“Indeed!” he replied. And he stared at me as if he had never seen a King’s officer before. Then “Why did you stop to pick up that fellow?” he asked, indicating poor Simms by a gesture. “If you’d ridden straight away, I should have been too late. It was your pause that gave me time to level at your horse and bring it down.”
I raised myself on my elbow and found that the man had released me from Minden and had lifted me to the edge of the clearing. Simms still sprawled where he had fallen, with his arms cast wide and his neck awry. The horse lay half in and half out of the stagnant pool that lapped the roots of the trees on the farther side of the clearing.
“Is he dead?” I asked, staring at Simms.
“Neck broken,” the man replied, “Who was he?”
“My orderly.”
“Rank and file?”
“What else?” I said.
He grunted. “Is that in the Articles of War, too?” he said. “But any way, you did him little good, and wrecked yourself by it!” Then, in a different tone, “See here,” he said, “you’ve tricked me, shamming to be dead and playing ’possum. I can’t leave you to the buzzards, nor yet carry you to the camp, for they’ll be for shooting you—shooting you, my friend, for certain! You’ll have to ride if I can get you a horse. That is your only chance. I shall be away some time and if you wish to live you will lie close. It’s not healthy anywhere this side of the Catawba for that uniform!”
I was in pain, but I was sufficiently myself to be anxious when he had left me; painfully anxious as time went on and he did not return. I lay staring at poor Simms; the flies were clustering on his face. I thought of the light heart with which I had ridden into Ferguson’s camp and joined him and his volunteers the day before. I thought of the gay dinner we had eaten, and the toasts we had drunk, and the “Confusion to the Rebels” which we had planned—campaigning, a man learns to enjoy life as it comes. And then I thought of the day that had gone against us, miserably and unaccountably; of poor Ferguson, dragged and dead, with his foot in the stirrup and enough wounds in him to let out the lives of five men; of Husbands and Plummer and Martin—I had seen them all go down,—those, who had escaped in the fight, shot like rabbits in the last rush for the horses. By the laws of war, or of anything but this blind partisan fighting we should have won the battle against an equal number of undrilled farmers and backwoodsmen. We must have won. But we had lost; and I lay there under the sumach bushes that blended with the red of the old uniform; and if the man who had shot poor Minden at that last unlucky moment did not return, the buzzards would presently spy me out and Simms would not be the less fortunate of the two.
For the sounds of the fight had died away. The pursuit had taken another line, the silence of the forest was no longer torn by shot or scream. Even the excited chatter of the birds had ceased. The little clearing lay lonely, with the short twilight not far off—was that a buzzard already, that tiny speck in the sky?