Who goes there?

by B. K. Benson

Now, I had been trying to begin with Jones on the bare hill where I had seen him latest, and to go back, but my efforts had only proved the truth of the foregoing. I had only jumped back a considerable distance, and from the past had followed Jones forward as well as my imperfect powers permitted; again I had jumped back and had followed him until he met the Doctor in the night. The episode of lifting Willis into the ambulance seemed a separate event of very short duration. My mind had unconsciously appreciated the difficulty of working backward, and had in reality endeavoured to avoid that almost impossible process by dividing Jones into several periods and following the events of each period in order of time and succession. I now, without having willed to think it, became conscious of this difficulty, and I yielded at once to suggestion. I would begin anew, and would help the natural process.

First I tried to sum up results. I found these: first, Jones, in blue, helps another man in blue and I follow him until I lose him when he reaches the Doctor. Second, Jones, in blue, and the Doctor come to Willis again--and then I lose Jones and all of them. Third, Jones--alone and in gray--is in the act of falling, with a shell bursting over him, and I lose him.

I had no doubt of the order in which these events had occurred, and none, whatever of the fact that all of Jones's life had been lost to me, if not indeed to himself, when I saw him fall. Now I wanted to find connecting events; I wanted to know how to join the Jones at the secret place in the woods with the Jones that I had seen fall, and I set my memory to work, but obtained nothing. The scene on the hill seemed unrelated to that of Willis.

There was remembrance, it is true, of Jones walking through a forest at night, but the scene was so indistinct that I could make nothing out of it; I could not decide even whether it had occurred before the time of Manassas. Then, too, there was recollection of Jonas in a tent, and of an officer in blue showing him a map, and I could also remember that I had seen or heard that Jones had been on a shore with the Doctor and Lydia. These events had no connection. Between Jones in blue and Jones in gray there were gaps which I could not cross.

Yet I set myself diligently to the task of joining these events with the more important ones; taxing my memory, diving into the past, hunting for the slightest clews.

And there was another event, farther back seemingly in the dim past, that I could faintly recall--Jones, sick in a tent with the Doctor attending him ... yes, and some one else in the tent. I strained my head to recall this scene more clearly. In this case Jones had no uniform; neither did the others wear uniform. And now a new doubt--why in a tent and without uniform?

For a moment I tried to settle this question by answering that the Confederate troops had not been provided with uniforms at so early a period; but the answer proved unsatisfactory. I knew or felt that Doctor Khayme's relationship with me was so near that, had he been a Confederate surgeon, he would have found me long since.

Yet the Doctor might be dead, as well as Jones, was the thought which followed.

But I knew again that Jones was still alive. How I knew it, I could not have told, but I knew it.

Then, too, there was a strange feeling of something like intuition in my knowing that Jones was sick--why should Jones not be wounded rather than sick? How could I know that this scene in the tent was not the sequence of the scene of the bursting shell? But I say that I knew Jones was sick, and not wounded. How could I know this?