it, because what use is man if he doesn't do something for his fellow?
I took the pail with water and a discarded rag that I found in a corner of the yard.
Kneeling by the wounded man, I did my best to clear away the blood and gore, and the vermin that infested it. As I cleared the gore, I found his injury was less than I'd at first suspected.
The right half of his head was intact, his elongated dolichocephalic cranium covered in pale blond hair. But the left half couldn't be cleaned. It remained a mass of gore and hair, with bits of bone and metal sticking to it. I could do no more than clear away the vermin and wrap his head in the cleanest ligature to be found.
He would be very young, perhaps twenty at most, and at one time might have been thought handsome, with clean-cut squarish features, somewhat obscured by a puffy swelling of his face.
As a man who'd long been interested in the human brain and the science of phrenology, I marveled at his being still alive despite his wound and wondered what faculties he would find missing, should he survive.
. . . . . .(pages missing, where a rat gnawed at manuscript) . . .as well as procuring food from the vegetable gardens and pens of the farm, besides keeping those wounded who could and would move about for their own purposes from eating all of it, leaving nothing for the worst sufferers.
While at these labors, I found a bottle of spirits in an unused cupboard and I thought it might be used to comfort some of those in worst extremities. I have to confess I thought foremost of my head-wound case, the nameless man who, as I've written earlier, had made wondrous progress in the last five hours, so that he sat up and looked about with remarkably clear green-brown eyes.
However, upon reaching the front parlor, where he had lain, I saw that his space had emptied, though all about it the wounded lay crowded as before. He must have died.
Yet, as I walked to the door, I looked at his spot once more and saw him standing where he'd once lain.
He looked startled, scared, his eyes wide and unreasoning,