“When did you write to your mother last?” the sick man babbled on. “Sure I’ll post it for you, and I’ll add a line of my own to comfort her—Water! Can’t you understand? He wants water, and mine’s gone. Too fat to fight! But I’ll make good; I’ll serve. Give me a chance—Steady, boys! They’re coming. They’re at the wire. Now give ’em hell! We’ll say it together, old man: ‘Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name—’”
There were scalding tears in Shipp’s eyes; his throat was aching terribly when Doctor Peters finally led him out of the ward. The last sound he heard was Dalrymple’s voice quavering:
“Over there! Over there!
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.”
“I had my hands full at the hut, for the wounded were coming in,” Doctor Peters was saying, “but every one says Dimples did a man’s work up there in the mud and the darkness. Some of the fellows confessed that they couldn’t have hung on, cut off as they were, only for him. But they did. It was late the next day before we picked him up. He was right out in the open; he’d been on his way back with a man over his shoulders. He was very strong, you know, and most of the stretcher-bearers had been shot down. The wounded man was dying, so Dimples walked into the barrage.”
“And he was afraid he wouldn’t make good!” Shipp muttered, with a crooked, mirthless smile.
“Yes—imagine it! There was never a day that he didn’t make me ashamed of myself, never a day that he didn’t do two men’s work. No task was too hard, too disagreeable, too lowly. And always a smile, a word of cheer, of hope. Our Master washed people’s feet and cooked a breakfast for hungry fishermen. Well, the spirit of Christ lives again in that boy.”
Shipp’s leave had several days to run; such time as he did not spend with Doctor Peters he put in at Dimples’s bedside. He was there when the delirium broke; his face was the first that Dimples recognized; his hand was the first that Dimples’s groping fingers weakly closed upon.
They had little to say to each other; they merely murmured a few words and smiled; and while Dimples feasted his eyes upon the brown face over him, Shipp held his limp, wasted hand tight and stroked it, and vowed profanely that the sick man was looking very fit.
Later in the day the captain said, with something like gruffness in his voice: