I looked at Murdo’s wound and marveled that he was still alive. Only his great powers of resistance had enabled him to live that long. I wondered that he had not died long before of blood-poisoning! He was emaciated beyond belief. His long arms were so thin that it looked as though his bones had been shaved down to spindles. The veins of his neck and around his temples showed like blue cords from which the hemp had been worn and loosened. The cheek-bones of his dark-grained face edged against the parched skin and gave him a haunted aspect. Even his voice, that great and haughty drum-voice, though still big and commanding, had lost the firmness of its tissue. It rasped like drumsticks upon the loosened skin of a bass drum. The tribe, nervous and restless, wandered hither and thither in narrow circles, like lost children, uncertain and afraid, forming little groups behind the trees in the forest, or under distant tents, discussing in subdued voices every detail, bickering, quarreling, doing their best to keep disagreeable things away from the ears and eyes of their chief. The horses and the dogs looked worn and forlorn, sick and sorely in need of a master. For the horse of the Gipsy and the dog of the Gipsy are happy when their master is happy, and sad when their master is sad, and grow restless and nervous when sojourning too long in the same place. “But why are you all so sad?” I asked Lica, the son of Miora, the witch, who had somehow assumed some sort of command during the chief’s illness. “How can we be happy,” he replied, “when we no longer hear the song of the hammer upon the anvil, when the smith dares not blow his bellows lest he disturb Murdo from his sleep? When we have looked upon the same hill so long the pegs of our tents are rotting in the ground? Look! Our horses have lost half their hoof-bones. It is an age since they have been shod. Look! We have muzzled our dogs, and when our goats bleat in the morning, our women rush out with knife in hand to cut out their tongues. Because our chief battles with death we have become like old women; fussy and afraid of noise.” That very afternoon, having bedded Murdo as comfortably as possible in the wagon, I started on my journey with him to the town of Braila on the Danube. The trip lasted several days. “Now tell me what thou hast learned while away from my camp,” Murdo turned upon me suddenly the night of our first stopover at an inn kept by a Greek. I was certain the doctor would have to operate and cleanse the wound where Yorga’s knife had struck. Fearing Murdo might oppose such operation, I began to explain the cause of infections and the means employed for staying them, and the existence of microbes in the human body. Murdo listened very attentively as though I were telling him some interesting story, but I could see that he did not believe what I was telling him. After a long pause he said to me: