“Asleep and doin’ well, ma’am. At least I should say so, and I peeked at him the last thing before I started.”
“Where is he?”
“In the little hospital over yonder. Camp warn’t no place for him, and I fetched him here as the nighest, and the best thing I could do for him.”
“How is he wounded?”
“Shot in the shoulder, side, and arm.”
“Dangerously you said?”
“No, ma’am, that warn’t and ain’t my opinion. The sergeant sent that telegram, and I think he done wrong. The Captain is hit pretty bad; but it ain’t by no means desperate accordin’ to my way of thinkin’,” replied the hopeful Wilkins, who seemed mercifully gifted with an unusual flow of language.
“Thank heaven! Now go on and tell me all about it as fast as you can,” commanded Christie, walking along the rough road so rapidly that Private Wilkins would have been distressed both in wind and limb if discipline and hardship had not done much for him.
“Well, you see we’ve been skirmishin’ round here for a week, for the woods are full of rebs waitin’ to surprise some commissary stores that’s expected along. Contrabands is always comin’ into camp, and we do the best we can for the poor devils, and send ’em along where they’ll be safe. Yesterday four women and a boy come: about as desperate a lot as I ever see; for they’d been two days and a night in the big swamp, wadin’ up to their waists in mud and water, with nothin’ to eat, and babies on their backs all the way. Every woman had a child, one dead, but she’d fetched it, ‘so it might be buried free,’ the poor soul said.”
Mr. Wilkins stopped an instant as if for breath, but the thought of his own “little chaps” filled his heart with pity for that bereaved mother; and he understood now why decent men were willing to be shot and starved for “the confounded niggers,” as he once called them.