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“My commander, Captain Le Rat, the one that got the bullet that smashed up his ankle, was the first one to be dosed with digestive. His ankle got better,” said Corporal Cuckoo, snapping his fingers, “—like that. I was the third or fourth soldier to get a dose of Doctor Paré’s digestive. The Doc was looking over the battlefield, because he wanted a dead body to cut up on the side. You know how doctors are. This kid Jehan told me he wanted a brain to play around with. Well, there I was, see, with my brains showing. All the doctor had to do was reach down and help himself. Well, to cut it short, he saw that I was breathing, and wondered how the hell a man could be breathing after he’d got what I had. So he poured some of his digestive into the hole in my head, tied it up, and watched for developments. I told you what happened then. I came back to life. More than that, the bones in my head grew together. Doctor Ambroise Paré believed he’d got something. So he was keeping me sort of under observation, and making notes.

“I know doctors. Well, anyway, I went to work on Jehan. I said: ‘Be a good fellow, Jehan, tell a pal what is this digestive, or whatever your master calls it?’

“Jehan said: ‘Why, sir, my master makes no secret of it. It is nothing but a mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses and turpentine.’ (I don’t mind telling you that, bub, because it’s already been printed.)”

I said to Corporal Cuckoo; “I don’t know how the devil you come by these curious facts, but I happen to know that they’re true. They are available in several histories of medicine. Ambroise Paré’s digestive, with which he treated the wounded after the Battle of Turin was, as you say, nothing but a mixture of oil of roses, egg yolks, and turpentine. And it is also a fact that the first wounded man upon whom he tried it really was Captain Le Rat, in 1537. Paré said at the time: ‘I dressed his wounds and God healed him’ . . . Well?”

“Yeahp,” said Corporal Cuckoo, with a sneer. “Sure. Turpentine, oil of roses, eggs. That’s right. You know the proportions?”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“I know you don’t, bub. Well, I do. See? And I’ll tell you something else. It’s not just oil of roses, eggs, and turpentine—there was one other thing Doc Paré slipped in in my case, for an experiment—see? And I know what it is.”

I said: “Well, go on.”

“Well, I could see that this Doctor Ambroise Paré was going to make something out of me, see? So I kept my eyes open, and I waited, and I worked on Jehan, until I found out just where the doctor kept his notebook. I mean, in those days you could get sixty or seventy thousand dollars for a bit of bone they called a ‘unicorn’s horn.’ Hell, I mean, if I had something that could just about bring a man back from the dead—draw his bones together and put him on his feet in a week or two, even if his brains were coming out—hell, everybody was having a war then, and I could have been rich in a few minutes.”

I said: “No doubt about that. What—”

“—What the hell,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “What the hell right did he have to use me for a guinea pig? Where would he have been if it hadn’t been for me? And where do you think I’d have been after? Out on my neck with two or three gold pieces, while the doctor grabbed the credit and made millions out of it. I wanted to open a place in Paris—girls and everything, see? Could I do that on two or three gold pieces? I ask you! Okay; one night when Doctor Paré and Jehan were out, I took his notebook, slipped out of a window, and got the hell out of it.

“As soon as I thought I was safe, I went into a saloon, and drank some wine, and got into conversation with a girl. It seems somebody else was interested in this girl, and there was a fight. The other guy cut me in the face with a knife. I had a knife too. You know how it is—all of a sudden I felt something pulling my knife out of my hand, and I saw that I’d pushed it between this man’s ribs. He was one of those mean little guys, about a hundred and twenty pounds, with a screwed-up face. (She was a great big girl with yellow hair.) I could see that I’d killed him, so I ran for my life, and I left my knife where it was—stuck tight between his ribs. I hid out, expecting trouble. But they never found me. Most of that night I lay under a hedge. I was pretty sick. I mean, he’d cut me from just under the eye to the back of my head—and cut me deep. He’d cut the top of my right ear off, clean. It wasn’t only that it hurt like hell, but I knew I could be identified by that cut. I’d left half an ear behind me. It was me for the gallows, see? So I kept as quiet as I could, in a ditch, and went to sleep for a few hours before dawn. And then, when I woke up, that cut didn’t hurt at all, not even my ear—and I can tell you that a cut ear sure does hurt. I went and washed my face in a pond, and when the water got still enough so I could see myself, I saw that that cut and this ear had healed right up so that the marks looked five years old. All that in half a night! So I went on my way. About two days later, a farmer’s dog bit me in the leg—took a piece out. Well, a bite like that ought to take weeks to heal up. But mine didn’t. It was all healed over by next day, and there was hardly a scar. That stuff Paré poured into my head had made me so that any wound I might get, anywhere, anytime, would just heal right up—like magic. I knew I had something when I grabbed those papers of Paré’s. But this was terrific!”

“You had them still, Corporal Cuckoo?”

“What do you think? Sure I had them, wrapped up in a bit of linen and tied round my waist—four pieces of . . . not paper, the other stuff, parchment. That’s it, parchment. Folded across, and sewn up along the fold. The outside bit was blank, like a cover. But the six pages inside were all written over. The hell of it was, I couldn’t read. I’d never been learned. See? Well, I had the best part of my two gold pieces left, and I pushed on to Paris.”

I asked: “Didn’t Ambroise Paré say anything?”

Corporal Cuckoo sneered again. “What the hell could he say?” he asked. “Say what? Say he’d resurrected the dead with his digestive? That would have finished him for sure. Where was his evidence? And you can bet your life that kid Jehan kept his mouth shut: he wouldn’t want the doctor to know he’d squealed. See? No, nobody said a word. I got into Paris okay.”

“What did you do there?” I asked.

“My idea was to find somebody I could trust, to read those papers for me, see? If you want to know how I got my living, well, I did the best I could . . . never mind what. Well, one night, in a place where I was, I came across a student, mooching drinks, an educated man with no place to sleep. I showed him the doctor’s papers, and asked him what they meant. They made him think a bit, but he got the hang of them. The doctor had written down just how he’d mixed that digestive of his, and that only filled up one page. Four of the other pages were full of figures, and the only other writing was on the last page. It was all about me. And how he’d cured me.”

I said: “With the yolks of eggs, oil of roses, and turpentine?”

Corporal Cuckoo nodded, and said: “Yeahp. Them three and something else.”

I said: “I’ll bet you anything you like I know what the fourth ingredient is, in this digestive.”

“What’ll you bet?” asked Corporal Cuckoo.

I said: “I’ll bet you a beehive.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, Corporal, it stands to reason. You said you wanted to raise chickens, roses, and bees. You said you wanted to go south for turpentine. You accounted for egg yolks, oil of roses, and turpentine in Doctor Paré’s formula. What would a man like you want with bees? Obviously the fourth ingredient is honey.”

“Yeahp,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “You’re right, bub. The doctor slipped in some honey. . . .” He opened a jackknife, looked at me narrowly, then snapped the blade back again and pocketed the knife, saying: “You don’t know the proportions. You don’t know how to mix the stuff. You don’t know how hot it ought to be, or how slow you’ve got to let it cool.”