“Why, Abel!” he called out, “what have you got there? and what ’s all this noise about?”

“We’ve ketched the Portagee!” Abel answered, as laconically as the hero of Lake Erie, in his famous dispatch.  “Go in there, you fellah!”

The prisoner was marched into the house, and the Doctor, who had bewitched his clothes upon him in a way that would have been miraculous in anybody but a physician, was down in presentable form as soon as if it had been a child in a fit that he was sent for.

“Richard Veneer!” the Doctor exclaimed.  “What is the meaning of all this?  Mr. Langdon, has anything happened to you?”

Mr. Bernard put his hand to his head.

“My mind is confused,” he said.  “I’ve had a fall.—­Oh, yes!—­wait a minute and it will all come back to me.”

“Sit down, sit down,” the Doctor said.  “Abel will tell me about it.  Slight concussion of the brain.  Can’t remember very well for an hour or two,—­will come right by to-morrow.”

“Been stunded,” Abel said.  “He can’t tell nothin’.”

Abel then proceeded to give a Napoleonic bulletin of the recent combat of cavalry and infantry and its results,—­none slain, one captured.

The Doctor looked at the prisoner through his spectacles.

“What ’s the matter with your shoulder, Venner?”

Dick answered sullenly, that he didn’t know, fell on it when his horse came down.  The Doctor examined it as carefully as he could through his clothes.

“Out of joint.  Untie his hands, Abel”

By this time a small alarm had spread among the neighbors, and there was a circle around Dick, who glared about on the assembled honest people like a hawk with a broken wing.

When the Doctor said, “Untie his hands,” the circle widened perceptibly.

“Isn’t it a leetle rash to give him the use of his hands?  I see there’s females and children standin’ near.”

This was the remark of our old friend, Deacon Soper, who retired from the front row, as he spoke, behind a respectable-looking, but somewhat hastily dressed person of the defenceless sex, the female help of a neighboring household, accompanied by a boy, whose unsmoothed shock of hair looked like a last year’s crow’s-nest.

But Abel untied his hands, in spite of the Deacon’s considerate remonstrance.

“Now,” said the Doctor, “the first thing is to put the joint back.”

“Stop,” said Deacon Soper,—­“stop a minute.  Don’t you think it will be safer—­for the women-folks—­jest to wait till mornin’, afore you put that j’int into the socket?”

Colonel Sprowle, who had been called by a special messenger, spoke up at this moment.

“Let the women-folks and the deacons go home, if they’re scared, and put the fellah’s j’int in as quick as you like.  I ’ll resk him, j’int in or out.”

“I want one of you to go straight down to Dudley Venner’s with a message,” the Doctor said.  “I will have the young man’s shoulder in quick enough.”