamps, swords, muskets, money, and other articles,
all Spanish, which these people had obtained from the fierce Comanches,
who had taken them in raids on the Mexican border. They also met some
of the Comanches themselves and were invited to join them in a foray
into New Mexico. But La Salle had, necessarily, long since given up
his mad scheme of conquest and was thinking only of extricating himself
from his pitiable dilemma.

This seems to have been the first meeting of Frenchmen with mounted
Indians of the plains. The possession of horses, which had strayed or
been stolen from Spanish settlements, had transformed these wild rovers
from foot-travelers, such {270} as Cabeza de Vaca and Coronado found
them, having no other domestic animals than dogs, into matchless
horsemen and the most dangerous brigands on the continent, capable of
covering hundreds of miles in an incredibly short space of time.
Splendid specimens of savage manhood, presenting the best type of the
Shoshonee stock, they amply avenged the terror which the sight of
mounted Spaniards at first struck into the hearts of the aborigines, by
harrying the colonists and laying the border in blood and ashes, as
they sometimes do to this day.[1]

{271}

From the Cenis villages, where they bought five horses, the Frenchmen
went as far, perhaps, as the Sabine River, encamped there for two
months, detained by La Salle's illness with fever, and then, on account
of their weakened condition, returned to Fort St. Louis.

{272}

A deeper pall of gloom settled upon the little band of exiles. They
h