Like a spirit had he vanished during those mysterious hours between midnight and dawn, leaving no trace of his going save a newly severed rope which hung dangling from a foreyard.
But had he escaped?
That morning--as we learn from private letters sent home by officers of the Spanish fleet--there came to the puzzled O'Reilly a report that in the dense blackness of that starless night a single boat sought to slip silently past beneath the deep shadows of the upper battery.

Unhalting in response to a hail of the sentry, a volley was hastily fired toward its uncertain outline, and, in the flare of the guns, the officer of the guard noted the black figure of a man leap high into air, and disappear beneath the dark surface of the river.

So it was the Captain-General wrote also the name "Charles de Noyan" with those of the other four, endorsing it with the same terse military record, "Shot at sunrise." Nor since that fateful hour has the world known otherwise, for, although strange rumors floated down the great river to be whispered about from lip to lip, and New Orleans wondered many a long month whither had vanished the fair young wife, the daughter of Lafreniere, yet no authentic message found its way out of the vast northern wilderness.

For nearly one hundred and fifty years history has accepted without question the testimony of the Spanish records.

The man who alone could tell the strange story was in old age impelled to do so by a feeling of sacred duty to the dead; and his papers, disarranged, ill-written, already yellowed by years, have fallen to my keeping.