The Indians barked when Verrieul had finished. “How! How! How!” they ejaculated, humping themselves far over, to give the sounds greater volume.

“There’s just one little point I’d like to bring up,” Doc continued. “You can build a better barrel out of staves than out of bung-holes. Here you got us all the way out here, hoping to make use of this magic that me and my children carry. Yet you ain’t doing nothing to keep us from freezing to death. There it is, gentlemen! There it is, my friends and brothers! If we freeze, you’re building your barrel out of bung-holes! You’ll have this and this and this”—he pointed to his Venesection Mannekin, Herbal and lancet—“but they won’t do you no good! Lemme remind you of this, too: He that soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly, and he that soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully.”

The Indians howped agreeably.

“Yes,” Doc concluded, “nobody can’t make you give more’n your heart tells you; but kindly bear in mind that the Great Spirit loveth a cheerful giver. What I’m getting at is this: unless you want to lose us and the great magic herein contained”—he slapped his medical supplies—“you got to give me and my children something to sleep under at night!”

Sponge-belly made a terse reply to Verrieul’s translation of these words of Doc’s. “He says,” Verrieul told us, “that we could have had part of their blankets whenever we asked for them. He says he had no way of knowing that our magic wouldn’t cure cold as well as other things. He says, too, he would like to look into the magic book of healing.”

When Doc relinquished his battered Culpeper’s Herbal, Sponge-belly and his companions examined it in the flickering firelight.

In Culpeper’s Herbal are colored drawings of hundreds of plants, leaves and flowers. The text tells how to use flowers, roots and leaves in the curing of every known ailment, from falling hair to cold feet. In it, too, is an appendix explaining the proper astronomical time to gather all these growing things—not only the best day of the month but the most fitting hour of the day: also how to mix potato pudding, take away little red pimples from the face, make icing for tarts, and so on.

The Indians were entranced by the pictures, and pointed first at one and then at another, exclaiming in amazement. They were particularly taken with the likeness of the mullein, which, because of its steeple-shaped spike of yellow flowers, was handsomer than adjoining pictures of mugwort, mustard, motherwort, maidenhair and wild marjoram. They made belching sounds, pushing at each other so to examine the page more closely.

“They want to know what that’s good for,” Verrieul translated.