d 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.

"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.

"P