Save that his face was purple with congested blood, so that his pale, staring eyes seemed colorless by comparison, and he walked with open mouth, the Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking as he gulped down the hot air, he conveyed no dire impression of breakdown. But suddenly he stumbled and spun round, as if seized by sudden giddiness, clutching at his shirt-breast, dropping his gun. Men were thrown out of step as he fell, with an absurd clatter of metal and tin-ware. Yet they marched on without a pause.
Others came, stepping over the fallen figure lying huddled in the way. Its fingers moved, paddling in the dust; and P. C. Breagh, yielding to a sudden impulse, dropped the bridle of the jackass, ran in, grabbed hold and hauled the heavy body out of the way.
"What are you doing, born stupid that you are?" the sutler-woman cried viciously, for Rumschottel had swerved aside to the hedge and was ravenously devouring weeds. She added, becoming aware of the prone infantryman, who was lying on his back staring at the sun unwinkingly: "It it all up with that one, his eyes are turning white already. Such as he have never six pfennigs to pay for other folks' time and trouble. Better leave him for the Feld-lazarett to pick up."
But P. C. Breagh only grunted dourly, hunkering by the prostrate Hessian, and with a parting sarcasm the proprietress of Rumschottel seized her beast's head and trudged on. If she had looked back, she would have seen good Irish whisky wasted. For despite the shade of the tree under which he was hauled, the rolled-up coat thrust under his head and the laving of his face and breast with spirit, it was all up with the man, as she had prophesied.
He grabbled with his sunburnt fingers in the dust a little, and tried to lift a hand to his perspiring chest. By the tin crucifix dependent from a leather bootlace round his neck, you could tell that he tried to make the sacred Sign. Then his eyes rolled up, and an expression of great surprise overspread his discolored countenance. His knees jerked and a sound like a rotten stick of wood, breaking, came from his open mouth.
"A-a-ach!"
XXXVII
He would breathe for possibly an hour longer, but practically the man was dead. Still listening for the faint, intermittent heart-beats, a splash of gravel stung P. C. Breagh smartly in the neck and cheek, and the dull thunder of horse-hoofs came unpleasantly close and stopped. He lifted his ear from the rattling chest, and looked up into the face of an infantry officer, who was reining up his beast and bending from the saddle as he looked at the casualty on the ground. The officer asked in staccato sentences:
"It is a case of heat-stroke? You are a doctor?"