e 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