“Go and find one of the wagons if you can,” ordered Dad. “Beg a nurse and a surgeon—both, if you can, and get back as quickly as possible. You’ve got a good head, son, to remember all that. It’s the real man who stores up petty details and makes use of them. Hurry!
“Wait!” he exclaimed, the memory of a woman’s chance words flashing athwart his mind. “Wait! She—she said she might become a nurse. Ask if there is a Mrs. Sessions—remember the name—Sessions—in the corps of nurses there. If there is, ask if she can be detailed for this work!”
Jimmie was gone.
Dad turned back to the couch and loosened the throat of his son’s jacket and shirt.
Joseph had grown thinner and darker and older this past year. The smugly self-sufficient look seemed gone from his face, as his father bent solicitously to scan it.
Dad’s hands ran over his body in search of the wound.
The graze on the wrist was a mere nothing. But a spent ball had struck the shoulder and, without piercing the skin, had snapped the shoulder-blade by its impact—one of the most painful and least perilous of injuries.
It was this hurt which had caused Joseph to spring up, stumble and fall, and whose pain had later made him swoon.
The man came back to his senses. Opening his eyes and seeing above him an officer in the uniform of a captain, he raised his uninjured arm with difficulty in an all-but-involuntary salute.
“Joe!” cried the old man. “Don’t you know me? Don’t you know me? It’s Dad. I—mean ‘father.’”