Ailsa Paige

And now a flare of light and a crash outside marked the descent of another shell. The confusion and panic among the wounded was terrible; ward-masters, nurses, surgeons, ran hither and thither, striving to quiet the excited patients as shell after shell rushed yelling overhead or exploded with terrific force, raining its whirring iron fragments over roof and chimney.

Ailsa, calm and collected in the dreadful crisis, stood at the end of the ward, directing the unnerved stretcher bearers, superintending the carrying out of cots to the barns, which stood in the shelter of the rising ground along the course of the little stream.

Letty appeared from the corridor behind her; and Ailsa smiled and kissed her lightly on the cheek; and the blood came back to the girl's face in a passion of gratitude which even the terror of death could not lessen or check.

"Ailsa—darling—" she whispered; then shuddered in the violence of an explosion that shattered the window-glass beside her,

"We're taking them to the old barns, Letty," said Ailsa, steadying her voice. "Will you take charge here while I go to Colonel Arran?"

"They've taken him out," whispered Letty. "That ward is on fire. Everybody is out. W-what a cruel thing for our boys! Some of them were getting well! Can you come now?"

"As soon as they carry out young Spencer. He's the last. . . . Look from the window! They're trying to put out the fire with water in buckets. O—h!" as a shell struck and the flame flashed out through a geyser of sand and smoke.

"Come," murmured Letty. "I will stay if there is anything to stay for–"

"No, dear; we can go. Give me your hand; this smoke is horrible.

Everything is on fire, I think. . . . Hurry, Letty!"

She stumbled, half suffocated, but Letty kept her hand fast and guided her to the outer air.

A company of cavalry, riding hard, passed in a whirlwind of dust. After them, clanking, thudding, pounding, tore a battery, horses on a dead run,

The west wing of the seminary was on fire; billows of sooty smoke rolled across the roof and blew downward over the ground where the forms of soldiers could be seen toiling to and fro with buckets.

Infantry now began to arrive, crowding the main road on the double quick, mounted officers cantering ahead. Long lines of them were swinging out east and west across the country, where a battery went into action wrapped in torrents of smoke.

Bullets swarmed, singing above and around in every key, and the distracting racket of the shrapnel shells became continuous.

Ailsa and Letty ran, stooping, into the lane where the stretchers were being hurried across the little footbridge. As they crossed they saw a dead artilleryman lying in the water, a crimson thread wavering from his head to the surface. It was Arthur Wye; and Letty knew him, and halted, trembling; but Ailsa called to her in a frightened voice, for, confused by the smoke, they had come out in the rear of a battery among the caissons, and the stretchers had turned to the right, filing down into the hollow where the barns stood on the edge of a cedar grove.

Already men were hard at work erecting hospital tents; the wounded lay on their stretchers, bloodless faces turned to the sky, the wind whipping their blankets and uncovering their naked, emaciated bodies. The faces of the dead had turned black.

"Good God!" said Dr. Benton as Letty and Ailsa came up, out of'breath, "we've got to get these sick men under shelter! Can you two girls keep their blankets from blowing away?"

They hurried from cot to cot, from mattress to mattress, from one heap of straw to another, from stretcher to stretcher, deftly replacing sheet and blanket, tucking them gently under, whispering courage, sometimes a gay jest or smiling admonition to the helpless men, soothing, petting, reassuring.

The medical director with his corps of aides worked furiously to get up the big tents. The smoke from the battery blew east and south, flowing into the hollow in sulphurous streams; the uproar from the musketry was terrific.

Ailsa, kneeling beside a stretcher to tuck in the blankets, looked up over her shoulder suddenly at Letty.

"Where did they take Colonel Arran?"

"I don't know, dear."

Ailsa rose from her knees and looked around her through the flying smoke; then she got wearily to her feet and began to make inquiries. Nobody seemed to know anything about Colonel Arran.

Anxious, she threaded her way through the stretchers and the hurrying attendants, past the men who were erecting the tents, looking everywhere, making inquiries, until, under the trees by the stream, she saw a heap of straw on which a man was dying.

He died as she came up—a big, pallid, red-headed zouave, whose blanket, soaked with blood, bore dreadful witness of his end.

A Sister of Charity rose as though dazed.

"I could not stop the hemorrhage," she said in her soft, bewildered voice.

Together they turned back toward the mass of stretchers, moving with difficulty in the confusion. Letty, passing, glanced wanly at the Sister, then said to Ailsa:

"Colonel Arran is in the second barn on the hay. I am afraid he is dying."

Ailsa turned toward the barns and hurried across the trampled sod.

Through the half light within she peered about her, moving carefully among the wounded stretched out on the fragrant hay.

Colonel Arran lay alone in the light of a window high under the eaves.

"Oh, here you are!" she said gaily. "I hear most most splendid things about you. I—" she stopped short, appalled at the terrible change that was coming over his face.

"I want to see—Phil—" he whispered.

"Yes—yes, I will find him," she said soothingly; "I will go immediately and find him."

His head was moving slowly, monotonously, from side to side.

"I want to see my boy," he murmured. "He is my son. I wish you to know it—my only son."

He lifted his brilliant eyes to Ailsa.

Twice he strove to speak, and could not, and she watched him, stunned.

He made the supreme effort.

"Philip!" he gasped; "our son! My little son! My little, little boy! I want him, Ailsa, I want him near me when I die!"

CHAPTER XX

They told her that Berkley had gone up the hill toward the firing line.

On the windy hill-top, hub deep in dry, dead grass, a section of a battery was in action, the violent light from the discharges lashing out through the rushing vapours which the wind flattened and drove, back into the hollow below so that the cannoneers seemed to be wading waist deep in fog.

The sick and wounded on their cots and stretchers were coughing and gasping in the hot mist; the partly erected tents had become full of it. And now the air in the hollow grew more suffocating as fragments of burning powder and wadding set the dead grass afire, and the thick, strangling blue smoke spread over everything.

Surgeons and assistants were working like beavers to house their patients; every now and then a bullet darted into the vale with an evil buzz, rewounding, sometimes killing, the crippled. To add to the complication and confusion, more wounded arrived from the firing line above and beyond to the westward; horses began to fall where they stood harnessed to the caissons; a fine, powerful gun-team galloping back to refill its chests suddenly reared straight up into annihilation, enveloped in the volcanic horror of a shell, so near that Ailsa, standing below in a clump of willows, saw the flash and smoke of the cataclysm and the flying disintegration of dark objects scattering through the smoke.

Far away on the hillside an artilleryman, making a funnel of his hands, shouted for stretchers; and Ailsa, repeating the call, managed to gather together half a dozen overworked bearers and start with them up through the smoke.

Deafened, blinded, her senses almost reeling under the nerve-shattering crash of the guns, she toiled on through the dry grass, pausing at the edge of charred spaces to beat out the low flames that leaped toward her skirts.

There was a leafy hollow ahead, filled with slender, willow-trees, many of them broken off, shot, torn, twisted, and splintered. Dead soldiers lay about under the smoke, their dirty shirts or naked skin visible between jacket and belt; to the left on a sparsely wooded elevation, the slope of which was scarred, showing dry red sand and gravel, a gun stood, firing obliquely across the gully into the woods. Long, wavering, irregular rings of smoke shot out, remaining intact and floating like the rings from a smoker's pipe, until another rush and blast of flame scattered them.