"Has Stephen Watts been taken?" I asked abruptly. "Or Hare, or Butler?"
"Not that I have heard of."
So they had got clean away, that spying crew!—Watts and Hare and Walter Butler! Well, that was better. God knows I had a million times rather meet Steve Watts in battle than take him skulking here inside our lines a-spying on our camp, exchanging information with his unhappy sister and with Claudia, or slinking about the shrubbery by night to press his sweetheart's waist and lips——
I turned my hot face on the pillow and lay a-thinking. The doctor laid back my blanket, looked at my hurts, then covered me.
"You do well," he said. "In two weeks you shall be out o' bed. Bones must knit and wounds scar before you carry pack again. And before your lung is strong you shall need six months rest ere you take the field."
Aghast at such news, I asked him the true nature of my hurts, and learned that Balty's bullet had broken three ribs into my right lung, then, glancing, had made a hole clean through my thigh, but not splintering the bone.
"That Oneida girl of Thomas Spencer's saved you," said he, "for she picked out the burnt wadding and bits of cloth, cleaned and checked the hemorrhage, and purged you. And there was no gangrene.
"She did all that anybody could have done; but the cold had already seized your lung before she arrived, and it was that which involved you so desperately."
After a silence: "Good God, doctor! Six months!"
"Six months before you take the field, sir."