The Lieutenant missed the familiar palms and the tiny block-house; and
seeing nothing beyond the iron rails but great wastes of gray water,
he decided he was on board a prison-ship, or that he had been strapped
to a raft and cast adrift. People came for hours at a time and stood
at the foot of his cot, and talked with him and he to them--people he
had loved and people he had long forgotten, some of whom he had
thought were dead. One of them he could have sworn he had seen buried
in a deep trench, and covered with branches of palmetto. He had heard
the bugler, with tears choking him, sound "taps"; and with his own
hand he had placed the dead man's campaign hat on the mound of fresh
earth above the grave. Yet here he was still alive, and he came with
other men of his troop to speak to him; but when he reached out to
them they were gone--the real and the unreal, the dead and the
living--and even She disappeared whenever he tried to take her hand,
and sometimes the hospital steward drove her away.
"Did that young lady say when she was coming back again?" he asked the
steward.
"The young lady! What young lady?" asked the steward, wearily.
"The one who has been sitting there," he answered. He pointed with his
gaunt hand at the man in the next cot.
"Oh, that young lady. Yes, she's coming back. She's just gone below to
fetch you some hardtack."
The young volunteer in the next cot whined grievously.
"That crazy man gives me the creeps," he groaned.
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