Adventures On A Crutch!_ --------------------- CHAPTER I. THE WAY IT HAPPENED. CRACK! went a rifle at the battle of Antietam. Not that it was the only one fired, for they were rattling away at the rate of a thousand per second just then; but there was one rifle in particular discharged, which, so far as I was concerned, was clearly distinguishable from all the rest. I did not see it, nor am I confident that, in the din of battle, I heard its report; yet I was made painfully aware of its existence and proximity, and shall no doubt entertain a recollection of it while life lasts, and reason retains her throne. That rifle, evidently fired by some one whom I would have shot first, if I had had a good chance—and therefore I couldn’t blame him much for shooting me—threw a leaden ball of one ounce in weight, and similar to an acorn in shape; and that missile, travelling at the rate of five thousand miles an hour—though they rarely travel a whole hour without resting—struck and wounded me, John Smith. It passed through the thigh, lacerating that muscle vulgarly known as the _tensor vaginæ femoris_, and causing a compound fracture of the _femur_, barely below the _trochanter major_; that is to say, it broke the bone about three inches below the hip. The ball had come diagonally from the direction of my right and front, passing through the outside portion of the left thigh, and coming out only an inch and a half from where it had entered; and I could not help, when I had regained my composure, making some little geometric calculations on the subject. I reckoned that if the man who had fired the rifle—allowing him to have been one hundred yards distant, and the barrel of the piece to have been four feet long—had moved the muzzle the one-hundredth part of an inch to the right, I should have been missed; if he had elevated it about the same distance I should have been _missing_. My next thought was that whereas my antagonist had discharged his rifle, I must request the government to discharge _me_. Some of my comrades carried me from the field, and, after a little diversion in the way of fainting, got me loaded into a one-horse ambulance—a vehicle that can beat a wild-cat jumping on moderately rough ground—and away it went, plunging diagonally across a corn-field, like a schooner hove to in a storm. A shattered limb is one of the most painful things in the world, especially when its owner is jostled about like old rusty nails. For good, solid, substantial pain, I know of nothing worthy of being spoken of on the same day with it. The toothache, in its worst form, is bliss compared with it. There was another wounded “hero” in the ambulance, lying beside me; his leg was shattered below the knee; and I reckon that the yelling he and I did, jointly, wasn’t the sort to be excelled by any other two youths of medium abilities.