“Who writ the accounts o’ them thar battles?” asked Shif’less Sol.

“Why, the Greeks, of course.”

“I thought so.  Why, Jim Hart here must be a Greek, then.  To hear him tell it, he’s always whippin’ twenty men at a time.  But it ain’t in natur’ for one man to whip twenty.”

“I never said once in my life that I whipped twenty men at a time,” protested Jim Hart.

“We’ll let it pass,” said Paul, “and Sol may be right about the Greeks piling it up for themselves; but so they wrote it, and so we have to take it.  Well, Alexander, although he wasn’t much more than a boy, kept on whipping the Persians until at last their king, Darius, ran away with his wives.”

Shif’less Sol whistled.

“Do you mean to tell me, Paul,” he said, “that any white man ever had more than one wife!  I thought only Injun chiefs had ’em?”

“Why, it was common a long time ago,” replied Paul.

“What a waste!” said Shif’less Sol.  “One man havin’ a lot uv wives, an’ Jim Hart here ain’t ever been able to get a single one.”

“An’ you ain’t, either, Sol Hyde,” said Jim Hart.

“Oh, me!” replied Shif’less Sol carelessly.  “I’m too young to marry.”

“Let him go on about Alexander, the fightin’ feller,” interrupted Tom Ross.

“Alexander conquered all Asia,” resumed Paul, “but it didn’t agree with him.  The more he conquered the more he wanted to conquer.”

“Jest like a little boy eatin’ turkey,” said Shif’less Sol.  “Can’t hold enough to suit him.  Stummick ain’t ez big ez his appetite, an’ he hez to cry about it.  I don’t think your Alexander wuz such a big man, after all.”

“He was not, from one point of view, Sol, but he was certainly a general.  After conquering all the world, he fell to drinking too much, and quarreling with his best friends.  One day he got raging drunk, which made him hot all over, and he jumped into an icy river to cool off.  That gave him a fever, and he died right away.  He was only thirty-two.”

Shif’less Sol sniffed in disgust.

“Dead at thirty-two!” he said.  “Now, I call him a plumb failure.  With fightin’ goin’ on all the time, an’ fevers layin’ aroun’ fur you, I call it somethin’ jest to live, an’ I mean to stay in these parts till I’m a hundred.  Why, that Alexander never had time, Paul, to think over what he’d done.  I wouldn’t change places with him, I think I’m a heap sight better off.”

“I agrees with Sol ag’in,” said Tom Ross, who had been in deep thought.  “In dang’rous times it’s doin’ a heap jest to live, an’ a man who dies off at thirty-two, all through his own foolishness, ain’t much to brag about.”

Henry laughed.

“Paul,” he said, “you’ll have to bring out better examples of greatness to satisfy Sol and Tom.”

Paul laughed, too.

“I just tell things as they are,” he said.  “Maybe they are right.”

Henry went to the door and looked out.  The air was full of raw chill, and he heard the leafless boughs rustling in the winter wind.  All around him was the dark wilderness, and, natural hunter and warrior though he was, he was glad to have the shelter, the fire, and his comrades.  He turned back and closed the door tightly, in order to shut out any stray gust that might be of an unusually penetrating quality.