The still-house was an old, dilapidated frame building, whose rude accommodations differed widely from those to which, save during his army life, Boyd had been accustomed from infancy.
They carried him in and laid him down upon a rough pallet of straw furnished with coarse cotton sheets and an army blanket or two, not over clean.
But in his dire extremity of pain he heeded naught of this, and his blinded eyes could not see the bare rafters overhead, the filthy uncarpeted floor, the few broken chairs and rude board seats, or the little unpainted pine table with its bit of flickering, flaming tallow candle, stuck in an old bottle.
His comrades did what they could for his relief; but it was not much, and their clumsy handling was exquisite torture to the raw, quivering flesh, and his entreaties that they would put him out of his misery at once, by sending a bullet through his brain, were piteous to hear. They had taken his arms from him, or he would have destroyed himself.
The room was filled with doleful sounds,—the groans and sighs of men in sore pain, but his rose above all others.
Dr. Savage arrived at length, but half drunk, and, an unskillful surgeon at his best, made but clumsy work with his patients on this occasion.
Yet the applications brought, in time, some slight alleviation of even Boyd's unendurable agony; his cries grew fainter and less frequent, till they ceased altogether, and like the other wounded he relieved himself only with an occasional moan or groan.
The doctor had finished his task, and lay in a drunken sleep on the floor. The uninjured raiders had followed his example, the candle had burned itself out and all was darkness and silence save the low, fitful sounds of suffering.
To Boyd sleep was impossible, the pain of his burns was still very great; especially in his eyes, the injury to which he feared must result in total blindness. How could he bear it? he asked himself, to go groping his way through life in utter darkness? Horrible! horrible! he would not endure it; they had put the means of self-destruction out of his way now, but on the first opportunity to get hold of a pistol, he would blow his own brains out and be done with this agony. The Bible was a fable; death an eternal sleep; he had been saying it for years, till he thought his belief—or more correctly unbelief—firmly fixed: but now the early teachings of a pious mother came back to him and he trembled with the fear that they might be true.
"It is appointed unto men once to die, but after that the judgment." "Every one of us shall give an account of himself to God." "These shall go away into everlasting punishment." "Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." Fire, fire! oh how unendurable he had found it! dare he risk its torment throughout the endless ages of eternity? Self-destruction might be but a plunge into deeper depths of anguish: from which there could be no return.