Miss Mink's Soldier and Other StoriesRice, Alice Caldwell Hegan
General
Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories
Rice, Alice Caldwell Hegan
Fiction; Short stories
"Soldier not happy very much is. I sink soldier heart sorry."
The Red Cross orderly looked up from his work, and his eyes followed her
gesture.
"He is hurt bad," he said shortly; "no legs, no arms."
"_So--deska_?" she said politely, then repeated his words in puzzled
incomprehension: "Nowarms? Nowarms?"
When she returned to the soldier she gathered up the flowers which she
had dropped by the wayside, and timidly offered them to him. For a long
moment she waited, then her smile faded mid her hand dropped. With a
child's quick sensitiveness to rebuff, she was turning away when an
exclamation recalled her.
The prisoner was looking at her in a strange, distressed way; his
deep-set gray eyes glanced down first at one bandaged shoulder, then at
the other, then he shook his head.
As O Sana San followed his glance, a startled look of comprehension
sprang into her face. "Nowarms!" she repeated softly as the meaning
dawned upon her, then with a little cry of sympathy she ran forward and
gently laid her flowers on his breast.
The cavalcade moved on, under the warm spring sun, over the smooth white
road, under the arching cryptomerias; but little O Sana Sun stood with
her butterfly net over her shoulder and watched it with troubled eyes.
A dreadful something was stirring in her breast, something clutched at
her throat, and she no longer saw the sunshine and the flowers. Kneeling
by the roadside, she loosened the little basket which was tied to her
_obi_ and gently lifted the lid. Slowly at first, and then with eager
wings, a dozen captive butterflies fluttered back to freedom.
* * * * *
Along the banks of the Upper Flowing River, in a rudely improvised
hospital, lay the wounded Russian prisoners. To one of the small rooms
at the end of the ward reserved for fatally wounded patients a
self-appointed nurse came daily, and rendered her tiny service in the
only way she knew.
O Sana San's heart had been so wrought upon by the sad plight of her
soldier friend that she had begged to be taken to see him and to be
allowed to carry him flowers with her own hand. Her mother, in whom
smoldered the fires of dead samurai, was quick to be gracious to a
fallen foe, and it was with her consent that O Sana San went day after
day to the hospital.
The nurses humored her childish whim, thinking each day would be the
last; but as the days grew into weeks and the weeks into months, her
visits became a matter of course.
And the young Russian, lying on his rack of pain, learned to watch for
her coming as the one hour of brightness in an interminable night of
gloom. He made a sort of sun-dial of the cracks in the floor, and when
the shadows reached a certain spot his tired eyes grew eager, and he
turned his head to listen for the patter of the little _tabi_ that was
sure to sound along the hall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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