I was about to return to my post, warmed and strengthened by a pannikin of coffee, when a couple of shots rang out. One of the very men to whom I had been talking—a young Scotchman named Blair—reeled and fell heavily, hit by a ball that had entered at a loophole. I bent over him, and saw at once that he was badly hurt. He was shot in the left breast, and blood was oozing from his lips.
“It’s all up with me, Carew,” he moaned. “Let me lie here.”
“Not a bit of it,” I replied. “You’ll pull through, take my word for it. But you must be in the doctor’s hands without delay.”
Three of us picked the wounded man up, and bore him across the yard to the hospital. At the door I relinquished my share of the burden, for the firing had suddenly recommenced so briskly that I feared the savages were meditating a rush.
But the fusillade dwindled to a few shots before I was halfway to the east side, and the next instant, as I was pushing along leisurely, I saw a dark object looming out of the snow twenty feet to my right. It was the figure of a woman. Her back was toward me, and she seemed to have halted in perplexity.
Suddenly she moved forward a little, and with that I was in pursuit, my heart beating fast. As I overtook her she turned round with a start.
“Denzil!” she gasped.
As I had suspected, it was Flora Hatherton. She was muffled in a cloak, a fur cap crowned her pretty face, and in her gloved hands she held a light musket.
“You here!” I exclaimed. “Are you mad, to expose yourself to such danger? Go back!”
“I don’t want to go back,” she said. “Please don’t make me, Denzil.”