The night now was bright and colorless, as I said, except where a burning house down by the canal made a faded saffron glare.  The Doctor had entered a small thicket of locust-trees; the moonlight penetrated clearly through their thin trunks, but the dead on the grass lay in shadow.  He carried a lantern, therefore, as he gently turned them over, searching for some one.  It was a Pennsylvania regiment which had held that wood longest,—­McKinstry’s.  Half a dozen other men were employed like the Doctor,—­Irish, generally:  they don’t forget the fellows that messed with them as quickly as our countrymen do.

“We’re in luck, Dan Reilly,” said one.  “Here’s the Docthor himself.  Av we hed the b’ys now, we’d be complate,”—­turning over one face after another, unmistakably Dutch or Puritan.

“Ev it’s Pat O’Shaughnessy yez want,” said another, “he’d be afther gittin’ ayont the McManuses, an’ here they are.  They’re Fardowners on’y.  Pat’s Corkonian, he is; he’ll be nearer th’ inemy by a fut, I’ll ingage yez.”

“He’s my cousin,”—­hard tugging at the dead bodies with one arm;—­the other hung powerless.  “I can’t face Mary an’ her childher agin an’ say I lift her man widout Christian burial.—­Howld yer sowl!  Dan Reilly, give us a lift; here he is.  Are ye dead, Pat?”

One eye in the blackened face opened.

“On’y my leg.  ‘O’Shaughnessy agin th’ warld, an’ the warld agin th’ Divil!’”—­which was received with a cheer from the Corkonians.

“Av yer Honor,” insinuated Dan, “wud attind to this poor man, we’d be proud to diskiver the frind you’re in sarch of.”

Blecker glanced at the stout Irishmen about him, with kind faces under all the whiskey, and stronger arms than his own.”

“I will, boys.  You know him,—­he’s in your regiment,—­Captain McKinstry.  He fell in this wood, they tell me.”

“I think I know him,”—­his head to one side.  “Woodenish-looking chap, all run up into shoulders, with yellow hair?”

Blecker nodded, and motioned them to carry O’Shaughnessy into a low tool-house near, a mere shed, half tumbling down from a shell that had shattered its side.  There was a bench there, where they could lay the wounded man, however.  He stooped over the big mangled body, joking with him,—­it was the best comfort to Pat to give him a chance to show how little he cared for the surgeon’s knife,—­glancing now and then at the pearly embankment of clouds in the south, or at the delicate locust-boughs in black and shivering tracery against the moonlight, trying to shut his ears to the unceasing under-current of moans that reached him in the silence.