Page:Ballinger Price--Us and the Bottle Man.djvu/116

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US AND THE BOTTLEMAN

so he took out his knife and ripped up the sleeve of Greg's jumper and the shoulder-seam of the white brocaded waistcoat. I don't see how people can stand being Red Cross nurses in France, for I'm sure I never could be one. Greg's shoulder was quite awful,—what we could see, for it was almost dark now. There was nothing at all we dared to do. We could n't even bathe it, for there was only sea-water, so I just sat and held Greg's other hand and patted it. He did n't cry,—I think the hurting was too bad for that,—but he moaned a little, and sometimes he said, "Hurts, Chris."

I tried to tell him a story, the way I did when we all had the measles and he was so much sicker than the rest of us, but he could n't listen. So we just sat there in the dark—it was perfectly dark now and we could n't see one another at all—and I began to count the flashes of the Headland

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