“However, whether I defend myself or not, it will, no doubt, be all
the same. Ah! if I were only a sailor, or even a marine, that would be
another pair of sleeves; they would hear me! But now, I am nothing but
a poor civilian; and here everybody knows civilians must have broad
shoulders. Wrong or right, as soon as they are accused, they are
convicted.”
The doctor seemed to have made up his mind; for he interrupted this flow
of words, saying in his kindest voice,--
“Calm yourself, my friend. There is a test which will clearly establish
your innocence. The ball that has struck Lieut. Champcey is still in the
wound; and I am the man who is going to take it out, I promise you. We
all here have rifles with conical balls; you are the only one who has an
ordinary shot-gun with round balls, so there is no mistake possible. I
do not know if you understand me?”
Yes, he understood, and so well, that his pale face turned livid, and
he looked all around with frightened glances. For about six seconds he
hesitated, counting his chances; then suddenly falling on his knees, his
hands folded, and beating the ground with his forehead, he cried out,--
“I confess! Yes, it may be I who have hit the officer. I heard
the bushes moving in his direction, and I fired at a guess. What a
misfortune! O God, what a misfortune! Ah! _I_ would give my life to save
his if I could. It was an accident, gentlemen, I swear. Such accidents
happen every day in hunting; the papers are full of them. Great God!
what an unfortunate man I am!”
The doctor had stepped back. He now ordered the two sailors who had
arrested the man, to make sure of him, to bind him, and carry him to
Saigon to prison. One of the gentlemen, he said, would write a few
lines, which they must take with them. The man seemed to be annihilated.
“A misfortune is not a crime,” he sighed out. “I am an honest mechanic.”
“We shall see that in Saigon,” answered the surgeon.
And he hastened away to see if all the preparations had been made
to carry the wounded man. In less than twenty minutes, and with that
marvellous skill which is one of the characteristic features of good
sailors, a solid litter had been constructed; the bottom formed a real
mattress of dry leaves; and overhead a kind of screen had been made of
larger leaves. When they put Daniel in, the pain caused him to utter a
low cry of pain. This was the first sign of life he had given.
“And now, my friends,” said the doctor, “let us go! And bear in mind, if
you shake the lieutenant, he is a dead man.”
It was hardly eight in the morning when the melancholy procession
started homeward; and it was not until between two and three o’clock on
the next morning that it entered Saigon, under one of those overwhelming
rains which give one an idea of the deluge, and of which Cochin China
has the monopoly. The sailors who carried the litter on which Daniel
lay had walked eighteen hours without stopping, on footpaths which
were almost impassable, and where every moment a passage had to be cut
through impenetrable thickets of aloes, cactus, and jack-trees. Several
times the officers had offered to take their places; but they had always
refused, relieving each other, and taking all the time as ingenious
precautions as a mother might devise for her dying infant. Although,
therefore, the march lasted so long, the dying man felt no shock; and
the old doctor said, quite touched, to the officers who were around
him,--
“Good fellows, how careful they are! You might have put a full glass of
water on the litter, and they would not have spilled a drop.”
Yes, indeed! Good people, rude and rough, no doubt, in many ways, coarse
sometimes, and even brutal, bad to meet on shore the day after pay-day,
or coming out from a drinking-shop, but keeping under the rough outside
a heart of gold, childlike simplicity, and the sacred fire of noblest
devotion. The fact was, they did not dare breathe heartily till after
they had put their precious burden safe under the hospital porch.
Two officers who had hastened in advance had ordered a room to be made
ready. Daniel was carried there; and when he had been gently put on a
white, good bed, officers and sailors withdrew into an adjoining room to
await the doctor’s sentence. The latter remained with the wounded man,
with two assistant surgeons who had been roused in the meantime.
Hope was very faint. Daniel had recovered his consciousness during
the journey, and had even spoken a few words to those around him, but
incoherent words, the utterance of delirium. They had questioned him
once or twice; but his answers had shown that he had no consciousness
of the accident which had befallen him, nor of his present condition; so
that the general opinion among the sailors who were waiting, and who all
had more or less experience of shot-wounds, was, that fever would carry
off their lieutenant before sunrise.
Suddenly, as if by magic, all was hushed, and not a word spoken.
The old surgeon had just appeared at the door of the sick-chamber; and,
with a pleasant and hopeful smile on his lips, he said,--
“Our poor Champcey is doing as well as could be expected; and I would
almost be sure of his recovery, if the great heat was not upon us.”
And, silencing the murmur of satisfaction which arose among them at this
good news, he went on to say,--
“Because, after all, serious as the wound is, it is nothing in
comparison with what it might have been; and what is more, gentlemen, I
have the _corpus delicti_.”
He raised in the air, as he said this, a spherical ball, which he held
between his thumb and forefinger.
“Another instance,” he said, “to be added to those mentioned by our
great masters of surgery, of the oddities of projectiles. This one,
instead of pursuing its way straight through the body of our poor
friend, had turned around the ribs, and gone to its place close by the
vertebral column. There I found it, almost on the surface; and nothing
was needed to dislodge it but a slight push with the probe.”
The shot-gun taken from the hands of the murderer had been deposited
in a corner of the large room: they brought it up, tried the ball, and
found it to fit accurately.
“Now we have a tangible proof,” exclaimed a young ensign, “an
unmistakable proof, that the wretch whom our men have caught is Daniel’s
murderer. Ah, he might as well have kept his confession!”