The next April, after Leipsic, Napoleon Bonaparte was banished to the island of Elba; and Louis XVIII passed from his latest refuge at Hartwell House in England, to London; where the Prince Regent honored him and the whole capital cheered him; and thence to Paris where he was proclaimed king of France.  We heard of it in due course, as ships brought news.  I was serving with the American forces.

The world is fluid to a boy.  He can do and dare anything.  But it hardens around a man and becomes a wall through which he must cut.  I felt the wall close around me.

In September I was wounded at the battle of Plattsburg on Lake Champlain.  Three men, besides the General and the doctor, and my Oneida, showed a differing interest in me, while I lay with a gap under my left arm, in a hospital tent.

First came Count de Chaumont, his face plowed with lines; no longer the trim gentleman, youthfully easy, and in his full maturity, that he had been when I first saw him at close range.

He sat down on a camp seat by my cot, and I asked him before he could speak—­

“Where is Madame de Ferrier?”

“She’s dead,” he answered.

“I don’t believe it.”

“You’re young.  I’m going back to France for a while.  France will not be what it was under the Empire.  I’m tired of most things, however, and my holdings here make me independent of changes there.”

“What reason have you to think that she is dead?”

“Do you know the Indiana Territory well?”

“The northern part only.”

“It happened in what was called the Pigeon Roost settlement at the fork of the White River.  The Kickapoos and Winnebagoes did it.  There were about two dozen people in the settlement.”

“I asked how you know these things.”

“I have some of the best Indian runners that ever trod moccasins, and when I set them to scouting, they generally find what I want;—­so I know a great many things.”

“But Paul—­”

“It’s an old custom to adopt children into the tribes.  You know your father, Chief Williams, is descended from a white girl who was a prisoner.  There were about two dozen people in the settlement, men, women and children.  The majority of the children were dashed against trees.  It has been consolation to me to think she did not survive in the hands of savages.”

The hidden causes which work out results never worked out a result more improbable.  I lay silent, and De Chaumont said,

“Do you remember the night you disappeared from the Tuileries?”

“I remember it.”

“You remember we determined not to let the Marquis de Ferrier see Napoleon.  When you went down the corridor with Eagle I thought you were luring him.  But she told us afterward you were threatened with arrest, and she helped you out of the Tuileries by a private stairway.”

“Did it make any stir in the palace?”