“Does he always go barefoot?” I asked.

“Sometimes he makes bark sandals.  If you give him a pair of shoes he’ll give them away to the first person that can wear them and needs them.  Hunters wrap dried leaves around their leggins to keep the rattlesnakes out, but Johnny never protects himself at all.”

“No wonder,” spoke a soldier.  “Any snake’d be discouraged at them shanks.  A seven-year rattler’d break his fang on ’em.”

Johnny came out of the cook-house with an iron poker, and heated it in the coals.  All the men around the fire waited, understanding what he was about to do, but my own breath drew with a hiss through my teeth as he laid the red hot iron first on one long cut and then another in his travel-worn feet.  Having cauterized himself effectually, and returned the poker, he took his place in perfect serenity, without any show of pain, prepared to accommodate himself to the company.

Some boys, awake with the bigness of the occasion, sat down near Johnny Appleseed, and gave him their frank attention.  Each boy had his hair cut straight around below the ears, where his mother had measured it with an inverted bowl, and freshly trimmed him for life in the fort, and perhaps for the discomfiture of savages, if he came under the scalping knife.  Open-mouthed or stern-jawed, according to temperament, the young pioneers listened to stories about Tecumseh, and surmises on the enemy’s march, and the likelihood of a night attack.

“Tippecanoe was fought at four o’clock in the morning,” said a soldier.

“I was there,” spoke out Johnny Appleseed.

No other man could say as much.  All looked at him as he stood on his cauterized feet, stretching his arms, lean and sun-cured, upward in the firelight.

“Angels were there.  In rain and darkness I heard them speak and say, ’He hath cast the lot for them, and His hand hath divided it unto them by line; they shall possess it forever; from generation to generation shall they dwell therein.  The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose!’”

“Say, Johnny, what does an angel look like?” piped up one of the boys, quite in fellowship.

Johnny Appleseed turned his rapt vision aside and answered: 

“‘White robes were given unto every one of them.’  There had I laid me down in peace to sleep, and the Lord made me to dwell in safety.  The camp-fires burned red in the sheltered place, and they who were to possess the land watched by the campfires.  I looked down from my high place, from my shelter of leaves and my log that the Lord gave me for a bed, and saw the red camp-fires blink in the darkness.

“Then was I aware that the heathen crept betwixt me and the camp, surrounding it as a cloud that lies upon the ground.  The rain fell upon us all, and there was not so much sound as the rustling of grasshoppers in tall grass.  I said they will surprise the camp and slay the sleepers, not knowing that they who were to possess the land watched every man with his weapon.  But when I would have sounded the trumpet of warning, I heard a rifle shot, and all the Indians rose up screeching and rushed at the red fires.