The next few days, during which Bob grew steadily worse, were hard almost beyond endurance to Sergeant Cameron's anxious and devoted spirit. He stayed tirelessly by Bob's bedside, until the German guards grew weary of ordering him away and let him be. Never did a sick man receive more faithful care or more earnest watching, and the doctor, at his rare visits, looked curiously more than once at the pale, unshaven, eager face of the old "non-com," as though he wondered at such persistent faithfulness.
Bob was not suffering just then. For the first time in many weeks he was free, and his hot aching body, lying on the narrow cot, did not much trouble the real self that was back again on the firing line, hovering over the German trenches in Benton's biplane, or swooping back to safety from pursuing guns. In quiet moments, when Sergeant Cameron fell into a doze by his bedside, Bob dreamed he was back in his barrack room at West Point, planning his graduation leave. Then Lucy's face would come before him and her voice sound in his ears. His mother's eyes would smile at him, with their old cheerfulness, and the war seemed very dreadful, but very dim and far away.
Once, after a long time during which he had lain still, not even dreaming, too weary and weak to do more than lie dully half-asleep, Bob opened his eyes with a sudden clearing of his senses. Voices were close beside him, and he wanted to hear what they said, but he could not understand them. Then he realized they were speaking German, and felt a light-headed sort of joy at his own cleverness in discovering it. He looked up from the knees of the man who stood beside his cot, and found his face with a difficult, slow gaze. It was the doctor, and Bob's troubled eyes fell from his face, for it was stern and frowning. He met another glance, as a second man bent over him, and this face arrested his attention by its difference from the doctor's light hair and fair skin. The stranger had black smooth hair, dark, sparkling eyes, and an olive complexion. Bob could see his face plainly, for it was near him as the unknown bent over him from his short height. He wanted to ask, "Who are you?" but the effort seemed too great to make, and before he had summoned strength for it, the two had left his side and their boots were clumping off across the room.
Half an hour later, in the office of the Commandant, the secretary of the Spanish Embassy at Berlin urged his case strongly. He had an ally more powerful than his arguments in the fever itself, which was bringing a look of worn anxiety to the doctor's face. He had not time nor medicine enough for the few patients the camps now held, and the prospect of a wide-spread epidemic was horrible to his harassed and order-loving soul. The conference was a short one, but the Spanish Secretary went back to Berlin with a signed recommendation for Bob's removal in his pocket, and a strong confidence that success awaited his Ambassador, in his friendly prosecution of Mr. Leslie's demand.
Of all this neither Sergeant Cameron nor Bob knew anything, but on the same day Bob's faithful nurse had cause for more tempered rejoicing. One of the lulls in the fever, during which Captain Bertrand had been used to go about with languid footsteps, came to Bob's relief. To his bodily relief, for his mind felt almost as though he would rather have stayed in the delirium when he awoke again to the dingy darkness of his prison. But for the time he was much better, and the joy on Sergeant Cameron's face told plainly what his desperate anxiety had been. Bob's stammered thanks were quite inadequate, but without words a new bond of friendship had been forged between the two, which they knew could never break.
Bob ate a little bread, soaked in water, and wondered at the weakness that would hardly let him lift his hand to feed himself. "I'm pretty worthless, aren't I?" he asked, with a faint smile, then, with a sudden recollection of his ministrations to poor Bertrand he added, "I wonder what they've done to Bertrand! How I'd like to know."
"You haven't had any letters from home, Sergeant? Nothing for me?" was another repeated question. The sergeant's reluctant denial cast Bob's spirits down heavily, but in spite of all he convalesced—only, as both he and Sergeant Cameron knew, he would succumb again as Bertrand had done unless his youth and health could fight more strongly for him.
"Funny dreams I had," he said one day to Sergeant Cameron, as he sat over his meagre breakfast. "I used to think I was at home, then I'd be fighting again—I never got back to prison, there was some comfort in that. One time I thought I saw a man here with the doctor—a stranger with dark hair and eyes. He looked so different from these Germans—not like a Frenchman either. I wonder what I was dreaming of?"
"Have a little of the bread, sir," suggested Sergeant Cameron. He was rather non-committal that morning. A new British prisoner had just whispered to him of General Byng's forced retreat from a part of his hard-won gains, and the old soldier was torn with longing to get back on to the field. "I might have done more if I'd stayed with the Major on Governor's Island," he thought bitterly, then remembering Bob's need with a quick rush of generosity he took back his own words.