Dicky shouted in his shrill boyish voice, and in a few minutes some of
our pioneers and bandsmen came that way with stretchers. I was
speedily freed from my superincumbent load, and very gently and
carefully borne rearward to my tent, when it was found that a couple
of contusions on the head were all I had suffered, and that a little
rest and quiet would soon make me fit for duty again.
"You must be more than ever careful of our goat, Dicky," said I, as
the small warrior, who was not much taller than his own bearskin cap,
was about to leave me (by the bye, my poor fellow Evans had been cut
in two by a round shot). "But for Carneydd Llewellyn, I might have
lain all night on the field."
"There is a date scratched on one of his horns, sir," said Roll; "I
saw it to-day for the first time."
"A date!--what date?"
"Sunday, 21st August."
"Sunday, 21st August," I repeated; "what can that refer to?"
"I don't know, sir--_do you?_"
The drummer saluted and left the tent. I lay on my camp-bed weak and
feverish, so weak, that I could almost have wept; for now came
powerfully back to memory that episode, till then forgotten--the
Sunday ramble I had with Winifred Lloyd when we visited the goat, by
the woods of Craigaderyn, by the cavern in the glen, by the Maen Hir
or the Giant's Grave, and the rocking stone, and all that passed that
day, and how she wept when I kissed her. Poor Winifred! her pretty
white hand must have engraved the date which the little drummer
referred to--a date which was evidently dwelling more in her artless
mind than in mine.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.--THE CAMP AGAIN.
After the living were mustered next morning, and burial parties
detailed to inter the dead, Caradoc and one or two others dropped into
my tent to share some tiffin and a cigar or two with me; for, as Digby
Grand has it, "whatever people's feelings may be, they go to dine all
the same."
Poor Phil looked as pale and weary, if not more so, than I did. He was
on the sick-list also, and had his head tied up by a bloody bandage,
necessitated by a pretty trenchant sword-cut, dealt, as we afterwards
discovered on comparing notes, by Volhonski just before his recapture.
"I was first knocked over by Cathcart's riderless horse--"
"Poor old Cathcart--a Waterloo man!" said Gwynne, parenthetically.
"Well, Phil?"
"It was wounded and mad with terror," continued Caradoc; "then the
splinter of a shell struck me on the left leg. Still I limped to the
front, keeping the men together and close to the colours, till that
fellow you call Volhonski cut me across the head; even my bearskin
failed to protect me from his sabre. Then, but not till _then_, when
blood blinded me, I threw up the sponge and went to the rear."
"What news of our friends in the 19th?" I asked.
"O, the old story, many killed and wounded."
"Little Tom Clavell?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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