aul," 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.

"In the fort, by the southern blockhouse," I answered. "Let Fort
Stephenson be his monument. It will stand here forever. The woods around
it will be trampled by prowling savages, and later on by prowling white
men. Within, nothing will obliterate the place. Give a little fellow a
bed here, who died between two countries, and will never be a citizen of
either."

"I don't want to make a graveyard of the fort," said Croghan. But he
looked at Paul, bent low over him, and allowed him to be buried near the
southwest angle.

There the child's bones rest to this day. The town of Fremont in the
commonwealth of Ohio has grown up around them. Young children who climb
the grassy bastion, may walk above his head, never guessing that a
little gentleman of France, who died like a soldier of his wound, lies
deeply cradled there.

Before throwing myself down in the dead heaviness which results from
continual loss of sleep, I questioned the wounded British soldiers a