“Bad flesh-wounds—great loss of blood. I just got at that artery in time.”
West heard these words spoken by someone whose head kept getting in his way as he lay staring up at the great bright stars directly overhead, and it seemed very tiresome.
He tried to speak and ask whoever it was to move aside; but his tongue would not stir, and he lay perfectly still, trying to think what it all meant, and in a dull far-off sort of way it gradually dawned upon him that the people near him were talking about the Boers he had somehow or another and for some reason shot down.
Then, as he thought, the calm feeling he was enjoying grew troubled, and he began to recall the fact that he had been shooting somebody’s ponies to supply somebody else with food, and that he must have been mad, for he felt convinced that they would not be nice eating, as he had heard that the fat was oily and the flesh tasted sweet. Besides which, it would be horrible to have to eat horseflesh at a time when his throat was dry with an agonising thirst. Then the terrible thought forced itself upon him that while shooting down ponies he had missed them and killed men instead, and once more all was blank.
The next time the power of thinking came to the poor fellow all was very dark, and a jarring pain kept running through him, caused by the motion of his hard bed, which had somehow grown wheels and was being dragged along.
Cattle were lowing and sheep bleating. There were shouts, too, such as he knew were uttered by Kaffir drivers, and there were the crackings of their great whips.
After a while he made out the trampling of horses and heard men talking, while in an eager confused way he listened for what they would say about those two wounded Boers, one of whom had nearly bled to death before that artery was stopped. These, he felt, must be the Boers he shot when he ought to have shot ponies.
And as he got to that point the trouble of thinking worried his brain so that he could think no more, and again all was blank.
At last came a morning when West woke up in a great room which seemed to be familiar. There were nurses moving about in their clean white-bordered dresses, and he knew that he was in some place fitted up as a hospital. Several of the occupants of the beds wore bandages suggestive of bad wounds, and to help his thoughts there came from time to time the dull heavy reports of cannon.
He did not recollect all that had preceded his coming yet; but he grasped the fact that he had been wounded and was now in hospital.