ost soldierly looking of any of the young
officers in the army--and as I saw him then death had given him a great
dignity and nobleness. He was only twenty-eight years old, the age when
life has just begun, but he rested his head on the surgeon's shoulder
like a man who knew he was already through with it and that, though they
might peck and mend at the body, he had received his final orders. His
breast and shoulders were bare, and as the surgeon cut the tunic from him
the sight of his great chest and the skin, as white as a girl's, and the
black open wound against it made the yellow stripes and the brass
insignia on the tunic, strangely mean and tawdry.

Fifty yards farther on, around a turn in the trail, behind a rock, a boy
was lying with a bullet wound between his eyes. His chest was heaving
with short, hoarse noises which I guessed were due to some muscular
action entirely, and that he was virtually dead. I lifted him and gave
him some water, but it would not pass through his fixed teeth. In the
pocket of his blouse was a New Testament with the name Fielder Dawson,
Mo., scribbled in it in pencil. While I was writing it down for
identification, a boy as young as himself came from behind me down the
trail.

"It is no use," he said; "the surgeon has seen him; he says he is just
the same as dead. He is my bunkie; we only met two weeks ago at San
Antonio; but he and me had got to be such good friends--But there's
nothing I can do now." He threw himself down on the rock beside his
bunkie, who was still breathing with that hoarse inhuman rattle, and I
left them, the one who had been spared looking down helplessly with the
tears creeping across his cheeks.

The firing was quite close now, and the trail was no longer filled with
blanket rolls and haversacks, nor did pitiful, prostrate figures lie in
wait behind each rock. I guessed this must mean that I now was well in
advance of the farthest point to which Capron's troop had moved, and I
was running forward feeling confident that I must be close on our men,
when I saw the body of a sergeant blocking the trail and stretched at
full length across it. Its position was a hundred yards in advance of
that of any of the others--it was apparently the body of the first man
killed. After death the bodies of some men seem to shrink almost
instantly within themselves; they become limp and shapeless, and their
uniforms hang upon them strangely. But this man, who was a gia