“The lad is sure one scrapper, eh?” The surgeon was much tickled and slapped his leg at the realistic narrative of the ambulancier.
“He is, Major; all of that!” continued the soldier. “For a kid, or for a veteran, for that matter, he is some boy with a gun! And he showed pluck, too, when we got there. You see, we seen and heard them Hun gas shells comin’ over—that there Hun balloon give the range, I reckon—and we heard the gongs, too, but we reckoned the kid, bein’ so excited over the fight, didn’t get on to it, so the only thing to do was to get there right quick and you bet we did! Here was this one dead Hun with the Red Cross on his sleeve—the feller that the kid shot—and in the bushes was the kid bendin’ over the feller what them Huns had knocked in the head, and the gas from two busted shells a sneakin’ up on ’em lively. We had on our masks and we started to grab him and get him away. He hadn’t saw us ner heard us come and he turned round on me with a drawed pistol, so’s I thought it was all off sure. But the kid knowed us and didn’t shoot. We yelled ‘gas’ at him and what did he do? Run to his car off there and get his mask? Never a bit of it! He jest sez to us: ‘help me with this feller to my car,’ he sez. ‘I’ve got two masks there, his’n and mine’ he sez. So I sez: ‘this way’s quicker; make tracks fer our car, young feller!’ and I picked up the insensible feller and run with him to our car and the kid follered, and we got away from the gas. The kid he begged us to get here quick, or his pal might die and so that’s why we come back with only one.”
“Well, all right; excused, of course,” said the Major.
“Now we’re off, back up there, Major, and we’ll try to make up fer—”
“It isn’t lost time, or it wouldn’t be if we could save that lad’s life. Well, anyway—but you’d better wait a moment and I’ll get the kid, as you call him—Richards—to go back with you and get his car.”
The chief entered the tent and wended his way quickly down the long aisle, between the rows of brown cots, many of which held wounded men, he stopped here and there for a word of encouragement, of advice, or to answer a question. Reaching the farther end he stood for a moment, looking down at a white-faced figure lying very inert beneath the blanket and at another sitting, with his face in his hands, beside the cot. A woman nurse, rather young, with wonderfully gentle eyes, passed softly and whispered to the Major.
“He feels it terribly; we don’t often see such grief, though he is not of the loud weeping kind.”
The Major nodded and, stooping forward, laid his hand on the shoulder of the figure in the chair.
“Come, Richards. No use sitting here; there is much to do; much. Getting away on duty will make you feel better.”
Don looked up with a face that was drawn with sorrow.