In the last terrible charge, a grape shot had struck him in the leg and arm and torn the flesh from his broken bones. Over him his comrades swept up to the face of the enemy’s guns, and little Giffin was left to fight his battle with cold, and rain and hunger. All night long he lay moaning on the ground, and it was late in the forenoon of the next day when he was found and taken to the hospital.
There they laid his mangled body among the hundreds of others who had met with a fate as hard as his own. It was hours before the surgeons could come to him, and then so hurried were they by other calls upon them that only a hasty dressing of his poisoned wound was possible.
Some kindly visitors found him there, his fair young face flushed with the deadly fever, and begged the surgeons to do something for him.
“We can do nothing,” they said. “Our hands are full. His case is hopeless. We must help where it will do some good.”
“But may we take him with us? May we see what we can do for him? Perhaps we can find a doctor who can cure him.”
“Take him and welcome,” the surgeon replied. “But you can find no doctor who can save the dead. Little Giffin can never get well.”
But the good people lifted the broken form and carried it out from the hospital’s deadly air, into the golden sunshine and away to a clean little cot in a humble home where a good doctor treated him and a kind motherly nurse hung over him and soothed his feverish brain for many a weary hour. For days it seemed that every breath would be his last and for months his sufferings wrung the hearts of his friends.
But at last there came a day when he could sit up a little, and then for weeks he hobbled about, an almost helpless cripple with a rude crutch for his only support.
But his new friends had known that he would get well, for even during the days of burning fever and the weeks of weary recovery his heart had been filled with courage and his steel blue eye had glinted with a dauntless spirit that would not die.
The crippled right arm and mangled fingers were slow in healing and nearly useless when the wounds were closed and only ugly scars remained. In spite of all, though, he learned again to write, and you can imagine that the first letter, in its scraggly writing, began, “My Dearest Mother,” and the next, “Dear Captain.”