Wearied and shattered though he was and replete as the night had been
with anxiety and vigil, Drummond climbed the goat-track that led to
the sentry's perch feeling full of hope and pluck and fight. He and
his men had divided the night into watches, one being awake and astir,
not even permitting himself to sit a moment, while the others slept.
The fact that he was able to send back to the caves, have an
ambulance hitched in and driven down to where Wing lay wounded, and to
bear him slowly, carefully, back to shelter, reaching the caves
without further molestation before darkness set in, had served to
convince the young commander that he could count on reasonable
security for the night. Unless they know their prey to be puny and
well-nigh defenceless, Apaches make no assault in the darkness, and
so, with the coming of the dawn, he had about him fit for service a
squad of seven troopers, most of them seasoned mountain fighters. His
main anxiety now was for Wing, whose wound was severe, the bullet
having gone clear through, just grazing the bone, and who, despite the
fact that Fanny Harvey early in the night had every now and then crept
noiselessly in to cool his fevered head, seemed strangely affected
mentally, seemed unnaturally flighty and wandering, seemed oppressed
or excited alternately in a way that baffled Drummond completely, for
no explanation was plausible. Two or three times during the night he
had been heard moaning, and yet the moment Drummond or, as once
happened, Miss Harvey hastened to his side, he declared it was
nothing. "I must have been dozing and imagined the pain was greater
than it was." Awake and conscious, so stout a soldier as he would be
the last to give way to childish exhibition of suffering, yet twice
Drummond knew him to be awake despite his protestation of dozing, and
he did not at all like it that Wing should bury his face in his arms,
hiding it from all. What could have occurred to change this buoyant,
joyous, high-spirited trooper all on a sudden into a sighing, moaning,
womanish fellow? Surely not a wound of which, however painful, any
soldier might be proud.
Somewhere along towards four o'clock, when it was again Patterson's
watch and Drummond arose from his blanket after a refreshing sleep of
nearly two hours and he and his faithful sentry were standing just
outside the mouth of the cave, they distinctly heard the same moan of
distress.
"Is there nothing we can do to ease the sergeant, sir?" whispered
Patterson. "This makes the second time I have heard him groaning, and
it's so unlike him."
"We have no opiates, and I doubt if he would use one if we had. He
declares there is no intense pain."
"Well, first off, sir, I thought he was dreaming, but he was wide
awake, and Miss Harvey came in only a moment after I got to him. Could
those devils poison a bullet as they do their arrows, and could that
make him go into fever so soon?"
"I hardly think so; but why did you say dreaming?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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