Dorris is leaning forward in breathless interest, and as he pauses asks a characteristic question: “How did you feel then? What were your thoughts?”
“Well, it was a most absurd thing, but I found myself, though I could scarcely hear my own voice, repeating a verse from one of the old cavalier ballads:—
“‘We were standing foot to foot, and giving shoot for shoot;
Hot and strong went our volleys at the blue;
We knelt, but not for grace, and the fuse lit up the face
Of the gunner, as the round shot by us flew.’”
Endicott smiles. “But it was a good battle-cry, Allen. I remember your reciting verses at Cambridge in your college-days, but it was generally ‘A sonnet to your mistress’ eyebrows,’—some fair one who had conquered your heart for a week perhaps.”
Dorris is not to be diverted from the absorbing topic of ball and bayonet, and returns to the charge.
“But how did you feel when you were wounded?” she asks again.
“Oh, I did not know where I was hit. In the midst of the fight I wondered why I couldn’t move my left foot; it was like lead in the stirrup, and looking down I saw the mark where the ball had struck, and the blood following it. It was a little quieter then, so I got the sergeant near me to clip, and ease my foot a little. But you should have seen L’Estrange: he was wounded then; and when the order came to charge he rushed on, waving his sword, with the blood dripping from his arm. How the men rushed after him! And when he came back supporting another poor fellow, and insisting on his being cared for first, you should have heard the men cheer him.”
“And you, Allen,” suggests Endicott,—“how did you get on with that wound of yours?”
“Well, I was rather faint by the time we were ready to go back to camp; but somebody set me straight in the saddle when I reeled, and I managed to get back all right.”
“But where was the surgeon all the while?”