United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction
It did not occur to Baynell to doubt this statement, and not one word
did he say to the surgeon of his dream of the presence of the
Confederate officer. He made no effort to account for the disaster,
merely lending himself to the surgeon's view that he had grown suddenly
dizzy and the stairs were steep in the third flight.
This gave the surgeon a disquieting sense of suspicion some time
afterward. When returning from his tour of duty at the hospital he was
again in the camp, he heard there the amazing rumor among the soldiers
that a Confederate officer, covered with blood, had been seen to issue
from the Roscoe house and with lightning-like speed disappear among the
shrubbery. He wondered that Baynell should not have mentioned the
commotion, forgetting that as he was unconscious he might be still
unaware of the fact.
Dr. Grindley was not of a designing nature; but he was consciously
experimenting when he said, rather banteringly, on his next visit, "How
about the notion that there was a Confederate officer concealed in this
house?"
Baynell looked annoyed. He had heard as yet not an allusion to the raid
upon the house during the period of his insensibility, and he did not
know that the presence of a Confederate officer had even been rumored.
He supposed that the doctor referred to the chance question he had asked
Uncle Ephraim, and he deprecated the fact that the old man should have
heedlessly repeated this. The dream of the altercation, as he fancied
the recollection, was still vague in his mind, and with that quality of
unreality and so blended with other visions of his delirium and fever
that he in naught doubted its tenuous state as a figment of a disordered
brain.
"There was no Rebel," he said somewhat gruffly.
"That was all merely the love of sensation?" asked the surgeon.
"Of course," Baynell assented, and fell silent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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