“I was not near the lodge,” said my father.  “I was down the lake, fishing.”

“I have bled him once, and shall bleed him again; though the rock did that pretty effectually.  But these strapping young creatures need frequent blood-letting.”

The chief gave him no thanks, and I myself resolved to knock the little doctor down, if he came near me with a knife.

“In the absence of Count de Chaumont, Thomas,” he proceeded, “I may direct you to go and knock on the cook’s door, and ask for something to eat before you go home.”

“I stay here,” responded my father.

“There is not the slightest need of anybody’s watching beside the lad to-night.  I was about to retire when you were permitted to enter.  He is sleeping like an infant.”

“He belongs to me,” the chief said.

Doctor Chantry jumped at the chief in rage.

“For God’s sake, shut up and go about your business!”

It was like one of the little dogs in our camp snapping at the patriarch of them all, and recoiling from a growl.  My father’s hand was on his hunting knife; but he grunted and said nothing.  Doctor Chantry himself withdrew from the room and left the Indian in possession.  Weak as I was I felt my insides quake with laughter.  My very first observation of the whimsical being tickled me with a kind of foreknowledge of all his weak fretfulness.

My father sat down on the floor at the foot of my couch, where the wax light threw his shadow, exaggerating its unmoving profile.  I noticed one of the chairs he disdained as useless; though when eating or drinking with white men he sat at table with them.  The chair I saw was one that I faintly recognized, as furniture of some previous experience, slim legged, gracefully curved, and brocaded.  Brocaded was the word.  I studied it until I fell asleep.

The sun, shining through the protected windows, instead of glaring into our lodge door, showed my father sitting in the same position when I woke, and Skenedonk at my side.  I liked the educated Iroquois.  He was about ten years my senior.  He had been taken to France when a stripling, and was much bound to the whites, though living with his own tribe.  Skenedonk had the mildest brown eyes I ever saw outside a deer’s head.  He was a bald Indian with one small scalp lock.  But the just and perfect dome to which his close lying ears were attached needed no hair to adorn it.  You felt glad that nothing shaded the benevolence of his all-over forehead.  By contrast he emphasized the sullenness of my father; yet when occasion had pressed there never was a readier hand than Skenedonk’s to kill.

I tossed the cover back to spring out of bed with a whoop.  But a woman in a high cap with ribbons hanging down to her heels, and a dress short enough to show her shoes, stepped into the room and made a courtesy.  Her face fell easily into creases when she talked, and gave you the feeling that it was too soft of flesh.  Indeed, her eyes were cushioned all around.  She spoke and Skenedonk answered her in French.  The meaning of every word broke through my mind as fire breaks through paper.