Stafford left his horse and, stepping through a quagmire of watery turf, came into the ring of cedars. The man who had called upon him, a tall, long-moustached person in blue, one arm and booted leg painfully caught beneath the dead steed, spoke in a voice curt with suffering. "Grey, aren't you? Don't care. Can't help it. Get this infernal weight off me, won't you?"
The other bent to the task, and at last managed to free the blue soldier. "There! That position must have been no joke! How long—"
The blue cavalryman proceeded to feel bone and flesh, slowly and cautiously to move the imprisoned limbs. He drew a breath of relief. "Nothing broken!—How long? Well, to reckon by one's feeling I should say about a week. Say, however, since about noon. We drove against a party under Stuart. He got the best of us, and poor Caliph got a bullet. I could see the road. Everything grey—grey as the sea."
"Why didn't you call before? Any one would have helped you."
The other continued to rub his arm and leg. "You haven't got a drop of brandy—eh?"
"Yes, I have. I should have thought of that before." He gave the other a small flask. The cavalryman drank. "Ah! in '55, when I was with Walker in Nicaragua, I got pinned like that beneath a falling cottonwood." He gave the flask back. "You are the kind of Samaritan I like to meet. I feel a new man. Thanks awfully."
"It was foolish of you to lie there for hours—"
The other leaned his back against a cedar. "Well, I thought I might hold out, perhaps, until we beat you and I was again in the house of my friends. I don't, however, object to acknowledging that you're hard to beat. Couldn't manage it. Growing cold and faint—head ringing. Waited as long as I could, then called. They say your prisons are very bad."
"They are no worse than yours."
"That may be. Any of them are bad."