"Lay Captain Marshall on the stretcher," the surgeon said. "Lift him carefully and carry him to his quarters. I will drive on at once and get things ready. I suppose, Mr. Rankin, you will go with him. You had better cover him up with a rug. Have either of you any brandy? I forgot to bring any with me."
"I have a flask," the major replied. "I will get it for you at once."
"We may as well be off, Wyatt," Captain Lister said to Frank; "it is of no use your waiting here any longer. We can do no good."
"I am sorry he is hurt so," Frank said, as they drove off.
"Then you will be the only man that is," Captain Lister replied. "You have rid the army of a pest; that is to say, you have rendered him harmless. Possibly he may not retire. There are plenty of men in the service who have lost an arm; however, I should think he will go. The disgrace will be worse to him than the wound."
"Still, I am heartily sorry that I hurt him so much," Frank repeated. "I meant to take off one or two of his fingers, and spoil his shooting for the rest of his life; but I never thought of the ball going up his arm as it did."
"Well, if you had not hit him where you did, you would be lying on that stretcher now. It was a close thing between the two shots, not more than a fifth of a second, I should say, and if you had only hit him in the body, I have no doubt that he would have fired before he fell; and if ever a man meant to kill another, he did. I could see it in his eye, as he stood there waiting for the signal. Well, Wyatt, you can stop in the army until you get to be a general, but one thing is morally certain, that after this affair no one will venture to insult you, and your first duel is likely to be your last."
"I sincerely trust so," Frank said gravely. "I think I can say that assuredly I shall never be the first to insult anyone else, and that if ever I fight again, it will, as in this case, not be in my own quarrel."
As they drove along the straight road towards the barracks, they saw a number of men clustered outside the gate.
"They are on the look-out," Captain Lister said. "They will have heard from the mess waiters the news of the quarrel last night, and I don't suppose there was a soul in barracks that did not know what our errand was when we drove out this morning. I expect if you had been killed they would have had to move either the Lancers' depôt or ours away from Canterbury, for the men of the two regiments would have been sure to have fought whenever they met each other."