Griffith’s eyes slowly opened again. “You youngsters?” he asked feebly. “Was it the whole troop rode over me?”
Hugh laid open his coat, and, with a certain grim thankfulness that what he had unwillingly seen now enabled him without physical shrinking to help a friend, bandaged his hurt. “We must carry him to the rear,” he finally ordered Frank. “You take his legs, and I’ll manage his head.”
They lifted up Ned Griffith, who hung limp and heavy in their hands, and set their faces toward the dark hill whence the king’s army had charged forth. The walk out into the field had gone briskly enough, but there seemed no end to the return journey. Again and again they had to lay the injured man down while they recovered breath; but though wounded stragglers passed them, they saw none who could aid them, so of necessity they lifted up their burden once more and struggled on. Sometimes Frank panted out a grumbling complaint, but Hugh made no reply, for his eyes were on the wounded man’s white face and parted lips, and he found himself wondering how his father was faring in the battle, and what might have befallen Dick Strangwayes.
Of a sudden Frank, letting Griffith’s boots come to the ground abruptly, began shouting with all his strength to a brace of loiterers. “Men of our troop,” he explained to Hugh, “and not much wounded, Heaven be thanked for’t! They can convey Ned to a surgeon, if such a one is in the field, and we’ll back to see more.”
Relinquishing their charge on such terms, they set their faces again to the field of battle. It was now drawing toward sundown, and the fire to the south had slackened. “Mark my words, the war is ended,” Frank lamented; “and we have had no part in it, only to tramp about and look on those others have killed.”
Hugh must acknowledge to himself it had been a grim afternoon’s work, so with some hope of brisker adventures he followed willingly, as his companion headed southerly toward the clearer line of a road. “Maybe we’ll find our troop if we walk toward Kineton,” Frank suggested. “And we could ride back with them.”
“Yes, they should have taken some horses from the rebels by this,” Hugh replied, with a nod toward a corpse with an orange sash that lay on the edge of the roadway. He stubbornly told himself it was only another monument to the Royalist fighting quality, and tried to believe he had nearly deadened sympathy in him and calloused his senses to the horror of what he must endure if he would follow this life he had chosen.