CHAPTER XXXI.
HARNESSED LIGHTNING CARRYING AWFUL TIDINGS—HE “MAKES IT”—A BROKEN FINGER WON’T DISFIGURE A CORPSE.
It is night, and in the solders’ camp a wail of anguish is heard coming from the tent nearest Gen. Canby’s late quarters. Grief weighs down the heart of Orderly Scott, who is giving vent to his anguish in stifled sobs and vows of vengeance on the perpetrators of the foul deed. He rises from his bed, and, with face half buried in his hands, looks again on the mangled form of his benefactor, and, in renewed paroxysms of grief, is borne away by his friends.
The sound of hammer and saw disturbs the midnight hour, while the carpenters are transforming the wooden gun-cases into coffins for the dead. Two are in progress, but the mechanics are economizing the rough boards, for the probabilities are that the third will be needed on the morrow.
The steward is holding a lamp while Drs. Semig and Cabanis are dressing the wounds of the only patient in the hospital tent. He is unconscious, while the ugly, ragged wound in his face is being carefully bound, and the long crooked cut on the left side of the head is being closed with the silver threads, and his ear is being stitched together. He flinches a little when the flexible silver probe is following the trail cut through his right arm made by the pistol ball that struck it
outside of the wrist, and, passing between the bones of the fore arms, came out on the inside, midway between the hand and elbow. The left hand is laid out on a board, and the wounded man is told that “the forefinger must come off.”
“Make out the line of the cut, doctor,” says Meacham.
“There, about this way,” the doctor replies, while with his scalpel he traces a cut nearly to the wrist.