CHAPTER XV
THE AMETHYST MOMENT
I
Nathan had been too toughened by eighteen months of soldiering to remain long indisposed. What he wanted more than all else was sleep,—hours and hours of sleep.
The man never would have become so exhausted in so short a time as a night and a morning and a journey through fifteen miles of muddy slough, if he had not lost far more blood from the wound in his arm than he realized, and if that flight had not been made in pitchy darkness which turned his overwrought emotions and racked imagination inward and sapped his nerve force with even far more deadly effect than the injury to his shoulder. Therefore, when the mud and blood and filth had been washed from his face and body, his wounds sterilized and bound, and his mind fully saturated with the consciousness that he had been saved and the whole horror was a thing of the past, his invalidism was short-lived.
They kept him under opiates the first day and night. The second morning he awoke, raved for a time, was made to take food, then went back to sleep again. The third morning he sat up, called for his clothes and got them. There was small room on that train for invalids to remain invalids for the luxury of it. His clothes had been cleaned in the time intervening. He dressed with a doctor’s help. But he felt dizzy after breakfast when he tried to smoke and lay down on his berth again. He must have fallen asleep, for when he awoke it was high noon and the train had stopped. Far out on the expanse of hard brown steppe, it had turned upon a siding to permit an eastern-bound train of “empties” to clear.
Nathan arose and looked out of the window. The world was surfeited with sunshine. Never had there been such a day. The small white-enameled compartment in which his bunk was located was empty. Off across the prairie he saw doctors and nurses strolling. A warning whistle would bring them back in time. Beside, they could see the western track for miles, straight to the far horizon. Nathan suddenly wanted to be out there in the sunshine too.
He discovered that his leg, where the jagged nail had penetrated, had been cauterized and tightly bandaged. But it gave him no especial distress. The cut in his forehead, when dried gore and caked muck had been washed away, had turned out to be a two-inch gash above his right eye which a bit of adhesive plaster covered. His wounded arm, in which the feeling had begun to return about noon of the previous day, was tightly bound against his body. Thirty hours of sleep had brought back his strength and rebuilt his shattered nerves. Yes, Nathan suddenly wanted to be out there in the sunshine too. There were several khaki coats on the bunk above. He swung one around and got his good arm into its right sleeve. He pulled it as best he could over his battered shoulder and fastened a couple of black-copper buttons at the throat. An officer’s cap hung on a hook in the passageway. Nathan went out into the iron vestibule and down the steps.
He had not seen Madelaine since she had helped him to the hill top. The car to which she was attached was far up forward. Nathan had been hurriedly carried into the next to the last coach. He wanted to find Madelaine, however, and thank her. But most of all, he simply wanted to gaze into her face, to see “in a close-up” his Girl of the Window. His stunned brain had not quite assimilated yet that he had found her, far out on the other side of the globe, deep in the lands of the Tartars.
“What the devil are you doing out here?” demanded a sharp voice behind him. Nathan turned to behold one of the surgeons.