Two or three days after that, while we were marching on rapidly in column again, we passed an ambulance-train filled with wounded on their way to Fredericksburg. Hearing my name called by some one, I ran out of line to an ambulance, in which I found Stannard.
"Harry, for pity's sake, have you any water?"
"No, lieutenant; I'm very sorry, but there's not a drop in my canteen, and there's no time now to get any."
It was the last time I ever saw him. He was taken to Fredericksburg, submitted to a second operation, and died; and I have always believed that his death was largely owing to want of faith.
Six months, or maybe a year, later, Smith came back to us with a great white scar between his shoulders, and I doubt not he is alive and well to this day.
And there was Jimmy Lucas too. They brought him in about the middle of that same afternoon, two men bearing him on their arms. He was so pale, that I knew at a glance he was severely hurt. "A ball through the lungs," they said, and "he can't live." Jimmy was of my own company, from my own village. We had been school-fellows and playmates from childhood almost, and you may well believe it was sad work to kneel down by his side and watch his slow and labored breathing, looking at his pallid features, and thinking—ah, yes, that was the saddest of all!—of those at home. He would scarcely let me go from him a moment, and when the sun was setting, he requested every one to go out of the tent, for he wanted to speak a few words to me in private. As I bent down over him, he gave me his message for his father and mother, and a tender good by to his sweetheart, begging me not to forget a single word of it all if ever I should live to see them; and then he said:
"And, Harry, tell father and mother I thank them now for all their care and kindness in trying to bring me up well and in the fear of God. I know I have been a wayward boy sometimes, but my trust is in him who said,'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' My hope is in God, and I shall die a Christian man."
When the sun had set that evening, poor Jimmy had entered into rest. He was buried somewhere among the woods that night, and no flowers are strewn over his grave on "Decoration Day" as the years go by, for no head-board marks his resting-place among the moaning pines; but "the Lord knoweth them that are his."