“Let him talk,” said the doctor briefly.

Unlike the night before, this was a night of silence.  Everybody slept, but the sentinels, and the men whose wounds kept them awake; and I was both a sentinel, and a man whose wounds kept him awake.

Paul’s little hands were scratched; and there was a stone bruise on the heel he pushed from cover of the blankets.  His small body, compact of so much manliness, was fine and sweet.  Though he bore no resemblance to his mother, it seemed to me that she lay there for me to tend; and the change was no more an astounding miracle than the change of baby to boy.

I had him all that night for my own, putting every other thought out of mind and absorbing his presence.  His forehead and his face lost their burning heat with the coolness of dawn, which blew our shaded candle, flowing from miles of fragrant oaks.

He awoke and looked all around the cabin.  I tried to put his opiate into his mouth; but something restrained me.  I held his hand to my cheek.

“I like you,” he spoke out.  “Don’t you think my mother is pretty?”

I said I thought his mother was the most beautiful woman in the world.  He curled up his mouth corners and gave me a blue-eyed smile.

“My father is not pretty.  But he is a gentleman of France.”

“Where are they, Paul?”

He turned a look upon me without answering.

“Paul,” I said brutally, “tell me where your father and mother are.”

He was so far gone that my voice recalled him.  He simply knew me as a voice and a presence that he liked.

“With poor old Ernestine,” he answered.

“And where is poor old Ernestine?”

He began to shake as if struck with a chill.  I drew the blanket closer.

“Paul, you must tell me!”

He shook his head.  His mouth worked, and his little breast went into convulsions.

He shrieked and threw himself toward me.  “My pretty little mother!”

I held him still in a tight grip.  “My darling—­don’t start your wound!”

I could have beaten myself, but the surgeon afterwards told me the child was dying when he came into the fort.  About dawn, when men’s lives sink to their lowest ebb with night, his sank away, I smoothed his head and kissed and quieted him.  Once he looked into space with blurred eyes, and curled up his mouth corners when I am sure he no longer saw me.

Thus swiftly ended Paul’s unaccountable appearance at the fort.  It was like the falling of a slain bird out of the sky at my feet.  The women were tender with his little body.  They cried over him as they washed him for burial.  The children went outside the stockade and brought green boughs and August wild flowers, bearing the early autumn colors of gold and scarlet.  With these they bedded the child in his plank coffin, unafraid of his waxen sleep.

Before Croghan went to report to his General, he asked me where we should bury the little fellow.