“Hi-yi!” Doc exclaimed when Verrieul translated this to us. “This feller’s going to try to make me out a wizard instead of a medicine man! If he does that, he’ll have us tomahawked, all three of us. Well, you tell him this before we go out: you tell him we ain’t none of us wizards, because if we was, we’d have used our magic on him to shut him up, instead of being willing to trust our red brothers to do the right thing by us!” He nodded amiably at Gautier, then herded Verrieul and me from the crowded council house.

Outside, he drew a sleeve across his forehead. “By Grapes! If I ever get out of this, I ain’t never again going to tell nobody I’m a doctor! It’s the most ungratefullest profession there is, and if I had it to do over again, I’d ruther be anything than a doctor. Yes sir: I’d even ruther be in that there Congress in Philadelphia!”

XLVIII

WHILE we waited apprehensively outside the council house, I felt a touch on my sleeve. A quiet voice, close beside me, whispered, “Say nothing. We go where nobody hear.” It was Joseph Phipps, who had somehow contrived to follow us.

When we stood in the center of the grassless dance-enclosure, Joseph laughed silently. “This place long ways from anywhere! I was think I become to be old man before I catch up with you!”

“She sent you?”

He nodded.

“Have you a letter for me?”

“No,” Joseph said. “No chance. My aunt—like hawk!” He made a clutching gesture.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. I understand. But you saw Ellen, didn’t you? She’s well, isn’t she?”

“She all right.”

“And my brother Nathaniel? You saw him too?”

“One-two times.”

“He’s well?”

“Didn’t ask about health,” Joseph said.

“They exchanged him? They sent him to Ticonderoga?”

“No,” he said, and then, disjointedly, in his mangled English, he made me understand that he had taken Ellen to Albany when the two of them had left Skenesboro. In Albany she had remained for two days with people she had never before seen—people to whom she had been directed by Marie de Sabrevois, and with whom she expected to remain until her aunt should join her. At first these strangers had been hospitable; then had changed. They had told Ellen that Albany was not a safe place, and had insisted that she return to St. John’s. They had given her letters to take to her aunt.