Doc Means and I lay in the smoke of a green-wood fire, that night, to keep ourselves from being eaten alive by mosquitoes and black flies; and Doc was restless, getting up a score of times to tinker with the smudge and peer toward the sentry fires that ringed the fort.

“Go to sleep,” I told him. “From the way you’re fretting, a body’d think you had a brother within the British lines yourself.”

Doc seemed only half to hear me. “I’m fretting because I’m getting to be like a regular doctor. I’m getting so I change my medical ideas too often. Only last year I used to think there wasn’t nothing so good for people as rest. I used to think you’d get sick if you didn’t get enough rest. Well, I know now it ain’t rest that keeps people healthy. It’s work. If I can’t get me some work pretty quick, I’ll get sick. If somebody don’t give me something to work at tomorrow or next day, I’ll feel obliged to leave this army to get along by itself and go home and start making medicine. I got an idea for a fine medicine to cure fright, worry, falling pains and so on. There’s a great field for it in this country, and I bet I could get rich selling it. Old Shaman Means’s Injun Remedy—Old Shaman Means’s Midewiwin Medicine—Old Shaman Means’s Catamount Compound … cures homesickness, backbiting, Toryism and feelings like your insides were sinking … just a little rum and a lot of water and a pinch of Digby’s Sympathetic Powder … that’s all you’d need … there ain’t nothing the matter with you unless you think there is.…”

In listening to his nonsense I forgot, for a moment, my worries about Nathaniel and Ellen Phipps, and in that moment I fell asleep, as I think Doc knew I would.

*    *    *

… It was many a day before either of us had occasion to worry over not having enough work to do. There were times, indeed, when I came to think that if health, as Doc now claimed to believe, depended on a surfeit of hard work, the pair of us might live to be older than Methuselah.