"Now I have reached camp," thought La Salle, and he fired his gun to let his people know he was approaching. Echoes rolled through the woods. Without waiting for a shot in reply he hurried to the fire. No person was near it. The descending snow hissed, caught in the flames. Here was a home hearth prepared in the wilderness, and no welcome to it but silence. La Salle called out in every Indian language he knew. Dead branches grated, and the stream rustled betwixt its edges of ice. A heap of dry grass was gathered for a bed under a tree by the fire, and its elastic top showed the hollow where a man had lain. La Salle put some more wood on the fire, piled a barricade of brush around the bed, and lay down in a place left warm by some strolling Indian whom his gun had frightened away. He slept until morning. In the afternoon he found his own camp. From the first thread of the Kankakee oozing out of swamps to the Indian town on the Illinois River where Marquette had done his last missionary work, was a long canoe journey. It has been said the rivers of the New World made its rapid settlement possible; for they were open highways, even in the dead of winter guiding the explorer by their frozen courses. The Illinois tribe had scattered to their hunting, and the lodges stood empty. La Salle's men were famished for supplies, so he ventured to open the covered pits in which the Indians stored their corn. Nothing was more precious than this hidden grain; but he paid for what he took when he reached the Indians. This was not until after New Year's day. He had descended the river as far as that expansion now called Peoria Lake. The Illinois, after their first panic at the appearance of strange white men, received La Salle's party kindly, fed all with their own fingers, and, as they had done with Jolliet and Marquette when those explorers passed them on the Mississippi, tried to coax their guests to go no farther. They and other Indians who came to the winter camp told such tales of danger on that great river about which the French knew so little, that six of La Salle's men deserted in one night. This caused him to move half a league beyond the Illinois camp, where, on the southern bank, he built a palisaded fort and called it Crevecoeur. He was by this time convinced that the Griffin was lost. Whether she went down in a storm, or was scuttled and sunk by those to whom he intrusted her, nothing was ever heard of her again. The furs he had sent to pay his creditors never in any way reached port. If they escaped shipwreck, they were stolen by the men who escaped with them. Nothing could bend La Salle's resolution. He meant in some way to explore the west through which the southern Mississippi ran. But the loss of the Griffin hurt him sorely. He could not go on without more supplies; and having no vessel to bring them, the fearful necessity was before him of returning on foot and by canoe to Fort Frontenac to bring them himself.