“Remove your coat, Captain,” said the officer.
One sleeve of his coat was slipped from his arm,—the undergarment was rolled back disclosing the scar of a wound.
“A clever piece of surgery,” explained the prisoner. “Two inches of bone sawed away and united by a silver wire. It is a little loose. But I can use it quite handily—when I choose,” he added with a side glance at me. “I am Captain Adolph Von Rucker, as I have declared.”
Then turning again to the examining officer he spoke in his ear a few words that could not be understood by others. The officer nodded as if in assent and the prisoner was led away.
My heart rose again. I was not to see Jot shot or hanged. It was not my former friend, thank God! but Adolph Von Rucker, his half-brother.
The excitement and the reaction was apparently too much for me. I was sick and prostrated. In this condition I was attended by our surgeon, who said briefly, “It’s the gas. I have been attending similar cases since the men have recrossed the river.” Then he became preoccupied in his own professional diagnosis, as though there had never been neither a Von Rucker or a Jonathan Nickerson.
I did not recover under his treatment, but grew worse and worse under the poisonous influence of German gas. This, the surgeon told me, was often the case with a new gas which the enemy were using; that sometimes its effects were but little noticed at first and afterward became fatal!
I was under the best and most tyrannical care—a slave to the scientific theories of a doctor, and my readers know how well I loved that.
I was surprised to learn, later, that Captain Von Rucker had been seen in Colonel Burbank’s office in conversation with him and the division general. “Possibly,” suggested my informant, “he was allowed to explain his former presence within our lines in citizen dress—but!”
When I was allowed to call at the ward where my friend, Chaplain John, was confined, I met with a surprise that drove all other thoughts out of my mind. Emily Grant was a Red Cross nurse there! I was now willing to be sick for an indefinite time if I could only be in that ward; but that ward was for the wounded, and I was not supposed to be so afflicted—but I was not so sure of that.