“Giuseppe is not dead?”

“He is not dead, and on the whole I incline to think he is not going to die, though you will allow me to say that the rogue deserved it.  The other three gentlemen-at-arms despatched by you are at this moment bringing him up the hill, very carefully, following my instructions.  He will need care.  In fact, it will be touch-and-go with him for many days to come.”

While he talked, my father, catching sight of me, had stepped to Nat’s couch.  Nodding to me without more ado to lift the patient and cut away his shirt, he knelt, unrolled his case of instruments, and with a “Courage, lad!” bent an ear to the faint breathing.  In less than a minute, as it seemed, his hand feeling around the naked back came to a pause a little behind and under the right arm-pit.

“Courage, lad!” he repeated.  “A little pain, and we’ll have it, safe as a wasp in an apple.”

The Corsicans under his orders had withdrawn to a little distance and stood about us in a ring.  While he probed and Nat’s poor body writhed feebly in my arms, I lifted my eyes once with a shudder, and met the Princess Camilla’s.  She was watching, and without a tremor, her face grave as a child’s.

With a short grunt of triumph, my father caught away his hand, dipped it swiftly into the pan of water beside him, and held the bullet aloft between thumb and forefinger.  The Corsicans broke into quick guttural cries, as men hailing a miracle.  As Nat’s head fell back limp against my shoulder I saw the Princess turn and walk away alone.  Her followers dispersed by degrees, but not, I should say, until every man had explained to every other his own theory of the wound and the operation, and how my father had come to find the bullet so unerringly, each theorist tapping his own chest and back, or his interlocutor’s, sometimes a couple tapping each other with vigour, neither listening, both jabbering at full pitch of the voice with prodigious elisions of consonants and equally prodigious drawlings of the vowels.  For us, the dressing of the wound kept us busy, and we paid little attention even when a fresh jabbering announced that the litter-bearers had arrived with Giuseppe.

By-and-by, however, my father rose from his knees and, leaving me to fasten the last bandages, strolled across the slope to see how his other patient had borne the journey.  Just at that moment I heard again a voice calling to the Princess Camilla:  “Ajo, ajo!  O principessa, veni qui!” and simultaneously the voice of Billy Priske uplifted in an incongruous British oath.

My father halted with a gesture of annoyance, checked himself, and, awaiting the Princess, pointed towards an object on the turf—­an object at which Billy Priske, too, was pointing.

It appeared that while his comrades had been attending on Giuseppe, the third Corsican (whom they called Ste, or Stephanu) had filled up his time by rifling our camp; and of all our possessions he had chosen to select our half-dozen spare muskets and a burst coffer, from which he now extracted and (for his comrade’s admiration) held aloft our chiefest treasure—­the Iron Crown of Corsica.