A DEAD MAN’S MESSAGE
DICK FULCHER was the best natured man in the battery, and he was nothing else.
He was entirely ignorant and entirely content to be so. He could neither read nor write, and we could never persuade him to try to learn. He had nothing resembling pride in his composition apparently, nothing that it would do to call a character.
One morning the alarm came that the enemy had landed below, and we were ordered hurriedly forward. Fulcher had just taken post as stable-guard, and was, therefore, under no obligation of duty to go. He quietly threw down the musket he was carrying, and, going up to the sergeant-major, said: “Major, can’t I be taken off guard? I want to go with the battery into the fight.”
His request was granted, of course. He was number four at Joe’s gun; number four is the man who pulls the lanyard, or string, that fires the gun. When we unlimbered to the front on Yemassee Creek, within pistol-shot range of the advancing enemy, Fulcher was laughing as usual, and apparently as indifferent to the work he was doing as he had been to everything else, since we had first known him.
I remember wondering, as I watched him, why a man who felt so little interest in the dangerous business had gone out of his way as he had done to engage in it.
The fire of the enemy was terrific in its destructiveness from the first. Within the first three minutes we had lost ten men and a score of horses. Among the men was Fulcher. He had fallen, shot through the body, just as the command was given to him to “fire.”
Lying there upon the ground, with his life ebbing away, he made a feeble effort to pull the lanyard; but his strength was too far gone, and Joe, being short of men, took his place. He had to stand astride the poor dying fellow, in order to do his work, for Fulcher’s wound was beyond the possibility of a surgeon’s help.
After two or three more shots of the gun, Joe heard Fulcher feebly calling to him: “Joe—Joe.” Inclining his ear, Joe received this last message: “I’m done for, sergeant. But won’t you just write to my father and tell him I died like a man? I’d like him to know that about his only boy.”
Joe wrote the letter and it was blotted with tears.
After all, it is hard to guess what a man is made of till you know his motives.
A Dead Man’s Message.