It was an hour before dawn, and Tyson was kneeling on the floor of his

tent, doing something to the body of a sick man. He had turned the narrow

place into a temporary ambulance. Dysentery had broken out among his

little troop; and wherever there was a reasonable chance of saving a

man's life, Tyson carried that man from under the long awning, pitched in

the pitiless sunlight where the men swooned and maddened in their

sickness, and brought him into his own tent, where as often as not he

died. This boy was dying. The air was stifling; but it was better than

what they had down there among those close-packed rows, where the poor

devils were dying faster than you could bury them--even in the desert,

where funeral rites are short. And as he stooped to moisten the boy's

lips, Tyson swore with a great oath: there was no water in the tin basin;

the sponge was dry as sand, and caked with blood. His own tongue was like

a hot file laid to the roof of his mouth. The heat by night was the heat

of the great desert, stretched out like a sheet of slowly cooling iron;

and the heat by day was like the fire of the furnace that tried it.

He went out to find water. When they were not interrupted by the enemy,

he might be kept at this sort of work for days; if it was not this boy it

would be another. The care of at least one-half of his sick and wounded

had fallen to Tyson's charge.

Let the Justice that cries out against what men have done for women

remember what they have done for men.

The boy died before dawn. And now, what with sickness and much fighting,

out of the fifty Tyson had brought out with him there were but twenty

sound men.

When he had seen to the burying of his dead, and gone his rounds among

the hopelessly dying, Tyson turned to his own affairs. The mail had come

in, and his letters had been forwarded to him overnight from the nearest

station. There was one from Stanistreet; it lay unopened on a box of

cartridges amongst his other papers. These he began to look over and

arrange.

They were curious documents. One was a letter to his wife, imploring her

forgiveness. "And yet," he had written, "except for one sin (committed

when I was to all intents and purposes insane), and for one mistake, the

grossest man ever made, you have nothing to forgive. I swear that I loved

you even then; and I shall always love you, as I have never loved--never

could love--any other woman. Believe me, I don't say this to justify

myself. There would be far more excuse for me if I had been simply

incapable of the feeling. As it is, I sinned against the highest, the

best part of myself, as much as against you." There was more in the same

strain, only less coherent; hurried sentences jotted down in the night,

whenever he could snatch a minute from his duty. He must have meant

every word of it at the moment of writing; and yet--this is the curious

thing--it was in flat contradiction to certain statements made in the

other paper.




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