They carried him to the shack they called a hospital, and while the relief party gathered and went out, twenty silent men loaded down with rations, the post surgeon and his wife worked over him. Suddenly the girl broke down.
"Oh!" she cried. "Look at his poor hands and knees! Oh, Will, what did that to him?"
"What?" stuttered the young surgeon gruffly. "What! Why, the—the nervy son—son of a gun walked on 'em, God knows how far, that's all! Fill those water bottles, will you. And hurry up."
Two days later Sullivan opened his eyes, and stared wonderingly at the room, and the lamplight, and the olla hanging in the window, and the post surgeon's pretty wife, who sat beside his cot. At last his eyes rested on his own hands, shapeless in bandages. And as he looked at them his lips trembled, and he began to cry, weakly, like a child.
The post surgeon's wife thought she understood, and her own breath caught. She was very new to the Army, and she was trying to make a hero of Sullivan. "Poor fellow," she murmured, "I know they're bad. But we'll fix them up. Don't cry about them."
"I ain't c-cryin'!" Sullivan whispered, in tremulous indignation. "I'm l-laughin'. I reckon," he muttered, and a ripple of the old whimsicality swept across his face, "I must be about th' first man ever wore his hands to a blister, walkin'." The wonder of the thought held him entranced.
The girl thought he was light-headed. "Is there anything you'd like?" she asked soothingly.
Sullivan considered. "Salt," he announced emphatically. "I want salt. Ev'ry drop you've got in th' place. What're you lookin' at? Salt's cheap enough, ain't it? Well, I want some. Seems like I hadn't had no salt f'r years."
How the relief party did its work is another story, and a brave one. It is hard to kill strong men by exhaustion, and, by the time Sullivan could walk a little, the Captain and the other rescued men were sitting up in bed. At last a day came when Burrell was permitted to have one visitor. "Send Sullivan," he ordered.
The lanky fellow shuffled in bashfully, and stood with averted eyes. "Glad to see you're back, sir," he muttered.