"I fear I have not sufficient strength to
bear mine for long; yet I am a Christian, and there are wife and child
waiting for me at home. God knows I am ready when He calls, but my duty
is to live, if possible, for their sake. They will have nothing left if
I pass on."
"The road must grow smoother as we come down into the valley. Are your
wounds serious?"
"I was struck by fragments of a shell," he answered, and I could tell
he spoke the words through his clinched teeth, "and am wounded in the
head as well as the body--oh, my God!" The cry was wrung from him by a
sudden tilting of the wagon, and for a moment my own pain prevented
utterance.
"I hear nothing from the other man," I managed to say at last. "Colonel
Mosby said there were three of us; surely the third man cannot be
already dead?"
"Mercifully unconscious, I think; at least he has made no sound since I
was placed in here."
"No, friends," spoke another and deeper voice from farther back within
the jolting wagon, "I am not unconscious, but less noticeably in pain.
I have lost a leg, yet the stump seems seared and dead, hurting me
little unless I touch it."
We lapsed into solemn silence, it was such an effort to talk, and we
had so little to say. Each man, no doubt, was struggling, as I know I
was, to withhold expression of his agony for the sake of the others. I
lay racked in every nerve, my teeth tightly clinched, my temples beaded
with perspiration.
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