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.