Cool forest night air flowed over the stockade, swaying smoke this way and that.  As the fire was stirred, and smoke turned to flame, it showed more and more distinctly what dimness had screened.

A man rose up on the other side of it, clothed in a coffee sack, in which holes were cut for his head and arms.  His hat was a tin kettle with the handle sticking out behind like a stiff queue.

Indifferent to his grotesqueness, he took it off and put it on the ground beside him, standing ready to command attention.

He was a small, dark, wiry man, barefooted and barelegged, whose black eyes sparkled, and whose scanty hair and beard hung down over shoulders and breast.  Some pokes of leather, much scratched, hung bulging from the rope which girded his coffee sack.  From one of these he took a few unbound leaves, the fragment of a book, spread them open, and began to read in a chanting, prophetic key, something about the love of the Lord and the mysteries of angels.  His listeners kept their eyes on him, giving an indulgent ear to spiritual messages that made less demand on them than the violent earthly ones to which they were accustomed.

“It’s Johnny Appleseed,” a man at my side told me, as if the name explained anything he might do.

[Illustration:  “It’s Johnny Appleseed,” a man at my side told me]

When Johnny Appleseed finished reading the leaves he put them back in his bag, and took his kettle to the well for water.  He then brought some meal from the cook-house and made mush in his hat.

The others, turning their minds from future mysteries, began to talk about present danger, when he stood up from his labor to inquire: 

“Is there plenty in the fort for the children to eat?”

“Plenty, Johnny, plenty,” several voices assured him.

“I can go without supper if the children haven’t enough.”

“Eat your supper, Johnny.  Major Croghan will give you more if you want it,” said a soldier.

“And we’ll give you jerked Britisher, if you’ll wait for it,” said another.

“Johnny never eats meat,” one of the refugees put in.  “He thinks it’s sinful to kill critters.  All the things in the woods likes him.  Once he got into a holler log to sleep, and some squirrels warned him to move out, they settled there first; and he done it.  I don’t allow he’d pick a flea off his own hide for fear he’d break its legs so it couldn’t hop around and make a living.”

The wilderness prophet sat down quietly to his meal without appearing to notice what was said about him; and when he had eaten, carried his hat into the cook-house, where dogs could not get at his remaining porridge.

“Now he’ll save that for his breakfast,” remarked another refugee.  “There’s nothing he hates like waste.”

“Talking about squirrels,” exclaimed the man at my side, “I believe he has a pasture for old, broke-down horses somewhere east in the hills.  All the bates he can find he swaps young trees for, and they go off with him leading them, but he never comes into the settlements on horseback.”