"Who makes that 'dolly' furniture?" he asked, idly. "I wish I could get any one to work for me one-half so well. Carved, too. I didn't know there were tools fine enough to make those tiny wreaths."
Mrs. Schotz shook her head at him good-humoredly.
"My man, he speak English. I—not—can." Following her gesture, the stranger saw, in the back part of the shop, a patient figure at work.
Joseph Schotz was sitting in an invalid-chair, a table littered with tools and bits of wood by his side. One leg, bandaged and swathed, rested on a cushion. His strong peasant face was seamed and drawn with pain.
The Man was beside him in an instant.
"Yes, I make the dolls' houses and carve the furniture—great work, that, for a man, sir? I used to be a cabinet-maker at Annapolis—before my leg got so bad. No, sir, I did not learn my trade there. I was apprenticed to Cadieux, who was cabinet-maker to Napoleon. Yes, the Emperor. Who else could it have been? But that was after those pigs of Russians shot me in the leg. It was their ball that brought me here," with a contemptuous glance at his bandaged leg. "I was color-bearer—you see, I was too young to go in any other way. I was sixteen when I was wounded."
The Man found himself a chair.
"Why, no, sir, it isn't much of a story. It is only that I could never stay still. I don't believe men were ever meant to. That's why it's—" He checked himself with a glance at his wife. "I was born in the Tyrol, but the name of Buonaparte pulled me to France. Why, sir, I don't know what it was, but he is the only great man I have ever known. He made you drop everything and go with him, that is all. We never stopped to ask what it was, but—he knew his soldiers, he didn't know what it was to be afraid—and where he wanted to go he went."
The Man, who had been listening thus far with sympathy, started—at these last words—into tenseness.