Next morning, having heard nothing of Moranget or the others, he set out to find them, accompanied by his Indian guide, and by Douay, the friar. "All the way," writes the friar, "he spoke to me of nothing but matters of piety, grace, and predestination; enlarging on the debt he owed to God, who had saved him from so many perils during more than twenty years of travel in America. Suddenly, I saw him overwhelmed with a profound sadness, for which he himself could not account. He was so much moved that I scarcely knew him." He soon recovered his usual calmness, and they walked on till they approached the camp of Duhaut, on the farther side of a small river. Looking about him, La Salle saw two eagles circling in the air, as if attracted by the carcasses of beasts or men. He fired his gun and his pistol as a summons. The shots reached the ears of the conspirators, who fired from their place of concealment, and La Salle, shot through the brain, sank lifeless on the ground. Douay stood terror-stricken. Duhaut called out to him that he had nothing to fear. The murderers came forward and gathered about their victim. "There thou liest, great Bashaw! There thou liest!" exclaimed the surgeon Liotot, in base exultation over the unconscious corpse. With mockery and insult, they stripped it naked, dragged it into the bushes, and left it there a prey to the buzzards and the wolves. It is sad to think that such was the fate of the veritable Discoverer of the Great West. "Thus," says Mr. Parkman, "in the vigour of his manhood, at the age of forty-three, died Robert Cavelier de la Salle, 'one of the greatest men,' writes Tonty, 'of this age;' without question one of the most remarkable explorers whose names live in history. The enthusiasm of the disinterested and chivalrous Champlain was not the enthusiasm of La Salle; nor had he any part in the self-devoted zeal of the early Jesuit explorers. He belonged not to the age of the knight-errant and the saint, but to the modern world of practical study and action. He was the hero, not of a principle nor of a faith, but simply of a fixed idea and a determined purpose. It is easy to reckon up his defects, but it is not easy to hide from sight the Roman virtues that redeemed them. Beset by a throng of enemies, he stands, like the King of Israel, head and shoulders above them all. He was a tower of adamant, against whose impregnable front hardship and danger, the rage of man and of the elements, the southern sun, the northern blast, fatigue, famine and disease, delay, disappointment and deferred hope, emptied their quivers in vain. Never under the impenetrable mail of paladin or crusader beat a heart of more intrepid mettle than within the stoic panoply that armed the breast of La Salle. To estimate aright the marvels of his patient fortitude, one must follow on his track through the vast scene of his interminable journeyings, those thousands of weary miles of forest,