I saw fit to put in a word. “It’s true that most doctors say they’re poison, but those of us who’ve sailed to Spain know it’s not so. The Spaniards use tomatoes on everything they cook, nearly, and every Arundel mariner that’s sailed there has tomatoes planted in his garden, and has ’em made into ketchup for winter use.”

“They’re poison!” Cap insisted. “Any damned fool knows love apples is pure poison!” He eyed Doc craftily. “If doctors ain’t no good, and all their ideas is so wrong, what you want to carry a medical liberry around with you for?”

“So to find out what the best doctors recommend, and then do different,” Doc said.

Enraged at Doc’s stubbornness, Cap would, I think, have taken our treatment into his own hands if Nason had not interfered and ordered him away to the westward, reminding him that the citizens of Rumford might be on his trail. So Cap loaded his supplies on the back of his gray mare, frequently pausing to drink copiously from a kettle in which he had mixed two quarts of rum and a quart of warm milk; and we all felt more at peace when he hoisted himself clumsily into the saddle and went lurching off toward Lake Champlain, hoarsely bawling a French song.

Due, perhaps, to the thimbleful of Digby’s Sympathetic Powder that Doc had put in our milk, we were able to be on our feet and move around on the following day.

Nason set rabbit snares in the lowland at the foot of the hill, so that we might have fresh meat when our illness was over; and twice a day he drilled us—in the morning in the English fashion; and in the afternoon in the Indian fashion. In the first we formed straight ranks and held in our stomachs, very military, shouldering oak saplings in place of muskets. In the second we learned how to break from single file into double and shelter ourselves behind trees, facing outward, so that no enemy could take us in the rear.

For the most part we lay and listened to Doc Means, who gave us repeated assurances of how healthy he proposed to keep the lot of us after we should reach Canada, provided we kept away from regular doctors and went without food occasionally—a piece of advice to which even he, in after days, sometimes referred sardonically.

He took pleasure in quoting to us from his medical library and calling attention to some of the drawbacks connected with the remedies that had come to his notice.

He had learned by heart, out of his books, a cure for everything on earth that anybody could name, from warts to fright; and the only one with which he seemed to find no fault was the fright cure.