seriously, I think," answered Crawford, a
little faintly. "He hit me here in the left arm, below the elbow. I
think the bullet went through, and maybe the bone is broken."

"Too bad! tut! tut!" said his brother Zouave. "Never mind--I will bind
it up in a moment. Do you think you can lean against that tree and keep
from fainting until I run and see whether my little joker went in the
right direction?"

"Nary faint!" said Crawford, making a strong effort to overcome the pain
he was suffering. "Go ahead, Bob, and hurry!"

Webster did hurry, and Crawford had scarcely more than time to enjoy
half-a-dozen exquisite throbs of agony and observe that the light
through the trees, Northward, was growing brighter and brighter, when he
came running back, very jubilant.

"Dead as the deadest kind of a herring!" he said. "Didn't hit him where
I meant to, but it answered. Bored him right through the skull, and he
lies there, hugging the root of the tree he was so fond of."

"Well, I am glad of that, at all events!" answered Crawford. Men, even
of the best hearts and warmest natures, change terribly in times of war
and among the influences of the camp and the battle-field. The man who
by nature could only have said "Thank God!" at some benefit rendered to
his kind or some dispensation of Providence by which the lives of his
perilled fellow-men have been preserved--easily learns to be thankful
for the explosion of a magazine or the sinking of a ship by which
hundreds of men have been sent suddenly into eternity, those men being
_his enemies_.

"But come--let us see what kind of a nick you have got!" said Webster,
examining the arm with some skill once acquired in a doctor's shop to
which run-over and fainted people were sometimes brought for sudden
assistance. "No, the bones are not broken--all right! Here, let me bind
it up with my handkerchief and put my scarf-belt around your neck for a
sling." He proceeded to make these dispositions, with speed and
dexterity, and in a moment after Crawford felt the sickening pain
subsiding and the slight faintness leaving him.

"Humph! that is better--it scarcely hurts at all now," he said. "Thank
you, Bob--or Doctor Bob, I ought to call you."

"Well, call me anything you like, except a coward or a humbug!" answered
Webster. "And now, old fellow, think you are strong enough to get back
to the Hill?"

"Yes, but I am not going there!" said John Crawford. "Don't you see how
bright that fire