This threat had its effect, for it touched their deep-rooted jealousy of the Osages. They were lavish of promises, and feasts and dances consumed the day. Yet La Salle soon learned that the intrigues of his enemies were still pursuing him. That evening, unknown to him, a stranger appeared in the Illinois camp. He was a Mascoutin chief, named Monso, attended by five or six Miamis, and bringing a gift of knives, hatchets, and kettles to the Illinois. The chiefs assembled in a secret nocturnal session, where, smoking their pipes, they listened with open ears to the harangue of the envoys. Monso told them that he had come in behalf of certain Frenchmen, whom he named, to warn his hearers against the designs of La Salle, whom he denounced as a partisan and spy of the Iroquois, affirming that he was now on his way to stir up the tribes beyond the Mississippi to join in a war against the Illinois, who, thus assailed from the east and from the west, would be utterly destroyed. There was no hope for them, he added, but in checking the farther progress of La Salle, or, at least, retarding it, thus causing his men to desert him. Having thrown his firebrand, Monso and his party left the camp in haste, dreading to be confronted with the object of their aspersions. [Footnote: Hennepin (1683), 151, (1704), 205. Le Clercq, ii. 157. _Memoire du Voyage de M. de la Salle_, MS. This is a paper appended to Frontenac's Letter to the Minister, 9 Nov. 1680. Hennepin prints a translation of it in the English edition of his later work. It charges the Jesuit Allouez with being at the bottom of the intrigue. La Salle had a special distrust of this missionary, who, on his part, always shunned a meeting with him. In another memoir, addressed to Frontenac in 1680, La Salle states fully his conviction that Allouez, who was then, he says, among the Miamis, had induced them to send Monso on his sinister errand. See the memoir in Thomassy, _Geologie, Pratique de la Louisiane_, 203. The account of the affair of Monso in the spurious work bearing Tonty's name is mere romance.]