enetrable on horseback. The firing on the extreme
right seemed to be farther in the rear, and he made his way in that
direction. Again he came out at the edge of the woods, and to his
surprise saw a battalion of the enemy at a short distance from him. He
turned his horse, stuck his spurs into him, and went back along the
path to the rear at a full run, while a shower of bullets fell around
him. He still kept on working to the right in the direction of the
firing which he heard in front of him. At last in a hollow of the
jungle he came upon a Red Cross station, one of those advance temporary
relief posts where the wounded who are too much injured to be taken at
once to the rear are treated. Twenty or thirty men were lying in a row,
some of them on their coats, others on the bare ground. Two surgeons
were doing what they could in the line of first aid to the injured,
binding up arms and legs, dressing wounds, and trying to stop the flow
of blood from arteries. Two soldiers were lifting a wounded man on a
stretcher so that he might be carried to the rear, and he was groaning
with agony. Every one of the patients was blotched in one place or
another with blood, and some of them were lying in pools of the crimson
fluid. Sam felt a little sick at his stomach. Two men came in with
another stretcher, bringing a wounded man from the front. The man gave
a convulsive start as they set him down.

"A bullet's just hit him in the head," said one of the men. "I'm glad
it wasn't me."

One of the doctors looked at the wounded man.

"He's dead," he said. "Damn you, what do you mean by bringing dead men
here?"

The two bearers took up their load again and dropped it out of sight in
the bushes. Sam did not like to interrupt the doctors, who were
overtasked, so he dismounted and tried to find a wounded man well
enough to answer his questions. One man at the end of the row looked
less pale than the rest, and he asked him where he could find the 43d.

"That's my regiment, sir," he replied, as a twig, cut off by a bullet,
fell on his face. "You'd better lie down here, sir; you'll be shot if
you don't. A lot of the wounded have been hit here again."

Sam sat down by his side.

"Our regiment is over that way," he said, pointing in the direction of
the firing. "I don't know where the colonel is. We haven't seen him for
hours. The lieutenant-colonel is down with fever. I think the major's
in command. Y