Dan's eyes grew very tender; a look crept into them which only Betty and his mother had seen there before.
“I would have died for her if I could, Jack, you know that,” he said slowly.
Jack walked off a few paces and then came back again. “I remember the Governor's telling me once,” he went on in the same hard voice, “that if a man only rode boldly enough at death it would always get out of the way. I didn't believe it at the time, but, by God, it's true. Why, I've gone straight into the enemy's lines and heard the bullets whistling in my ears, but I've always come out whole. When I rode with Stuart round McClellan's army, I was side by side with poor Latane when he fell in the skirmish at Old Church, and I sat stock still on my horse and waited for a fellow to club me with his sabre, but he wouldn't; he looked at me as if he thought I had gone crazy, and actually shook his head. Some men can't die, confound it, and I'm one of them.”
He went out, his spurs striking the stone steps as he passed into the street, and Dan fell back upon the narrow cushions to toss with fever and the memory of Virginia—of Virginia in the days when she wore her rose-pink gown and he believed he loved her.
At the door an ambulance drew up and a stretcher was brought into the building, and let down in one corner. The man on it was lying very still, and when he was lifted off and placed upon the blood-soaked top of the long pine table, he made no sound, either of fear or of pain. The close odours of the place suddenly sickened Dan and he asked Big Abel to draw him nearer the open window, where he might catch the least breeze from the river; but outside the July sunlight lay white and hot upon the bricks, and when he struggled up the reflected heat struck him down again. On the sidewalk he saw several prisoners going by amid a hooting crowd, and with his old instinct to fight upon the weaker side, he hurled an oath at the tormenters of his enemies.
“Go to the field, you crows, and be damned!” he called.
One of the prisoners, a ruddy-cheeked young fellow in private's clothes, looked up and touched his cap.
“Thank you, sir, I hope we'll meet at the front,” he said, in a rich Irish brogue. Then he passed on to Libby prison, while Dan turned from the window and lay watching the surgeon's faces as they probed for bullets.
It was a long unceiled building, filled with bright daylight and the buzzing of countless flies. Women, who had volunteered for the service, passed swiftly over the creaking boards, or knelt beside the pallets as they bathed the shattered limbs with steady fingers. Here and there a child held a glass of water to a man who could not raise himself, or sat fanning the flies from a pallid face. None was too old nor too young where there was work for all.
A stir passed through the group about the long pine table, and one of the surgeons, wiping the sweat from his brow, came over to where Dan lay, and stopped to take breath beside the window.