"Come on--come on to bed. Don't excite yourself," he stammered in
embarrassment.

With a howl of triumph the sick man cut him short and snapped in an
unnaturally high voice:

"You don't know what happened to Dill, you don't? We were standing just
the way we are now, and he was just going to show me the new photograph
that his wife had sent him--his brave wife, he-he, his restrained wife.
Oh yes, restrained! That's what they all were--all prepared for
anything. And while we were standing there, he about to show me the
picture, a twenty-eighter struck quite a distance away from us, a good
two-hundred yards. We didn't even look that way. Then all of a sudden I
saw something black come flying through the air--and Dill fell over with
his dashing wife's picture in his hand and a boot, a leg, a boot with
the leg of a baggage soldier sticking in his head--a soldier that the
twenty-eighter had blown to pieces far away from where we stood."

He stopped for an instant and stared at the captain triumphantly. Then
he went on with a note of spiteful pride in his voice, though every now
and then interrupted by a peculiar gurgling groan.

"Poor Dill never said another word--Dill with the spur sticking in his
skull, a regular cavalry spur, as big as a five-crown piece. He only
turned up the whites of his eyes a little and looked sadly at his wife's
picture, that she should have permitted such a thing as that. Such a
thing as that! Such a thing! It took four of us to pull the boot out--
four of us. We had to turn it and twist it, until a piece of his brain
came along--like roots pulled up--like a jellyfish--a dead one--sticking