“Why wouldn’t they get their heads snapped off,” Cap demanded, “if they stand around slapping horses’ tails and not listening to what’s said to ’em! Go on, now: go tell General Arnold his scouts want to see him!”

“Who, me?” the attendant asked. “Me tell him?”

Cap made a contemptuous sound. “What you afraid of! Here, I’ll go with you. I and Arnold, we been through three campaigns together. He won’t say nothing to me!”

He took the attendant by the arm and set off: then seemed to change his mind; for he hesitated and came back to us. “I was just thinking,” he said to Nason. “Maybe you better go. I ought to stay here in case a provision cart drives up or something.”

“Provision carts don’t drive up here,” the attendant explained. “They drive up at the back.”

“I’ll go around back,” Cap said immediately.

“You’ll stay right where you are!” Nason told him. He climbed from the cart and went with the attendant along the veranda that extended across the front of the hospital. We saw Nason enter the western wing, and almost immediately appear and beckon to us. We lifted Nathaniel from the cart and helped him up the steps and to where Nason waited.

We could hear Arnold’s voice within—a venomous, rasping voice. “Charlatans!” he railed. “Empirics! Not a doctor among you that knows what he’s doing or why he does it! Why don’t you learn your trade, so you won’t have to spend your life guessing, guessing, guessing! A set of charlatans and empirics: that’s what you are!”

“Hm!” Doc Means said. “I guess one of those doctors must have done something pretty interesting to get himself called names like that!”

“What do those names mean?” Cap asked. “What’s a empiric?”

“Well,” Doc said, glancing apologetically at Ellen, “I don’t like to say right here.”

A man whom we took to be a doctor, since he carried a black bag, threw open the door at the end of the veranda. He was red-faced and indignant, and stalked past us, muttering.

“Wait,” I said to Nason. “Arnold’s angry. We’d better come back later.”

“No,” Ellen said. “No!” She smiled at Nathaniel. “It’s better to face a man when he’s angry, you understand, because his anger can’t last forever; and as it grows less, he becomes kind. Remember this while you’re with him, Nathaniel!”

He nodded heavily. She raised her eyes to mine, and at that, suddenly ashamed of my timidity, I pressed Nathaniel toward the door. Cap, Doc, Tom, Natanis and Lewis Vincent waited on the veranda, and the rest of us went in to Arnold’s room.