"That answered very well for about three months, but then suddenly Fly assumed a strange attitude towards us. She was less merry, nervous, uneasy, and almost irritable, and we frequently asked her: 'What is the matter with you?' And she replied: 'Nothing; leave me alone.'
"Only-One-Eye told us what was the matter with her, one Saturday evening. We had just sat down to table in the little dining-room which our eating house keeper, Barbichon, reserved for us at his inn, and, the soup being finished, we were waiting for the fried fish, when our friend, who also appeared thoughtful, took Fly's hand and said: 'My dear comrades, I have a very grave communication to make to you, and one that may, perhaps, give rise to a prolonged discussion, but we shall have to argue between the courses. Poor Fly has announced a piece of disastrous news to me, and at the same time has asked me to tell it to you: She is pregnant, and I will only add two words. This is not the moment to abandon her, and it is forbidden to try and find out who is the father.'[2]
"At first we were stupefied, and felt as if some disaster had befallen us, and we looked at each other with the longing to accuse some one, but whom? Oh! Which of us? I have never felt as I did at that moment, the perfidy of that cruel joke of nature, which never allows a man to know for certainty whether he is the father of his child. Then, however, by degrees a sort of feeling of consolation came over us and gave us comfort, which sprung from a confused idea of joint responsibility.
"Tomahawk, who spoke but little, formulated a beginning of reassurance by these words: 'Well, so much the worse, by Jove: Union is Strength, however.' At that moment a scullion brought in the fried gudgeons, but they did not fall to on them like they generally did, for they all had the same trouble on their mind, and Only-One-Eye continued: 'Under these circumstances she has had the delicacy to confess everything to me. My friends, we are all equally guilty, so let us shake hands and adopt the child.'
"That was decided upon unanimously; they raised their hands to the dish of fried fish and swore: 'We will adopt it.' Then, when she was thus suddenly saved, and delivered from the weight of the terrible anxiety that had been tormenting her for a month, this pretty, crazy, poor child of love, Fly, exclaimed: 'Oh! my friends! my friends! You have kind, good hearts ... good hearts.... Thank you, all of you!' And she shed tears for the first time before us all.
"From that time we spoke in the boat about the child, as if it were already born, and each of us took an exaggerated interest, because of our share in the matter, in the slow and regular development of our mistress's waist, and we stopped rowing in order to say: 'Fly?' 'Here I am,' she replied. 'Boy or girl?' 'Boy.' 'What will he be when he grows up?'
"Then she indulged in the most fantastic flights of fancy. They were interminable stories, astounding inventions, from the day of his birth until his final triumph. In the unsophisticated, passionate and moving fancy of this extraordinary little creature, who now lived chastely in the midst of us five, whom she called 'her five papas.' She saw him as a sailor, and told us that he would discover another America; as a general, restoring Alsace and Lorraine to France, then as an emperor, founding a dynasty of wise and generous rulers who would bestow settled welfare on our country; then as a learned man and natural philosopher, revealing, first of all, the secret of the manufacture of gold, then that of living forever; then as an aeronaut, who invented the means of soaring up to the stars, and of making the skies an immense promenade for men; the realization of the most unforeseen and magnificent dreams.
"How nice and how amusing she was, poor little girl, until the end of the summer, but the twentieth of September dissipated her dream. We had come back from breakfasting at the Maison Lafitte and were passing Saint-Germain, when she felt thirsty and asked us to stop at Pecq.
"For some time past, she had been getting very heavy, and that inconvenienced her very much. She could not run about as she used to do, nor jump from the boat to the shore, as she had formerly done. She would try, in spite of our warnings and efforts to stop her, and she would have fallen a dozen times, had it not been that our restraining arms kept her back. On that day, she was imprudent enough to wish to land before the boat had stopped; it was one of those pieces of bravado by which athletes, who are ill or tired, sometimes kill themselves, and at the very moment when we were going to come alongside, she got up, took a spring and tried to jump onto the landing-stage. She was not strong enough, however, and only just touched the stones with her foot, struck the sharp angle with her stomach, uttered a cry and disappeared into the water.
"We all five plunged in at the same moment, and pulled out the poor, fainting woman, who was as pale as death, and was already suffering terrible pain, and we carried her as quickly as possible to the nearest inn, and sent for a medical man. For the six hours that her miscarriage lasted, she suffered the most terrible pain with the courage of a heroine, while we were grieving round her, feverish with anxiety and fear. Then she was delivered of a dead child, and for some days we were in the greatest fear for her life; at last, however, the doctor said to us one morning: 'I think her life is saved. That girl is made of steel,' and we all of us went into her room, with radiant hearts, and Only-One-Eye, as spokesman for us all, said to her: 'The danger is all over, little Fly, and we are all happy again.'