“I--I know what to do for him,” she panted on the wings of a gassed sneeze. “I’ve taken an elementary Red Cross course--have talked with nurses who’ve been across. Some--some idea of going over as a nurse’s aid, if father would let me!... Aromatic spirits of ammonia--that would help! Carry it always when I’m off with dad, because--because of his--faint----”
Even as the unfinished sentence tickled her throat like a tainted feather, she was kneeling beside the gassed soldier, plucking wisps from a tiny fleece of cotton-wool in her pin-seal bag, moistening them from a little phial, holding them, one by one, to the laboring nostrils, or chaffing the victim’s right hand, stiffening like a poisoned claw, between her own girlish palms--trying to rub the life back into it.
Her younger Camp Fire Sisters watched her from the position which they had been ordered to take up, a few yards to windward, where the young April breeze, keeping guard over them like a skipping brother, warded off the ghost of gas.
They clasped their hands tensely as they saw her forced to a position behind the sufferer’s head, to windward of his tainted clothing, by the pale, strained officer who forebore to interfere further because the vanishing gas-ghost was too weak for danger--as they beheld her kneeling there, dauntlessly ministering, quailing not before the staggering horrors of the gas sickness--the spewed blood upon the ground.
“Olive! Olive! Look at her! Isn’t she wonderful--wonderful! And she--she was ‘reared in cotton-wool’ herself, as the saying is!” Tears sprang to Sesooā’s eyes. “Nothing but ease and luxury!... ‘Elementary Course!’ Oh, she never jumped to this by fifteen lessons--and talking with nurses!” The voice was the low moaning of a Flame. “Never! She came to it by the long trail, the Camp Fire trail--hiking, climbing, sleeping out on mountain-tops, or by the seashore, having our little accidents, until--until we just forgot that we were we!”
“You forgot that you were you!” echoed the guardian breeze.
“Not one of us--one of us--was a flower-pot plant!”
“True! You weren’t!” corroborated Brother Gust.
“But Iver--Iver! Oh, this is terribly hard for him!” was the Flame’s next moaning outburst. “Besides his sympathy for the poor soldier, he’s feeling bitterly now that there--there goes his reputation for a smart and seasoned company! He--he’s all ready to be splitting mad with somebody. And he has a temper, my brother Iver. Mine’s like it only I don’t--can’t--explode with quite so much force.”
Lieutenant Iver was exploding now, with all the luck of the holiday tarnished in his eyes, his nostrils smoking like a sulphur-candle in his eagerness to nail the blighter who was responsible for the ghastly accident that had, incidentally, withered the flowers of this day of days for him.