Nason seemed uncomfortable. “There’s one more thing. It’s important, and you’ll have to swear not to tell. When you hear it, you may not want to go; but whether you go or not, you’ve got to keep quiet about it, or you might get us shot. It’s against the law.”

“Well, what is it?”

“You swear, both of you?” He looked from Nathaniel to me.

We said we did.

“Well,” he said, “smallpox is bad in Canada. Bad! It’s hard to dodge. Nearly everybody gets it. There’s no use taking men to Canada for scout duty unless they’ve had the smallpox. They’d be busier dying than scouting. All that go with us must take smallpox by inoculation.”

“Where must we take it?”

Cap Huff cleared his throat importantly. “I got my own doctor with me. He’ll fix you in a jiffy.”

Nathaniel came to stand close beside me. “You mean we’d take the smallpox right here: right in this room?”

“You’d just get inoculated with scrapings from a mild case,” Nason said. “Doc Means took some nice scrapings. You won’t break out for a week.”

“Break out?” Nathaniel asked. “Will we have scars on us?”

Cap Huff helped himself from the rum bottle. “Listen, I’d ruther have this kind of smallpox than one flea, and everybody’s got to have fleas sometime. You’ve had ’em, ain’t you?”

He went to the outer door, opened it, and, to our astonishment—for we hadn’t suspected that our two guests had been accompanied by a third guest who waited outside—we heard him speaking to someone.

Immediately there walked in a man as mild-looking and helpless-appearing as I had ever seen. He was certainly sixty years old, and maybe even seventy. His hair was white and his face a fresh pink, in spite of its thinness; and perhaps because his eyes were a faded blue, there was an air of childish innocence about him: a trustful, useless look. He was, I thought, somewhat insecure on his feet: he seemed to waver a little in his walk. The fact is, my own youthful vanity in my strength and agility led me to feel a certain compassion for his feebleness. Since that time I have found that there were few who were not similarly affected by Doc Means; but the truth is that he was about as feeble as a young wildcat.

It was not Doc Means’s feebleness, however, that upon our first meeting impressed us most poignantly and instantly. It was his smell. With his entrance the room was filled with an acrid, penetrating odor that made the eyes water.

Nason and Huff, apparently inured, seemed not aware of anything unusual; but Nathaniel, unprepared, uttered a muffled sound of surprise and protest, opened a window wide and remained near it.