He did not look around, and she laid a hand gently on his arm, not daring to touch it firmly lest it be shattered.
"Tell me," she began again, in a louder voice, "are you badly wounded?"
Slowly he turned a face matted with sweat and powdered earth, haggard, as though it had been drawn up from a grave. She uttered a wild scream of recognition.
Her eyes opened to him. They suggested fluid-vague sympathies and fears that many a man would have bartered his life for; but this one before her only stared back with a look that was hardly sane, then turned again to the crater wall. He seemed to be stunned; without feeling, indeed, because dust and grit were plastered on one of his eye-balls.
"Jeb," she screamed, horrified at this, "tell me quickly where you're hurt!--oh, Jeb!"
He shook his head, muttering something she could not hear; but his gesture implied a negative. At first she did not understand; she could not reconcile this with the fact that he crouched inactive when wounded men were gasping for relief.
"Not hurt?" she insisted, taking hold of his arm. "But you must be, Jeb! You must be--to be _here_!"
Petulantly he shook off her hand; slowly she drew away from him, beginning--yet fearing--to understand. "But you must be, Jeb! You must be--to be _here_!"
"Help me, Jeb! There's a man behind you hit pretty hard!--help me get him in!"
She had again reached out and taken hold of him, but this time he jerked away, crying with his mouth against the earth:
"Let him stay! Only a fool would go out there!"
Her young eyes, already schooled in a realm of ravages that exists beyond the ken of those who do not go to wars, grew suddenly older. They seemed at last to have met a thing they could not look upon! They had witnessed the dying of many men--but here was a dying soul! As she had healed men, she now clutched for an heroic remedy in the hope of saving this more precious thing than life. But first, pitifully pleading, with her lips close to his ear, she asked:
"You _must_ be wounded! For the love of Christ tell me the shell blew you here--that you didn't come willingly! Tell me even that you're dying, Jeb, but not----"
She could not say it, and waited, while his silence answered. Forgetting everything else she sprang to her feet and stepped back, her eyes narrowing at what she had discovered to be under his uniform--or, rather, not under it! In a panic she realized that here was a derelict ship of manliness being irresistibly driven by a hurricane of Fear; that a complete wreck was imminent unless she were the master-pilot. Her cheeks were aflame with indignation, her body bending tensely forward might have been a spring of steel set to release some instrument of torture--and then she let the bolt descend like the wrath of furies.