Surely he had not come thus near success to suffer his splendid Yankee captain to be brained there before his eyes.  Like a hawk he had watched every incident of the fight, and was on the alert to act the part of surgeon toward any who might be either wounded in the battery or taken prisoner.  He had even resolved, in case of the capture of the place, to represent his peculiar position to the United States officer in command, and to beg of him permission to make his experiment upon a wounded rebel.

The gunner turned fiercely upon him, but dropped his arm and sheathed his sabre at his question, and then walked back to his gun abashed, for he was, after all, a brave and chivalrous man.

Fournier simply asked:  “Do Confederate soldiers murder prisoners of war?” And added, “He is a wounded man—­leave him to me.”

Then he knelt down beside him and examined his wound, and though he strove to be calm he trembled with excitement as he tore open the blue blouse and felt the warm blood welling over his fingers.  It was a simple wound through the fleshy part of the shoulder:  a strand of saddler’s silk and a few strips of sticking-plaster would have sufficed to dress it, but the Frenchman smiled when he wiped away the clots and saw the blood spurting from two or three small divided arteries.

Then he called his African, and they carried the wounded man back to a tent, and laid him on a bed of moss and cypress boughs, and left him there to bleed, while he went out into the air, and walked about, and tossed his hat and shouted with excitement like a madman.  But the battle raged, and the gunners charged their guns and fired, and charged and fired again, and the men along the breastwork grew furious with the slaughter and the fiery draughts they took from their canteens through lips blackened with powder and defiled with grease and shreds of cartridge-paper; and no one noticed the doctor’s mad conduct nor the savage standing guard before the tent; nor did any other save those two in the whole battery—­no, not even the gunner who had captured him—­give a thought to the prisoner who lay bleeding there, until the battle was over.

And this prisoner, what of him?  Any one, looking upon him as he lay upon the cypress boughs, would have known him to be thoroughbred.  Everything about him proclaimed it.  His face, manly but gentle, his figure, great in stature and strength, yet graceful in outline like a Grecian god, the very dress and accoutrements he wore, which were neat, strong, expensive, but without ornament, showed him to be a gentleman.  And Robert Shirley was a gentleman.  Probably no man in all the States could have been found who would have presented a greater contrast to the man standing guard outside the tent than this man who lay within it; and for that reason none who would have been so welcome to Fournier.  As the one was a pure savage, the other was the realization of the most illustrious enlightenment; the one fierce, cunning,