Regardless of his broken body, no woman had ever spoken to Nathan in that tone before. Tears flooded across his glazed eyes then. Moisture welled in his throat. He wanted to speak, to answer. He could not.
Let her help him! No woman had ever said that to him, either.
“Lean on me!” came the invitation from her wealth of compassion and tenderness. “You’ve only a little way more to go. Make a little more effort. Then you can rest—up in the Sunlight!”
He could rest—up in the Sunlight!
The third miracle happened then. The broken man felt his arm being lifted across a woman’s shoulders. And suddenly by his side the resilient, supple strength of a woman sustained him. He felt a woman’s effort added to his own. He felt her almost lift him. He never knew that a woman could possess such strength. She spoke with compassion, she asked to help him, she placed his arm across her shoulder, she sustained him, she added her effort to his own, she lifted him, she gave him her strength—all she had to give, all that he needed; she literally bore him upward to the summit. He reached the Hill Top.
It was all Sunlight.
A thousand feet away was the railroad. A long train of a dozen white cars stood there, great carmine crosses emblazoned upon their sides, the glory insignia of the great Red Cross. The engine had been detached. Train crew and guard of soldiers were using that locomotive to shunt off piles of charred and smoldering wreckage—to clear the track—that the Red Cross on its mission of mercy might “carry on.”
Into the last car broke the woman in blue and scarlet. She interrupted the doctor in charge.
“Come quickly!” she cried. “A wounded soldier! I went off to that point of land to the south while they were clearing the track. As I stood here, a horribly hurt man crawled up the slope out of the valley fog. He’s stretched out on the ground in collapse. Come quickly!”
A stream of white-clad figures poured from the coaches, across the level plateau to the edge of the ravine. Two young surgeons bore a stretcher.