He pitched forward, and I was quicker than Ensign Shipp. I set him on my knees, and the surgeon poured a little watered brandy clown his throat. "Paul!" I said to him. "Stand back," ordered the surgeon, as women followed their children, crowding the room. "Do you know him, Lazarre?" asked Croghan. "It's Madame de Ferrier's child." "Not the baby I used to see at De Chaumont's? What's he doing at Fort Stephenson?" The women made up my bunk for Paul, and I laid him in it. Each wanted to take him to her care. The surgeon sent them to the cook-house to brew messes for him, and stripped the child, finding a bullet wound in his side. Probing brought nothing out, and I did not ask a single question. The child should live. There could be no thought of anything else. While the surgeon dressed and bandaged that small hole like a sucked-in mouth, I saw the boy sitting on saddle-bags behind me, his arms clipping my waist, while we threaded bowers of horse paths. I had not known how I wanted a boy to sit behind me! No wonder pioneer men were so confident and full of jokes: they had children behind them! He was burning with fever. His eyes swam in it as he looked at me. He could not eat when food was brought to him, but begged for water, and the surgeon allowed him what the women considered reckless quantities. Over stockades came the August rustle of the forest. Morning bird voices succeeded to the cannon's reverberations. The surgeon turned everybody out but me, and looked in by times from his hospital of British wounded. I wiped the boy's forehead and gave him his medicine, fanning him all day long. He lay in stupor, and the surgeon said he was going comfortably, and would suffer little. Once in awhile he turned up the corners of his mouth and smiled at me, as if the opiate gave him blessed sensations. I asked the surgeon what I should do in the night if he came out of it and wanted to talk. "Let him talk," said the doctor briefly. Unlike the night before, this was a night of silence. Everybody slept, but the sentinels, and the men whose wounds kept them awake; and I was both a sentinel, and a man whose wounds kept him awake. Paul's little hands were scratched; and there was a stone bruise on the heel he pushed from cover of the blankets. His small body, compact of so much manliness, was fine and sweet. Though he bore no resemblance to his mother, it seemed to me that she lay there for me to tend; and the change was no more an astounding miracle than the change of baby to boy. I had him all that night for my own, putting every other thought out of mind and absorbing his presence. His forehead and his face lost their burning heat with the coolness of dawn, which blew our shaded candle, flowing from miles of fragrant oaks. He awoke and looked all around the cabin. I tried to put his opiate into his mouth; but something restrained me. I held his hand to my cheek. "I like you," he spoke out. "Don't you think my mother is pretty?" I said I thought his mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. He curled up his mouth corners and gave me a blue-eyed smile. "My father is not pretty. But he is a gentleman of France." "Where are they, Paul?" He turned a look upon me without answering. "Paul," I said brutally, "tell me where your father and mother are." He was so far gone that my voice recalled him. He simply knew me as a voice and a presence that he liked. "With poor old Ernestine," he answered. "And where is poor old Ernestine?" He began to shake as if struck with a chill. I drew the blanket closer. "Paul, you must tell me!" He shook his head. His mouth worked, and his little breast went into convulsions. He shrieked and threw himself toward me. "My pretty little mother!" I held him still in a tight grip. "My darling--don't start your wound!" I could have beaten myself, but the surgeon afterwards told me the child was dying when he came into the fort. About dawn, when men's lives sink to their lowest ebb with night, his sank away, I smoothed his head and kissed and quieted him. Once he looked into space with blurred eyes, and curled up his mouth corners when I am sure he no longer saw me. Thus swiftly ended Paul's unaccountable appearance at the fort. It was like the falling of a slain bird out of the sky at my feet. The women were tender with his little body. They cried over him as they washed him for burial. The children went outside the stockade and brought green boughs and August wild flowers, bearing the early autumn colors of gold and scarlet. With these they bedded the child in his plank coffin, unafraid of his waxen sleep. Before Croghan went to report to his General, he asked me where we should bury the little fellow. "In the fort, by the southern blockhouse," I answered. "Let Fort Stephenson be his monument. It will stand here forever. The woods around it will be trampled by prowling savages, and later on by prowling white men. Within, nothing will obliterate the place. Give a little fellow a bed here, who died between two countries, and will never be a citizen of either." "I don't want to make a graveyard of the fort," said Croghan. But he looked at Paul, bent low over him, and allowed him to be buried near the southwest angle. There the child's bones rest to this day. The town of Fremont in the commonwealth of Ohio has grown up around them. Young children who climb the grassy bastion, may walk above his head, never guessing that a little gentleman of France, who died like a soldier of his wound, lies deeply cradled there. Before throwing myself down in the dead heaviness which results from continual loss of sleep, I questioned the wounded British soldiers about Paul. None of them had seen him. Straggling bands of Indians continually joined their force. Captives were always a possibility in the savage camp. Paul might have been taken hundreds of miles away. But I had the padlocked book, which might tell the whole story. With desperate haste that could hardly wait to open the lids, I took it out, wondering at the patience which long self-restraint had bred in me. I was very tired, and stretched my arms across the pillow where Paul's head had lain, to rest one instant. But I must have slept. My hand woke first, and feeling itself empty, grasped at the book. It was gone, and so was the sun. I got a light and searched, thrusting my arm between the bunk and the log wall. It was not on the floor, or in my breast pocket, or in my saddle-bags. The robbery was unendurable. And I knew the Indian who had done it. He was the quietest, most stubborn Oneida that ever followed an adopted white man. Why he had taken the book I could not understand. But I was entirely certain that he had taken it out of my hand while I slept. He would not break the padlock and read it, but like a judicious father he would take care of a possibly unwholesome volume himself. I went out and found the bald-headed and well-beloved wretch. He was sitting with his knees to his chin by the evening log fire. "Skenedonk," I said, "I want my book." "Children and books make a woman of you," he responded. "You had enough books at Longmeadow." "I want it at once," I repeated. "It's sorcery," he answered. "It's a letter from Madame de Ferrier, and may tell where she is." His fawn eyes were startled, but he continued to hug his knees. "Skenedonk, I can't quarrel with you. You were my friend before I could remember. When you know I am so bound to you, how can you deal me a deadly hurt?" "White woman sorcery is the worst sorcery. You thought I never saw it. But I did see it. You went after her to Paris. You did not think of being the king. So you had to come back with nothing. That's what woman sorcery does. Now you have power with the tribes. The President sees you are a big man! And she sends a book to you to bewitch you! I knew she sent the book as soon as I saw it." "Do you think she sent Paul?" He made no answer. "Madame de Ferrier does not know I have the book." "You haven't it," said Skenedonk. "But you have." "If she wrote and sent a letter she expected it would be received." "When I said a letter I meant what is called a journal: the writing down of what happens daily. Johnny Appleseed got the book from an Indian. That is how it was sent to me." "If you read it you will want to drop everything else and go to find her." This was the truth, for I was not under military law. "Where is the book?" "Down my back," said Skenedonk. I felt the loose buckskin. "It isn't there." "In my front," said Skenedonk. I ran my hand over his chest, finding nothing but bone and brawn. "There it is," he said, pointing to a curled wisp of board at the edge of the fire. "I burnt it." "Then you've finished me." I turned and left him sitting like an image by the fire.