CHAPTER XXXIV
THE MAN AT WASHINGTON
DAD sat in the late September sunlight at the door of the hospital tent where for ten days he had lain. Slowly, but very surely, the old, wiry strength was beginning to creep back to the lean body.
No longer did the slightest sudden motion or an effort to concentrate his thoughts set his head to aching blindly, and no longer did his knees buckle under him when he tried to cross the tent from bed to door.
Dad was well out of danger, the surgeons said. Nothing but a few more days of rest was needed to bring him back to health.
An injury to the head is always dangerous, but it has this redeeming quality—it does not long keep its victim in suspense. It kills, crazes, or gets entirely well in an unbelievably short time. The issue is settled, one way or another, in far less time than in the case of an equally severe wound in any other part of the anatomy.
The campaign was over.
The Confederate army, back in its lair, was licking the grievous wounds sustained in the Antietam fight. The Army of the Potomac, nearly thirteen thousand of its soldiers dead from that same fight, was resting on its doubtful laurels.
Here and there skirmish parties or small detachments of the rival forces were in motion, but between the main bodies of both armies brooded the truce of exhaustion.
The Federals that summer and early fall had invaded Virginia, and after a series of fearful defeats had been driven out. Lee in September had invaded the North, and had met with like fate.
The season was too far advanced for any more extensive operations, and a lull came.