n the blue
blouse and felt the warm blood welling over his fingers. It was a simple
wound through the fleshy part of the shoulder: a strand of saddler's
silk and a few strips of sticking-plaster would have sufficed to dress
it, but the Frenchman smiled when he wiped away the clots and saw the
blood spurting from two or three small divided arteries.

Then he called his African, and they carried the wounded man back to a
tent, and laid him on a bed of moss and cypress boughs, and left him
there to bleed, while he went out into the air, and walked about, and
tossed his hat and shouted with excitement like a madman. But the battle
raged, and the gunners charged their guns and fired, and charged and
fired again, and the men along the breastwork grew furious with the
slaughter and the fiery draughts they took from their canteens through
lips blackened with powder and defiled with grease and shreds of
cartridge-paper; and no one noticed the doctor's mad conduct nor the
savage standing guard before the tent; nor did any other save those two
in the whole battery--no, not even the gunner who had captured him--give
a thought to the prisoner who lay bleeding there, until the battle was
over.

And this prisoner, what of him? Any one, looking upon him as he lay upon
the cypress boughs, would have known him to be thoroughbred. Everything
about him proclaimed it. His face, manly but gentle, his figure, great
in stature and strength, yet graceful in outline like a Grecian god, the
very dress and accoutrements he wore, which were neat, strong,
expensive, but without ornament, showed him to be a gentleman. And
Robert Shirley was a gentleman. Probably no man in all the States could
have been found who would have presented a greater contrast to the man
standing guard outside the tent than this man who lay within it; and for
that reason none who would have been so welcome to Fournier. As the one
was a pure savage, the other was the realization of the most illustrious
enlightenment; the one fierce, cunning, undisciplined, the other gentle,
frank, considerate; as the one was hideous, ill-formed and black as
night, so the other was radiant with manly beauty and fair as the
morning. Each among his own people sprang from noble stock; the one a
prince, the other the descendant of the purest Puritan race, which knew
among its own divines and judges brave captains, and farther back a
governor of the colony. But the guard and his people were at the