“I think it unlikely the British would allow the Shawanoes to burden their march with any prisoners.”

“Somebody had him, and I’m afraid he’s been shot either during the action or in the retreat.  He was hid in the ravine.”

“Bring him here,” said Croghan.

A boy with blue eyes set wide apart, hair clinging brightly and moistly to his pallid forehead, and mouth corners turning up in a courageous smile, entered and stood erect before the officer.  He was a well made little fellow.  His tiny buckskin hunting shirt was draped with a sash in the Indian fashion, showing the curve of his naked hip.  Down this a narrow line of blood was moving.  Children of refugees, full of pity, looked through the open door behind him.

“Go to him, Shipp,” said Croghan, as the boy staggered.  But he waved the ensign back.

“Who are you, my man?” asked the Major.

“I believe,” he answered, “I am the Marquis de Ferrier.”

IV

He pitched forward, and I was quicker than Ensign Shipp.  I set him on my knees, and the surgeon poured a little watered brandy clown his throat.

“Paul!” I said to him.

“Stand back,” ordered the surgeon, as women followed their children, crowding the room.

“Do you know him, Lazarre?” asked Croghan.

“It’s Madame de Ferrier’s child.”

“Not the baby I used to see at De Chaumont’s?  What’s he doing at Fort Stephenson?”

The women made up my bunk for Paul, and I laid him in it.  Each wanted to take him to her care.  The surgeon sent them to the cook-house to brew messes for him, and stripped the child, finding a bullet wound in his side.  Probing brought nothing out, and I did not ask a single question.  The child should live.  There could be no thought of anything else.  While the surgeon dressed and bandaged that small hole like a sucked-in mouth, I saw the boy sitting on saddle-bags behind me, his arms clipping my waist, while we threaded bowers of horse paths.  I had not known how I wanted a boy to sit behind me!  No wonder pioneer men were so confident and full of jokes:  they had children behind them!

He was burning with fever.  His eyes swam in it as he looked at me.  He could not eat when food was brought to him, but begged for water, and the surgeon allowed him what the women considered reckless quantities.  Over stockades came the August rustle of the forest.  Morning bird voices succeeded to the cannon’s reverberations.

The surgeon turned everybody out but me, and looked in by times from his hospital of British wounded.  I wiped the boy’s forehead and gave him his medicine, fanning him all day long.  He lay in stupor, and the surgeon said he was going comfortably, and would suffer little.  Once in awhile he turned up the corners of his mouth and smiled at me, as if the opiate gave him blessed sensations.  I asked the surgeon what I should do in the night if he came out of it and wanted to talk.