The automobile with the racing motor turned out to be a light ambulance of a popular Detroit make. Its speeding engine was pure camouflage for its slow progress. It bubbled and steamed at the radiator cap as it pushed along at almost a snail's pace.
"All full?" Hartzell shouted into the darkness of the driver's seat.
"To the brim," responded the driver. "Are you wounded?"
"No, but I have a wounded man with me," said Hartzell. "He can sit beside you on the seat if you have room."
"Get right in," said the driver, and Hartzell boosted me into the front seat. We pushed along slowly, Hartzell walking beside the car and the driver's assistant proceeding ahead of us, searching the dark road with his cane for new shell craters.
Occasionally, when our wheels would strike in one of these, groans would come from the ambulance proper.
"Take it easy," would come a voice through pain-pressed lips; "for Christ's sake, do you think you are driving a truck?"
I heard the driver tell Hartzell that he had three men with bullet splintered legs in the ambulance. Every jolt of the car caused their broken bones to jolt and increased the pounding of their wearied nerves to an extremity of agony. The fourth occupant of the ambulance, he said, had been shot through the lungs.
Some distance along, there came a knock on the wooden partition behind my back,—the partition that separates the driver's seat from the ambulance proper. The car stopped and the driver and Hartzell went to the rear door and opened it. The man with the shot through the lungs was half sitting up on his stretcher. He had one hand to his mouth and his lips, as revealed in the rays of the driver's flashlight, were red wet.
"Quick—get me—to a doctor," the man said between gulps and gurgles.